In the course of looking into a very curious corner of science, an examination of the “weight of the soul,” I became aware of the Journal of Scientific Exploration (JSE), a publication of the Society for Scientific Exploration (SSE). Both SSE and JSE are serious entities, the latter a peer-reviewed and genuinely scientific journal in existence since 1987. SSE’s website is here, and a listing of publicly available articles from JSE (in pdf format) is here. Looking at many of the articles caused me to update my sense of trends in the area, meaning now the intersection between matters of the borderzone and serious science. But first about the weight of soul—and how I stumbled upon the JSE.
In 1907 a physician in Massachusetts, Duncan MacDougall, published results of a research study in Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research and shortly after that in American Medicine. He continuously weighed six terminal patients before and after their death. He rejected one of the six observations but used the other five and concluded that at or very near the point of death the body lost weight, very rapidly or in a very short time, ranging between half and three-quarters of an ounce. He also conducted tests on dogs and found that they did not lose any weight. What material I found on the web emphasized that nobody had been able to duplicate MacDougall’s results. This bare statement on repetition of the investigation intrigued me. I saw no citations of these studies. But in that process, lo and behold, I discovered a 2010 paper by Masayoshi Ishida titled “Rebuttal to Claimed Refutations of Duncan MacDougall’s Experiment on Human Weight Change at the Moment of Death” in JSE Volume 24, No. 10, 2010. It turns out that people refuted but did not replicate the studies. So there you are. That issue is accessible here.
Now for me the fascinating issue here is that in an age of materialism, a doctor would have been inspired to try to find a material proof for the soul’s existence—which was MacDougall’s aim. The fact that nobody bothered to replicate his study did not surprise me. People like me who are certain of the soul’s existence, wouldn’t be interested in its weight—and those convinced of its non-existence would not bother organizing a technically and sociologically difficult venture like that. My own interest was, and is, in the conjunction, namely the attempt to link the transcendent back to the physical in some way—which to me testifies to the narrowness of the materially-focused mind. And in that context, the JSE turned out to be a gold-mine.
For decades now (certainly since the 1950s) I’ve watched with fascination both the astounding increase in genuine experiential evidence for the soul’s survival of death and a parallel development whereby some people have attempted to make use of the ambiguities of quantum theory to materialize these phenomena. The positive evidence arose from near death experience (NDE) studies on one hand and scientific studies of reincarnation on the other. The late Ian Stephenson of Virginia University, largely associated with the latter, was also involved with the former. Another development in this period, indeed arising from the very cumulation of evidence, is a delightful debate about the nature of science, or, rather scientism, led on the one side by those who’ve presented the evidence and work in these fields and the professional skeptics who feel themselves called to conduct an on-going inquisition to stamp out such heretical claims.
The JSE, like a good scientific journal should, presents papers on all sides of this issue. Not, I hasten to say, ideologically motivated debunkers who simply “refute,” but those who wish to explain the experiential using approaches like quantum physics. The general stance of the journal, however, is openness and objectivity. Those who have evidence to present are welcome—if they are, as it were, well-behaved. Therefore we find, in the JSE, the very best presentations of actual evidence favoring the reality of things beyond the border stripped of the attention- (and money-) seeking tendencies of virtually all popular sites on such subjects.
One of the genuinely interesting facets of this subject that I encountered in three days of reading journal articles is that the hard, ideologically-motivated scientism so seemingly firm in the saddle in the United States seems not at all to dominate science as practiced in Asia, India, and in the Near East. An example of that, reporting on some truly astonishing research in China, is Dong Shen’s article, “Unexpected Behavior of Matter in Conjunction with Human Consciousness” in the same issue in which I found Ishida’s article.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Sunday, May 22, 2011
New Paradigm
The image that now begins to emerge of the Cosmos—by means of NASA’s measurements of the effects of dark energy—provides yet another hint that Idries Shah’s fable of the beginnings might be true. I’ve been of that opinion for many years now. Among the myths it comes closest to agree with the cosmos of physics, at least if we accept David Bohm’s suggestion that our universe is a tiny Explicate Order emerging from the vast Implicate Order that is the greater, thus the Cosmos. (I discuss the first subject here on Ghulf Genes; more on Idries Shah’s myth is on this blog here.)
The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.
Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.
That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.
We can’t get closer than that, I assume.
The downside of Shah’s formulation is that it does not suggest the sort of “personalistic” cosmology we’re used to, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But it contains an assertion of conscious intelligence in the Cosmos while also matching what we are learning from our astrophysics, thus a “beginning” (the big bang)—which can be read as the disturbance of an order of equilibrium—and the unfolding of that new event in a lawful way that we’re now seeing disclosed in the astrophysical observations of the visible universe.
Conversely, the myth also matches what Bohm hypothesizes, namely that alongside the Implicate and Explicate orders reality also manifests a Conditioned and an Unconditioned order. The latter permits intelligence and consciousness. Our own freedom and consciousness, to be sure, are the only direct observables of that order.
That in this realm we are most definitely disconnected from an ocean, if you like, of that Unconditioned order, thus from the realms of spirit and higher intelligence, which may well be equivalent to the ocean of the Conditioned, the physical, which now surrounds us, is also evident. And hence the grand thematic I once envisioned (in an unpublished work called What Does Life Want?) namely a return to that earlier unity, seems quite on—because even the universe, thus the visible, unfolded material realm and thus the conditioned order seems also to be striving for a reabsorption.
We can’t get closer than that, I assume.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Apocalypticism
End-times are a favorite subject of mine, albeit in the much more limited sense of cyclic history—thus the end of civilizations. Thus I thought I’d look things up. Come to think of it, the two subjects are closely linked, certainly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The Apocalypse (meaning the Book of Revelation) appeared in a time when the Graeco-Roman civilization was entering its end-stages. The date of the book is unknown but falls somewhere between the first and second centuries of our era. In rough terms, I would say, the Roman civilization fell apart between 44 BC, with Caesar, and 305 AD, when Diocletian’s reign ended. He was the one who formally split the empire. In times like that, above all, sensitive souls intuit that something is wrong. All manner of Gnosticisms rise; in our case, for instance, in the form of existentialism. Sophistication and book-learning are wide-spread. People read—and they do so because others write. Our peculiar version of that is that everybody writes—but nobody reads…
Imposing some sort of structure onto the maddeningly structure-less nature of sheer, brute Duration must be at least one reason why apocalypticism is a perennial fruit of human civilization. It becomes acute in hard times—and attracts particularly the elderly. The latter have actual cause for having end-time feelings. These begin to rise geometrically as we pass 75—and what I feel must be the very law of the universe. Mustn’t it? Let the wicked finally be punished; and let me be saved from the turmoil of the end-times.
I note that the Encyclopedia Britannica, at least my 1956 version, restricts the subject to Christian speculation, but Wikipedia, the now encyclopedia, avoid the word itself and substitutes “End of the World” instead. And it embraces a wider cultural interpretation. We learn there that apocalypticism has the same structure all around the world. There is a definite, precise, calculable end—take that, insufferable Duration. Evil, very often personified, is finally defeated. And the blessings of timelessness are always brought to us by a divine or divine-like grand benevolent figure.
I like the Hindu version of apocalypticism best of all. Plenty of time to see if the strawberries we planted, and I enclosed in a protective mesh against the rabbits yesterday, will actually eventually, with a little help from Duration, end up in a bowl with my breakfast.
Friday, May 13, 2011
The Ghost Who E'er Denies
Contradictions inhere in evil. We picture it as powerful, often as superior in intellect, but when we look at evil closely, analytically, comprehensively, it turns out to be pathetic, limited, deficient, and contemptible. The philosophers’ definition of evil as the absence of good turns out to be narrowly correct. Let’s take a moment to examine that contradiction—power and absence—before turning to other aspects of this subject.
Genuinely powerful phenomena have a neutral character: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides. We know them to be innocent of the least intention. They represent release of energy. Droughts that come when the rains fail and devastate the land represent the opposite, denial of energy. Droughts also lack intentions; they are conditions, not real denials of anything.
But the power we associate with evil is also simply energy. But those who release or deny it are people who have what nature lacks: intention. What we mean by that word, strictly speaking, is a fusion of will and consciousness. When consciousness is missing we’re dealing with instinct. The tiger may “intend” to eat, but it has no awareness whatsoever that its victim is just another “tiger” in a different form.
People are capable of evil because they innately know—and the more sophisticated they are the more certain we can be that they do—that what they intend will cause harm to others; but they do not care. Innate knowledge and choice of action contrary to it is of the very essence of evil. If we deny this innate knowledge, we cannot really hold people responsible. Conscience must be an absolute, must be really present—or to put it more sharply must have been present at some point and then been consciously overstepped—before evil is possible. And the knowledge that I talk about is the real sort of thing, not a conceptual structure but something fused with a feeling best rendered as empathy. To harm others knowingly shows an absence of empathy, and in the philosophical “absence of good,” the real absence is that of empathy. It is a hardening of the heart. This hardening, however, does not deprive the evil-doer of power; it redirects this power to an evil expression.
It intrigues me that the personification of evil—as Mephistopheles—achieves an ambiguous but yet heroic status in Goethe’s Faust as the nineteenth century dawns (1808). It is from Faust that my post’s title comes, rendered in the same beat Goethe used, I am the ghost who e’er denies (Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint). The Enlightenment is then already in the past, and the devil is now promoted to the status of God’s agent provocateur. Mephistopheles becomes a more interesting figure than Faust; Faust wins in the end; we like this sort of story; it means the cake and eating it too.
The Faust figure appears to have been a real person who styled himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. In his own time, the early sixteenth century, he was uniformly denounced as a charlatan, alchemist, moving about with a performing horse, a dog, familiar and evil spirits, and in league with the devil who eventually carried him off. In all of the earlier literary works based on Faust, the magician reaches a bargain with the devil, benefits for a set number of years with all kinds of rewards, but in the end is carried off to hell. Thus Encyclopedia Britannica informs me—and thus also end of story. In Goethe’s Faust we encounter the blessed transformation to modernity—at least if we view the story from a distance. Faust enjoys the powers that he bargains for but at the end is—saved! saved in part by the pleadings of the virtuous Gretchen, whom he seduces, gets pregnant, and who, in turn, drowns her illegitimate child—but she is saved and enters heaven anyway. There, in a role that evokes Dante’s Beatrice in Heaven, she intercedes for Faust. And all ends well.
But does it? In the earlier tales, the high sophistication, towering intellect, and all those other things Goethe lavishes on Faust do not produce the transformation. The absence of empathy corrupts. In the long run things always end badly. It might be time, again, to write another Faust, in modern dress. Ah, if only I had the energy, the poetry—and the years left for the labor—I might attempt it myself. That being beyond me, I invite a kindred spirit to do this necessary task.
Oh, yes. Perhaps I’d better define what “kindred spirit” means. It means a spirit of the new times, now in process of gestation. In those times it is Gretchen that matters, and who gives a fig for Faust. A kindred spirit will not give a dime for Faust’s ever so exalted soul if his will is bent the wrong way round. The poet will see him enter hell and wait for the doors to slam shut. And leave judgment to the Almighty.
Genuinely powerful phenomena have a neutral character: tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides. We know them to be innocent of the least intention. They represent release of energy. Droughts that come when the rains fail and devastate the land represent the opposite, denial of energy. Droughts also lack intentions; they are conditions, not real denials of anything.
But the power we associate with evil is also simply energy. But those who release or deny it are people who have what nature lacks: intention. What we mean by that word, strictly speaking, is a fusion of will and consciousness. When consciousness is missing we’re dealing with instinct. The tiger may “intend” to eat, but it has no awareness whatsoever that its victim is just another “tiger” in a different form.
People are capable of evil because they innately know—and the more sophisticated they are the more certain we can be that they do—that what they intend will cause harm to others; but they do not care. Innate knowledge and choice of action contrary to it is of the very essence of evil. If we deny this innate knowledge, we cannot really hold people responsible. Conscience must be an absolute, must be really present—or to put it more sharply must have been present at some point and then been consciously overstepped—before evil is possible. And the knowledge that I talk about is the real sort of thing, not a conceptual structure but something fused with a feeling best rendered as empathy. To harm others knowingly shows an absence of empathy, and in the philosophical “absence of good,” the real absence is that of empathy. It is a hardening of the heart. This hardening, however, does not deprive the evil-doer of power; it redirects this power to an evil expression.
It intrigues me that the personification of evil—as Mephistopheles—achieves an ambiguous but yet heroic status in Goethe’s Faust as the nineteenth century dawns (1808). It is from Faust that my post’s title comes, rendered in the same beat Goethe used, I am the ghost who e’er denies (Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint). The Enlightenment is then already in the past, and the devil is now promoted to the status of God’s agent provocateur. Mephistopheles becomes a more interesting figure than Faust; Faust wins in the end; we like this sort of story; it means the cake and eating it too.
The Faust figure appears to have been a real person who styled himself Magister Georgius Sabellicus Faustus Junior. In his own time, the early sixteenth century, he was uniformly denounced as a charlatan, alchemist, moving about with a performing horse, a dog, familiar and evil spirits, and in league with the devil who eventually carried him off. In all of the earlier literary works based on Faust, the magician reaches a bargain with the devil, benefits for a set number of years with all kinds of rewards, but in the end is carried off to hell. Thus Encyclopedia Britannica informs me—and thus also end of story. In Goethe’s Faust we encounter the blessed transformation to modernity—at least if we view the story from a distance. Faust enjoys the powers that he bargains for but at the end is—saved! saved in part by the pleadings of the virtuous Gretchen, whom he seduces, gets pregnant, and who, in turn, drowns her illegitimate child—but she is saved and enters heaven anyway. There, in a role that evokes Dante’s Beatrice in Heaven, she intercedes for Faust. And all ends well.
But does it? In the earlier tales, the high sophistication, towering intellect, and all those other things Goethe lavishes on Faust do not produce the transformation. The absence of empathy corrupts. In the long run things always end badly. It might be time, again, to write another Faust, in modern dress. Ah, if only I had the energy, the poetry—and the years left for the labor—I might attempt it myself. That being beyond me, I invite a kindred spirit to do this necessary task.
Oh, yes. Perhaps I’d better define what “kindred spirit” means. It means a spirit of the new times, now in process of gestation. In those times it is Gretchen that matters, and who gives a fig for Faust. A kindred spirit will not give a dime for Faust’s ever so exalted soul if his will is bent the wrong way round. The poet will see him enter hell and wait for the doors to slam shut. And leave judgment to the Almighty.
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