Me: Doctor, it hurts when I go like this. Doctor: Then don't do that.
I just love modern medicine!
I'm pretty pissed off about the situation today. Drug companies have a stranglehold on medical education, and M.D. students learn minutia of human anatomy, and how drugs work to fix the problem, or what surgery is needed (and how to do the surgery). Nothing about nutrition or other therapies that don't cost a bajillion dollars...
I was just reading an article in a July issue of Business Week (magazine) about how 90% of heart surgeries don't do anything for the patient, long term, beyond the benefit as a placebo. Heart bypass surgery, angioplasties, etc., account for tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars a year in medical charges.
And the patients don't really care because someone else (insurance) is paying the bill. "The inmates are running the asylum". When my grandmother was going through cancer therapy, I had the distinct impression that the whole charade was set up to bilk Medicare for all Grandma was worth. When grandma got tired of their treatment program (which kept her alive for a couple extra months, maybe) they handed her off to Hospice care, to refocus on their next victim.
Patients think that, "with all the money they made off of me, I should be getting perfect results", and when some happen to get a less-than-satisfactory outcome, they go straight to a lawyer, to prevent the doctor from profiteering off their misfortune.
You need to look at my other comment in this story, surgery never fixes the actual problem, on a superior treatment modality (1000x better than drugs & surgery) for biomechanical problems..
My Osteopath said something last time I saw him about how he's had two (osteopathic) journal articles published, and that after the third one you're considered an expert (he was talking more to the 3rd year osteopathic student who was observing than myself).
Anyways, the conversation was on how one of my legs was shorter than the other, and that it was shorter because the bones in my right lower leg were all tweaked out of place. One of his articles was on how the bones in the carpal tunnel or forearm get displaced, leading to pressure against the nerve. M.D.s view this as cause for surgery, D.O.s who practice in the tradition of Osteopathy founder Andrew Taylor Still ("structure and function are interrelated") find it acceptable to just put the bones back where they should be, by releasing the muscle and fascial tissue strains that pull said bones out of position. (He said that in all his years [25+] of practicing, he'd only had one patient who actually had a short leg after he was done with them. Usually, "short legs" are the result of the hips being out of balance, leg bones being all knoted up, etc.)
Western medicine's two tools are drugs and surgery. Dr. Still, a traditionally-trained doctor in the civil-war era, formulated the Philosophy of Osteopathy after he was powerless to prevent three of his children from dying from viral meningitis. Osteopathy's distinguishing characteristic is a gentle form of manipulation that puts the body back like it's supposed to be.
I myself tried everything - trackballs, posture, keyboards, massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc... I bumped from M.D. to M.D.: "your arms are fine", "just need to exercise more", "go to this chiropractor", "need to stop doing _____ so much", "gonna need surgery", etc. Finally I said "phooey on them", and started the "alternative" medical rounds.
Didn't get any relief until I found my present Cranial Osteopath. "Your arms don't work because your left hip is higher than the other", iirc. Doing his ten-fingered detective work, he wandered around that first visit, feeling (no need for a $1500 MRI/cat scan/etc) all the structures that weren't where they were supposed to be. "And it's all coming from right.... (searching) here", and he settled on a spot just to the left of my heart. He pushes, "breath in... and out", pushes again, repeat. All to release a specific strain in my body's myofascial tissue that resulted from a knock to the head 7 years earlier. Every visit since has been to release other traumas that've been stored in my body for a very long time. We're almost done, and I'm feeling really good.
"Do these strains ever come back?" "No."... "well, unless there's a specific cause", and demostrates how someone might habitually hold a phone up to their ear with their shoulder. "Then you stop the specific cause of the lesions, and fix them again."
The funniest thing of it all is we paid china to do it by whoring out most of our economy to them just for the sake of greed , stupid politicians and corporations.
The cause is inflation, moreso than greed and corporations. "Stupid politicians" voted for a central bank, to change the U.S. currency from value-based (Gold & Silver) to debt-based. Politicians like a debt-based (fiat) currency, because then they don't need to tax the citizenry to give money to their fellow bandits - they just "print" up a billion dollars and give it to connected organizations (Military-Industrial Complex, Halliburton, Betchtel, etc).
("stupid politicians" is in quotes because I don't know the veracity of the allegation that the Federal Reserve Bank act was passed by a handful of congressmen on December 23rd, when most of the other congressmen had already left. See Response to crticism of The Creature from Jeckyll Island)
Corporations are just fighting for survival... Because of inflation, employees of American manufacturers are forced to demand higher wages. So the manufacturers send out notices that, because their costs are going up, they're going to be charging more. WalMart ("Always Low Prices. Always") says to their suppliers, "Sorry, no can-do - keep your prices the same or we'll go somewhere else. P.S. Why don't you follow us to China?" See PBS Frontline's Is Wal-Mart Good for America? on how they bitchslapped Rubbermaid when the costs for plastic material went up.
This is not "greed" on wal-mart's part, so much as it is fear that their competitors will undercut them.
So, if not stupid politicians & corporations, who's to blame for the destruction of the economy? Well - George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and John Kerry were all members of Skull & Bones... Bill Clinton was a member of the Bilderberg group (American Free Press is the only American news outlet I know of that reports on Bilderberg). Most of the presidents since the 50's have been a member of Bilderburg, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, or Skull & Bones. The push for one-world-government has been going on for over 120 years - these people are dedicated, and this is the end-game. NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, EU, UN - all these entities play a part in dividing up the world into blocks for efficient global governance.
Someone will dismiss what I've said here with "you're just a conspiracy theorist"... Well - think what you want. You're certainly free to believe that you're as free in America today as you would've been 200 years ago. I have no such delusions.
batteries lasting the lifetime of the car has a _lot_ to do with Depth of Discharge (DoD). Battery chemistry has a lot to do with how low you can discharge a battery before you start to lose performance. For example, you don't want to discharge a lead-acid battery past 20% (even a "deep-discharge" PbA), or the capacity goes to shit real quick. Nickel-metal Hydride batteries don't like to be discharged past 50%, iirc. Hence, the Prius computer starts the engine whenever it detects that the battery level is less than a certain level - 60% or 80%, i think.
Lithium Ion batteries don't like to be fully charged (this is why some apple i-pod batteries only last a year before their performance craps out - people consistently plug 'em in until they're fully charged), not really sure on the specifics of Nickel-Cadmium, other than that the guy I met with a nickel-cadmium Electric Dodge Caravan said that he doesn't have any problems with discharging it all the way. Usual precaution about overcharging appliecs to NiCd, PbA, and LiIon...
The plug-in-hybrid project replaces the battery pack with a bigger one, and has electronics to tell the Toyota computer that it's consistently 90% full, until it gets down to a certain level. This allows for more electric-only city miles.
AC Propulsion's tZero now has a lithium-ion battery pack, which is good for 300+ miles. It originally had a cheap lead-acid pack, which was good for up to 100 miles/trip. I think they had 15,000 or 20,000 miles on it when they switched to the new battery pack.
such a simple question, and yet I'm thinking through all the books I've bought, and none of them really talk about what I've learned from my cranial osteopath or the biodynamic cranio-sacral therapist (superior, imho, to regular craniosacral therapy, as taught by the Upledger Institute) I've also worked with.
The Edgar Cayce Manual for Health through Drugless Therapy was written by an Osteopath, but he practiced before Dr. Sutherland's "cranial" technique (a supplemental to Andrew Still's system of osteopathic manipulation) became widespread.
If all you want to do is learn how to visualize, start with Win Wenger's techniques, or start by learning Self Hypnosis, or The Silva Method / Silva Ultramind, or start with a notepad to write down your dreams every morning (working towards waking up in your dreams, commonly known as "lucid dreaming").
In another post, I talked about how I discovered I had a problem 7 years ago... I missed the first week and a half of my senior year (I bumped my head, and don't remember 2 weeks), and went out on the internet to get information about speed reading, so I could catch up in my classes. I ended up buying Win's The Einstein Factor, which uses visualization for creative problem solving. "Wow, neat, I want to be able to do that." Win says that visualization is a natural human ability, and even people who don't visualize can easily be taught.
For me, Win Wenger's methods didn't work. So I picked up a silva method book. Then self-hypnosis books. These books all have steps to follow techniques to get the skills (creative problem solving, self mind control, visualization, etc) promised. I was also interested in Lucid Dreaming, and learned all I could about dreaming, what to do, which vitamins to take, etc. I did all these things, and still I couldn't even remember anything more than the tiniest fragments of my dreams when I woke in the morning, let alone "picture" something when I was wide-awake.
After stumbling around for six years, I figured that my problem was related to my disfunctional body, and that I needed an osteopath to fix that. My mother frequently told me what a difficult baby I was. Now I know that crying is an indication that baby hurts. Osteopathic Manipulation is especially good for children - ADHD, chronic childhood ear infections,... etc. - all are a good indication that the kid's body is out of alignment, and needs proper attention.
Dr. D. says that one of the purposes of osteopathic treatment is to remove trauma from the body. I needed osteopathic treatment because of unresolved brith trauma and the afore-mentioned head injury. Most people (99.9+%) are nowhere near as bad as I was, and can learn visualization without going through all the hoops I've been through.
Healing Through Cranial Osteopathy by Tajinder Deoora - I don't have this book, but it does seem like a good modern take on what Cranial Osteopathy is good for.
Also see chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing.
(not all Osteopaths are equally talented. The most specialized form of osteopathic manipulation treats the patient's visual perception, but my osteopath says there's only about 100 D.O.'s in the country who've taken the training. Cranio-Sacral therapy is osteopathic manipulation done by non-osteopaths. Your mileage will vary with CST practitioners - some are very good, some so-so, some have just taken a week or two of courses & set up shop as a CST. Biodynamic certification is a good indication of competency; some Biodynamic practitioners may be more advanced than cranial-academy certified docs.... ? - gotta build your own road map here.:)
But, in part, the problem is that school has been structured to get you through the tests and out the door. The other problem is they can't actually force you to learn. They can put it in front of you, and speak in front of the class, and even threaten you with stuff on your 'permanent record'. But they can't actually force you to participate in the classes, read the books, or learn the stuff you're intended to.
All the people at the level of the local school mean well - the teachers want the best for their students, the principle wants the best for his school, the parents want the best for their kids. The problem is, as Mr. Gatto reveals in his books, that the game is rigged.
My own memories from early school include a lot of kids who simply had no interest in being taught, and who were actively doing what they could do prevent everyone else from learning anything. (At the time I was a rather advanced reader for my age, and probbaly continue to be.)
I was bored out of my mind in school. I wanted to learn, but I cared about learning other things than the teacher was teaching at the time, or I learned the subject's lesson in the first 5 minutes, and had to sit still for the rest of that section of class.
Schools are designed (at the national level) to prevent children from becoming all they can be. This reply gave some good videos where John Gatto succinctly defines the problem of government schooling.
I kind of disagree with your conclusion that the answer is turning the books into film,
It was said in jest.:)
Thank you for the link to Mr. Gatto's interview - I look forward to watching them. Hopefully someone will throw some mod-points your way, to get some much needed attention on this vital issue!
Quote from the first video: "... 300 such [elite-private] schools... produce a substantial chunk of our national leadership. I don't think there are many people aware of the fact that in the 2000 presidential election, 4 of the 6 finalists for the presidency went to one or another of these schools... These schools only graduate about a thousand kids a year."
Effective schools for children of the elite, government schools for the masses. To arms!
I'm still trying to find the part in your post where you take some bit of responsibility for your inability to read anything longer than a blurb.
I realized that something wasn't right about 7 years ago, a quarter of the way through my last year of High School.
I see you pointing the finger at your teachers, the government, and a medical problem.
I don't blame the teachers - they all meant well by me. But the government is the institution that enforces a system that "doesn't teach the way children learn best" (to paraphrase Mr. Gatto).
But nowhere in there do you actually take it on yourself to learn to do something that might be a bit difficult.
This is what I've spent the last seven years on - six years bumbling around in a cloud of confusion (learning to define the problem I had), and another year after I realized my problem was biomechanical in origen.
And as for the medical problem: Imagine you're trying to learn how to shoot a basketball. You spend years trying to learn, but never advance to the level of others. "Just the way I am". Then one day you realize that, "the reason I can't shoot a basketball very well is because my left arm just flops around with no muscle control. Other people can shoot a basketball well because they can use both hands." Then the question becomes, why doesn't my arm work? You bump from M.D. to M.D.: "your arm is fine", "just need to exercise more", "go to this chiropractor", "need to stop doing _____ so much", "gonna need surgery", etc. Finally you say "phooey on them", and start the "alternative" medical rounds.
Then one day you finally happen across an Osteopathic Physician in Andrew Taylor Still's tradition ("structure and function are interrelated"). He says, "well, your left arm doesn't work very well because the nerve that controls it is pinched at the spine, and that vertebrae is being pulled out of place by this, this and that muscles, which are locked in spasm." Which is a gross simplification of what Dr. D's done for me, but hopefully it gets the point across.
Or maybe a better analogy is trying to sprint with ankle braces. No matter how much you train, you won't be as fast as you could be without the braces.
When my mother was growing up, Kindergarten cost extra. Hers was a poor family, and both parents needed to work. They did the math and found that a caretaker was cheaper than the government's Kindergarten, so that's where my mother spent her 5th year.
When she got to 1st grade, her parents were surprised to learn from the 1st grade teacher that their daughter already knew how to read. Surprised, because they certainly hadn't taught her.
What happened? Well - while spending all that time at the caretaker's house, my mother was very bored. So, with a little help from her slightly older sister and the caretaker's kids, she taught herself how to read.
Some 47 or 48 years later, mom says that she doesn't remember getting much help from her sister or others. Which is what John T. Gatto says: when a child is ready to learn, when the motivation is present, learning to read is extremely easy.
My mother could read so well, that after she moved to a new school 1/2 way through first grade, she was getting in trouble for reading ahead. Her family moved every year or two when she was growing up, finally finishing with the last three years of highschool in one place.
Normally, nomadic children don't do so well in school. My mother graduated Valedictorian. She didn't just teach herself how to read while imprisioned at the caretakers - she learned the lesson that if there was anything she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.
Mom didn't know any better, and sent me to Kindergarten, where I learned the alphabet and short words. First grade brought short sentances, 2nd grade was contractions, etc. Education is for learning how to learn, as you put it. But government schools do not "educate". The school system as it exists today is nothing but a "spoon-feeding" process, designed to strip children of responsibility for learning. If johnny ain't learning, school rhetoric says it's because the teachers aren't good, the buildings suck, the technology is outdated, etc. No one knows to inspire children to learn how to teach themselves what they want to know. It is this way by design, otherwise, who would staff the factories and the fast food businesses, if not for an entire population of dumbed-down worker drones?
Yes, I can place the blame entirely on the "education" system. I've been through it, and after reading Mr. Gatto's books, I agree that there is little worth salvaging. Check out Underground History of American Education (available for Free on the website given in the GP post), and it's hard to feel any other way.
Tried to read Moby Dick for my 10th grade honors English class... Had something to do with a whale, but that was just the picture on the cover.
Tried to read The Hobbit several times. Another 20-30 pages...
Tried to read The Lord of the Rings before I saw the movies. 10 pages before I gave up.
I couldn't even read Harry Potter.
I did really well on all those standardized reading tests they make you take in government schools, and I do just fine on magazine article-length pieces, or technical stuff... I never really did any reading for my B.S. degree - went to class, skim-read the texts.
Finally, a year after finishing my 16.5 years of schooling, I picked up a copy of John Taylor Gatto'sA Different Kind of Teacher. In the first chapter, Mr. Gatto talks about how he found that his 7th graders ("at some of Manhattan's best schools, and at some of the worst") were unable to read, beyond for a standardized test. To prove it for his readers, he said to read the first 20 pages of All Quiet on the Western Front (available at just about any library), and then he'd have a question. Well, I read the question first, so I knew the answer. But I didn't read the second question, and even after I had, I still had NO IDEA WHAT WAS TAKING PLACE. I could pass my eyes over the words, but I was incapable of extracting the story from them.
Mr. Gatto says that the way reading is taught in schools today & for the last 60+ years actually discourages children from visualizing the story as they read it. Which is certainly my problem, and the reason why I couldn't read all those books I gave above.
While I can't blame school for my inability to visualize, I do resent how they led me to believe that I knew how to read, when that certainly wasn't the case. They wasted 13 years of my life in Elementary, Middle and High schools, and I wasted 3.5 years and a whole lotta $$$ in College. I could've learned so much more if I'd been able to read beyond the level of standardized test.
(My problem with visualization was due to a medical problem that I am only now resolving, with the assitance of a capable Osteopathic physician in the Cranial Field.)
So anyways, back to the subject at hand: It's nice that Movie Studios are putting these classic novels on film. This way, since so many of us are incapable of reading complex stories due to our miseducation by the government (ref: books by John Taylor Gatto & others), we can still enjoy the stories our ancestors got from reading the books.
They cannot be studied scientifically. Or are you saying that they do, in fact, reduce ultimately to materialism?
Science is a process that can be used to study anything. All levels of existence interact with each other.
It's only metaphysical so long as the physical mechanism hasn't been discovered yet.
Yes, in fact, you are saying that it's all ultimately "hard, atomic stuff" (as you referred to it earlier),
The 'physical mechanism' I spoke of is the means for interaction of the physical body with higher levels. Think of the aforementioned Mirror Neurons as the biological equivalent of radio antennae for higher vibrations.
OBEs have been validated by scientists, just not the "official" ones.
I have to admit, you've got me confused. Maybe it's your (apparent) quirky belief about what science is good for and what it's not. Maybe it's a linguistic thing - the words I used don't mean to me what they mean to you (and we actually are taking the same stance on the issue at hand?). Or maybe I was less than clear in my earlier posts. Whatever. I just don't think it's valid to draw a line of separation, to put scientists on one side and spiritual traditions on the other. Everything is a valid target to shine the scientific process' flashlight on.
science insofar as it doesn't re-inforce your metaphysical commitments,
oh, but it can, and it does. See my other post in this thread about Mirror Neurons being the biological basis for telepathy. It's only metaphysical so long as the physical mechanism hasn't been discovered yet.
I don't deny mystical truths
then why not use the scientific method to examine them? You know, theory, experiment, revision, wash, rinse, repeat? Why would it be that some phenomena are exempt from scientific scruntiny?
You simpletons would like a nice little black-and-white universe. Yes or no, true or false. Sorry bud, doesn't work that way. I'm sure you believe in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That's the one that says you can't know BOTH the position and the momentum of a quantum particle, because the act of observing one changes the other. It's not just a quantum phenomena either: The observer affects the observed - we just usually don't notice the effect.
You materialists are no different than the flat-earthers, and no different than the theologians who threw Galileo in the tower for daring to propose that the earth went around the sun. For that matter, you're no different than the ID-ers you oppose. "We Believe in a mechanical universe..."
I fully encourage the USE of SCIENCE to examine higher energetic phenomena. But it's just foolish to pretend that these phenomena don't exist.
I'd like to state, again, that I am NOT an advocate of Intelligent Design. I'm just pointing out that there's more philosophy to Evolution than is commonly acknowledged.
The Scientific Process is perfectly valid. The problem comes when groups use it to push their agenda (the above-mentioned philosophy of evolution), conciously or unconciously. There are natural explanations for everything. Incorporating a SCIENTIFIC study of 'spirit' into the process (instead of pretending that spirit doesn't exist, or is merely tacked-on to a physical subsystem) will help to fill in the black holes that currently exist in the present material overview.
"Metaphysics" is a field which has much to offer in the form of future scientific discoveries. There are all sorts of phenomena (that have been studied by scientists, but who's findings haven't been universally accepted by materialistic-biased peers) that have valid explanations that lie outside a strictly physical worldview.
Materialism is the doctrine that matter is first cause, and everything else is a byproduct thereof. Vitalism is the philosophy that Conciousness is primary, and everything else derives therefrom. It's like in the Matrix (which was based on Buddhist philosophy) - there's the "real world" (conciousness), and the illusory Matrix (our shared physical experience).
...
Vitalism is just a different 'lense' to examine the universe through, to apply the scientific method with.
The bias is in the overview used. Something like, "we are physical beings living on a physical planet undergoing physical-chemical interactions, with a little bit of mental processes tacked on as an afterthought". Order emerged spontaneously from chaos. This is materialist philosophy.
Vitalism maintains that there is an essential, non-material spark that enters the material world to animate non-living matter into something higher.
What do you mean by "causes" behind the changes?
See Robert Monroe's Far Journeys - there's a short passage about the creative process (NOT intelligent design) that resulted in the earth-life system as we know it today. A "Creative Process" is contrasted against Natural Selection, which is more of an "Accidental Process".
Please don't confuse my post with advocation of Intelligent Design. All I'm saying is that the scientific theory of evolution as taught in biology class has essential, unstated philosophical underpinnings of a materialist-bent. Proponents of ID perceive the materialistic nature of ID as a threat, and have organized against it.
I'm just trying to widen the discussion a little bit here, so it becomes more than just turf warfare...
Evolution as taught to the kiddies is heavily biased towards a material overview. Atoms come together in the swamp to somehow become algae, which through natural selection become plants and bacteria and animals and finally humans, the pinacle of the evolutionary process on this planet. Or maybe life's proto-structures were seeded from deep space. Little is said about the causes behind the changes seen in the fossil record, just a hint that there's certainly a good, material explanation. Certified Scientists just haven't figured out what it is quite yet.
While a pure-scientific model may be agnostic, scientists and teachers all have their biases (materialistic/vitalisitic/etc), and those biases color everything they do.
>[T]he proponents of Intelligent Design are really just pushing for equal time.
They don't deserve equal time. A right to equal time would imply they were saying something that, in the interests of a fair and balanced discussion, was worth listening to.
Which is certainly the case. BUT those parents pushing ID also Don't deserve to have their home religious teachings purposefully undermined by a school system pushing the materialist-based philosophy of Evolution (as it is currently taught).
See my other responses in this thread for more 'evolved' (haha, pun intended:) coverage of what I was getting at in the GP post. This Evolution:ID:: Materialism:Vitalism analogy is something that I'm piecing together from disparate sources, hence the wording in my GP post reflects confusion before clarity emerges. (well, hopefully clarity will come by some day...)
I'm not sure how this relates to "Vitalism", which has nothing to do with Mirror Neurons and is untestable.
I think of it this way: Mirror Neurons and the other structures Mr. Swann talks about in this paper are analogous to "radio receivers", whereby thoughts/feelings/images/smells/etc are 'transmitted' or 'shared' in some form or fashion between two bodies. Furthermore, this transmission and reception is not limited to isolated structures of the brain, but is instead a fundamental part of our makeup/existence. A different way of looking at the brain is not as the "human CPU", but more like a radio set, which channels a specific non-material "entity" into a specific human body.
Materialism is the doctrine that matter is first cause, and everything else is a byproduct thereof. Vitalism is the philosophy that Conciousness is primary, and everything else derives therefrom. It's like in the Matrix (which was based on Buddhist philosophy) - there's the "real world" (conciousness), and the illusory Matrix (our shared physical experience).
Of course, I'm just figuring this out for myself, so I reserve the right to revise whatever I've said here in the future.:)
You might be intererested in Robert Monroe's three books (I recommend starting with the first one - the library probably has a copy). Robert was an engineer and businessman who discovered quite accidentally that his materialistic overview was incomplete.
Intelligent Design is anti-science, a doctrine whose proponents throw up their hands, "god must've done it". It is designed to fit into a pre-existing, rigid dogma. Vitalism is just a different 'lense' to examine the universe through, to apply the scientific method with.
Telepathy is something that can be measured and evaluated, HexRei, just not with a physical doo-hickey.
Actually, I take that back... Mr. Swann's article talks about Mirror Neurons being involved in Telepathy, and you can measure mirror neurons with a "physical doo-hickey".
But the real question is, will your beliefs allow you to accept the possibility that mind-to-mind communication is taking place, or will you say "gotta be some other explanation..."?
(sigh). Vitalism is NOT anti-science. ID, perhaps, but NOT vitalism.
A rigid Materialism-based outlook is anti-science. "We believe the nature of everything is hard atomic stuff" - then materialist scientists go out to prove their belief.
Beliefs are at the very core of the human experience. It's fundamentally impossible to separate the observed and the observer. Our experience of the physical world is filtered through our beliefs about the way things should be.
That is all for now. Thanks for your feedback - I'm expanding my GP post into something larger, eventually...
haha, so the only things that are real are the things that can be measured with currently-existing physical instruments.
That's a good one. Thanks.:)
P.S. For everyone else: I went to Mr. Swann's website myself, and found a recent update! (1st in 3 years? It's on the opening of the telepathic capability among us humans. Mr. Swann always refused the 'psychic' label, saying that he only worked with scientists. Telepathy is something that can be measured and evaluated, HexRei, just not with a physical doo-hickey.:)
Nonsense, eh? Tell that to the 12-year old mozart: "you're really just some stupid know-it-all-kid". Go find someone who's had an actual Near Death Experience: "you were just hallucinating".
I didn't say Intelligent Design explains anything, just that ID is a subset of Vitalism-based philosophy, just as Evolution is a subset of Materialism-based philosophy.
Superficially, it seems that Evolution vs. Intelligent design is a simple case of Science vs. Religion.
But dig a little deeper, and things aren't so clear.
Evolution, as taught in schools today, is fundamentally based on a Materialistic philosophy. That is, the universe (all that is) is made up of physical, chemical and nuclear interactions.
The people pushing intelligent design for inclusion in schools (who were formerly pushing for creationism) are just trying to get something more compatible with their particular variety of Vitalism. Vitalism being, of course, the philosophy that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces. Life is the non-material spark that animates cold hard matter.
So, the proponents of Intelligent Design are really just pushing for equal time.
Vitalism explains a lot - the ubiquity of the Near Death Experience (also: Out of Body Experiences), tribal religious tradtions (Native Americans leaving their tribe when they become a burden, so they could enter the spirit world directly), child prodigies, etc.
Some people (such as authors Robert Monroe, Ingo Swann, etc) also claim to Know that there's more than just the physical world out there. I can't make the same claim myself, but vitalistic philosophy explains some of my experiences better than anything else...
Slashdot Mirror
Me: Doctor, it hurts when I go like this.
Doctor: Then don't do that.
I just love modern medicine!
I'm pretty pissed off about the situation today. Drug companies have a stranglehold on medical education, and M.D. students learn minutia of human anatomy, and how drugs work to fix the problem, or what surgery is needed (and how to do the surgery). Nothing about nutrition or other therapies that don't cost a bajillion dollars...
I was just reading an article in a July issue of Business Week (magazine) about how 90% of heart surgeries don't do anything for the patient, long term, beyond the benefit as a placebo. Heart bypass surgery, angioplasties, etc., account for tens (maybe hundreds) of billions of dollars a year in medical charges.
And the patients don't really care because someone else (insurance) is paying the bill. "The inmates are running the asylum". When my grandmother was going through cancer therapy, I had the distinct impression that the whole charade was set up to bilk Medicare for all Grandma was worth. When grandma got tired of their treatment program (which kept her alive for a couple extra months, maybe) they handed her off to Hospice care, to refocus on their next victim.
Patients think that, "with all the money they made off of me, I should be getting perfect results", and when some happen to get a less-than-satisfactory outcome, they go straight to a lawyer, to prevent the doctor from profiteering off their misfortune.
You need to look at my other comment in this story, surgery never fixes the actual problem, on a superior treatment modality (1000x better than drugs & surgery) for biomechanical problems..
My Osteopath said something last time I saw him about how he's had two (osteopathic) journal articles published, and that after the third one you're considered an expert (he was talking more to the 3rd year osteopathic student who was observing than myself).
... "well, unless there's a specific cause", and demostrates how someone might habitually hold a phone up to their ear with their shoulder. "Then you stop the specific cause of the lesions, and fix them again."
Anyways, the conversation was on how one of my legs was shorter than the other, and that it was shorter because the bones in my right lower leg were all tweaked out of place. One of his articles was on how the bones in the carpal tunnel or forearm get displaced, leading to pressure against the nerve. M.D.s view this as cause for surgery, D.O.s who practice in the tradition of Osteopathy founder Andrew Taylor Still ("structure and function are interrelated") find it acceptable to just put the bones back where they should be, by releasing the muscle and fascial tissue strains that pull said bones out of position. (He said that in all his years [25+] of practicing, he'd only had one patient who actually had a short leg after he was done with them. Usually, "short legs" are the result of the hips being out of balance, leg bones being all knoted up, etc.)
Western medicine's two tools are drugs and surgery. Dr. Still, a traditionally-trained doctor in the civil-war era, formulated the Philosophy of Osteopathy after he was powerless to prevent three of his children from dying from viral meningitis. Osteopathy's distinguishing characteristic is a gentle form of manipulation that puts the body back like it's supposed to be.
I myself tried everything - trackballs, posture, keyboards, massage, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc... I bumped from M.D. to M.D.: "your arms are fine", "just need to exercise more", "go to this chiropractor", "need to stop doing _____ so much", "gonna need surgery", etc. Finally I said "phooey on them", and started the "alternative" medical rounds.
Didn't get any relief until I found my present Cranial Osteopath. "Your arms don't work because your left hip is higher than the other", iirc. Doing his ten-fingered detective work, he wandered around that first visit, feeling (no need for a $1500 MRI/cat scan/etc) all the structures that weren't where they were supposed to be. "And it's all coming from right.... (searching) here", and he settled on a spot just to the left of my heart. He pushes, "breath in... and out", pushes again, repeat. All to release a specific strain in my body's myofascial tissue that resulted from a knock to the head 7 years earlier. Every visit since has been to release other traumas that've been stored in my body for a very long time. We're almost done, and I'm feeling really good.
"Do these strains ever come back?"
"No."
The funniest thing of it all is we paid china to do it by whoring out most of our economy to them just for the sake of greed , stupid politicians and corporations .
The cause is inflation, moreso than greed and corporations. "Stupid politicians" voted for a central bank, to change the U.S. currency from value-based (Gold & Silver) to debt-based. Politicians like a debt-based (fiat) currency, because then they don't need to tax the citizenry to give money to their fellow bandits - they just "print" up a billion dollars and give it to connected organizations (Military-Industrial Complex, Halliburton, Betchtel, etc).
("stupid politicians" is in quotes because I don't know the veracity of the allegation that the Federal Reserve Bank act was passed by a handful of congressmen on December 23rd, when most of the other congressmen had already left. See Response to crticism of The Creature from Jeckyll Island)
Corporations are just fighting for survival... Because of inflation, employees of American manufacturers are forced to demand higher wages. So the manufacturers send out notices that, because their costs are going up, they're going to be charging more. WalMart ("Always Low Prices. Always") says to their suppliers, "Sorry, no can-do - keep your prices the same or we'll go somewhere else. P.S. Why don't you follow us to China?" See PBS Frontline's Is Wal-Mart Good for America? on how they bitchslapped Rubbermaid when the costs for plastic material went up.
This is not "greed" on wal-mart's part, so much as it is fear that their competitors will undercut them.
So, if not stupid politicians & corporations, who's to blame for the destruction of the economy? Well - George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush and John Kerry were all members of Skull & Bones... Bill Clinton was a member of the Bilderberg group (American Free Press is the only American news outlet I know of that reports on Bilderberg). Most of the presidents since the 50's have been a member of Bilderburg, Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, or Skull & Bones. The push for one-world-government has been going on for over 120 years - these people are dedicated, and this is the end-game. NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, EU, UN - all these entities play a part in dividing up the world into blocks for efficient global governance.
Someone will dismiss what I've said here with "you're just a conspiracy theorist"... Well - think what you want. You're certainly free to believe that you're as free in America today as you would've been 200 years ago. I have no such delusions.
batteries lasting the lifetime of the car has a _lot_ to do with Depth of Discharge (DoD). Battery chemistry has a lot to do with how low you can discharge a battery before you start to lose performance. For example, you don't want to discharge a lead-acid battery past 20% (even a "deep-discharge" PbA), or the capacity goes to shit real quick. Nickel-metal Hydride batteries don't like to be discharged past 50%, iirc. Hence, the Prius computer starts the engine whenever it detects that the battery level is less than a certain level - 60% or 80%, i think.
Lithium Ion batteries don't like to be fully charged (this is why some apple i-pod batteries only last a year before their performance craps out - people consistently plug 'em in until they're fully charged), not really sure on the specifics of Nickel-Cadmium, other than that the guy I met with a nickel-cadmium Electric Dodge Caravan said that he doesn't have any problems with discharging it all the way. Usual precaution about overcharging appliecs to NiCd, PbA, and LiIon...
The plug-in-hybrid project replaces the battery pack with a bigger one, and has electronics to tell the Toyota computer that it's consistently 90% full, until it gets down to a certain level. This allows for more electric-only city miles.
AC Propulsion's tZero now has a lithium-ion battery pack, which is good for 300+ miles. It originally had a cheap lead-acid pack, which was good for up to 100 miles/trip. I think they had 15,000 or 20,000 miles on it when they switched to the new battery pack.
such a simple question, and yet I'm thinking through all the books I've bought, and none of them really talk about what I've learned from my cranial osteopath or the biodynamic cranio-sacral therapist (superior, imho, to regular craniosacral therapy, as taught by the Upledger Institute) I've also worked with.
... etc. - all are a good indication that the kid's body is out of alignment, and needs proper attention.
:)
The Edgar Cayce Manual for Health through Drugless Therapy was written by an Osteopath, but he practiced before Dr. Sutherland's "cranial" technique (a supplemental to Andrew Still's system of osteopathic manipulation) became widespread.
If all you want to do is learn how to visualize, start with Win Wenger's techniques, or start by learning Self Hypnosis, or The Silva Method / Silva Ultramind, or start with a notepad to write down your dreams every morning (working towards waking up in your dreams, commonly known as "lucid dreaming").
In another post, I talked about how I discovered I had a problem 7 years ago... I missed the first week and a half of my senior year (I bumped my head, and don't remember 2 weeks), and went out on the internet to get information about speed reading, so I could catch up in my classes. I ended up buying Win's The Einstein Factor, which uses visualization for creative problem solving. "Wow, neat, I want to be able to do that." Win says that visualization is a natural human ability, and even people who don't visualize can easily be taught.
For me, Win Wenger's methods didn't work. So I picked up a silva method book. Then self-hypnosis books. These books all have steps to follow techniques to get the skills (creative problem solving, self mind control, visualization, etc) promised. I was also interested in Lucid Dreaming, and learned all I could about dreaming, what to do, which vitamins to take, etc. I did all these things, and still I couldn't even remember anything more than the tiniest fragments of my dreams when I woke in the morning, let alone "picture" something when I was wide-awake.
After stumbling around for six years, I figured that my problem was related to my disfunctional body, and that I needed an osteopath to fix that. My mother frequently told me what a difficult baby I was. Now I know that crying is an indication that baby hurts. Osteopathic Manipulation is especially good for children - ADHD, chronic childhood ear infections,
Dr. D. says that one of the purposes of osteopathic treatment is to remove trauma from the body. I needed osteopathic treatment because of unresolved brith trauma and the afore-mentioned head injury. Most people (99.9+%) are nowhere near as bad as I was, and can learn visualization without going through all the hoops I've been through.
Healing Through Cranial Osteopathy by Tajinder Deoora - I don't have this book, but it does seem like a good modern take on what Cranial Osteopathy is good for.
Also see chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing.
(not all Osteopaths are equally talented. The most specialized form of osteopathic manipulation treats the patient's visual perception, but my osteopath says there's only about 100 D.O.'s in the country who've taken the training. Cranio-Sacral therapy is osteopathic manipulation done by non-osteopaths. Your mileage will vary with CST practitioners - some are very good, some so-so, some have just taken a week or two of courses & set up shop as a CST. Biodynamic certification is a good indication of competency; some Biodynamic practitioners may be more advanced than cranial-academy certified docs.... ? - gotta build your own road map here.
Hope this helps.
But, in part, the problem is that school has been structured to get you through the tests and out the door. The other problem is they can't actually force you to learn. They can put it in front of you, and speak in front of the class, and even threaten you with stuff on your 'permanent record'. But they can't actually force you to participate in the classes, read the books, or learn the stuff you're intended to.
All the people at the level of the local school mean well - the teachers want the best for their students, the principle wants the best for his school, the parents want the best for their kids. The problem is, as Mr. Gatto reveals in his books, that the game is rigged.
My own memories from early school include a lot of kids who simply had no interest in being taught, and who were actively doing what they could do prevent everyone else from learning anything. (At the time I was a rather advanced reader for my age, and probbaly continue to be.)
I was bored out of my mind in school. I wanted to learn, but I cared about learning other things than the teacher was teaching at the time, or I learned the subject's lesson in the first 5 minutes, and had to sit still for the rest of that section of class.
Schools are designed (at the national level) to prevent children from becoming all they can be. This reply gave some good videos where John Gatto succinctly defines the problem of government schooling.
I kind of disagree with your conclusion that the answer is turning the books into film,
:)
... produce a substantial chunk of our national leadership. I don't think there are many people aware of the fact that in the 2000 presidential election, 4 of the 6 finalists for the presidency went to one or another of these schools... These schools only graduate about a thousand kids a year."
It was said in jest.
Thank you for the link to Mr. Gatto's interview - I look forward to watching them. Hopefully someone will throw some mod-points your way, to get some much needed attention on this vital issue!
Quote from the first video: "... 300 such [elite-private] schools
Effective schools for children of the elite, government schools for the masses. To arms!
I'm still trying to find the part in your post where you take some bit of responsibility for your inability to read anything longer than a blurb.
I realized that something wasn't right about 7 years ago, a quarter of the way through my last year of High School.
I see you pointing the finger at your teachers, the government, and a medical problem.
I don't blame the teachers - they all meant well by me. But the government is the institution that enforces a system that "doesn't teach the way children learn best" (to paraphrase Mr. Gatto).
But nowhere in there do you actually take it on yourself to learn to do something that might be a bit difficult.
This is what I've spent the last seven years on - six years bumbling around in a cloud of confusion (learning to define the problem I had), and another year after I realized my problem was biomechanical in origen.
And as for the medical problem: Imagine you're trying to learn how to shoot a basketball. You spend years trying to learn, but never advance to the level of others. "Just the way I am". Then one day you realize that, "the reason I can't shoot a basketball very well is because my left arm just flops around with no muscle control. Other people can shoot a basketball well because they can use both hands." Then the question becomes, why doesn't my arm work? You bump from M.D. to M.D.: "your arm is fine", "just need to exercise more", "go to this chiropractor", "need to stop doing _____ so much", "gonna need surgery", etc. Finally you say "phooey on them", and start the "alternative" medical rounds.
Then one day you finally happen across an Osteopathic Physician in Andrew Taylor Still's tradition ("structure and function are interrelated"). He says, "well, your left arm doesn't work very well because the nerve that controls it is pinched at the spine, and that vertebrae is being pulled out of place by this, this and that muscles, which are locked in spasm." Which is a gross simplification of what Dr. D's done for me, but hopefully it gets the point across.
Or maybe a better analogy is trying to sprint with ankle braces. No matter how much you train, you won't be as fast as you could be without the braces.
See also another of my replies in this thread, on how my mother learned to read.
Dear Mr. Coward,
:)
When my mother was growing up, Kindergarten cost extra. Hers was a poor family, and both parents needed to work. They did the math and found that a caretaker was cheaper than the government's Kindergarten, so that's where my mother spent her 5th year.
When she got to 1st grade, her parents were surprised to learn from the 1st grade teacher that their daughter already knew how to read. Surprised, because they certainly hadn't taught her.
What happened? Well - while spending all that time at the caretaker's house, my mother was very bored. So, with a little help from her slightly older sister and the caretaker's kids, she taught herself how to read.
Some 47 or 48 years later, mom says that she doesn't remember getting much help from her sister or others. Which is what John T. Gatto says: when a child is ready to learn, when the motivation is present, learning to read is extremely easy.
My mother could read so well, that after she moved to a new school 1/2 way through first grade, she was getting in trouble for reading ahead. Her family moved every year or two when she was growing up, finally finishing with the last three years of highschool in one place.
Normally, nomadic children don't do so well in school. My mother graduated Valedictorian. She didn't just teach herself how to read while imprisioned at the caretakers - she learned the lesson that if there was anything she wanted to learn, it was her responsibility to teach herself.
Mom didn't know any better, and sent me to Kindergarten, where I learned the alphabet and short words. First grade brought short sentances, 2nd grade was contractions, etc. Education is for learning how to learn, as you put it. But government schools do not "educate". The school system as it exists today is nothing but a "spoon-feeding" process, designed to strip children of responsibility for learning. If johnny ain't learning, school rhetoric says it's because the teachers aren't good, the buildings suck, the technology is outdated, etc. No one knows to inspire children to learn how to teach themselves what they want to know. It is this way by design, otherwise, who would staff the factories and the fast food businesses, if not for an entire population of dumbed-down worker drones?
Yes, I can place the blame entirely on the "education" system. I've been through it, and after reading Mr. Gatto's books, I agree that there is little worth salvaging. Check out Underground History of American Education (available for Free on the website given in the GP post), and it's hard to feel any other way.
Good day.
Couldn't get more than 20-30 pages into it.
Tried to read Moby Dick for my 10th grade honors English class... Had something to do with a whale, but that was just the picture on the cover.
Tried to read The Hobbit several times. Another 20-30 pages...
Tried to read The Lord of the Rings before I saw the movies. 10 pages before I gave up.
I couldn't even read Harry Potter.
I did really well on all those standardized reading tests they make you take in government schools, and I do just fine on magazine article-length pieces, or technical stuff... I never really did any reading for my B.S. degree - went to class, skim-read the texts.
Finally, a year after finishing my 16.5 years of schooling, I picked up a copy of John Taylor Gatto's A Different Kind of Teacher. In the first chapter, Mr. Gatto talks about how he found that his 7th graders ("at some of Manhattan's best schools, and at some of the worst") were unable to read, beyond for a standardized test. To prove it for his readers, he said to read the first 20 pages of All Quiet on the Western Front (available at just about any library), and then he'd have a question. Well, I read the question first, so I knew the answer. But I didn't read the second question, and even after I had, I still had NO IDEA WHAT WAS TAKING PLACE. I could pass my eyes over the words, but I was incapable of extracting the story from them.
Mr. Gatto says that the way reading is taught in schools today & for the last 60+ years actually discourages children from visualizing the story as they read it. Which is certainly my problem, and the reason why I couldn't read all those books I gave above.
While I can't blame school for my inability to visualize, I do resent how they led me to believe that I knew how to read, when that certainly wasn't the case. They wasted 13 years of my life in Elementary, Middle and High schools, and I wasted 3.5 years and a whole lotta $$$ in College. I could've learned so much more if I'd been able to read beyond the level of standardized test.
(My problem with visualization was due to a medical problem that I am only now resolving, with the assitance of a capable Osteopathic physician in the Cranial Field.)
So anyways, back to the subject at hand: It's nice that Movie Studios are putting these classic novels on film. This way, since so many of us are incapable of reading complex stories due to our miseducation by the government (ref: books by John Taylor Gatto & others), we can still enjoy the stories our ancestors got from reading the books.
Science is a process that can be used to study anything. All levels of existence interact with each other.
Yes, in fact, you are saying that it's all ultimately "hard, atomic stuff" (as you referred to it earlier),
The 'physical mechanism' I spoke of is the means for interaction of the physical body with higher levels. Think of the aforementioned Mirror Neurons as the biological equivalent of radio antennae for higher vibrations.
OBEs have been validated by scientists, just not the "official" ones.
I have to admit, you've got me confused. Maybe it's your (apparent) quirky belief about what science is good for and what it's not. Maybe it's a linguistic thing - the words I used don't mean to me what they mean to you (and we actually are taking the same stance on the issue at hand?). Or maybe I was less than clear in my earlier posts. Whatever. I just don't think it's valid to draw a line of separation, to put scientists on one side and spiritual traditions on the other. Everything is a valid target to shine the scientific process' flashlight on.
science insofar as it doesn't re-inforce your metaphysical commitments,
oh, but it can, and it does. See my other post in this thread about Mirror Neurons being the biological basis for telepathy. It's only metaphysical so long as the physical mechanism hasn't been discovered yet.
I don't deny mystical truths
then why not use the scientific method to examine them? You know, theory, experiment, revision, wash, rinse, repeat? Why would it be that some phenomena are exempt from scientific scruntiny?
You simpletons would like a nice little black-and-white universe. Yes or no, true or false. Sorry bud, doesn't work that way. I'm sure you believe in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That's the one that says you can't know BOTH the position and the momentum of a quantum particle, because the act of observing one changes the other. It's not just a quantum phenomena either: The observer affects the observed - we just usually don't notice the effect.
:)
You materialists are no different than the flat-earthers, and no different than the theologians who threw Galileo in the tower for daring to propose that the earth went around the sun. For that matter, you're no different than the ID-ers you oppose. "We Believe in a mechanical universe..."
I fully encourage the USE of SCIENCE to examine higher energetic phenomena. But it's just foolish to pretend that these phenomena don't exist.
Good day, sir.
The Scientific Process is perfectly valid. The problem comes when groups use it to push their agenda (the above-mentioned philosophy of evolution), conciously or unconciously. There are natural explanations for everything. Incorporating a SCIENTIFIC study of 'spirit' into the process (instead of pretending that spirit doesn't exist, or is merely tacked-on to a physical subsystem) will help to fill in the black holes that currently exist in the present material overview.
"Metaphysics" is a field which has much to offer in the form of future scientific discoveries. There are all sorts of phenomena (that have been studied by scientists, but who's findings haven't been universally accepted by materialistic-biased peers) that have valid explanations that lie outside a strictly physical worldview.
From another comment:
The bias is in the overview used. Something like, "we are physical beings living on a physical planet undergoing physical-chemical interactions, with a little bit of mental processes tacked on as an afterthought". Order emerged spontaneously from chaos. This is materialist philosophy.
Vitalism maintains that there is an essential, non-material spark that enters the material world to animate non-living matter into something higher.
What do you mean by "causes" behind the changes?
See Robert Monroe's Far Journeys - there's a short passage about the creative process (NOT intelligent design) that resulted in the earth-life system as we know it today. A "Creative Process" is contrasted against Natural Selection, which is more of an "Accidental Process".
Please don't confuse my post with advocation of Intelligent Design. All I'm saying is that the scientific theory of evolution as taught in biology class has essential, unstated philosophical underpinnings of a materialist-bent. Proponents of ID perceive the materialistic nature of ID as a threat, and have organized against it.
I'm just trying to widen the discussion a little bit here, so it becomes more than just turf warfare...
Evolution as taught to the kiddies is heavily biased towards a material overview. Atoms come together in the swamp to somehow become algae, which through natural selection become plants and bacteria and animals and finally humans, the pinacle of the evolutionary process on this planet. Or maybe life's proto-structures were seeded from deep space. Little is said about the causes behind the changes seen in the fossil record, just a hint that there's certainly a good, material explanation. Certified Scientists just haven't figured out what it is quite yet.
While a pure-scientific model may be agnostic, scientists and teachers all have their biases (materialistic/vitalisitic/etc), and those biases color everything they do.
>[T]he proponents of Intelligent Design are really just pushing for equal time.
:) coverage of what I was getting at in the GP post. This Evolution:ID :: Materialism:Vitalism analogy is something that I'm piecing together from disparate sources, hence the wording in my GP post reflects confusion before clarity emerges. (well, hopefully clarity will come by some day...)
They don't deserve equal time. A right to equal time would imply they were saying something that, in the interests of a fair and balanced discussion, was worth listening to.
Which is certainly the case. BUT those parents pushing ID also Don't deserve to have their home religious teachings purposefully undermined by a school system pushing the materialist-based philosophy of Evolution (as it is currently taught).
See my other responses in this thread for more 'evolved' (haha, pun intended
I'm not sure how this relates to "Vitalism", which has nothing to do with Mirror Neurons and is untestable.
:)
I think of it this way: Mirror Neurons and the other structures Mr. Swann talks about in this paper are analogous to "radio receivers", whereby thoughts/feelings/images/smells/etc are 'transmitted' or 'shared' in some form or fashion between two bodies. Furthermore, this transmission and reception is not limited to isolated structures of the brain, but is instead a fundamental part of our makeup/existence. A different way of looking at the brain is not as the "human CPU", but more like a radio set, which channels a specific non-material "entity" into a specific human body.
Materialism is the doctrine that matter is first cause, and everything else is a byproduct thereof. Vitalism is the philosophy that Conciousness is primary, and everything else derives therefrom. It's like in the Matrix (which was based on Buddhist philosophy) - there's the "real world" (conciousness), and the illusory Matrix (our shared physical experience).
Of course, I'm just figuring this out for myself, so I reserve the right to revise whatever I've said here in the future.
You might be intererested in Robert Monroe's three books (I recommend starting with the first one - the library probably has a copy). Robert was an engineer and businessman who discovered quite accidentally that his materialistic overview was incomplete.
Intelligent Design is anti-science, a doctrine whose proponents throw up their hands, "god must've done it". It is designed to fit into a pre-existing, rigid dogma. Vitalism is just a different 'lense' to examine the universe through, to apply the scientific method with.
Telepathy is something that can be measured and evaluated, HexRei, just not with a physical doo-hickey.
Actually, I take that back... Mr. Swann's article talks about Mirror Neurons being involved in Telepathy, and you can measure mirror neurons with a "physical doo-hickey".
But the real question is, will your beliefs allow you to accept the possibility that mind-to-mind communication is taking place, or will you say "gotta be some other explanation..."?
(sigh). Vitalism is NOT anti-science. ID, perhaps, but NOT vitalism.
A rigid Materialism-based outlook is anti-science. "We believe the nature of everything is hard atomic stuff" - then materialist scientists go out to prove their belief.
Beliefs are at the very core of the human experience. It's fundamentally impossible to separate the observed and the observer. Our experience of the physical world is filtered through our beliefs about the way things should be.
That is all for now. Thanks for your feedback - I'm expanding my GP post into something larger, eventually...
haha, so the only things that are real are the things that can be measured with currently-existing physical instruments.
:)
:)
That's a good one. Thanks.
P.S. For everyone else: I went to Mr. Swann's website myself, and found a recent update! (1st in 3 years? It's on the opening of the telepathic capability among us humans. Mr. Swann always refused the 'psychic' label, saying that he only worked with scientists. Telepathy is something that can be measured and evaluated, HexRei, just not with a physical doo-hickey.
Nonsense, eh? Tell that to the 12-year old mozart: "you're really just some stupid know-it-all-kid". Go find someone who's had an actual Near Death Experience: "you were just hallucinating".
I didn't say Intelligent Design explains anything, just that ID is a subset of Vitalism-based philosophy, just as Evolution is a subset of Materialism-based philosophy.
Intelligent Design may not be provable, but vitalism is, or at least as provable as materialism is.
:)
You know nothing about Vitalism. Try picking up Ingo Swann's Psychic Sexuality.
Superficially, it seems that Evolution vs. Intelligent design is a simple case of Science vs. Religion.
But dig a little deeper, and things aren't so clear.
Evolution, as taught in schools today, is fundamentally based on a Materialistic philosophy. That is, the universe (all that is) is made up of physical, chemical and nuclear interactions.
The people pushing intelligent design for inclusion in schools (who were formerly pushing for creationism) are just trying to get something more compatible with their particular variety of Vitalism. Vitalism being, of course, the philosophy that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from physicochemical forces. Life is the non-material spark that animates cold hard matter.
So, the proponents of Intelligent Design are really just pushing for equal time.
Vitalism explains a lot - the ubiquity of the Near Death Experience (also: Out of Body Experiences), tribal religious tradtions (Native Americans leaving their tribe when they become a burden, so they could enter the spirit world directly), child prodigies, etc.
Some people (such as authors Robert Monroe, Ingo Swann, etc) also claim to Know that there's more than just the physical world out there. I can't make the same claim myself, but vitalistic philosophy explains some of my experiences better than anything else...