My opinion is that most religions have both good and bad in them. They also evolve overtime to become less violent and more tolerant. Religions served a good purpose of helping society to advance for hundreds or sometimes thousands of years. However, they have past their peak usefulness now and they are on the decline. From reading and hearing psychic mediums talk on the subject, it seems that power and influence of religions over societies will slowly decline over the this century and religions such as Christianity and Islam will basically be irrelevant by 2100. You can see this today in many western countries like England and Australia where people are increasingly identifying as being atheists, agnostic or spiritually independent. I personally identify as spiritually independent. I know that life exists after death and I also have a basic grasp of how it all works.

impressive

To address the OP, part of Buddhism is upholding the Dharma, and part of the Dharma is Law and Order.
Obviously we might think what constitutes fitting punishment is rather different from what the Tibetans of 100 years ago did. I don't really see it as being contradictory to Buddhism, though.

And I think people forget that even 50 years ago people in Europe and North America were much harder than they are now. And we forget that, for instance, in the time of our great-grandparents, infant mortality rate was maybe 10%. Maternal mortality not far behind that. And that is in the "advanced" West, of the time (I am talking around 1900 here).

What does that mean? It means that the reality of life and death was more acute to us then, just as it remains acute to people in less developed countries. So if a thief dies, or gets his eyes put out or whatever, tough shit for him, who cares?

I have been lucky in my life to have spent time amongst isolated peoples, who live according to more primordial ways. Such people are often characterised by a wonderful sweetness shown to their own people, and an almost psychotic disregard for the lives of the people they deem their enemies.

This is a great thread. I'm very interested in global cataclysm, sunken continents and the place this occupies in tribal and collective imagination. Hancock has written extensively on the subject and his controversial ideas (in that field, at least) are becoming increasingly backed up from submarine archaeological evidence. In western Europe alone, besides the well-known Doggerland which existed as a fertile swampy lowland in what is now the North Sea there is also - as can be seen in the appropriate map, posted above - a sizeable area of submerged lowland extending from Britain's Southwest peninsula across the Bay of Biscay. What became of the inhabitants of this region? What unknown treasures exist there beneath the waves.


Meanwhile, back to my favourite obsession:
Bisphenol A is used because it is very cheap and easy to produce from bulk petrochemicals and it does its job well.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisphenol_A

As for "man's [sic] inhumanity to man", we all have our moments, don't we? Although some rather worse than others...



This could apply as well to various members of the modern 'Western' world, couldn't it?

I'm all ears, please fill us in. How did you come by this information, especially since mystics, philosophers, and researchers have all in vain searched for some kind of proof they can bring back.

Blessings
~ND

Yes please, show us the proof.

And please note that this is a science oriented forum where hypothesis, underbelly feelings and hunches should not be presented as fact. It is okay to theorize about ideas and write supporting hypothesis about it, but please make it clear that it is your idea and not a set fact.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

I was formerly agnostic but then started becoming psychic in 2015. In particular I am good at feeling spirits when they are around me and I also occasionally hear them and have seen glimpses of them (this happens when I am sober and not on any drugs). I also sometimes have out of body experiences (astral projections) again without any drugs, though it almost always happens when I am asleep. When I try to do it consciously I can get parts of my body such as an arm of leg out. I have managed to touch my face with my astral arm as well. There has also been a few occasions where I have managed to fully astral project just when I was almost asleep and I had 100% lucidity of what was going on and I was floating above my body. I also get harassed by entities. They do things like sucking from my Chakras at night when I am in bed and they also like to touch my face. I even have one that I call my stalker. She is a dead spirit that refuses to cross over and is in love with me and tries to get me to have sex with her (yes it is possible, google succubus or sex with ghost).I have gotten rid of others but she is proving rather difficult to get rid of... As far as good spirits go, I sometimes get pranked by them. For example they will fuck with my computer or my iPhone.

Some of you reading this will no doubt think I am either a liar or mentally ill. To those people who think this or those that demand scientific proof, I would suggest reading "Your Eternal Self" by Craig Hogan PhD, "Physics of the Soul" by Amit Goswami PhD, "Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander M.D., "The Science Delusion" by Rupert Sheldrake, "Supernormal - Science, yoga and the Evidence For Extraordinary Psychic Abilities" by Dean Radin, PhD and "Miracles" by Eric Metaxas. All those books layout a strong case for life after death and psychic abilities. I think some of them get some stuff wrong but if you read them you will get a reasonable understanding of things. Also look at www.channelingerik.com It's a blog put together by the mother of a Texas guy that killed himself. He is the one that likes to prank people so if you read the blog and ask him to prank you he might. He has gotten me a few times and he has entered into one of my dreams as well.

I'm looking at the Amazon reviews for the book right now (My Son and the Afterlife: Conversations from the Other Side) and I'm seeing this all on the front page for the book:

Five stars
By Kristinaon October 4, 2013

Five stars
By MBon October 7, 2013

Five stars
By joyful judyon October 6, 2013

Five stars
By Thegalon October 6, 2013

Five stars
By amyrmaidon October 6, 2013

Five stars
By Amazon Customeron October 6, 2013

Sort of, but in the West communal and personal violence have become so far removed from each other.
-We vote for scumbag politicians who will send rockets or drones to kill faceless "enemies" who really only exist, for us, on paper.
And the men who do actual killing are dehumanised, by military and popular culture, and by the crippling damage they do themselves in trying to either integrate or keep separate the facts of their social being and their ultimate social transgression; the taking of life and the witnessing of the human being reduced to its most terrifyingly inanimate components.
By contrast, the men I was referring to were comfortable playing with kids, gossiping with women, just relaxing, undisturbed, untormented, unconflicted, while also having the capacity for enormous bravery and cold-blooded killing.
I remember one occasion I was socialising with a group of men; I was able to reduce them to tears of laughter, real, joyful, gleeful laughter, by teaching them a silly game we used to play at school. It's called "knuckles", but there is a milder version using slapping rather than rapping with knuckles which I played with them. Anyway, the point is that this game is quite sly and vicious, and the men just found this the most hilarious thing, I guess because viciousness and slyness and causing pain to your friends was alien to them, and yet, of the men present, I knew that two of the men had ambushed and killed five men from a hostile group while they were sleeping (the dead men had been sleeping!). I presume that other of the men had killed people or multiple people, as was not unusual for the area at that time.

I haven't actually read the book, only the blog so I don't know much about it.

Swayambhu, thanks for expanding on that. For some reason I am reminded of Ernest Becker's book, "The Denial of Death" even though I've never read it - this might be a good time for me to do so. Becker took his inspiration from, among others, Wilhelm Reich who himself wrote (you may already know this!) "The Function of the Orgasm" and "The Mass Psychology of Fascism" which are kind of relevant to the topic as well. What am I trying to get across here? I'm a bit sleep deprived and therefore my cognitive abilities aren't really up to much at the moment! Aha, yes! I'm adding three more books in the category of "haven't read yet but really should".

Swayambhu - I don't like to label people as either liars or 'mentally ill' (unless they self-identify as such), so you don't have to worry that I'm just going to brush your experiences off as being a 'crazy person.' I have no problem believing that you have had these experiences and that they've been meaningful to you. No need to make value judgements.

I will say that, based on my own training, research, and experiences, I am more likely to believe that the experiences you're reporting here are not what they seem to be, but rather, creations of your own nervous system. As a big fan of Occam's Razor, it makes more sense to me that it's your own brain, rather than hypothesizing undiscovered worlds and entities that, for some reason, selectively reveal themselves to seemingly arbitrary people.

As for the authors, I've actually looked into some of them and remain unimpressed. One of the key elements of science is predictability under controlled conditions, and a lot of the 'scientific' evidence that gets cited are usually one-off studies that haven't held up to robust scrutiny. With a standard alpha value of 0.05, it's important to remember that 1/20 studies will give a false positive.

Blessings
~ND

Occam's Razor would allow the brain to be a sort of TV antenna for different channels imo. Change the neural network via drugs, injury or meditation and switch to a different channel. I guess it's the reason why it's called ''neural correlates of consciousness'' and not ''neural causalities of consciousness''

That would require hypothesizing the existence of some place that these 'signals' are coming from though, which complicates the picture considerably.

If you assume it's all in the brain you still have a massive, unanswered question (the 'how does it happen' one), but that's still a question in the reciever model, as well as additional ones, like 'how is the signal transmitted,' and 'how is it interpreted,' etc.

Blessings
~ND

The outside world? Why should this complicate matters?


Isn't "it's all in the brain" called solipsism? I really doubt it's all in the brain. Outside signals are interpreted inside the brain, but the source is outside. And I doubt that neuroscience has mapped all receptors or have a complete understanding of how the brain really works. I think there are ~ 7bn different perceptions of the outside world, if you count the human brains on earth. And they are somewhat similar, yet different.


If you are interested in Psi and well-versed in statistics, check out 'My Research Interests' @ https://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/ -- She's a professor of statistics and has written about the subject. Not in favor of the skeptics, if I'm not mistaken. In a report for the US gov it's written:


If this is true, how does remote viewing work and what are the receptors for the signal?

The way I see it, we have two competing hypothesis about consciousness:

1) Consciousness is a local phenomena, and somehow emerges from information processing in the nervous system. Signals come in through sensory channels, but they are not, themselves, the stuff of consciousness, somehow the brain generates the experience of consciousness from them.

This leaves the unanswered question of how does the physical matter of the brain generate and interact with consciousness.

2) Consciousness is a non-local phenomena and somehow the brain 'tunes into' specific frequencies and interprets them as first-hand conscious experience.

This leaves the same unanswered question as above (how does the physical matter of the brain interact with consciousness), as well as adding two new questions: how are those signals or frequencies propagated, and where do they initially come from?

So far, 1 seems to me to be the simpler of the two (gutwrenchingly complex) questions.

Thanks for the link to Utt's page, this looks really interesting.

Blessings
~ND

Since statistics seem to tell us that Psi/ESP is real, you can't omit questions just to support your theory. Occam's razor does not apply there imo. Also theory 1 and theory 2 don't really contradict each other, I think the answer lies in the middle. But I'm too tired to think about it more. Edit: okay a little more: think about a nonlocal unified consciousness with local, seperate entities (brains).


Yw


I get headaches from them.

Gimme some time to actually dig into those statistics and see if I buy it. I'm currently withholding judgment and trying to keep an open mind.

Blessings
~ND

Also, if you haven't before, check out The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby - this provides some food for thought WRT this particular question. What I find interesting is the idea that the long repeat sections of the 'junk' DNA act as linear crystals capable of receiving specific modulated frequencies of IR radiation. For whatever that's worth. I lost my copy about ten years ago so my memories are a little patchy, but there was something in it about the way harmala alkaloids enhance this information exchange and thus facilitate the whole telepathic plant communication phenomenon. Sounds a bit dodgy, I know

Take all the time you need, I'm off to munching on some chilli.