This is my new blog covering everything not covered in my music Blog "Music from under My Skin" it'll cover subjects like: Spirituality, Religion, Art, Culture & politics. Both blogs are to explore the land of heart's desire I need to set the tone so the first blog is on the spiritual world view, that is the view that we are spiritual beings having a human experience, that consciousness and love is at the centre of what we are.
In 20th/21st Century intellectual culture Atheism of a reductionist materialist kind is the ruling paradigm, it is the expected faith of most scientists (even if it isn't their faith) so it has a social weight, a gravitas, an influence upon our society and culture, but I think it is mistaken and it is time to move on.
I think we have a spirit that survives the body. Why?:
All enquiry rises from our consciousness it is the only thing that we can be positive exists, it is our direct experience, even the external world is a supposition, although a pretty good one due to it’s consistency. So our consciousness is all we can be certain of, an argument that ends by denying or devaluing consciousness strikes me as undermining the foundation upon which it was built. In materialist philosophy consciousness is called “the hard problem” because it shouldn’t exist. Consciousness shouldn't exist because materialism supposes that matter is without consciousness and human beings are determined wholly by our material make up, so how can consciousness emerge from these determinist unconscious elements.
If consciousness is a byproduct of the chemistry of the brain then that implies that all causality is essentially upwards, that is our brain chemistry produces our thoughts. This directly contradicts how we generally appreciate our actions, that is that they follow our thoughts. I don’t think anyone that follows materialism actually acts in accordance with this supposition, people act on the assumption that we are responsible for our own actions. Thus I think reductionist materialism fails the utility test.
Nearly everyone has had experiences where consciousness seems to act at a distance (this can’t happen if consciousness is a localised phenomena inside our heads as posited by materialism). Two common experiences are the sense of being stared at and knowing who is calling you before you answer the phone. The sense off being stared at, is the experience of feeling that someone is looking at you and then turning around to see that they are (this experience is more common among woman than men). The flip side of this experience is staring at someone and having them turn around to look at you (more common for men than women). Knowing who is calling you on the phone or thinking of someone you haven't seen in years and they call you are experiences that everyone has had and imply telepathy. Materialists will say these are just due to chance, but it is a testable and thus falsifiable theory (probably the main feature of a scientific theory). Rupert Sheldrake (and others) have done studies, one of which was getting four people to ring someone they knew, one of the 4 is selected at random, and the person had to guess who was calling before they answered the phone. Chance alone over an extended period would have the results at 25% but instead they averaged 40%, given the size of the tests was a hugely significant result, massively improbable to attribute to chance. What is more these tests weren’t using psychically gifted subjects but just regular folks, this paranormal phenomena is actually normal.
Millions of people have experienced directly leaving their bodies in either out of Body experiences, near death experiences and shared death experiences. In NDEs the persons body will be in a coma and sometimes as close as it is possible to get to brain death and yet come back, but they can see, hear and feel what is going on accurately usually from above their body. They also move into spiritual landscapes and their sense is of a heightened reality, normal waking consciousness compares to this heightened as sleep to waking, it is that profoundly richer and more real. These experiences have a profound effect on the person having them and lead to them losing their fear of death. They are entirely convincing to the person having them. There have been extensive studies done on these experiences and to me the simplest explanation is that they are just what they appear to be.
Lastly the materialist philosophy seems predicated on Newtonian physics with it’s solid billiard ball atoms and the machine model for the universe (note Newton himself was not a reductionist materialist but a dualist). Modern physics is much odder, where the act of witnessing (consciousness) turns a probability wave into a particle, where quantum entanglement has instant (faster than light speed) interaction between particles and where energy and matter are interchangeable qualities. As has been famously summarised the universe starts to look more like a giant thought than a giant machine.
What difference does it make?
Well for people coming back from near death experiences, their lives are transformed, almost turned upside down, the truth's of the heart become the centre of who they are, if you don't fear death other fears diminish too. If your intellect supports rather than questions those moments when you feel joy and everything falls into place then that joy is likely to come through more often and infiltrate the entire psyche. To me it is a much better paradigm for art, art can actually help us towards the reality of the spirit it is not a pleasant diversion from more serious matters like politics and commerce.
Time to put this first little credo out from my head and out for my handful of readers
What difference does it make?
Well for people coming back from near death experiences, their lives are transformed, almost turned upside down, the truth's of the heart become the centre of who they are, if you don't fear death other fears diminish too. If your intellect supports rather than questions those moments when you feel joy and everything falls into place then that joy is likely to come through more often and infiltrate the entire psyche. To me it is a much better paradigm for art, art can actually help us towards the reality of the spirit it is not a pleasant diversion from more serious matters like politics and commerce.
Time to put this first little credo out from my head and out for my handful of readers
Links
Chris Carter on Science and Psychic Phenomena:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07BM3fASJG4
Rupert Sheldrake, who has written on the sense of being stared at and dogs who know when their owners are coming home as well as on other issues of spirit and biology:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg
Some excellent Near Death Experiences:
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