How woo, magic, and religion are simply glimpses into non-ordinary neurology. It’s all right here.
It is religion that drives certain men and women to ask real questions and find real answers to how the world operates. Thank you religion. Science has challenged the millennia long status quo—that what is occasionally seen by mystics is merely how the world would look when you mess with the wires.
Those who grew tired of being watched by a persistent deity that had no bearing on life, decided to answer a few questions on their own without postulating a god—but to find out how things actually work.
We have evolved with a certain brain configuration and perceive the world through a specific shaped eye and tactile senses. Alter these receptors any way you want and you can see the spirit world, which is this world in a non-ordinary, alternate perception of reality. This is the religious experience—attempting to maintain that different reality than what evolution has normalized as our current, best chance at survival.
Change the shape of the eye, we all may look like Jabba the Hut, but we’d still be here, and that would be normal. Mess with the optic nerve and flip the left and right lobes and voilet! Things certainly wouldn’t be like they seem now.
Understanding this, that a minor change in physiology and nothing would seem the same. I’m sure the octopus who is born knowing how to hunt and strategize it’s prey, has a completely different perception and hereditary underpinning than a human—but the octopus is still here, just a different set of lenses, and a different reality.
Enter the traumatic event or addiction.
Carry yourself deep into the difficult side of human existence, to the brink of losing family or life itself, or just play around with a little peyote? Activate those adrenals and delve into the hypoxia of a NDE and you can see god. Feel god. Feel your brain reach it’s outer limits to grasp at survival. Those unlucky enough just don’t have enough trauma in their lives, or indoctrination? It is up to them to move the planet beyond belief mode.
TheCommonAtheist 
“Change the shape of the eye, we all may look like Jabba the Hut, but we’d still be here, and that would be normal. Mess with the optic nerve and flip the left and right lobes and voilet! Things certainly wouldn’t be like they seem now.”
Actually, there have been some experiments done on this. I recall inverse glasses, the wearing of which presents the world upside down or flips the left and right field of vision. It takes a while to get used to them in the sense of how does this affect one’s ability to walk in a straight line, to pick up a glass, to push a button, to function throughout the day. But here’s the takeaway: the brain compensates and reverses all these changes! Although the left field may be switched to being seen only by the right eye, the brain shifts it back to the left. When everything is being seen upside down, the brain inverts the signal to upside right. The brain – not the eyes – maps the world and creates its model for us to function in. In other words and contrary to your assertion above, ‘Things WOULD be like they seem now’ if you messed with the optic nerve… because it’s not the eye, nor the optic nerve, that ‘sees’. It’s the brain. And the brain does a pretty good job accurately mapping the environment.
Only because I know you want to know, the brain reverts when the glasses are discarded, and this reverting takes about 1/10 the time. (The brain is very flexible. Well, most brains. It takes dedication and an incredible rigidity of imposed belief in the creation of an alternate world ‘explanation’ to maintain an altered view that no longer aligns with our brain’s mapping. See rawgod for more details….)
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Yup, there’s only one way to look at the world, and it is yours. Congratulations.
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@ Rawgod
In actual fact one can look at the world any way one wants to.
Reality , however, has a way of letting you know who’s boss very quickly when you try to force it to become something it most certainly isn’t.
As a test, consider gravity for example, and try stepping out of a two-storey window and see what reality thinks of any notion you may have of flying – an idea a chap who I once knew named Carl had. He worked for the Post Office. Unfortunately for him the notion of flying came upon him while working up a telegraph pole one summer after he had dropped a tab of acid the day before.
Another example: There is a condition/illness known as ‘calenture’ that sailors experienced when, having been becalmed for weeks under a pitiless sun, they suddenly believed that the ship was surrounded by green fields and stepped overboard.
No LSD needed.
Oops! Reality check!
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Yeah, but fairies wear boots and you gotta believe me
Yeah I saw it, I saw it, I tell you no lies
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Yeah, but …she comes in colours ev’ry where, she combs her hair, she’s like a rainbow, and it’s so very lonely, ‘cos you’re two thousand light years from home.
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Sounds like you can’t get no satisfaction. Try mother’s little helper. Or go ask Alice. I think she’ll know.
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Alice? Who the f… is Alice?
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Who’s Alice? She’s the slick chic who adds grace to your surrealistic pillows.
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This reminds me of Lucile Ball in “yours, mine and ours”—the alcoholic Pearl Harbor when she didn’t know what happened to her. Hahah.
Some people see things off and on and really, with the messy entanglement of neurons it’s amazing we adapt at all. Or maybe that’s why we do? Have you ever seen this. Wonderful ten minute TED.
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Notice that to make room for religious belief, she divides the ‘truth’ into outer and inner. Red flag. Why do this?
Well, she says outer ‘truth’ can be tested but the inner ‘truth’ is fine and respectable. (Are these the same terms now or compeltely different meanings?) To make this case, she has to make the inner ‘truth’ metaphorical by fiat. This is straight up religious apologetics, a disputable if not dishonest tactic of switching meaning for the same term so that nothing like a single term can ever be pinned down and shown to be ‘not true’. Anyway, she claims allowing one’s ‘inner’ truth to be completely incompatible with reality when used to explain reality is all very respectable and respectful (a dubious claim) but in reality provides a fantastic camouflage for whatever these inner ‘truths’ are when pinned to the ground (a ground of being, so to speak). The squirt of ink here when captured is to claim it’s all metaphorical!
Well, that’s a stinking pile of bullshit; no one ‘believes’ a metaphor like they do a factual, historical claim about reality but this little game of sleight of hand apologists commit without any apology whatsoever does a couple of things: it provides cover to make a claim about reality that is extremely doubtful to be considered true in an inner sense and insist everyone must now respect that claim as ‘true’, but then when challenged by reality, retreat behind, “Oh, well, belief in a creation event for humanity is only a metaphor, the flood is only a metaphor, Jesus as an historical man is just a metaphor, that reincarnation is just a metaphor, that heaven and or an ‘after’ life (whatever the hell that might be) is just a metaphor. No, inner – just like ‘outer’ – factual claims about reality are factual claims, full stop. There’s no artificial divide to be had.
Either our beliefs we want to claim are ‘true’ aligns with reality or they don’t. There is no artificial division. But hey, don’t we ALWAYS have to make special rules of privilege for the religiously-challenged among us even if we have warp reality to make it fit and everyone go along with the charade a offer faux-respect?
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I think at the end there she was just trying not to offend anyone’s beliefs. But I hear you. She could have left it at 100% of the time science wins the day, but she’s probably got family members that are believers. That’s the other part of the problem. Play nice or be alone.
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Not always. My mother is a devout Christian. We simply don’t talk about it and she has never preached. We get on fine.
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I listened to her. What I hear at the end is: if we shut down the dialogue we can miss the conversation . . . which as she explained in some cases might mean getting someone help.
I leaned towards her approach being that of showing respect to a fellow human being and not dehumanizing them. Not so much a respect for the “faux” part so-to-speak but for the human part.
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Good catch Zoe. I haven’t seen that for a while, but even tildeb would agree with that.
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As is often the problem, not showing ‘respect’ to a belief or claim is then interpreted to be not showing respect to a person.
This is a thinking error.
This interpretation is almost always wrong. Factually wrong. Importantly wrong. Our value as human beings is not synonymous with the truth value others hold about our current beliefs. If it were the case, we’d all lose value as we learn and change. It’s an idiotic idea. So the association that this assumption has ANY merit value whatsoever in a discussion about whether or not a claim about reality is true is a huge red flag when imported. Huge. And it’s huge because what’s true no longer matters.
So what often happens is that the person whose claims are being challenged then retreats behind this fallacy of ‘personal’ attack. It’s a tactic of not facing up to the challenge one has initiated by making a claim but a means to avoiding having to do so. We see this, for example, with rawgod. Woe is me, everyone hates me, I’m being attacked, poor me, but not once – NOT ONCE – will he entertain the idea that just maybe his interpretation might not accurately reflect reality. NOT ONCE. He has become Belief Inc.. That’s how rigid his belief structure is. He’s ALL about protecting his belief claims from legitimate criticism. That’s not showing respect for what’s true; that’s undermining it in the name of victimhood, of protecting his beliefs from reality’s arbitration of them.
That’s fine. He can’t support his claims. So what? But the issue of greater concern is this:
As sure as the sun will rise in the east, using this tactic lends support to other people who can then jump in and support the ‘victim’ interpretation. These are often the ‘butters’ – the people who may actually agree with the challenge but present themselves as more concerned with the respect ‘owed’ to the person whose claims are being challenged. The person challenging the claims are then falsely painted by comparison as bad people who deserve MORE criticism than the person who has advanced a claim in need of challenge. And the ‘butter’ can appear to be more virtuous, more friendly, more tolerant and forgiving, well… superior in every way, actually… hence the earned title of Virtue Signaler. The VS relegates the importance of respecting what’s true in that challenge to be of no consequence whatsoever but can feel like they’ve helped ‘rescue’ the poor victim from the clutches of the Bad Person who has not so much challenged their claim but targeted the person for being mean and bullying. Well, as long as someone can feel virtuous, then that’s all that really matters.
We see this unfolding today in all kinds of areas. And the natural effect is for people to do two highly pernicious but related things: 1) stop challenging really bad ideas, even blatant falsehoods, so that people can’t accuse you of being a ______ -phobe or _ -ist or a Bad Person, and 2) self censor.
This tactic is so common today, so ubiquitous, so entrenched throughout our Western society, in that few people even notice it being employed anymore. It’s just a given. So the result is absolutely predictable: if you disagree with anything from ‘the elect’ – these self-appointed hallway monitors ready and willing to signal their virtue on behalf of victims, then shut the fuck up or be vilified. This allows not just terrible ideas to grow -but an alternate reality that doesn’t exist in fact… not least of which is, say, Trump won the election; if you believe it, then what’s actually the case, what’s actually true, just doesn’t matter! You believe it, it must be the case and everyone should go along to get along or be Really Bad People. Enemies, actually. We MUST protect claims from legitimate criticism if we want to respect people! Or how about eliminating the term ‘women’ altogether so that the feelings of those who want to pretend they are women can continue to shape reality that suits their claims. We MUST protect claims from legitimate criticism if we want to respect people! See how this works?
Claims about reality are not reality and the feelings of those who make claims are not of primary or even secondary concern but a non sequitur if what’s being sought is respect for what is true. And unlike many ‘butters’ I think what is true actually matters far more than going along with lies and deceit and misrepresentation and distortion to get along.
Shocking, I know.
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Of all you wrote … this, IMO, carries the most weight: the person whose claims are being challenged then retreats behind this fallacy of ‘personal’ attack. It happens ALL the time. Even in households. 😕
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Offense is taken, not given. Plus, if not “offending” anyone had been my primary concern, I’d never have been able to leave religion, because lots of people were “deeply offended” by my actions.
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I agree with you. I did have this overwhelming fear I would offend my family. In the end they were disappointed (my kids all celebrated but one) I could do such a thing. Like it’s a choice. That’s one reason I think there is a lot of pretending going on. Choosing to believe something that makes no sense is crazy, really.
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Exactly. What doth it profit a man, to gain the approval of others and forfeit his personal integrity?
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Octopi are so fuckin’ smart some consider them aliens…which is why in many scifi stories, the aliens are cephalopods!
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There is a great show on Netflix right now called My Octopus Teacher. This guy visits an octopus every day for a year and they become friends. Incredibly smart and adaptive. Highly recommended show!
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Thanks! Will watch!
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similar to “My Life as a Turkey”. won numerous awards. a man’s incredible relationship with wild turkeys, whom he imprints upon hatching.
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I’ll have to check it out. Thanks
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mystic vision has nothing to do with the brain. the brain is just an apparatus.
what needs to change is the WAY we look at things.
it’s a bit like focusing your vision on a fly on your windshield (and having done so all your life). then opening the aperture of the eye to include the whole windshield, and suddenly seeing the whole view. it has been there all along, of course. absolutely nothing has changed. but your focus was so intent on the fly, the rest of the view could not enter your field of perception.
and then you realize “ahhh. that’s what it is!”. then you never miss the windshield again.
so the awakened one sees the whole thing. we (regular people) keep staring at the fly.
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Sometimes, the problem with analogies are the first four letters of the word itself.
Being regular is important. One does not need to be ”awakened”, either, merely eat bran for breakfast.
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I heard the same notion of awakening to something much bigger than one thinks from a person this morning explaining why she was an anti-vaxer influencer (over 100,000 followers): at the time she felt “a cool and special feeling” that she knew more than all the world’s best scientists. I find the same is true when it comes to ‘spiritual perception’ versus neuroscience.
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you must be a lil more discerning when picking your examples, tildeb. can’t poo poo on the message just because the messenger sucks. Lao Tzu avoided putting his teaching into writing for this exact reason: people will distort it, misinterpret, mess up the whole thing and create confusion around it. why truth remains outside the grasp of mind
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In other words, how well do the claims of spiritual awareness translate into mapping reality with greater insight? I’m not seeing it, but I am seeing a growing willingness by people to pay less and less attention to what neuroscientists are finding out.
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To claim the brain is “just an apparatus,” and that “mystic vision” has nothing to do with it smacks of assuming a position of knowledge that leads to this dismissal of it’s fundamental and central feature of all mind/consciousness. Of course, anyone can get around all detailed clutter gumming up the works by claiming the ‘mystic’ realm is ‘beyond’ using the blunt instruments of science because it’s not physical, not material, not subject to the forces of reality, yada, yada, yada. But when all is said and done, what insight HAS been produced by this awakened insight? There’s the rub.
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nothing, indeed. if you’re looking for a material application, there isn’t any.
spirituality is the greatest disappointment to the ego. there is no gain in it. in fact, it’s all about losing.
losing our false ideas about who we are, losing our sense of being a separate individual, losing our negative persistent tendencies, losing our endless needs and desires, our clingy emotions, our dependency for this and that, our ideas of how the world should be, how life should be, how others should treat us. etc. basically, it makes you so empty that something else, more original can take birth.
but if your only interest is a better, newer iphone application, or a more sophisticated way to mistreat the planet earth, then don’t look there. we all go there at the right time only😊
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Well, it seems to me you’re arguing that nothing is more spiritually freeing and enlightening than being brain dead.
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not brain-dead. ego-less.
I and life are not two. it is ONE. as you feel, so life plays out. there is no ‘out there’.
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my dear friend, you don’t become a father by reading books on fatherhood or talking to fathers. you must actually go through the process.
awakening is a process (a damn slow one too) that reveals your ‘existence’ in its entirety: not physical, nor psychological, not even existential. not any one dimension. but all dimensions possible. for that, an openness to know is crucial.
i challenge you is to find the source of that feeling “I am”. where does it arise? what, in your body, tells you that you are?
you see, most people take such elemental things for granted. but what is not enquired into, remains unknown. cheers!😊
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I think it would be a mistake to devalue every philosophy because it does not produce a scientific fact, which outside of applied science there are very few of. If one reasons his way all the way out, we find we’re all a part of the same process. Whether that makes you feel connected or not depends on your point of view. The Pale Blue Dot does it for some, where others (I’ve seen it here) come to that conclusion through philosophy. Either way, if it didn’t hold some importance we would have to deny what evolution has done. Nothing is a mistake.
I am about as unreligious as they come, but I also see the value in it, if only for you to know where you stand. How would you appreciate all that intelligence if there were others that were not? We cannot have equality and diversity, though both need the other.
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imagine if we threw out all the art works, all creative pieces because they carry no practical application! and we just focus on creating more machinery (most of which is useless, anyway) is that what life boils down to?? is that what makes people feel fulfilled and happy?? if it is, why aren’t we happy? 8 in 10 americans i meet have some sort of drug addiction, they all own a hand gun, and lack the most basic idea of kindness. well, thank you, science! we have reached the pinnacle of civilization
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My wife went to Toronto last year to Babaylan conference titled “unlearning empire”. It was a fabulous retreat, but What amazed her most was the kindness of the people she encountered in Canada.
This is a great commentary on current day America. Each man for himself.
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yes, canadians are still quite kind. i’m grateful to live here. strangers actually say ‘hello’ to each other on the street.
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lol
Most machinery is useless . . . sayeth the person utilizing the very machinery needed to post such a comment.
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What’s there to enquire into?
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all our lives spin around this ‘I’ : i am, i see, i like, i want, i understand, etc.
this sense of beingness. where does it come from?
we take it for granted, but no one bothers to find its source.
just like science, you can make no assumptions
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Who is the arbiter that referees all the chatter in your head?
It’s funny with all the contemplation and pros and cons that most of our decisions are off the cuff—and it usually works out. How?
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excellent question!! who watches all the chatter?
and why in hell doesn’t he intervene?? 🤣🤣
another curious thing to ponder on. that voice, that chatter, how can we hear it in our heads? it’s not like we have an ear in our head.
if we did… we could hear other sounds inside the body, wouldn’t we? but we don’t.
so…. are we sure that voice is ‘inside’ the head??
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Well, you can advance your understanding of what the answers are to these questions are, or you can ask them as a literary device to avoid even trying, using them like a shield because you assume no hard work has been done in this regard. You’d be wrong if you bothered to look, bothered to learn, bothered to investigate. That’s why I say listening to the neuroscientists, learning from them, and understanding the challenges they face I think produces knowledge about what these terms thrown about as if deep actually mean in reality.
Or one can wave these neuroscientists aside en masse as if they couldn’t possibly share the stage with a grand metaphysical vision of spiritual consequences that so many people imagine they own in the form of living wisdom.
So the very first lesson should be how to ask the right questions of reality rather than the oh-so-typical scatter-shot puddle-deep musings using the lingo of new age mysticism. Lingo is no replacement for knowledge. And it seems to me that lingo is the main product of almost all spiritualism. It’s really nothing more than rephrasing Adam’s puddle analogy and deciding 42 really is quite profound.
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you see, it’s very easy to maintain “well, i’m smart. i don’t believe in a daddy in the sky god”.
well, i don’t believe in him either. that’s not so difficult.
but when i ask you a simple question to look into yourself, into your being, that’s not so easy, is it??
you keep looking outside yourself, ’cause that’s much easier. but all your questions, tildeb, about the world, all your science, all your understanding are possible only on the account that you ARE.
yet, you don’t want to look there.
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I didn’t go there because my understanding and yours shares no common language. You presume stuff about me that is unrelated to what’s the case about me. I was quite young when an immediate family member suffered a traumatic brain injury. This person went down the rabbit hole of spirituality and has never resurfaced. So when I was very young, I started to read all about every philosophy and religion and spiritual approach I could to try to find this common language so that I could better understand this family member.
The more I studied across many decades, the more I realized they were all talking about the same thing, about this idea of meaning yet intentionally used obfuscating terms that had no mooring to reality, as if the reader already understood these esoteric and chauvinistic terms as if they were catholic. I discovered many books relied on translations and that these differed significantly between editions and languages. So I studied linguistics to find out why this was the case, how language was shaped by environment and culture and genes, so I studied culture and environment and genes. I applied this knowledge in my career to great practical success.
And what I discovered after reading and talking and writing and connecting literally thousands of books and many ongoing decades of enquiry, was that spirituality in all its forms always led eventually to same place: claims made about reality without any means, any method, any ability, to be anchored to it. But a common thread through all of this – through philosophy and religion and spirituality and language and culture and genetics and art and science and politics and history – was the human being. And common to all human beings was the bicameral brain.
And so studying it – how it develops and changes – was coming full circle to finally – FINALLY! – having some anchored way to understand why and how my immediate family member was fundamentally altered and how this was expressed by impairment, by rewiring, by chemical imbalances, by coping. This was something anchored to reality, to the detailed nuts and bolts of what makes us human, something I could not only understand but compassionately appreciate and benefit from.
Having lived in in various cultures and traveled a ridiculous amount, I have nothing but appreciation for just how marvelous and ingenious and frustrating and complicated human beings are. I am also keenly aware of just how little I know about so many things, how little knowledge I actually have, how any and all of my abilities compare so poorly with so many others of gigantic talent and ability, yet I also know I’m doing my best to learn. That’s why I get so excited about scientific advances in so many areas. I want to know it all and a single lifetime barely gets me out of the starting gate. So I get great satisfaction from being able to wrap my limited intellect around many complex ideas. I know how important the creative and artistic is to my quality of life and understand that I can only get out of any subject only as much as I’m willing to put into it. So I know taking how seductive and alluring it is to take shortcuts and disguising a lack of real knowledge with highly imprecise terminology is. It’s very human. But I know better.
Is this claim true, and if so how can I know it is? Am I using the right method to reach that answer or am I fooling myself? If you ever want to know, try teaching that idea and see just how well you actually know what you think you do. If you’re like most people, you’ll soon realize most of what we think we know we barely know. So this is why I try to hold people to explaining what they think and why they think it. Reasons. That is of great value to me and so I try my best to return the favour. And that means long comments that annoy people like Nan to no end and test the patience of people like Jim . But hey: that’s just me doing me. If it’s valuable, great. If it’s not, oh well. But it’s a mistake to presume I’m coming from a place of ignorance and rigid ideology. I am a perpetual student but I have learned long ago that I can only learn from knowledge. And knowledge has to be connected to reality. Otherwise we have no common language.
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that was quite heart-felt- thank you for being so utterly open. and i’m sorry your brother had such an unfortunate path.
yes, i did presume that you were quite rigid in your attachment to science, but i also know that such attributes are merely superficial. as jim said once, we meet here only to bounce off ideas about this and this, not to convert, and we all bring quite a diverse spectrum of experiences to the table. i tease and poke people to push their boundary, but am always deeply aware that, behind our different way of seeing things, we are essentially same.
thank you again for that wonderful reply!☺️
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I can confirm your observations on teaching. The real mastery of any subject begins when you’re called upon to put it to practical use or transfer that knowledge to others. And for the latter, it invokes the mastery of a second skillset: tailoring the delivery method to suit the needs of the individual learner — because not everyone learns in the same way.
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If I may insert … long comments do not “annoy” me. I just believe a plethora of words rarely make an idea/thought any clearer. In fact, the profusion of words often waters down (and sometimes distracts) what is often very good input on a topic.
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Maybe it’s the ‘often’ part that’s the problem.
Point of contention/criticism
Reason for contention from this angle
Reason for contention from that angle
Reason for contention for negative consequences
Conclusion.
I think of this format as a reasonable explanation.
‘Often’ criticized because tl;dr
Therefore brevity, not explanation, not reason, is the higher value. Greater if amusing.
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Your contributions are solid, but IMO, designed more for college essays, not blog comments/posts. And yes — humor can make all the difference! 😉
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Is this claim true, and if so, how might we know?
This is the question that drives me.
Answering this is rarely a line or two. Occasionally, but very rare. Offering a quip is usually just a quip… if it’s not a question. So using quips – especially clever quips – usually promotes motivated in-group thinking, playing to the audience for approval. It rarely answers the question that I think more of us should constantly use to promote critical thinking about all kinds of topics and issues, thinking better about all kinds of topics and issues.
So, if it take a ‘college essay’ approach for me actually answer this (often unspoken) question, then I can open my own reasoning up for criticism and critique, as in “This is where your reasoning goes wrong,” or “here’s evidence that doesn’t fit with what you’re saying,” and so on. This is WHY we learn the most from people with whom we disagree… if they are willing to spend the time and effort to do so. That’s what can make so many blogs vital and important rather than mostly entertaining. Entertainment I can get anywhere; disagreement with real people in real life is where I can find real learning value. And that ‘often’ requires length.
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The simple answer is this: Because what you are touting has no meaning – other than a possible reference to improving one’s character by the way we act – that you can explain and are therefore just using supposed mystical spiritual enlightenment guru om language to get across a point that you have not the foggiest idea of what you mean.
To put it bluntly: A load of bollocks.
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“yeah, well.. that’s just like your opinion, Dude”
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Yes, it is my p.o.v. But a p.o.v based on the total lack of anything close to resembling evidence provided by you.
Maybe you could drop the Woo-Talk , put away the incense, the spirit guides, the personal familiar, the crystals, tarot cards, , dream catcher, the third eye, the shamble, the bones, and try to behave in a more constructive manner using more appropriate language /terms? You know, like, er …. science ?
Om… and peace be upon this house etc.
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And that’s why I think leaving a belief system takes a great deal of courage.
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Thank you. I think it’s a race with a vector of sorts. Maturing in the faith…can you die before integrity takes over your faith
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I understand. You’ve got to live with yourself…
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To add to this, at first it made me a little nervous, but then I realized nothing had changed. I’d been doing this gig called life on my own all along…with a little help from friends and family. It was empowering. I got this!
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For those readers who have struggled through the various posts by Jim that reference Quantum Mechanics and all the commentary specific to trying to understand what much of the content of quantum theory entails and why it does or doesn’t help us to grasp the role of religion and spirituality that references these, here is something we may better appreciate from our friend Valerie that is actually a devastating counter-argument to Critical Race Theory (CRT):
“… some Asian and Levantine people have started jokingly calling themselves “Schrodinger’s Whites”—pointing out that when they are perceived as aggressors (e.g. Colorado shooter) or successful (New York school admissions) they are labeled as white or “white adjacent,” and when they get harmed (Atlanta shooting) then they are POC (edit: People of Color). Rather than challenging the dichotomy, they get held up alternately on one side or the other.”
I actually laughed out loud when I read this because this keen observation is just as helpful understanding why CRT is not based in reality as is woo that references the same, but is as revealing that in many cases our imported interpretation imposed on reality simply doesn’t align with reality. If these Asians or Jews were in a box, we wouldn’t have any means to ‘know’ if they were white or not! That’s a brilliant observation that connects two seemingly unrelated topics and makes a connection that reveals something worth knowing: CRT is fatally flawed.
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I wish someone would do more research on NDEs and the religiosity of those affected seeing how all are not just about experiencing a feeling of being in heaven but some have none or actually the opposite, a hell experience.
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Susi — check out <a href=this link.
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Whoops! Sorry … messed up! Try this: https://www.near-death.com/science/articles/religious-interpretations-of-ndes.html
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Thanks, Nan! Fascinating, would have loved to see a breakdown of religious vs. non-religious in that abstract.
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Jill Bolte Taylor – a neuroscientist – had a fairly significant but slow moving stroke and then wrote a book about the experience. Because the human brain lies at the center of all these NDE experiences, her description bounded by her knowledge of the brain makes for a fascinating read; one can easily understand from a neurological point of view why so many people share similar experiences during brain events. Much of what is being reported in many NDEs can actually be duplicated by directed magnetic impediment (using the ‘God’ helmet by Persinger in his lab) so I think what people might attribute to sensory data about what they ‘encounter’ as if it comes from ‘out there’ during these really interesting events might actually be what we ‘experience in here’ (tapping the brain). Of course, there are anecdotal reports about accessing information unavailable to the person having the NDE, and many of these are quite intriguing if true.
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Absolutely!
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