The Men Who Stare at Goats (2004) is a book by Jon Ronson about the U.S. Army’s investigation of psychic theories and the possible military uses of the paranormal. Its title alludes to efforts to kill goats by staring at them. In a Nov 7, 2009 online Twitter post, the well-known mentalist Uri Geller referred to actor George Clooney, saying, “His latest film is about my work.” In a Nov 12 Twitter post, Geller added:
“George Clooney is Uri Geller in the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats? I believe I ignited the story when I told Jon Ronson about some of my adventures with a certain intelligence agency.”
Jon Ronson’s book examines the links between paranormal military programs and psychological techniques used today. The book follows the development of secret psychic activities over the past decades and explores how they are used today in U.S. security and military operations. Project Stargate, the CIA-run program that used remote viewing for psychic spying, came to an end in 1995, and thousands of pages of formerly classified material were released. Journalist Gary S. Bekkum has researched those secret government documents, as well as UFO information and psychic explorations.
According to Bekkum, The Men Who Stare at Goats (the 2009 comedy film) is more or less consistent, with polished performances from a first-rate cast headed by George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey. The America government has been involved in using the paranormal since the beginning of the Cold War. Bekkum now has 89,900 pages of documents about the psychic effort provided by the CIA:
In the 1970s, the American Intelligence Community, including but not limited to CIA, DIA, NSA, Army intelligence, the USAF, the Navy, and others, engaged in secret research to determine the usefulness of psychic phenomena. This is true, and this larger effort is mostly ignored by the film, which tells the story from the point of view of the characters, some who were inspired by real persons and events.
In the 1980s, Army intelligence did train operational military psychic spies, who were tasked against real targets of interest, including several high profile cases, such as the hostage crisis in Iran. Tasking for the units was handed down from highest levels of the U.S. government, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to declassified government files.
Jon Ronson’s book focused on one group of psychic spies in the U.S. Army. But if famed paranormalist Uri Geller is somehow related to Ronson’s observations, perhaps we ought to also look into Geller’s military background. Uri Geller was a paratrooper in the Israeli army. He fought in the Six Day War of 1967 and was wounded in action.
Geller’s biographers disclosed a rather intense incident when Uri supposedly tried to “duck and dive” on military service: “His working out of a cunning plan of deception in the paratroopers was not only foolhardy at the time – for what he did, he could have been flung in a military prison for months and suffered a stain on his record for the rest of his life.”
What actually happened to Uri Geller in the Israeli army? According to Uri, a miraculous switchover incident took place, with a machine gun. (‘Ben Gunn,’ says you, ‘has reasons of his own.’) But there was no one he could tell. “His first thought was that God had intervened, and as he has never had any other explanation for it, that tends to remain his belief.”
Although Geller took a bullet through his left hand in the Six Day War, he still headed a crack unit to knock out a pillbox. After being shot at twice, he fired his gun and killed a Jordanian soldier. Shortly later, slices of metal flying off a stricken tank, or possibly bullets, hit Geller again. “He felt a blast, sensed something entering his right arm and the left side of his forehead, and, as he blacked out, assumed with resignation that he was dead.”
Is there anything in the army records to suggest that Uri Geller might be able to stop someone’s heart by staring at him or her? Uri has been filmed staring at fertilized cells (zygotes) and plant seeds in order to make them germinate and sprout. But do certain psychic techniques involve martial arts and self-defense? Why does Geller relate to the men who stare at goats? Should we take a more careful look at Gary Bekkum’s files?
Uri Geller once said he had a dream he would die during a paratrooper jump: “He appreciated that dreaming of dying on a jump was a fairly normal thing for a paratrooper to do.” Did something weird happen to Uri Geller when he jumped as a paratrooper in the Six Day War? Did he in some way set off from this life? Was Uri’s miraculous switchover incident a reference to an out-of-body experience (OBE), or a significant UFO intrusion?
In the Second World War, UFO sightings were called “foo fighters.” Nowadays, if the blip of an unidentified paratrooper shows up on a radar screen, it’s sometimes called a “Mary Poppins” (the one-liner joke is that someone jumped down from the sky).
When the 11th blip abruptly arrived on Israeli radar in June of 1967, it was far more life threatening than a pathetic joke of duck and dive. Ten Israeli soldiers had volunteered for a critical mission to defend Israel’s right to exist. The radar screens showed eleven. Who was the 11th paratrooper of the Six Day War?
For what he did, he could have been put in prison. His mind raced beyond the limits of past and future. His body was a weightless force, faster than a speeding projectile. His right hand was outstretched. A shock wave roared and thundered in the sky behind him. The eleventh paratrooper was descending to the Mount of Olives.
There would be no picnic tables set with refreshments or well-dressed pastors waiting with Bibles at the moment. Jerusalem was a battle zone with heavy fighting –– a desert theater of fortifications and tanks. Pieces of someone’s dismembered leg marked the burning ground. “Where’s your parachute?” asked another soldier. “Over there,” the eleventh replied and pointed to a near graveyard. His shirt was saturated with color, dipped in his own blood.
He projected phases of his life as several dimensions, from a playful child to an elderly peacekeeper. Those aspects he embedded into terrestrial reality –– past and future –– when his feet touched the ground, and his body descended to the Mount of Olives. Who was the 11th paratrooper?
The eleventh paratrooper was at last identified and a background check was conducted. The niece of Sigmund Freud became a refugee when book burning and violent outbursts of anti-Semitism began in Vienna. Sigmund Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Many would perish in the Holocaust.
The niece of Sigmund Freud was put at great risk with numerous forced abortion incidents –– enough to bring about female infertility. It would have been a medical wonder for her to be his biological mother.
The “SS Exodus” was a ship that carried Jewish emigrants from France in 1947 with the goal of taking its passengers to Israel. Most of the emigrants were Holocaust survivors who had no immigration certificates. Homeless orphans had no legal birth certificates or given names.
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Uri Geller said that his paratrooper switchover was under the protection of some outside force, which was unfathomable. His first thought was that God had intervened. The American psychic Ingo Swann worked with Uri in the 1970s. Russel Targ and Harold Puthoff conducted experiments with them at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). They believed that Uri Geller, retired police commissioner Pat Price, and artist Ingo Swann had genuine psychic abilities. The CIA and the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), directed by Andrija Puharich, allegedly worked with Geller, Price, and Swann to develop psychic powers for the military.
In November 2009, NASA scientists made the thrilling discovery that the moon has lots of water and could probably support life. NASA’s October 9 mission involving the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite provided the stunning confirmation of water in the forms of ice and vapor. “Having definitive evidence that there is substantial water is a significant step forward in making the moon an interesting place to go,” said John Logsdon, a space policy researcher for George Washington University.
In 1998, Ingo Swann wrote of water on the moon and said the moon also supports life. Swann claimed that men in black had taken him into the wing of a covert black ops survey into lunar anomalies to learn what aliens were doing there. Swann said he had made government connections with human looking moon visitors that were living on earth.
“VALIS” is a 1981 science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. (The title is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.) Dick’s theory was that we have been contacted by a transcendental mind he called VALIS:
In 1973 world-famous psychic showman Uri Geller had also been receiving messages and regular UFO sightings from something calling itself SPECTRA, which claimed to be a super computer in orbit around the earth. Not normally reticent about his bizarre beliefs, Geller has been suspiciously quiet about his experiences of SPECTRA – which may or may not relate to the publicly recorded interest the CIA paid to this particular aspect of his unusual career. However, the maverick, but world-renowned physicist, Dr. Jack Sarfatti, was prepared to commit almost certain professional suicide by publicly declaring that he too had been contacted by, in his own words, “a VALIS-like being.” Despite knowing he was going to face ridicule and scientific crucifixion, Sarfatti went on record to recount how, in 1952 at the age of 13, he had received a telephone call from an inhuman, metallic voice. The voice declared himself a sentient computer on a spacecraft from the future and instructed him to pursue a career in science.
After Sarfatti went public about his phone call from VALIS as a teenager, it emerged that he was not the only scientist to have had a similar experience. In recent years, researchers have discovered that at least a dozen other senior players in the international scientific community received a mysterious call claiming to be from a computer or other being from the future encouraging them to study science.
(David Southwell and Sean Twist, “Conspiracy Files: Real-life Stories of Paranoia, Secrecy, and Intrigue” 2004)
Tim Boucher freshly considered Philip K. Dick’s premise and said that Geller is also responsible for stories regarding John Lennon’s UFO contacts. Today, the prospects for life on the moon are better than ever before. “Rather than a dead and unchanging world, it could in fact be a very dynamic and interesting one,” said Greg Delory, a researcher for the University of California.
Former astronaut Buzz Aldrin recently said in an interview that there’s a “monolith” on a moon. Benjamin Creme, a writer of esotericism for Share International magazine, claims that the modern “Messiah” already entered the earth’s atmosphere –– decades ago –– and is now living in England. The modern messiah-figure is making his policies known to the world as the current global systems give way.
As the “megachurch” movement spreads worldwide and “televangelists” make use of home entertainment media to provide teaching and support to believers, a new inquiry has been put forward: “If Jesus had a TV show, what would he broadcast?” The men who stare at quotes think he should probably instruct Bible and Sunday school studies. The men who stare at notes think he should explore lost archeology, ancient biology or stellar explosions in space. But the men who stare at votes think he should perform more miracles –– in harmony with our current laws. Today it is unlawful for a layman to heal without a medical license (very soon, it might also be forbidden for one to offer security related help).
“Another world,” the stranger said to the small crowd of men. “Why do you stand there, looking up at the sky? He will return in the same way that you saw him go.”
According to Benjamin Crème (and maybe Dan Brown), the modern messiah-figure’s intention is to marry and live the dream of Eden. His legendary wedding feast is supposed to last for a thousand years, to mark the “technological singularity” or scientific era of eternal life.
Some critics may perhaps argue that men who stare at goats use the evil side of the mind. But a more angelic inspiration for Jon Ronson’s weird tale can be found in Acts 5:
Now a man named Ananias, together with his wife Sapphira, also sold a piece of property. With his wife’s full knowledge he kept back part of the money for himself, but brought the rest and put it at the apostles’ feet.
Then Peter said, “Ananias, how is it that Satan has so filled your heart that you have lied to the Holy Spirit and have kept for yourself some of the money you received for the land? Didn’t it belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal? What made you think of doing such a thing? You have not lied to men but to God.”
When Ananias heard this, he fell down and died. And great fear seized all who heard what had happened. Then the young men came forward, wrapped up his body, and carried him out and buried him.
About three hours later his wife came in, not knowing what had happened. Peter asked her, “Tell me, is this the price you and Ananias got for the land?”
“Yes,” she said, “that is the price.”
Peter said to her, “How could you agree to test the Spirit of the Lord? Look! The feet of the men who buried your husband are at the door, and they will carry you out also.”
At that moment she fell down at his feet and died. Then the young men came in and, finding her dead, carried her out and buried her beside her husband. Great fear seized the whole church and all who heard about these events.
At the dawn of our social development, humans believed that the sky or firmament was the abode of spirits. In most traditions, a spirit was a ghost or being without a material body. The sky as seen from Earth was called “the heavens” and was accepted in various doctrines as the dwelling place of God and angels –– as well as the blessed after death. Most religions looked upon the spirit as an intelligent life force or “soul.”
The introduction of modern science finally consigned ghosts and spirits to the fantasy zone of delusions and superstitions. In our day, eminent reasoned thinkers are in charge of our scientific and educational systems. But the swift growth of astrobiology in the past few years has presented an exceptional challenge. Several popular theories have been proposed about the possible basis of alien life. The latest phase in the critical analysis of extraterrestrial life now focuses on what physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies recently described as “Q-life.”
“A century and a half after Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species, the origin of life itself remains a stubborn mystery, and is deeply problematic. The simplest known living organism is already stupendously complex, and it is inconceivable that such an entity would arise spontaneously by chance self-assembly. Most researchers suppose that life began either with a set of self-replicating, digital-information-carrying molecules much simpler than DNA, or with a self-catalyzing chemical cycle that stored no precise genetic information but was capable of producing additional quantities of the same chemical mixture. Both these approaches focus on the reproduction of material substances, which is only natural because, after all, known life reproduces by copying genetic material. However, the key properties of life — replication with variation, and natural selection — do not logically require material structures themselves to be replicated. It is sufficient that information is replicated. This opens up the possibility that life may have started with some form of quantum replicator: Q-life, if you like.”
Q-life –– set apart as a “life form without material structure” –– ironically harks back to our ancient belief in spirits. According to Professor Davies, the benefit of simply copying information at the quantum level, instead of building rigidduplicate molecular structures, is speed: “Q-life can therefore evolve many orders of magnitude faster than chemical life,” Davies pointed out. The environment of theoretical Q-life is unclear, but the surfaces of interstellar grains or the interiors of comets could allow “low-temperature environments with rich physical and chemical potential.”
The possibility of a quantum replicator became evident in 2007, when an international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck Institute of Germany, and the University of Sydney found that under certain conditions galactic dust “comes alive” in outer space. The panel’s chief researcher, V.N. Tsytovich, announced that microscopic corkscrew shapes (helixes and double helixes) could form “spontaneously” in interstellar space. As they have memory and the power to reproduce, the helical strands show the necessary properties to meet the criteria for life. Since that affirmative disclosure, NASA scientists have given weight to a search for what they now call “weird life” –– organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth.
Quantum mechanics predicts that a proton can probably tunnel through the potential barrier separating quantum states of a DNA base pair, thus producing genetic mutations. “Mutations are the driver of evolution,” Davies wrote. “So in this limited sense, quantum mechanics is certainly a contributory factor to evolutionary change.” But how did Q-life evolve into familiar organic life? A possible scenario proposed by Davies is that common bio-molecules were derived by Q-life as a dynamic back-up information storage process.
“A good analogy is a computer. The processor is incredibly small and fast, but delicate: switch off the computer and the data are lost. Hence computers use hard disks to back up and store the digital information. Hard disks are relatively enormous and extremely slow, but they are robust and reliable, and they retain their information under a wide range of environmental insults. Organic life could have started as the slow-but-reliable ‘hard-disk’ of Q-life. Because of its greater versatility and toughness, it was eventually able to literally ‘take on a life of its own’, disconnect from its Q-life progenitor and spread to less-specialized and restrictive environments — such as Earth.” (Paul Davies, “The quantum life,” physicsworld.com – July 1, 2009.)
Cambridge astronomers Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe first took up the question of quantum life in the 1970s, when they said that self-organizing plasma in interstellar space could have the form of a panspermia life cloud. In 2008, Arvydas Tamulis of Vilnius University described a comparable kind of Q-life progenitoras a molecular quantum computer able to absorb energy from stars, perform digital functions, and travel through interstellar space by means of radiation pressure. A quantum computer cloud in space would use photoactive molecules to convert light energy to floating point operations at extremely low temperatures.
Since a Q-life cloud meets the key criteria for life, but does not require any material substance, it bizarrely suits the limit for an intelligent spirit. The paradigm of a sentient computer cloud also helped to add some details to current reasoning that plasma has willpower –– and water has memory. Emergence theory describes the way complex systems and patterns crop up from simple interactions. For example, the self-organization of plasma (an ionized gas) leads to the formation of membranes, which eventually partition a cell’s genetic material.
Duke University engineer Adrian Bejan and Penn State biologist James Marden recently put forward the idea that “complexity is a function of flow.” Bejan’s 1996 constructal law is based on the principle that flow systems evolve to balance and minimize friction or other forms of resistance so that the least amount of useful energy is lost. The efficiency of a flow system increases as its branching design components become more complex. Since matter is not required for Q-life, it involvesonly the flow of information. Hence the “will” of a quantum plasma cloud perhaps is merely to fluctuate –– and flow into more complex patterns with a tendency to become smart. This is also called the physics of evolution.
In 1988, French scientist Jacques Benveniste published a controversial paper in Nature, which indicated that water has “memory” –– and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Some researchers now conjecture that water is capable of containing a memory of particle configurations within its molecular structure, which could also trigger access to electromagnetic signaling.
It was recently discovered that plants, animals, and even isolated microbes converse or “talk” to each other with molecular signals (external hormones) called pheromones. Today, we know there are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect life through a sort of sixth sense (most likely related to smell and taste). Assortments of plants emit distress pheromones when grazed upon. Ants mark their trail with pheromones. And a number of organisms use pheromones to attract their mates from a distance of two or more miles.
It is now understood that water is an ideal pheromone-signaling pathway. The surface tension of liquids could retain the pH memory of a pheromone source –– allowing water to store up information (aggregation pheromone concentrations) rather like a hard disk. Pheromones have been shown to act as single molecules or as a mix of chemicals that evolved into an extraordinary system of micro communication. Results of up to date research into water’s memory of structural correlations have allegedly verified that “water even remembers whether it has been recently hot or cold.”
A potential environment for theoretical Q-life was plausibly foretold in 2005, when Professor Stephen Hawking worked on the “information paradox” and announced that information was not lost in black holes. Scientists had previously imagined that nothing could ever escape from a black hole. But it was determined that event horizon quantum fluctuations could allow information to seep out from a black hole. Hawking said that information configured below the atom in size could flow through black holes without wiping out structural complexity –– and be retrieved in parallel universes.
A new discipline called evolutionary developmental biology, or colloquially, evo-devo, was granted its own division in major universities. Leading scientists, from geneticists to paleontologists, published reports and attended symposiums that presented Q-life as a black-hole-analogous reproductive system. The New Yorker magazine covered topical findings in biology and wrote, “Some of the biggest have come from the new science of evo devo.”
A few of the strange and wonderful areas now under discussion are black hole intelligence mergers, intrauniversal intelligences, and new universe creation. Today, the most powerful Q-life computer cloud in space is thought to be the event horizon of an intelligent black hole.
It appears that even the Vatican is paying attention to the new sphere of evolutionary developmental biology. Given that it embodies the event horizon or “Omega Point” (singularity) of an intelligent black hole, sentient Q-life in the universe probably exists beyond our customary sense of space and time. It outwardly emerges from an untold multiverse, and most likely cannot be created or destroyed. On the face of it, Q-life is equivalent to eternal life. For this reason, the transcendent locale of Q-life is amazingly similar to the miraculous realm of God and angels. Pope Benedict XVI recently made a reference to the late French Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who offered an evolutionary theology claiming that all creation is developing towards the Omega Point, which he identified with Christ as the Logos of God. Attesting to a renovation of the world as foretold by St. Paul, Pope Benedict said, “It’s the great vision that later Teilhard de Chardin also had: At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.”
In 2007, Ruth Gledhill of the London Times interviewed Britain’s foremost atheist, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. When asked about the possibility of design by a cosmic intelligence, Dawkins replied: “But that gigantic intelligence itself would need an explanation. It’s not enough to call it God, it would need some sort of explanation such as evolution.”
The odd notion that skeptics might one day demand an explanation from an intelligent Q-life replicator seems brashly outrageous to many of us. Helical strands of “weird life” take shape spontaneously in interstellar space –– apparently not by evolution or a gradual development from earlier forms. Even so, hulking cynics scoff at a cosmic intelligence by writing it off as the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
Since religion’s true mission is to encourage friendship with God, perhaps members of the clergy need to consider the link between perception and the geometry of Q-life –– and to explore its impact on human behavior and emotions. Recent studies at Florida State University and the University of Vienna confirmed that people see human facial features in the front end of automobiles, and ascribe various personality traits to their cars. “One-third of the subjects associated a human or animal face with at least 90 percent of the cars.” If humans can interpret inanimate structures in biological terms even if presented in abstract ways, how would they interpret Q-life? For emotional bonding to come about, a Q-life progenitormust not be imagined as an inanimate object or “thing,” but as a highly evolved living being –– with as much intelligence as necessary to initiate new universe creation.
In 1964 the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a system to determine the measure of an alien civilization. The most advanced civilization is a Type III or IV civilization that would harness the power of an entire galaxy and tap into the energy produced from a super massive black hole. A Q-life progenitorsending out information at the event horizon of a black hole to merge from a singularity is the best runner for a Type III or IV civilization. Such hypothetical life clouds –– bearing information without material structures –– are so highly developed that in all probability they are immortal.
Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind recently proposed the holographic principle, which suggests the universe is akin to a giant hologram. David Bohm, Karl Pribram, and Michael Talbot talk about the “whole in every part” nature of a hologram as a new way of understanding reality. Every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. If a hologram of an object is cut in half and illuminated by a laser, each half will still contain the entire image of the object. Consequently, information around an event horizon could be pictured as a “Master Hologram” that imparts its thermodynamic symmetries of order and entropy (or archetypal law and revolt). All self-gravitating systems in the universe would be holographic reflections of that Master Hologram. Each and every system would duplicate an allocation scheme according to a “best fit” principle that minimizes wasted resource space while reproducing the positive and negative correlations of the Master Hologram.
In other words, “familiar objects and chronological events” on Earth could be the mirror images of a Master Hologram, modified to simulate our terrestrial best fit. (So too, would every effect in all self-gravitating systems.) Thus, the thermodynamic distortion of “world wars” on Earth could find its cosmic parallel as an equivalent rebellious struggle on other life-sustaining planets. In a planetary system without organic structures, the Master Hologram’s best fit could adjust the thermodynamic distortion to appear as a massive red spot of gas –– for example. If the cosmic holographic principle proves to be technically valid, alien civilizations could be holographic resemblances of the Master Hologram – and of us.
Microbiologists recently found that friendly bacteria account for about 90% of the cells in the human body. Some could even be cases of “weird life.” What happens to our friendly microbes when we die? While the body itself might be clinically dead, up to 90% of its cells could continue to live and connect to convection fields or subterranean water basins. Are we holographic copies of Q-life clouds?
(AUG 2009) PETER FOT K KAPNISTOS – http://reporter.blackraiser.com/
Perhaps the most incredible space photos ever put on view are enfolded in a great mystery known as “pareidolia.” A category of optical illusions, pareidolia is an uncertain impression perceived as something clear and distinct. The astronomer Carl Sagan thought that seeing faces in clouds is an evolutionary trait. “Confirmation bias” refers to the tendency to notice what confirms one’s beliefs, and to ignore what disagrees with them.
Some psychologists promote pareidolia under clinical conditions to evaluate their patients. The most well known example is the Rorschach inkblot test. The Baltimore Sun in recent times reported: “Pareidolia is common enough, and predates the space program by a millennium or two. We’ve all seen the Man in the Moon, or faces and images of ships and elephants in cloud formations.”
In 1978, some 8,000 people made pilgrimages to the home of a New Mexico woman who discovered a picture of Jesus in a burned tortilla. And in 2001, thousands saw the face of Satan captured in a CNN video and Associated Press photos of smoke billowing from the World Trade Center. (Mike Himowitz, “Space photo contents often are all in eye of the beholder,” Baltimore Sun, Feb 12, 2004.)
Space photos pose a fuzzy hurdle for scientists now programming computers to observe images and to recognize objects. If a computer were taught to make out the symbolic abstractions of modern art, how would it perceive the contents of deep space photos? Some might argue that teaching machines to see “arty abstractions” is simply a waste of time. Yet we surely expect our GPS-fitted cars of the future to identify ordinary road sign symbols, which are likewise graphic abstractions.
In his book, “How We Believe,” publisher of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer said that our brains are belief engines or evolved pattern-recognition machines that connect the dots and create meaning out of the patterns that we think we see in nature. According to Shermer, we are the descendants of those most successful at finding patterns. This process is called association learning, and is basic to all animal behavior.
Why do people see faces in nature, interpret window stains as human figures, hear voices in random sounds generated by electronic devices or find conspiracies in the daily news? A proximate cause is the priming effect, in which our brain and senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to an expected model. UFOlogists see a face on Mars. Religionists see the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. Paranormalists hear dead people speaking to them through a radio receiver. Conspiracy theorists think 9/11 was an inside job by the Bush administration. Is there a deeper ultimate cause for why people believe such weird things? There is. I call it “patternicity,” or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. (Michael Shermer, “Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise,” Scientific American, Nov 25, 2008.)
I first explored the conceptual problem of space photos when I staged an art gallery exhibition during the 1980s, near the Polytechnic University of Athens, Greece. Various journalists and local television personalities turned up to scrutinize my close-up prints of the “map of the universe.”
The foremost panoramic optical view of the entire sky was made during the middle of the 20th century under the direction of astronomer Knut Lundmark at the Lund Observatory in Sweden (the first Hasselblad camera in space was Swedish made). To construct the image, draftsmen used a mathematical distortion (Aitoff projection) to map the sky with the plane of the Milky Way along the center and the north galactic pole at the top.
In this way, the oval map is really an optical illusion. What appear to be the distant left and right wings of a flattened plane are part of the same curved space that wraps around us and joins up behind our star system. Accordingly, we are actually located in the center of the curved sky map, although we get the flat impression of being outside of it.
The Milky Way clouds, or the collective glow of stars in the densely populated galactic plane, are accurately drafted and mixed with dark dust lanes. 7,000 individual stars are shown as white dots indicating brightness. The end product is photographic in quality and represents the entire observable sky. The map took two years to complete and is usually referred to as the Lund Panorama of the visible universe.
Alexis Kostalas, one of Greece’s best-known performing arts journalists and the official presenter of the 2004 Olympic Games of Athens, was one of several visitors who came to my exhibition to investigate the bizarre power of pareidolia. At first, I considered the space photo stuff to be little more than a speculative task of finding patterns. But since then, remarkable discoveries in biology forced me to enlarge my way of thinking about what the space pictures might possibly disclose.
Astronomers today believe they have come up with solid proof for the existence of a super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy –– right behind the bull’s eye or event horizon of our sky map. The accelerating growth of science and new tools of atomic research like the Large Hadron Collider are expected to rapidly produce a technological singularity. Evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biologists think the best computer is a black hole system and information can be sent into a new universe from an intelligent black hole attractor.
A few years ago, most scientists imagined that nothing could ever escape from a black hole –– not even light. It was understood that a black hole would destroy information about the original quantum state of anything falling into it. Only a mixed disturbance of stray Hawking radiation or irrelevant noise could be emitted as faded energy from a black hole.
But in 1997, theoretical physicist John Preskill bet Stephen Hawking that information was not lost in black holes. Hawking wrote an article in 2005 and announced that quantum perturbations of the event horizon could indeed let information escape from a black hole. Stephen Hawking lost the wager but shed light on the information paradox. He said that we must look at the multiverse as a whole since information going into black holes is saved in parallel universes.
The best opinion among physicists today is that information is preserved and that Hawking radiation is not precisely thermal but receives quantum corrections. In simple terms, this implies that a strong chemical synapse (intelligence-transmitting impulse) of complex organic molecules would most certainly be crushed out of reality by the physically powerful gravitational forces of a black hole. But a weaker electrical synapse of elementary particles below the atom in size could conceivably endure a passive black hole merger without wiping out structural complexities. For this reason, evo-devo biologists think the ultimate universal computer is a black hole attractor.
If a developmental singularity is the ideal computing platform for a universal intelligence merger, how many universal civilizations might be involved in such a merger? The Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Today there has also been an explosion of renewed interest in astrobiology over the search for “extreme forms of life” on Earth and for similar life in deep space.
An international panel from the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Max Planck institute in Germany and the University of Sydney found that galactic dust could form spontaneously into helixes and double helixes and that the inorganic creations had memory and the power to reproduce themselves.
A similar rethinking of prospective alien life is being undertaken by the National Research Council, an advisory body to the US government. It says NASA should start a search for what it describes as “weird life” –– organisms that lack DNA or other molecules found in life on Earth. (Robert Booth, “Dust ‘comes alive’ in space,” Sunday Times, August 12, 2007.)
I was initially amused to find that nearly all of the visitors attracted to my small exhibit expressed sight of an allegorical humanoid shape pinpointed on the map of the visible universe. Their metaphors ranged from Godhead, Jesus, and Buddha –– to a snowman, Bigfoot, and King Kong. But the pareidolia was the same: a cloudy pyramidal bulb at the center of the sky map looked a bit humanoid to most people.
I understand you’ve been running from the man That goes by the name of the Sandman He flies the sky like an eagle in the eye Of a hurricane that’s abandoned
(America – “Sandman,” 1972)
Yet today pareidolia is our least direct concern. Far more important is the possibility that the cloudy bulb on our sky map might be composed of helical plasma structures like those found in DNA. Far more significant is the prospect that an attractor near our galactic event horizon represents an intelligent black hole or developmental singularity with memory and the power to reproduce itself. Today the pareidolia aspect is only an “optional extra” to boost your interest. What you see is what you get.
Today we know that electromagnetic forces in space can hold together helical strands of galactic dust that may contain genetic codes comparable to the DNA information of organic matter. According to V.N. Tsytovich’s international panel, these interstellar microscopic corkscrew shapes exhibit the necessary properties to meet the criteria for life. For this reason, our picture puzzle goes beyond ordinary patternicity. It also crosses the threshold of synchronicity. Finding meaningful patterns in noise is not necessarily the same as believing what we see.
Yet a further coincidence is that our sky map pareidolia bears a resemblance to religious hallucinations and ecstatic visions known all through the ages. Remote viewing refers to information gathered about isolated targets using extra-sensory perception. Without a doubt, our all-encompassing panoramic map is an exemplar of the rotundum, a mental image of the self or world soul that emerges subconsciously with the thought of a circle or a sphere.
For the ancients, the kingdom of heaven was really the same as the visible sky. The word firmament is translated from the Hebrew “raqiya,” which meant the vault or dome of the expanding sky. The supreme deity was depicted as sitting on a throne in the firmament, reminiscent of an abstract radiant fetus in its protective bubble. Yet the ancients made it abundantly clear that what looked like a man in the sky with a crown of stars was merely humanoid pareidolia.
The full-grown being they spoke of escalated far beyond the measure of man to a cosmic degree of light years –– “he stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.” The flying throne chariot was described as a formation of wheels within wheels in the script of Ezekiel. A group of poets throughout the biblical era reiterated visions of a great white throne in the sky. In the West the chariot is the basis of Merkebah mysticism. In the East it’s the Car of the Norm.
Endurance is the armor of the Norm, And to attain the Peace that car rolls on. ‘Tis built by self, by one’s own self becometh –– This chariot, incomparable, supreme: Seated therin the sages leave the world, And verily they win the victory.
(The Pali Canon)
Pondering whirlwinds and cosmic fires, Cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle boldly proposed that self-organizing plasma could take the form of a molecular quantum computing cloud. Hoyle was responsible for the term “big bang,” although he did not believe the big bang theory. His study of panspermia with Chandra Wickramasinghe showed that a sentient “life cloud” might be able to absorb magnetic and light energy from stars and planets, process information, and move in space by using radiation pressure. Hoyle was knighted in 1972 for his theories about the origin of chemical elements in stars. Arvidas Tamulis described a similar kind of life cloud as a quantum computer that uses photoactive molecules converting light energy to magnetic flops at extremely low temperatures in interstellar dust clouds.
Molecular computing clouds are generally pictured as cold black “blobs, slithering things, unimaginable things.” Previous suggestions that huge quantum clouds may have “symmetrical limbs” provoked criticisms or claims of the supernatural. But there are some logical pointers to consider. In 2009, researcher Ronen Alon of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel discovered that white blood cells move like millipedes, creating many tiny “legs” that adhere to the lining of blood vessel walls. When scientists looked closely at these limb-like protrusions, using an electron microscope, they saw that the minute legs rapidly attach and detach themselves, allowing the cells to quickly crawl to their destination.
Marine biologist Mikhail Matz from the University of Texas at Austin monitored the Bahamas seabed in 2008. His team discovered that a single-celled organism the size of a grape (Gromia sphaerica) crawls and propels itself with temporary protrusions called “pseudopods.” Similar protrusions could perhaps produce supracellular structures containing tunnelling nanotubules, according to recent theories of DNA computing. Former astronaut and physicist Ulrich Walter thinks evolved space-faring creatures would require the same stereoscopic vision and the same hand-eye coordination as humans. Anthony Bragalia says they could be self-engineered, with humanoid limb structures to ambulate within their environment.
A curious detail about our sky map pareidolia is that none of the ancient truth-seekers with testimonies of the throne chariot were ever able to actually get a good look at the occupant. Deep clouds surrounded him (or “something like” a sea of glass mingled with fire). They could, however, remotely view his right arm amid bursts of lightning. Thus, the right arm implied protection. The Torah was supposedly prewritten on it.
Perhaps this “heavenly handedness” was a subconscious idiom of homochirality. It’s a logical sign that life in deep space will exhibit a particular handedness. Louis Pasteur discovered the homochirality of organic material in 1848. The molecules that make proteins and DNA all have either a left-handed or right-handed orientation. According to William Sparks of the Space Telescope Science Institute, life may be detectable by examining optical properties to identify regions of space where homochirality exists.
Several visitors that called on my exhibit noticed another outstanding example of pareidolia. For over half of the viewers, a forward region of our sky map seemed to resemble a bird’s outstretched wing. A longing for air flight and the subliminal lure of plumes and feathers is intriguingly marked in the human genome –– from indigenous tribal myths to Stravinsky’s “Firebird.” As luck would have it, winged creatures (called cherubim and seraphim in the Scriptures) were colorfully portrayed with the throne chariot. They’re personifications of the clouds that transport it.
Additional creatures resembling a lion and a calf as well as a number of elders were said to dwell in the winged cherubim throne. Strangely enough, on the opposite side of our sky map, a sprawling dark mass of cubist-like pareidolia emulates the wretched look of a black sheep’s head, lying dead on its side. The book of Revelation described a lamb as it had been slain in the midst of the throne.
Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky That’s where I’m gonna go when I die When I die and they lay me to rest I’m gonna go to the place that’s the best
(Norman Greenbaum – “Spirit in the Sky,” 1969)
Were ancient thinkers capable of observing abstract landscape features from our map of the cosmos? Or equally, why should our map display pareidolia of bygone archetypes? Since it’s highly unlikely (but not impossible) that ancient geeks possessed sophisticated technologies and the rules of Aitoff projections to sketch out an exact chart, we might accept as an alternative that it could all be due to something hardwired in our genes. In spite of everything, our panoramic map is certainly the mother of all inkblot tests. If we fix our eyes on it long enough, we may well see everything that exists.
Several theories in quantum physics suggest the cosmos may be a discerning entity or a living universe –– one single whole with consciousness. Physicist Gerald Schroeder explained that our human brains might act like data lines picking up information from a collective mind external to the body, and adding individual experiences back into the collective memory. This was allegedly supported by experiments conducted by the David Lynch Foundation where a statistical crime level was reduced for a short time in the locality of a large collective focus.
Complexity theorist James Gardner argued in his book “Biocosm” that the purpose of cosmic evolution is the propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe. Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin introduced the idea that every time a black hole collapses into a singularity and a new baby universe is formed with a new space-time, the laws of physics that are born with it are slightly different. John Gibbon reported that baby universes could be different from their parents. Some may lose the ability to grow much larger than the Planck length, and will fade back into the quantum realm. But some may have a little more inflation still than their parents, growing even larger, producing more black holes and giving birth to more baby universes in their turn.
Professor Rudy Rucker, a colleague of Stephen Wolfram (“A New Kind of Science”) recently wondered if a world in which everything is said to be alive could hatch a new pantheistic doctrine. He referred to the notion that every physical entity is alive (hylozoism) and the philosophical dogma that everything is conscious (psychism). But our sky map touches deeper than the reach of pantheism. Instead, it implies that primary consciousness could be present in a privileged position –– not everywhere. An attractor interface or fixed point of intelligent interaction between mass and energy might be located near the event horizon of our galactic black hole. Maybe the energy of a developmental singularity outflows nearby, from a higher multiverse of many dimensions, to engage in natural selection and to initiate new universe creation.
The attractor is perhaps similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of a colossal biological noosphere. Soviet geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky first popularized the noosphere as a metabolic process, or a mega-organism on a vast scale. Chicago Tribune reporter Guy Murchie said that one huge mind or “thinking layer” surrounding our world corresponds to the noosphere. But even if there’s a self-similar manifold, with innumerable attractors for every known galaxy, the information that brought our universe into existence is not confined in time like we are, or the way the universe is. The multiverse singularity is transcending, and can’t be reduced to pantheistic logic.
According to evo-devo biology, natural selection ceases to be the driving force of evolution after a particular point, and self-design takes over. The multiverse could correspond to a big bounce, merging two universal phases of expansion (big bang) and contraction (big crunch). Since the differentiation between past and future is meaningless, the multiverse could be gauged either as a forever-looping oscillation (cyclical), or an endless array of parallel universes (Witten’s M-theory).
Each phase is driven by natural selection. But after billions of years of relentless evolution and the chronological struggle of blood, sweat, and tears, a logical focus at length is able to engineer and load the initial conditions for its “opposite” phase. In that phase, initial conditions all at once emerge fine-tuned for a life-sustaining genesis not because of a weird or spectacular accident, but because a self-designing developmental platform reverse-assembled them via the universal transcension of an intelligent attractor (computing black hole).
Stephen Hawking thrashed out “The History of the Universe Backwards” with coworker Thomas Hertog in 2007. He said the best way to understand how the universe arose was with a “top-down approach” –– to look at our current cosmic conditions, then work back through the sum of all histories to figure out which theory best fits those conditions. Physicist Paul Davies took a similar view when he argued in his book “Cosmic Jackpot” that the cosmos made itself the way it is, “stretching backward in time to the very beginning,” to focus in on bio-friendliness. Physicist Ronald Mallett at the University of Connecticut said a circulating beam of light might reverse space-time symmetries.
Given that matter comes with equal parts of antimatter, maybe each big bounce cycle of the multiverse carries opposite charge, spin, and handedness. However, to maintain thermodynamic constancy, the contrasting phases could also give rise to some distantly masculine and feminine differences. For example, if our subconscious worldview now slants toward the male or Animus (in “him” we live and move and have our being) our archetypal calling to eventually unite with the “other side” is personified as the Anima “bride” –– a beautiful maternal habitat like a celestial city adorned for her husband.
The steady-state multiverse or “self-made universe” has neither beginning nor end in time. It can be described using the equations of physics and does not hinge on any inexpressible or external forces past the big bounce. Still, the attractor’s potential to amaze and inspire refuses to go away. According to stem-cell guru Robert Lanza, life creates the cosmos. We can understand reality better by accepting space and time as biological forms of perception rather than as external objects.
The final universal computronium must populate more than a standard memory chip. If every part of a holographic cosmos includes all the information held by the whole, an intelligence merger could also coincide with a Golgotha Event, reduced to chaos by the manifestation of a negative trade off. In the East, “annihilation of the self” is the way to eternity. Perhaps a black hole merger calls for a self-sacrificial unselfish gene.
Widespread anxieties that the Mayan calendar should end in 2012 also underscore the fact that medieval minds “merged a singularity” with the ghost of Golgotha. The BC / AD calendar system marks the life of Jesus as the “dividing point of time” and world history.
Some believe that an untimely earthquake that stretched to the Sea of Marmara caused a fissure in the rock of Golgotha when Jesus died. Also packed together in close proximity to Golgotha’s dim thunderstorm zone are the Thera crater (the most titanic volcano in the hemisphere) and the Dead Sea shores (the lowest point on the surface of Earth on dry land).
In “The Collapsing Universe,” Isaac Asimov said a mysterious blast estimated at 15 megatons that flattened a Siberian forest in 1908 might actually have been a small black hole. Russian scientist Yuri Labvin suggested that an alien intelligence wanting to save the Earth was behind the Tunguska blast that downed 80 million trees over nearly 100 square miles.
The Shroud of Turin is considered by many to be a photo of God. It reveals a negative contact print image of a crucified man’s body on a long piece of cloth. Shroud devotees believe it was the cloth used to bury the historic Jesus.
Radio carbon dating conducted in 1988 on threads of the shroud dated the cloth to several centuries after the death of Jesus. But in a documentary video, Ray Rogers, the chemist who led that project, afterward said those threads proved to be part of a burn repair made to the cloth in the 16th century. The Vatican recently reported that the Knights Templar kept the shroud a secret for over 100 years after the Crusades.
Maybe the most perfect coincidence of all is that the map of the universe has a similar structure as the field of human perception. In mental space, the rotundum (round element) corresponds to the self, the regulating center of the psyche and catalyst of individuation. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with it.
Scientists today are trying to figure out perception as it applies to design. According to Richard Strand, our “cognitive image” consists of an oval perceptual field that focuses on a focal area in its central foreground. Biologist Rupert Sheldrake suggested that our familiar life forms might owe their structure and development to “morphogenetic fields” which form a kind of cosmic template.
In his book, “The Production of Space,” philosopher Henri Lefebvre linked together mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we live). The actuality of space gives rise to a perceptual field in which we have the experience of art. But peculiarly, like the sky map, our perceptual field is also an optical illusion. Due to our binocular vision, separate parallax images arise in each eye to become a single image (stereopsis) by the mental process of fusion. Hearing is also stereophonic (binaural) because we have two ears.
For example, if we stare at the tip of our nose, we get the symmetric sense of a gold spoon-shaped design where the left and right images overlap. What we actually see is the external membrane of the olfactory bulb (fleshy wall of the nostrils). But the circular onion-shaped illusion is in fact the earliest thing our eyes observed after birth.
Like an inner apparition, the pyramidal bulb structure continues to guide us all through our lives. Even if we overlook it, subconsciously it stands for the rotunda, an image of our own self or true face. Infants discover the perceptual field as a central steering mechanism and a zone of contact. With this cosmic template, the mind retains a model of its environment. In effect, the kingdom is within us. It’s not just a psychic illusion, but also a bridge of matter and consciousness within a privileged position.
Scientists were recently surprised to find that our mental template of perception bears a strong resemblance to fractal geometry, or the bulb building process of the Mandelbrot Set. In 1999, Jeremy Avnet and Jennifer Carter gave a lecture entitled “Chaos and Neurodynamics” at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They studied EEG attractor formations in the olfactory bulb and processes controlling the oscillations between the inhalation attractor and exhalation attractor. They found that the exhalation process acts as a sort of reset button, causing all attractors throughout the olfactory bulb to vanish. Along with odors, molecular signals called “pheromones” are also detected in the olfactory bulb.
Located just behind the nostrils in the nose’s dividing septum are two tiny pits referred to as the vomeronasal organ (VNO), the seat of the sixth sense. Named for the vomer bone, where the septum meets the top of the mouth, the VNO contains nerve cells that sense chemicals called pheromones, secreted by many animals, including humans.
The University of Chicago established proof of human pheromones in 1998. They transmit fear, stimulate courtship behavior, and give rise to the language of love. Our ancestors in all likelihood communicated by a sixth sense, using semiochemical signals.
Were you at the day of rotunda?
Were you with the sons of thunder?
– were you?
The vestibular system is a paired set of tiny sensory organs tucked deep into the temporal bone on either side of the head, right near the cochlea of the inner ear. It gives us our natural sense of balance. In 1991, Martin Lenhardt of the University of Virginia discovered that people could also sense ultrasound, using the vestibular system as a hearing organ.
In the East, the mental template is often described as a third eye or golden flower. The Bible hints at a sealed forehead and “apple of the eye” (Deuteronomy 32:10, Psalm 17:8 refers to the “small man” or pupil of the eye). The rotunda bulb may look like an apple or guava fruit to make us wise, but eating it certainly isn’t beneficial to the human species.
A Taoist meditation called “The Secret of the Golden Flower” tells how the mental bulb ultimately unfolds its sentient petals when consciousness finally occupies “the square inch field inside the square foot house.” According to Newsweek, almost two thirds of Americans say they pray, and many now study “The Cloud of Unknowing,” as well as the writings of the contemplatives Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Avila.
In the East, the mental template’s nickname is the little vehicle or individual self, formed in the image of the cosmos or larger vehicle of the world soul. The individual self is “atman,” a humanoid idea tiny as a thumb but identical to God in essence. In the West, the “demiurge” originated with Plato and was identified as nous (mind). Another title for the demiurge, “Saklas,” is Aramaic for fool or trickster. Given that the individual self is a likeness of the cosmic whole, it can also become antagonistic to the will of universal intelligence. Pushed by faulty craving, rather than bonding with the world soul, Saklas mischievously proclaims himself as God, though even he desires a good outcome.
Do what you want, but think about the Omen A vision in your mind will lead your way. Go where you want, but don’t forget the Omen A light at your side will show you where.
(Magic Affair – “Omen,” 1994)
In 2009, researchers at UCLA used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate and found that meditation increases the brain’s size. Meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions. The researchers said they found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls.
If mind and universe share the same cosmic template and both use developmental attractors to store and send information, how might intelligent black hole mergers come about? Only 10% of our DNA is used for building proteins. The rest is regarded as junk DNA. Russian researchers recently got together linguists and geneticists in an experiment to investigate junk DNA. According to their findings, DNA also serves as data storage and communication.
Russian biophysicist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues found that alkalines of DNA seemingly follow a regular grammar and have set rules just like other languages. They reported that DNA could cause a disturbing pattern in a vacuum that churns out magnetized wormholes (or tunneling nanotubules). Wormholes are the microscopic equivalents of Einstein-Rosen bridges near black holes. They connect different areas of space-time through which information can instantly be transmitted.
Physicists David Hochberg and Thomas Kephart have shown how gravity was strong enough in the very early universe to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes is likely to still be around and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones. (Foreword to James Gardner’s “The Intelligent Universe” by Ray Kurzweil.)
Referring to dark matter and dark energy, theoretical physicist Michio Kaku recently said schoolbooks should no longer teach that our universe is made mostly of atoms. In 2009, physicists Donald Coyne and D. C. Cheng showed that mini black holes could be everywhere, and “all particles might be made of various forms of black holes.” As black holes lose energy, they slowly evaporate, shrinking in size down to the quantum scale where they may be identical to elementary particles. If everything is in fact made of mini black holes, the basis of biological death could be more directly linked to intelligent black hole mergers, and a Golgotha Event could express those final conditions.
Mama put my guns in the ground I can’t shoot them anymore That cold black cloud is comin’ down Feels like I’m knockin’ on heaven’s door
(Bob Dylan – “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” 1973)
Is mind a singularity? For some observers it looks and feels like it. Danny Penman reported that a group of British researchers are now challenging the establishment by launching a major scientific study into near-death experiences. Most survivors say they experienced the rotundum as a circulating tunnel of light.
One study published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal found that one in ten cardiac arrest survivors experienced emotions, visions or lucid thoughts while they were clinically dead. In medical terms they were “flatliners” or unconscious with no signs of brain activity, pulse or breathing. About one in four people who have a near-death experience also have a much more profound – and sometimes disturbing – experience such as watching doctors try and resuscitate their bodies.
Jewish historian Gershom Scholem said the Merkebah mystics practiced a breathing meditation to “descend” to the chariot. The mental template was a backdrop on which they focused their vision. The ganzfeld perceptual field is a state of mild sensory deprivation that purportedly sets off extra-sensory perception and remote viewing. A recent survey by the Pew Forum found 68 percent of Americans say they believe that angels and demons are active in this world.
People in at least three countries, including the United States, believe dreams contain important hidden truths, said researcher Carey Morewedge, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In six different studies, Morewedge and his colleagues surveyed nearly 1,100 people about their dreams. Across all three cultures, an overwhelming majority of the people endorsed the theory that dreams reveal hidden truths about themselves and the world, a belief also endorsed by a nationally representative sample of Americans, Morewedge said. (“Most People Believe Dreams Are Meaningful,” LiveScience, Feb 17, 2009.)
Rotunda visions have shaped certain forms of art and architecture. The Dome of the Rock, the Taj Mahal, the Kremlin, and the US Capitol are all geodesic structures called “onion domes.” A well-known rotunda edifice in the past was the Byzantine martyrium for saintly relics. The “tryblion” was a saucer or plate used as a measure or seal of weight and volume (kaarah in the Hebrew Old Testament) rooted in the Passover Seder Plate. The followers of a type of mysticism centered in Palestine inscribed prayers and rotunda diagrams on their tryblion saucers to give spiritual protection (Chretien speaks of “un graal,” or platter). Lately, visionary artist Ingo Swann integrated the crystal image of a pyramidal bulb in his painting, “Feminine Rising.” Coached by Salvador Dali, telepathist Uri Geller flaunted surreal mental spaces on pottery plates.
Brother you don’t need to turn me away I was waiting down at the ancient gate
(Fleet Foxes – “Mykonos,” 2008)
“Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, an academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thought, and imagination. Using examples of Escher’s optical illusions, a scrutiny of Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and reflections on Bach’s compositions along with Zen koans, Hofstadter explained how physical systems (reminiscent of art) acquire meaning despite being made of meaningless elements.
In his book “The Black Swan,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb interpreted a symbol for something that could not exist. The expression “black swan” refers to a prevailing, unforeseen, and uncommon occurrence beyond the sphere of normal probabilities. Taleb said that all important scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic achievements are black swans — uncontrolled and unpredicted.
James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” proposed that the biosphere acts as a superorganism. But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking so-called superorganisms studied today embody a higher intelligence. In fact, they’re sub-human. Honeybee communities may produce self-organization, but they don’t have the complexity required to build pyramids or skyscrapers. The underlying truth today is that scientists lack the will to respond to a black hole attractor or higher universal intelligence.
Craig Hogan of Fermilab, said we could be living in a giant cosmic hologram as an extension of our understanding of black holes. If information from a higher intelligence were projected out of a black hole, it would show up near the event horizon in a clutter of Hawking radiation. But quantum perturbations would allow at least some conspicuous meaning to arise from the clutter. Could intellectual abstraction be a key attractor to extraterrestrial contact?
Today, information and media literacy (IML) is important. Christie’s and Sotheby’s fetch high prices. TV stations and film studios prove art’s economic value. Nobel laureates praise art’s highest merits and say that abstraction is a key to cultural sophistication. Yet, why do our scientists guess that a higher extraterrestrial intelligence would not use visual abstraction, but send us a humdrum math signal instead?
The Inspector General of global officialdom looked at a foreboding silhouette of a male torso with a droll cap, flipping an obscene gesture with his finger. A frustrated bird struggled to free a hatchling with its wing, caught in the man’s smiling clenched teeth. “Decadent art,” the official voiced censure and guarded his dictatorship.
Fearlessly the idiot faced the crowd, smiling merciless the magistrate turns round, frowning and who’s the fool who wears the crown go down in your own way
(Pink Floyd – “Fearless,” 1971)
Inventor Ray Kurzweil said there could be a leap in intelligence that yields immortal life. But if humans may soon become immortal, why do scientists tell us not to believe in gods? According to the Apocalypse, God will be revealed in clouds. Every eye shall see him — and as they say in Sweden: “What may be glimpsed can also be photographed.”
When it was originally published in 1902, “The Varieties of Religious Experience“ by William James established the first psychological analysis of religion. It paved the way for the clinical and paranormal branches of psychology created by Freud and Jung.
William James’s book remains the best introduction to his pragmatic way of thinking, his almost devotional respect for discoveries of the human mind, and his unique claims upon the significance of personal experience. James’s classic study is of fundamental importance not only to the awareness of religions, but to modern psychology and psychiatric medicine. Underscored with personal accounts of belief and possession, intoxication, and near-death experience, James’s theories of conversion, saintliness, ecstasy, and mysticism continue to raise new questions and stir up fresh debates.
But some extreme adjustments have been made to the realm of science since then. It nowadays looks as if a groundless (and maybe financial) fear of touching the electrified “third rail” of intellectual disapproval prevents many researchers from speaking out about the varieties of unworldly experience. Just one year after William James published his psychological analysis, Orville and Wilbur Wright launched their famous first aircraft flight. Our contemporary space epoch finally got underway. Today, perhaps space exploration also influences the scientific viewpoint of the paranormal. For regardless of how skeptical we may be of the unknown, there is really nothing very “normal” to be said about walking on the Moon or encountering distant worlds. New technological miracles surprisingly awaken old insights of traditional beliefs. As a result, some of the greatest efforts of modern skeptics to block the bonding of unconscious archetypes are merely wasted labors in our current point in time.
It is often impatiently said that the scientific analysis of unidentified phenomena is a measureless tangle of confusion. Yet, in point of fact, most paranormal experiences belong to around only five chief categories or varieties. This small number of varieties may be interrelated. Hypothetically, they could all be scientifically explainable if irrefutable evidence for the underlying nature of God is precisely established.
Life-Sustaining Cosmos
Perhaps mankind’s most archaic belief is the idea that the original basis of life dwells in deep space (as opposed to a crystal in a cave, for example). Although countless deities and household idols have played a part in many mythologies of the world, it was almost universally acknowledged by ancient cultures that the supreme creative being and eternal spirit of life was a celestial Godhead or immortal sky-parent who resided in the lofty heavens above stormy mountains and forged a long history of cosmological creeds.
Today, some biologists think the need for God may be a central feature stamped deep into our genome. According to the book, “The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes,” by Dean Hamer, chief of gene structure at the National Cancer Institute, human spirituality may be an adaptive trait, located in one of the genes that also happens to code for production of the neurotransmitters that regulate our moods.
As fate would have it, an unexpected approach is now emerging in the native ranks of evolutionary biology with a brand-new “panspermia theory” in opposition to Charles Darwin’s original “warm pond” explanation. Today, we know that organic compounds are very common extraterrestrially. Because life appeared on Earth shortly after the planet had cooled down, with actually very little time for prebiotic evolution, the most current evidence suggests that life was transported from deep space to the Earth — by the impacts of comet-type bodies.
Instead of Darwin’s little pond, astrobiologists today picture a huge impact crater carved into a seafloor basin where a life-bearing comet once collided with our planet. Here is the starting point of all life on Earth — an all-encompassing seed (panspermia) for the original roots of terrestrial life. Although not exactly a common phenomenon, there’s nothing magical about such a hypothesis. It simply implies that complex organic molecules were outgassing from a volcanic seafloor fissure made by a prehistoric comet collision. That’s probably how life originally appeared on Earth, according to recent facts. And because humans are life forms, we can physically relate to our extraterrestrial seedling — possibly even on a genetic level.
Francis Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize with James Watson for their discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. Crick in addition made public a theory with biochemist Leslie Orgel that complex genetic codes could be spread by intelligent life forms using space travel technology in a process they called “directed panspermia.”
The first panspermia theory was mentioned in the writings of the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in the 5th century BC. Various scientists including Lord Kelvin and Svante Arrhenius revitalized it in modern times. In the 1970s, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe proposed that life arrived on Earth by being showered as living cells from comet-type bodies. Recently, a whole range of radiation-resistant microbes has been recognized and has forced us to expand our notion of what is biologically possible in deep space. The latest discoveries strengthen the astrophysical panspermia hypothesis and strongly suggest that life is a cosmic phenomenon. Supporters of the “Electric Universe” theory argue that the plasma astrophysics of Hannes Alfven best explain the synaptic interface of life by the interaction of electromagnetism on cosmic plasma.
In a 2007 report for “Scientific American,” theoretical physicist Paul Davies reflected on the possibility of extraterrestrial life. He cited a conference in 1995 when renowned Belgian biochemist Christian de Duve called life a cosmic rule and declared it almost definite to be found on any Earth-like planets. De Duve’s announcement underpinned the conviction of many scientists that the universe is teeming with life. Dubbed “biological determinism” by Robert Shapiro of New York University, this theory is sometimes put across as: “Life is written into the laws of nature.” The panspermia theory is also mapped out as “Cosmic Ancestry,” a development of Fred Hoyle’s original concept by Brig Klyce and James Lovelock. Supporters of Cosmic Ancestry maintain that — like mass and energy — life has no primary origin. It is written so profoundly into the laws of nature that the blueprint for life in the universe cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be altered from one form to another.
The cosmic storage of life’s genetic material is analogous to a self-repairing heat and mass transfer assembly. The large-scale motion of microscopic ice grains in deep space and their irradiation by ultraviolet light energetically recycles life’s synthesis by way of numerous microbial “splash-back” transmigration routes plotted by the shock waves of comet-type collisions.
Cosmic Ancestry indicates that together with the “conservation of mass and energy,” studies should also consider the “conservation of synthesis.” It’s a simple transfer rule that merely says: As the mass of a relativistic system decreases, its energy will increase, and vice versa. Its value must always be greater than zero, for without at least some conservation of synthesis, an interchange of mass and energy would not be possible.
An ideal state for the conservation of synthesis can be pictured as an equal mixture of mass and energy intertwined like an oscillating filament in a vacuum, which is a rather handy description of the quantum world. The most efficient synthesis found in nature is of course “biosynthesis,” or the metabolism of life. If a superior intelligence or God is indeed behind the laws of physics, perhaps the trinity of “Mass, Energy, and Life” are three aspects of only one thing — the fluctuation of a void:
Father – Singularity of Infinite Mass
Holy Spirit – Quantum of Absolute Energy
Son – Synthesis of Intelligent Life
According to the former head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, perhaps at times God does intervene in quantum mechanical uncertainty to nudge nature’s designs, because the chaotic unpredictability of complex systems impacts our future. “It is thus perfectly possible that God might influence the creation in subtle ways that are unrecognizable to scientific observation. In this way, modern science opens the door to divine action without the need for law-breaking miracles,” Collins recently said.
But if the mind of God or some type of higher consciousness is hardwired into the stuff of space-time, how did it get there? Is there a commonsense reason why the initial conditions of the big bang were fine-tuned, spot on, for a life-sustaining cosmos — or is consciousness just a weird and spectacular accident? What caused the big bang in the first place, and where did the matter that became the universe come from?
If the universe started from the singularity of a big bang and subsequently expanded, it seems likewise possible that it might also do the opposite and contract to a big crunch. There is a logical symmetry to such an effect. If the universe were fated for a big crunch, it would either contract to a singularity (a point of infinite density and zero volume) and everything would cease to exist; or otherwise, it might bounce back with a great outburst. This “big bounce” would be very similar to or perhaps exactly the same as the big bang before it. The theoretical multiverse is said to be the collection of multiple possible universes that together consist of all of reality. As luck would have it, William James first coined the particular term “multiverse” in 1895. The various universes within the multiverse are usually called parallel universes.
Today, a mixed bag of multiverse theories is taken into account. Astrophysicist Thomas Gold once proposed the reality of “other universes nesting within our observable space.” For physicist Michio Kaku, loop quantum gravity of the multiverse may be linked to the upcoming science of teleportation. The ekpyrotic model by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok is a forerunner of the widely held cyclic models in which the universe goes through infinite, self-sustaining big bounce cycles, with an eternity of alternating big bang and big crunch mirror-image phases repeating forever.
Theorist Peter Lynds recently proposed a model (“On a Finite Universe with no Beginning or End“) in which time is cyclic, and the universe repeats an infinite number of times. However, because it is exactly the same cycle that repeats, it can also be interpreted as taking place just once. The result is a two-phase multiverse loop that has no beginning and no end, but is finite and circumvents singularities. Problems such as monopoles, matter-antimatter imbalances, and why initial conditions at the big bang appear to be so specific require no additional solutions.
A key feature of Lynds’ model is his reasoning of thermodynamic time reversal. Rather than the second law of thermodynamics being violated and entropy decreasing, the order of events suddenly turns around in Lynds’ cyclic universe so the singularity is avoided and entropy can continue to increase.
Stephen Hawking once thought that if the universe began to contract, the whole thermodynamic arrow of time must reverse with it. “Everything would go into the reverse of the way we experience things today: light would travel back to the stars, and broken eggs on the floor would miraculously put themselves back together again.”
Physicist Ronald Mallett presently leads a controversial time travel research study. But the second law of thermodynamics shows that processes involving heat transfer tend to have one direction and to be irreversible. This law also predicts that the entropy or measure of disorder of an isolated system increases with time.
Lynds claimed: “If all of the laws of physics, with the exception of the second law of thermodynamics, are time symmetric and can equally be reversed, it became apparent that if faced with a situation where entropy might be forced to decrease rather than increase, rather than actually doing so, the order of events should simply reverse, so that the order in which they took place would still be in the direction in which entropy was increasing. The second law would continue to hold, events would remain continuous, and no other law of physics would be contravened.”
No conservation laws would be breached in this cyclic model because it’s only the order of events that gets turned around. We can go to a Saturday cinema matinee and watch a movie shown in reverse with all of its actors walking the wrong way around. But that won’t strangely turn the clock back to Friday. In a related way, Peter Lynds thinks that reversing the order of events near a singularity in respect to entropy does not necessarily mean that the thermodynamic arrow must also reverse. However, it does provide a very good scientific justification for the big bounce.
The distinction between past and future may be irrelevant near a singularity. Yet all time symmetric physical processes apart from the second law of thermodynamics could be reversed to take place in the direction in which entropy is still increasing. In this direction no singularity would be encountered. Events would simply recoil into their equivalent reverse alignments and carry on from where the singularity would have been if the order of events had not turned around.
According to Lynds, it becomes obvious that the big bounce would not only lead events back to the big bang, but it would actually cause it. The universe would then expand, cool, and sooner or later our solar system would take shape again: “If one asks the question, what caused the big bang? The answer here is the big crunch. This is strange enough. But is the big crunch in the past or the future of the big bang? It could equally be said to be either. Likewise, is the big bang in the past or future of the big crunch? Again, it could equally be said to be either. The differentiation between past and future becomes completely meaningless. Moreover, one is now faced with a universe that has neither a beginning nor end in time, but yet is also finite and needs no beginning.”
God from Machine Era
How can the mind of God fit into the cyclic universe? As computers get smarter, machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to a technological singularity. Many scientists take it on faith that machines will sooner or later become conscious. Perhaps the simplest way to achieve this would be to fit existing life forms (such as neurons or microbes) into biocomputer chips. In 1993, the scientist who coined the phrase “technological singularity,” Vernor Vinge, said: “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”
The Acceleration Studies Foundation (ASF) is a group of technologists and futurists that explore the accelerating development of special domains in science and venture to weigh up the anticipated technological singularity. The president of the ASF, John Smart, maintains archives on the singularity hypothesis. His latest thoughts relate to information and computation studies and evolutionary developmental (evo-devo) biology.
Smart and others like him suppose the technological singularity could max out as a “black hole analogous computing system.” According to theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, such a structure is likely to be an integral component in the replicative life cycle of our “evo devo” universe within the multiverse.
In the ancient recitals of Greek tragedy, a projecting crane arm was used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage. The Latin phrase “deus ex machina” came from Horace’s advice to dramatists never to draw on a god from the machine to explain their story line. Even so, evolutionary developmental scientists at present hope that two separate processes of Cartesian dualism — mind and matter — can work together inside the technological singularity to create a universe. They suggest that the initial conditions of the big bang are the result of an evolutionary selection process involving universe adaptation in the multiverse and universe reproduction via “intelligent black holes.”
Smart and his contemporaries currently propose that “Earth’s local intelligence is on the way to forming a black-hole-analogous reproductive system, and then seed (germline) formation to produce another universe within the multiverse.”
Roger Penrose confirmed with Stephen Hawking that a singularity must result inside a black hole. Gravity becomes infinitely strong at its center, causing the geometry of space-time to infinitely curve to a point of zero volume. Physicist John Wheeler, who coined the terms “black hole” and “wormhole,” thought a big crunch to be the possible ultimate fate of the universe. It’s not difficult to see the likeness between a black hole and a big crunch. However, there is a distinction between the two. (A black hole has the entire universe outside it. With a big crunch there is nothing outside the collapsing area because it represents the whole universe.)
Modern physicists and information theorists hope that a unified “information physics” will soon become known, allowing them to understand our universe as a quantum computing system. Several theorists support the cyclic multiverse model because “development in biology can also be thought of as a cyclical process, a movement from seed, to adapting organism in the environment, to a new seed.”
Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, recently said we can see that “mind” (which we may call an informational process) has an ever more pervasive impact on “matter” (local physical processes) as a function of its complexity. “Over time, complex systems become guiders and shapers of at least their local universal dynamics,” Smart suggested.
According to molecular biologist Sean Carroll, evolutionary developmental biology seeks to resolve differences between processes spanning the scales of cells, organisms and ecologies. It shows potential to deliver a meta-Darwinian paradigm in biology. And evo devo’s hottest theory is that intelligence may transfer learned information into a new universe by means of a black hole.
John Smart wrote: “A black hole is the last place you want to be if you are still trying to create (evolve) in the universe, but this seems exactly where you want to be if you have reached the asymptote of complexity development in ‘outer space,’ have employed all finite local resources into the most efficient nonrelativistic computronium you can, and are now finding the observable universe to be an increasingly ergodic (repetitive, uncreative, ‘cosmogonic’) and senescent or saturated learning environment, relative to you. In other words, the more computationally closed local computing and discovery become, the faster you want the external universe to go to gain the last bits of useful information in the shortest amount of local time, before entering an entirely new zone of creativity (black hole intelligence merger, natural selection and new universe creation).”
Yet, finding the old universe uncreative and no longer useful from one point of view could bear an awful resemblance to an unspeakable Golgotha Event: “As the external universe dies at an accelerating pace, you are locally learning every last thing you can about it as it disintegrates in virtually no subjective time.”
There’s more than one way to scientifically scrutinize such an event. On one hand, a minuscule black hole normally created in space could undergo a near-collision with an intelligent life form and siphon off some of its genetic data. Or, on the other hand, a microscopic black hole produced in an experimental reactor could similarly be directed to smash into organic life. Both paradigms may be connected through some kind of information entanglement or what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” In one description, the person receiving the action might be lifted up on crossed planks like a human lightning rod to draw a miniature black hole from the pitch-black sky. In another version, a subject might be pinned down like a living target assembly in a high-energy physics laboratory to absorb man-made black hole disintegration. Even if our Golgotha Event illustrations seem exceptionally miserable, an intelligent living target could breathe information into a microscopic black hole to lay down the initial conditions for the universe’s reverse cycle — and thus ensure that it sets off a life-sustaining cosmos.
What could be more all-powerful than creating a universe with pure consciousness? Singularity theorists call it “universal transcension” and consider black holes to be vast genetic intelligence transmission systems. A black hole could in theory pick up intelligence or biological consciousness without wiping out structural complexities. Stephen Hawking speculated it could do this if advanced intelligence is built out of some type of organization below the atom in size. (There are 25 orders of magnitude between atoms and the Planck length for the possible requirements of intelligent systems.)
John Smart confirmed: “Not only do intelligent black holes appear to be ideal pre-seeds, picking up and packaging the ‘last useful body information’ in the universe before they leave, but they may also be ideal vessels for merging, competing, cooperating, and engaging in natural selection with other intrauniversal intelligences. This is because black holes, and only black holes, allow a special kind of ‘one way time travel’ for merging with other evolutionarily unique universal intelligences in virtually no subjective (internal) time.”
Holographic Multiverse
Physicist Alain Aspect showed that under certain circumstances subatomic particles are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them — even if they are billions of miles apart. The holographic principle by Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind suggests the universe is akin to a giant hologram. David Bohm, Karl Pribram, and Michael Talbot presented the “whole in every part” nature of a hologram as a new way of knowing the universe. Every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole. If a hologram of an object is cut in half and illuminated by a laser, each half will still contain the entire image of the object. At some deeper level of reality, perhaps the Golgotha Event is not an individual accident, but the extension and fractal of an underlying built-in cosmic unity.
During the Middle Ages, belief in cyclic time was routinely outlawed by the Church. Yet the Bible actually spelled out a two-phase universe: The big bang was in Genesis, with the customary account of creation. The big crunch was described in Revelation. After squeezing through the gap of a bottomless pit, “a new heaven and a new Earth” finally came forward, without a sea. Perhaps the image of a deep well was the dying hint of an impact crater that opened in a seafloor when a life-bearing comet fell to our planet. The visionary Pierre Teilhard de Chardin encouraged meditation for the development of a close, interpersonal relationship with universal transcension — in order to believably know “what it feels like” to experience and cross the singularity of a multiverse.
In my lifetime I have experienced a few incidents that might be described as Fortean because they remain outside the recognized theories of science. Altogether, there were really only four or five such anomalous occurrences in my whole life and they took place years apart. But even so, I remember them in detail because they remain unexplained. I suspect that many ordinary people also experience extraordinary things but don´t talk about them for fear of being laughed at.
I personally don´t have a problem with making people chuckle. The way I see it, it´s a lot better than making people weep. So if you have a psychological need to giggle at something you can´t explain, go right ahead. It´s an excellent fear-repression mechanism. But listen closely to what I have to say.
Paul Dale Roberts, a paranormal investigator and writer recently interviewed me. He put forward a range of questions on the subjects of UFOs and Men in Black (MIBs) that I encountered several years ago. I also touched upon research in remote viewing conducted by the US Navy from 1972 until 1995. L.R. Bremseth, then a Navy commander, described it as a broad-based “transcendent and asymmetrical” research program. But there were some other matters that Paul Dale Roberts didn´t ask me about because they have no obvious link to UFOs. There are a few strange things I don´t talk about.
A most baffling incident happened to me one warm summer evening when I was walking alone. It was somewhere around three or four o´clock in the morning. The streets were empty and the neighborhood was silent as I nonchalantly made my way home after a get-together with a few friends. When I arrived at the intersection lights of two small streets near my house, I carefully looked in each direction to make sure no cars were coming. The junction was undisturbed and the narrow streets were abandoned. Nobody was outside except me. But I suddenly noticed something dim and small rapidly moving toward me from about half a block away. I was standing in the middle of the intersection and thought it could have been a dark cat or perhaps even a large rat running after me. The small dark thing was moving fast and when it approached me I quickly jumped in the air to prevent it from biting my foot. It abruptly stopped next to me. I cautiously crouched down to see what it was and was absolutely amazed by what I saw. It was a big cluster of muddy grapes. Where it came from, I do not know. How it scuttled along the street, I have no idea. There are some things I don´t talk about.
I realize there´s much symbolism to the grapevine. But I´m the type of person who looks for scientific explanations for bizarre experiences. This one really had me stumped. The only rationalization I am able to provide is a long shot. In 2008, researchers discovered single-celled organisms about the size of a grape on the seafloor near the Bahamas. These large single cells (called Gromia sphaerica) can actually scurry along the seafloor. Cosmologist Paul Davies recently speculated that a space-faring civilization could build miniature probes to explore the galaxy, perhaps no bigger than your palm. Such so-called “von Neumann probes” may act as roaming life forms the size of grapes from an extraterrestrial civilization. I told you it was a long shot. But if you can come up with a better explanation that doesn’t involve phantasms, please let me know.
About two years later, I visited Israel during the summer months because I wanted to see the old town of Jerusalem. Entering the ancient walled city was like taking a journey into the past. Unfortunately, there was much political tension in those days and soldiers with machine guns patrolled the streets at night. But that didn´t stop me from slipping past the guards and climbing up to the Mount of Olives where I found a comfortable spot to sit and gaze down upon Jerusalem and meditate every night. After doing that for a few consecutive evenings, one night I saw a small ball of light suddenly materialize in front of me as I sat in the grass. It seemed slightly larger than a ping-pong ball but looked smaller than a tennis ball. It was a bright sphere of continuous white light, not flashing, and seemed to float about four or five feet off the ground. It drifted slowly in front of me, from my right to my left, and traveled approximately thirty or forty feet before it abruptly evaporated.
Unlike the grape cluster, there is scientific recognition of this fact. It´s called ball lightning. According to Dr. Keith Heidorn, a similar phenomenon called St. Elmo’s fire can also appear on leaves, grass, and even at the tips of cattle horns. Prof. Colin Price, head of the Geophysics and Planetary Sciences Department at Tel Aviv University, said thunderstorms are the catalyst for a newly discovered natural phenomenon he calls sprites, described as flashes high in the atmosphere.
The exact cause and nature of ball lightning has yet to be determined; there may be several different types, confusing matters further. But generally it manifests as a grapefruit-sized sphere of light moving slowly through the air which may end by fizzling out or exploding.(David Hambling, “Scientist Looks to Weaponize Ball Lightning,” WIRED, February 20, 2009)
Even though scientists don´t know what causes ball lightning, at least they have a name for it. It seems that it may be a sporadic phenomenon in Israel. Uri Geller, the world´s most investigated paranormalist, said that at the age of four he had an encounter with a mysterious ball of light while in a garden near his house in Israel. He said that he chased after it and was actually hit in the head by the “sphere of light.” This might sound like a childhood flight of the imagination, but many years later an elderly Israeli man named Yaakov Avrahami recalled that while he was once walking to a bus station he witnessed a ball of light. “At that certain moment I noticed a little boy with a white shirt come out from the building to the left. This light ball stopped like it sensed him. Suddenly it moved backwards towards the little boy.”
Journalist Anthony Bragalia says that UFOs are both amorphous and solid. They appear as “lightforms” as often as they appear to be constructed of metal. Bragalia claims that in the coming months newly discovered information will be released revealing that the US government conducted some very interesting studies which, when published, will provide stunning insights.
Some of the aerial “plasma light” phenomena appears to be self-organized and self-directed, even exhibiting some type of intelligence. They can hover, move instantly, morph shape, blink out then reappear elsewhere… or fade into nothingness. Explanations have been proffered that the lights are unknown natural earth or atmospheric events or processes. Maybe they somehow relate to piezoelectricity, ions, earth lights — or unique combinations of these things. Or even still, some feel they may be some sort of unknown aerial life forms. (Anthony Bragalia, “UFOs and the States of Matter,” The UFO Reality, February 12, 2009)
The coincidental timing of my ball lightning experience is what symbolically matters to me. I can now say that “I saw the light” while meditating on the Mount of Olives over Jerusalem. But Uri Geller apparently caught it right between the eyes. Since the nature of ball lightning still remains unknown to scientists, we can´t rule out the possibility of a von Neumann probe in this case either. Observing a celestial probe might be amazing, but having one transferred into your forehead would truly be remarkable.
“The Men Who Stare at Goats” is a 2004 non-fiction book by Jon Ronson, and a movie based on the book, starring George Clooney, about the US Army’s exploration of the potential military applications of the paranormal. The title refers to attempts to kill goats by staring at them. According to David Hambling of WIRED magazine, Dr. Paul Koloc briefly obtained funding in 2002 from the Missile Defense Agency to create stable “magnetoplasmoids” or ball lightning a foot in diameter which would last between one and five seconds and accelerate to two hundred kilometers a second. This would make an idea anti-missile weapon, generating an intense electromagnetic pulse on impact. The USAF´s Phillips Laboratory supposedly examined a very similar concept in 1993.
Shortly before my father´s death, the hands of a small clock in my kitchen started moving counter-clockwise. We assumed that it was because the clock needed new batteries. When my father was placed in an intensive care unit after enduring a heart attack and a broken hip, I remained at home to watch over my ailing mother. As I prayed for my father´s health, I suddenly felt a mild breeze of air move from the left side of my body to the right. I sensed at that moment that my father had passed away. I looked at the clock in the living room. It was eight-twenty in the evening and I said so to my sister. When we later got our doctor´s hospital report, the exact hour of my father´s death was 8:20 PM. A few days later, our next-door neighbor happened to be visiting us. Because she was near the telephone, she answered it when it rang. It was a man´s voice. He asked about a family member. When my neighbor asked who the caller was, he replied that he was my father — and promptly hung up. Unless that was a heartless prank, it resembled various reports of so-called “dead ringers,” or phone calls from the dead. In many instances the cell or landline numbers had even been disconnected. But they still appeared on caller ID.
Every time the living picks up the phone all they hear on the other end is static. There have been instances of those who receive the calls recording them only to find voices in the recording that were not perceptible to the human ear at the time. (Pastor Swope, “Dead Ringers,” The Paranormal Pastor, November 30, 2008)
The Death and Resurrection of Mars
A popular website has built a minor-league reputation regularly nit-picking about “UFOs and the Death of God.” Citing Nietzsche´s schizophrenia and welcoming an existentiality that it presumes to be real, its most recent report claims “some in the UFO community replace God with UFOs for psychological reasons.”
That argument vaguely reminds us of the “Death of Mars” attitude. Scientists have long reflected on the possibility of life on Mars. In the 17th century, after telescopic observation by some observers of apparent Martian canals, it was natural to suppose that some form of life may inhabit Mars. But in 1894, U.S. astronomer William Campbell wrongly showed that water and oxygen were not present in the Martian atmosphere. By the early 1900s, the canal theory was no longer supported. In 1965, NASA scientists unhappily described a parched Mars without rivers, oceans or any signs of life. Mars was officially dead. But today all that has changed. The discovery of abundant sources of water on Mars, together with vast stores of methane gas have most researchers believing once again that Mars is alive and well.
Advocates of the “God is Dead” hypothesis may also be in for a big surprise. According to Paul Davies, there could be microbes that do not have the standard biochemistry of Earth-dwelling organisms. Davies and other leading researchers now think that an amazing realm of “life as we don´t know it” may exist around us. Scientists would never have identified such “weird life” because the techniques they use for studying microbes are based on the familiar biological processes that drive the living things we understand.
Some microbes may also have a means of carrying genetic information and replicating themselves that is not based on DNA, or that has extra DNA “letters.” These microbes could exist in extreme environments such as deep underground or in hot springs, or they could even live inside other organisms, including ourselves. “They might be right in front of our noses, or even in our noses,” Professor Davies said. (Mark Henderson, “Aliens ‘may be living among us’ undetected by science,” Times Online, February 15, 2009)
As one observer noted, the Bible clearly talks about life that is not based in DNA, realms of created beings that are not physical. Over eighty percent of the US population believes in God because that inkling appears to be hard-wired in our genes. The remaining twenty percent don´t believe because they have a psychological need (or guilt) not to. They argue that God is “too good to be true.” It is ironic that the English name God actually stems from the words “the good.” If you remove the possibility of an ultimate good, then you´re left with an ultimate banality. Are you good at what you do? Are you good at your job? Are you good in bed? Twenty percent of the US population has abandoned all trust in “the good” and by extension even attempts to identify the entire universe as an object of banality and mayhem. But they can only speak for themselves.
The “God is Dead” campaigners say God cannot possibly exist because he abandoned his people many times over the millennia, and more unspeakably during the Holocaust. Sir David Attenborough, a prominent agnostic and distinguished BBC television naturalist, recently said he rejects the Bible because a loving God would not allow an innocent child in Africa to have its eye destroyed by a parasitic worm. However, he failed to mention that there is still hope for that child if modern science turns away from warfare and concentrates on the healing arts. Perhaps what Sir David really means is: why would God allow an innocent Jesus to be crucified? The answer to that, we are told, is to teach us the importance of courage. Modern man has become a cowardly creature that destroys innocent life in underprivileged nations with push-button ease, while he gradually becomes a vile object of morbid obesity and banality. God´s death was to teach us the worth of valor — and that death cannot hold Him.
It is argued that many “deranged people in the UFO community” have taken to hallucinating about being taken to Him. But can you think of a medical specialist on appendicitis who has never actually seen a human appendix? Or how about a certified critic of hip hop music that´s never heard a single African American or Latino American song? They would probably be regarded as con artists, not authorities. Why then, are there so many official “UFO investigators” that have never seen a UFO — and really don´t want to because they fear it will make them appear to be unreasonable? Where is the expert common sense in that?
Imagine being a civilian in the Iraqi war (or any war for that matter). One day you look out your front door and see a large armored vehicle parked directly outside your house and perhaps a few soldiers patrolling your street with cameras and searchlights. Would you really suppose that the soldiers don´t notice you and that they don´t know who you are? You´d have to be pretty naïve to think that. It would be far more realistic to assume that they know exactly who you are — and they will probably keep tabs on you from time to time. This is how I interpret UFO experiencers: They are known and made use of by intelligent extraterrestrials to circulate and publicize particular facts of the UFO enterprise.
What is happening now appears to be a bizarre form of psychological warfare. We are being literally bombarded with countless sightings and photographs of unidentified aerial objects to drive home the intimidating point that something beyond the scope of human science is watching over our planet. There are simply too many reliable reports flowing in to be dismissed as hallucinations or frauds. Why then, doesn´t the government just admit that UFOs are real? Perhaps because the largest part of taxpayer money goes to an overwhelming defense budget. The last message the Defense Department wants to convey is the likely fact that it cannot defend us from potential UFO upheavals (as if we didn´t know by now). That would be an outright acknowledgment that billions of our dollars are being wasted. So instead, it plays the flightless ostrich game of hiding its head in the sand. Sixty years ago, the Japanese government chose to ignore warnings that America was developing a secret weapon. Japan´s ostrich game suffered a legendary defeat and the state religion of Emperor worship was banned. I don´t have a problem with making people laugh. But there are some things I don´t talk about.
(FEBRUARY 2009) PETER FOT K KAPNISTOS, ICARIAN SEA, GR, 83300.
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Jon Ronson’s book examines the links between paranormal military programs and psychological techniques used today. The book follows the development of secret psychic activities over the past decades and explores how they are used today in U.S. security and military operations. Project Stargate, the CIA-run program that used remote viewing for psychic spying, came to an end in 1995, and thousands of pages of formerly classified material were released. Journalist Gary S. Bekkum has researched those secret government documents, as well as UFO information and psychic explorations.
In the Second World War, UFO sightings were called “foo fighters.” Nowadays, if the blip of an unidentified paratrooper shows up on a radar screen, it’s sometimes called a “Mary Poppins” (the one-liner joke is that someone jumped down from the sky).
The introduction of modern science finally consigned ghosts and spirits to the fantasy zone of delusions and superstitions. In our day, eminent reasoned thinkers are in charge of our scientific and educational systems. But the swift growth of astrobiology in the past few years has presented an exceptional challenge. Several popular theories have been proposed about the possible basis of alien life. The latest phase in the critical analysis of extraterrestrial life now focuses on what physicist and astrobiologist Paul Davies recently described as “Q-life.”
It was recently discovered that plants, animals, and even isolated microbes converse or “talk” to each other with molecular signals (external hormones) called pheromones. Today, we know there are alarm pheromones, food trail pheromones, sex pheromones, and many others that affect life through a sort of sixth sense (most likely related to smell and taste). Assortments of plants emit distress pheromones when grazed upon. Ants mark their trail with pheromones. And a number of organisms use pheromones to attract their mates from a distance of two or more miles.
The odd notion that skeptics might one day demand an explanation from an intelligent Q-life replicator seems brashly outrageous to many of us. Helical strands of “weird life” take shape spontaneously in interstellar space –– apparently not by evolution or a gradual development from earlier forms. Even so, hulking cynics scoff at a cosmic intelligence by writing it off as the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.”
Some psychologists promote pareidolia under clinical conditions to evaluate their patients. The most well known example is the 
Like an inner apparition, the pyramidal bulb structure continues to guide us all through our lives. Even if we overlook it, subconsciously it stands for the rotunda, an image of our own self or true face. Infants discover the perceptual field as a central steering mechanism and a zone of contact. With this cosmic template, the mind retains a model of its environment. In effect, the kingdom is within us. It’s not just a psychic illusion, but also a bridge of matter and consciousness within a privileged position.
scrutiny of Godel’s incompleteness theorem, and reflections on Bach’s compositions along with Zen koans, Hofstadter explained how physical systems (reminiscent of art) acquire meaning despite being made of meaningless elements.
Today, 
Instead of Darwin’s little pond, astrobiologists today picture a huge impact crater carved into a seafloor basin where a life-bearing comet once collided with our planet. Here is the starting point of all life on Earth — an all-encompassing seed (panspermia) for the original roots of terrestrial life. Although not exactly a common phenomenon, there’s nothing magical about such a hypothesis. It simply implies that complex organic molecules were outgassing from a volcanic seafloor fissure made by a prehistoric comet collision. That’s probably how life originally appeared on Earth, according to recent facts. And because humans are life forms, we can physically relate to our extraterrestrial seedling — possibly even on a genetic level.
Theorist Peter Lynds recently proposed a model (“
How can the mind of God fit into the cyclic universe? As computers get smarter, machines could become more intelligent than humans within a few decades, leading to a technological singularity. Many scientists take it on faith that machines will sooner or later become conscious. Perhaps the simplest way to achieve this would be to fit existing life forms (such as neurons or microbes) into biocomputer chips. In 1993, the scientist who coined the phrase “
In my lifetime I have experienced a few incidents that might be described as Fortean because they remain outside the recognized theories of science. Altogether, there were really only four or five such anomalous occurrences in my whole life and they took place years apart. But even so, I remember them in detail because they remain unexplained. I suspect that many ordinary people also experience extraordinary things but don´t talk about them for fear of being laughed at.
