Liminal Worlds

The following is Part 3 of a four part new video series by David Wilcock. All are worth watching, but I’m highlighting this one right now because of some fascinating evidence that is unearthed in regard to two modern sacred cows: global warming and evolution.

David Wilcock first points out that climate change is occuring on many planets, not only earth, which suggests that it’s far more complicated an issue than is usually supposed.

Even more startling is the evidence he brings up that completely overturns many assumptions about evolution and Darwinism. For example, there are links to studies that show that life can spontaneously evolve within a single generation -or even within the lifetime of one organism- in response to environmental pressures.
There is even evidence to suggest that life can be generated from nonliving matter!

To be open to such ideas, you have to first remove them from any entrenched political or ideological frameworks. For example, people will tend to label you a reactionary or conservative if you question the orthodox view of climate change. Similarly, you are immediately labeled (by some) a religious fundamentalist if you question evolution.

The truth is really more complex, and not tied to any particular dogma. It does not follow, for example, that if climate change is interplanetary and not (mostly) caused by humans, that all environmental concerns are irrelevant. In other words, you don’t have to be an “anti-environmentalist” to question the orthodox view of global warming.

And you certainly don’t have to be a fundamentist, or even a monotheist to question the current orthodoxy on evolution. These are only the simplistic positions that the polorarized media push people into.

belief systems climate change, David Wilcock, evolution

When I first discovered the TED talks, I thought I’d found a great source of cutting edge, innovative intellectual stimulation. But the more of them I watch, the more I’m starting to think that it tends to represent a rather narrow and conventional view. I really started to wonder where they are coming from when they showed a rather trivial presentation by professional debunker Amazing Randi.

This video shows what happened when TED invited controversial comic Sarah Silverman to speak. Predictably enough, she offended many people, including the organizer of the conference. How smart can these people really be if they were surprised when Sarah Silverman said something politically incorrect?

What’s especially annoying is that I could not even find the original talk given by Sarah, while TED routinely posts all of their talks on their website. The video below is an interview by Bill Maher about the TED incident.

While I’m sure there are still some positive things about TED –with all of the hundreds of talks they organize every year some of it has to be good!– my overall estimation of them is steadily declining.

belief systems sarah silverman, TED

Kymatica is a video well worth watching if you are interested in subjects like new physics, consciousness expansion, conspiracy theories, alternative archeology and evolution and so forth. This video covers some of the same material as Zeitgeist, another popular video, but in some ways I think Kymatica has a clearer, more empowering message. While Zeitgeist mainly tries to expose all of the ways we are deceived, Ben Stewart, the creator of Kymatica, stresses the importance of personal responsibility. In fact, he ends up concluding that all of the negative events in our world are actually projections from the false ego that all of us share.

Some of the actual theories explored in Kymatica are, well, theories rather than facts. For example, Stewart explores the possibility that the real origin of the Satan/Devil archetype was a comet that destroyed much of civilization and became the basis for the flood myths of so many ancient traditions.

Similarly, he covers some of the familiar (at least to conspiracy buffs!) ideas that all of the major political leaders of the world are related by blood. He even states that Obama and Bush are related! This may or may not be true, but it’s something that is not proven in this film. There is also an interesting section that discusses how many of our laws and regulations are actually variations of Maritime law, and reduce people to the status of property when we are required to apply for things like birth certificates and driver’s licenses -and pay taxes. These are issues that are often brought up and debated among libertarians, constitutionalists and others who want to do away with the oppression and red tape of modern society. Stewart, however, weaves all of this into a more spiritual and empowering message.

The most important part of the video is the last twenty or so minutes, when Stewart really lays out the problem of people projecting their false egos/shadow selves upon external enemies. This is true whether you follow the mass media or radical or conspiracy theories. It’s easy to be diverted by the ultimately illusory idea of external enemies, whether in the guise of terrorists, corporations, the Illuminati, or other nations, races or religions.

Among the most interesting and informative parts of Kymatica are interviews by Dr. Bruce Lipton, who has done some cutting edge research on healing, genetics and evolution. Towards the end, he gives some convincing evidence that genes do not determine our fate, but are adaptable to the environment.

I don’t necessarily subscribe to every idea or theory put forth in Kymatica, but it’s definitely an important contribution to understanding the predicament of the modern world!

belief systems

Concert pianist-turned-philosopher Ervin Laszlo talks about his personal intellectual and spiritual evolution and about the evolutionary challenges facing humanity as global civilization approaches the ‘chaos point.’ The cofounder with Ludwig vonBertalanfy of General Systems Theory, Laszlo talks from a broad, trans-diciplinary perspective that integrates leading-edge science and spiritual understanding from many traditions. The founder of the Club of Budapest, he travels the world working with many organizations on the urgent mission of helping create a ’sustainable transformation’ to a peaceful planetary civilization before its too late. *

* The above is the description by eon3, the person who submitted the video to YouTube.

belief systems

New Realities is a group that discusses ideas, books and movies dealing with metaphysics, spirituality, 2012, Law of Attraction, new paradigms, alternative health and other such things. It meets at the 60 Main Cafe in New Paltz. The next meeting is Wed. 6/10 at 8 p.m. The topic will be “What the Bleep and Creating Reality” where we will discuss some of the ideas from the movie What the Bleep Do We Know. If you are interested in this, please join the meetup group so you can be put on the mailing list. Just click on the banner:

belief systems

Trine Erotic, by Alice Andrews (ViviSphere Publishing, 2002)

Trine Erotic is not the easiest book to describe or summarize, but here’s my attempt: a romantic, philosophical novel with a postmodern narrative structure that explores the dialectic between biology and free will. To what extent are our feelings, actions and relationships determined by our genes and by evolutionary forces?

While Trine Erotic is certainly an intellectual and philosophical novel, it is also down to earth and readable. The deeper issues are explored through the experiences of well-rounded characters. The technique of stories within stories has become a kind of postmodern genre of its own. Trine Erotic, however, uses this style in a way that is quite original -to explore the role of evolution and biology in human existence, more specifically in human romantic and sexual behavior.

If someone were to write a novel with the sole purpose of trying to prove an argument such as “biology is destiny,” it would, I fear, be quite one dimensional, even dull. Fortunately, Alice Andrews leaves the question of how much biology determines our actions open-ended. More importantly, the characters in this book are are more than abstract symbols to prove a point; they are real people who have interesting thoughts, conversations and relationships.

As the title suggests, the book consists of three sections, Love Stories, Siren’s Song and Third Force. The postmodern structure comes in as we discover that each section turns out to be about the author who penned the previous one. As you might expect with such a style, there are close parallels between the characters in each section.

The characters in Trine Erotic struggle with issues such as love, attraction, fidelity, jealousy and abandonment. One of the central issues is the tendency of some women to be drawn to “alpha” type males who are attractive and charismatic but often unreliable and unwilling to commit to one woman. This is not an unfamiliar theme, but in this novel it is scrutinized from a blatantly biological (evolutionary) perspective.

The whole biology vs. free will problem comes to a head in an interesting manner in the final section. Here, Helen, who turns out to be the author of all the previous narratives, meets Ed, who is not only an attractive alpha male, but the head of a spiritual community based on the teachings of someone named Guerttiev, who seems to be a thinly disguised stand in for Gurdjieff, the esoteric philosopher who taught that “the Work” of ones life should be to authentic and “wake up.”

This esoteric view of spiritual evolution differs fundamentally from the biological kind. The aim of the mystic or magus is to transcend mere physical existence and take conscious control of the evolutionary process. Whether or not this is possible is the kind of question that is raised but not definitively answered in Trine Erotic.

As someone who is quite ambivalent about evolution and science, I did not at all mind the lack of any definite conclusions in this novel. I prefers books that make me think about such issues rather than supply oversimplified and pat answers. Trine Erotic can be read either as a fascinating study of some basic philosophical issues, or as a compelling novel about modern relationships -or both.

Note: most of my book and film reviews are posted on Amazon.com. I’m gradually moving towards posting them on my blog, with links to the Amazon product pages. You can see my Amazon reviews here.

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belief systems, book review

This talk, from the TED site, is about how the Trickster point of view can be applied to looking at everything. Emily Levine discusses the book, which I also read and enjoyed, Trickster Makes This World Mischief, Myth, and Art. The idea or archetype of the Trickster is actually very closely related to the theme of this whole site, liminality. The Trickster is a liminal entity, who brings new things into being and lives on the boundaries.

belief systems

There’s a video circulating the internet, The Truth About Facebook, that explains how Facebook collects all kinds of data about members and has the right, according to the membership agreement, to do basically whatever they want with it. This much is fairly obvious, if a little disconcerting.

But the video goes on to talk about unsettling connections between Facebook and companies connected to the CIA. This raises the question -is Facebook part of a larger effort to create a massive, global database that has all of your info stored in one place?

There’s no question that if you value privacy, you should avoid social networks like Facebook -or, at least give them the minimum amount of data. One of the ironies of the modern age is that much of the data “they” have on us is what we voluntarily give “them.”

However, I look at it a little differently. I think Facebook, like the internet itself, is a good opportunity to connect with many people in a variety of ways. If you look at the “theys” who run anything whether it be nations, corporations or any kind of institutions, you will not have to look hard to find less than altruistic motives at work. Often, the motives are some combination of greed and desire for power. That does not mean that we have to use the tools provided to us by these institutions in a way that will help them achieve their goals.

The internet is a good example of something that was created as a tool for the government and military, but has turned into something that has a much wider, and in many ways contradictory use. This may not be an original idea, but I suspect that the best way to subvert any system is from within. When you try to do it the other way, from the outside, you end up disempowering yourself. For example, if you don’t use money or technology because they are controlled by TPTB (the powers that be), you are allowing them to dominate these areas.

Another aspect to this is that privacy is pretty much a doomed cause. Unless civilization collapses entirely (in which case we’ll have bigger problems at hand than worrying about our privacy), the fact is that you can be tracked very easily no matter where you are. This will most likely get worst, and trying to safeguard privacy, while a legitimate concern in many cases, is basically fighting the current.
Would it not be better to work towards a world where there’s less to fear so that it isn’t such a big deal if others can find out things about you?

So I say, use capitalism, the internet and even Facebook, but in a way that serves the values you believe in. At the same time, you may want to keep in mind that anything you post online can be shared with anyone else on the planet, but you probably know this already.

belief systems, social media

A French study shows that the majority of people will conform –agree with the prevailing opinion– even when it’s factually wrong. This is correlated to certain brain activity, which suggests that people have a “conformity” or “sheep” mechanism that is biological.

However, all such conclusions suffer from the “chicken or the egg” problem –that is, do we behave as we do because our brains dictate it, or does our freely chosen behavior create certain kinds of brain activity? While it’s probably both, I find that’s it too mechanistic to reduce everything to biology. This is what the whole medical model is based on in psychology –people are depressed because of their brain chemistry. Even if this is true, it’s also provable that we can change our brain chemistry without drugs

In any case, this is yet another study that shows that most people tend to conform, though this one is not as malevolent as the Milgram experiments, where people were willing to administer (what they thought were) electric shocks to test subjects for giving the wrong answer.

http://www.truthout.org/012709F

belief systems

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge. What do we know and how do we know it? This can be pretty abstract, but when you apply it to issues that everyone talks about -and things that “everybody knows” it can get interesting -and controversial.

It is now pretty much indisputable that global warming is caused by humans –or is it? There are still scientists who believe that climate change is a natural phenomenon -and that “global warming” is not what it appears. Yet, it has become extremely politically incorrect to even raise this issue. To some, to question global warming in any way makes you a reactionary or the tool of Big Oil (or some such label).

The upcoming International Conference on Climate Change, to be held in New York in March, will feature a number of scientists who question the conventional wisdom of climate change. Now, I don’t pretend to have the expertise to be able to have an opinion on this subject that is worth much. However, I might ask, how many people who “know” the truth about climate change -or many other issues- are really in a position to know the truth? How much of what we “know” is simply repeated something we’ve heard many times? Some other examples about things we might question the official story regarding – evolution, the attacks of 9/11/01, the effectiveness of much modern medicine, to name a few.

I feel the need to add that questioning climate change is not an attack on environmentalist or green ideas (though it could be used for that purpose, of course). Environmental problems are definitely real –much of our air, food and water is contaminated (this is actually much easier to prove than the idea that global warming is caused by humans).

I think everyone who considers themselves educated or well-informed should at least expose themselves to alternative possibilities.

belief systems epistemology, global warming