8 thoughts on “Mental Secret: How to believe anything”
Interesting. So if I focus on something absurd long enough, my brain will treat it as real. And if I can convince others to focus on it, they will treat it as if it’s real also. So by the same measure that’s being used to “debunk” God, can we not also debunk science?
No one can prove string theory. No one can prove many tenets of quantum theory. No one even prove evolution. But if you focus on it long enough, your brain will treat it as real. So really, what I take from this isn’t that God isn’t real, but that nothing is real. Hate isn’t real. It’s just people focusing on the idea of hate. Prejudice isn’t real. It’s just people focusing on prejudice. Racism isn’t real. It’s just people thinking about it too much. Those poor Nazi’s. If they had just spent more time contemplating happy butterflies rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection, then we never would have had a holocaust. Of course, there really was no holocaust. There are just too many people thinking about it and therefore making something false into something real.
Mr. Waldman, with all due respect, the fact that I think about something doesn’t make it real. I can believe that I’m not 40 pounds overweight all day long. But that’s not going to make me a pound thinner. Likewise, I can doubt the existance of God, aliens, or the oppression of the Bush administration. But that doesn’t make any of those things less real. Some things in life are real regardless of what you believe about them.
The map is not the territory. Mark is not saying that thoughts create physical reality. He is saying, I think, that your focus creates your mental reality.
Distinguishing external reality from our internal reality is difficult for humans, because the only way we experience reality is indirectly.
We have only our brain’s map of the territory of reality.
That map includes real physical things like Nazis and butterflies as well as abstract things like natural selection and God.
Our maps are partially imagined and they are often wrong. We extrapolate. We fill in the blanks. People once had a faulty mental map which said the world was flat. That didn’t *make* it flat. They just lived their lives and carried on for years as if it were flat. They made some wrong decisions due to their incorrect perception of reality.
So, yes, racism and hate are real internal experiences. And yes, one assumes that if the Nazi’s weren’t blinded by hate and fear, if they weren’t fooled by blind patriotism and xenophobic flag waving drummed up by Hitler’s tricks, there would have been no action (holocaust) based on these insanities (internal perception not matching external reality).
You and Mark are saying essentially the same thing about reality, but you are speaking from different life experiences which give you different implicit beliefs, different mental filters. Please define God, Steve.
Well said, Xeno. I understand Mark’s point that when we believe something, we act on it as if it were real. It can be seen easily in the actions of a child who fears monsters in the closet. And it can be seen in the actions of citizens who give up their liberty because they fear terrorists who “hate our freedom.” Neither are real, but we act as if they were and in some regards, that’s all that matters.
But my argument is that there are realities that are not bound by our beliefs. They exist whether we believe in them or not. If God is in our mind, then if we die, will God still exist? Berkeley addressed these issues in his “Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.” And I would side with Philonous that it is not our mind that imagines God, but it is God’s mind that imagines us. If you remove all the theists in the world, God will still exist. Just like political corruption will still exist, even if you remove all the neoconservatives.
I can define God for you, Xeno, but what good will that do? My intention is not to advance my idea of God, but rather to play devil’s advocate to those who say He doesn’t exist.
You are articulate and I appreciate the comments. This debate is of critical and universal human importance in my view. It is played out in great detail on many web sites and blogs.
The definition of God matters to me, because if God is your label for all that we do not know, then I agree with you: God certainly exists. Thus, if defined as the unknown, then God is the creator, because we do not know our origins.
If, on the other hand, God is man-shaped extra-terrestrial entity, perhaps with a white beard, omnipresent and omniscient, defined by the amalgam of conflicting oral traditions which were finally written down as the bible, then I’m skeptical. I think man made this God.
This God seems to have evolved from stories about older gods. Does Thor still exist, for example? At the root of it all I think humans labeled the unknown as “God”, anthropomorphizing this vision for their comfort. Nothing wrong with comfort, but religion leads at times to humans abusing other humans. I object strongly to this.
I agree that this issue is critical and of universal human importance. But in defining the limits of what we deem as an acceptable understanding of God, we impose an unnecessary prejudicial view on others. From your standpoint, if God is broadly defined, then it’s acceptable. But if God is more specifically defined, then it’s not. While appearing open-minded, this is nonetheless the same attitude that separates Jew from Muslim and Hindu from Christian. It says, “My view of God is superior to yours.”
I have my own view of who and what God is. And I can tell you in specific detail why I believe it. But will that serve to unite us or will it be a point of contention? If it’s the latter, why must that be so? If I am a Hindu, will you think less of me? And if I am a Catholic, will it make it that much easier for you to disregard my views? And yet I am neither.
You ask if Thor still exists. I would say that no spirit ever dies. Anthropologists like to create a notion of man before the 19th century as primitive and superstitous. Like a dumb ape, unable to comprehend his world and filling it with myth and legend to try to make sense of it. Of course, today we would never do that. We would never create popular myths to try and make sense of our world. Unless it’s religion. But state-sanctioned myths of science and “education” are perfectly acceptable and above reproach. But in reality, it’s all the same. People have not changed much over the past 10,000 years. And I am not one to believe what I’m told simply because it comes from an established organization such as a university or church. Both have interests that are not necessarily in my own best interest.
It should be clear to anyone that follows independant media that we still create popular myths. And it’s not just religion that’s doing so. We create popular myths in politics to allow inexcusable behavior at home and abroad. We create popular myths in education to avoid ethical and moral responsibility. And yes, we create religious myths in many cases to control the masses.
Xeno, I respect your opinion about God. I think you’re wrong, but I still respect your view. Yes, religion has been used to abuse other humans. But it’s not just the Muslims, Jews and Christians doing all the harm. It’s important to remember that Hitler took the occult notion of a pure Ayyan blood line and combined it with Darwin’s argument of Natural Selection to justify the Holocaust. The Reichstag didn’t give Hitler his power. It was a tool, but it wasn’t the only tool. Also key was the rejection of the Christian faith and a fervent belief that German blood contained pure Aryan DNA. The German people were fighting because they truly believed (to get back to the original point of this discussion) that they were superior humans, born to be masters of the world. If anything, religion isn’t the enemy. Bad ideas are.
You are saying basically, “I’m right and I won’t tell you why, I just am.” This is a faith based view. Science, on the other hand, can tell you why you can believe things in terms that involve observations you can make about your world.
The only observation religion offers is “Look here, see these relics, these symbols in clay. Someone wrote this stuff and it makes us feel good to believe it.” That is superstitious and naive because it neglects the fact that humans imagine things and pass on things that are not true.
Repeatable experiments form the basis of science. Religion has no such foundation. Religionists like to pretend that science is based on faith by pointing out that certain things are “just a theory”. Major theories in science, however, are based on hundreds, even thousands of repeatable observations of the physical world. The physical facts led to the theory of Natural Selection, and these facts can be directly observed.
If not for the fact that scientific method works, we could not even have this exchange because there would be no computers. It’s absurd, really. You are using tools science has given you to denounce science. The same observational methods that allowed scientists to create your computer also led to the scientific belief in evolution.
Change the brain, you change the personality. Change the brain, and you leave your body. Change the brain, and you lose your consciousness. Where and what then is the soul?
I’m not denouncing science. I’m denouncing the religion of science and those who claim that science has all the answers. The scientists I know all went to a University where they were told what to think and told what to believe, just like religious zealots who went to Synagog and came away with a head full of thoughts that weren’t their own.
I’m not denouncing Natural Selection. I’m denouncing the idea that one animal can magically transform into another. Developing an immunity or adapting to an environment is not the same as trans-species evolution. Scientists have never watched one species become another (unless its through deliberate genetic modification). The overwhelming lack of evidence (transitional forms) in the fossil record is what led scientists to develop the notion of punctuated equillibrium. They didn’t see trans-species evolution take place and they were missing the evidence from the fossil record. So they came up with a theory that said “no fossils were left because species changed into one another quickly, thereby leaving no trace.” But that is an argument from a LACK of evidence, not observed evidence. It’s like me saying that my patio is keeping away elephants and pointing to the lack of elephants as evidence it’s true.
I’m not saying that science hasn’t brought us great developments in terms of medicine and technology. I’m not saying that science is bad. ‘m saying that the scientific community claims to have all the answers but they don’t. The “facts” they so vehemently argue today will change. And then, what will they do? Will they admit they were wrong? No. hey will say that based on new “evidence” they have refined their theories. But if you challenged those theories while they were still sacred, you would be ousted and denounced as a heretic. Any casual study of the scientific community over the past 150 years will show that to be unquestionably true.
Scientists are told what is right and how they should interpret the data. Any dissent or questioning will cost you your diploma, your grant money, your reputation, etc. Consider the case of the questionable link between HIV and AIDS.
Esteemed doctors with expertise in retroviruses have denounced the link between HIV and AIDS. The facts certainly seem to suport them. But the scientific community has refused to even consider their claims. Why? Isn’t science supposed to be the quest for the truth? Isn’t science supposed to be an unbiased discipline that’s based on observation? And yet these scientists researching AIDS have observed the fact that HIV does not appear to cause AIDS. And for saying so, they were censored and their federal funding was pulled. Why? Because science IS a religion. And when you speak heresy, you are punished in the scientific community just as you would be in the religious community.
I’m not saying science is bad. But Xeno, come on. Science isn’t the bastion of intellectual purity that you are trying to make it out to be.
Xeno, you try to paint religion as superstition. But you fail to recognize the miraculous. I was having dinner with a friend who just had a baby. She said that her mother had just left after a week long visit. I asked when she had arrived and she smiled. “My mother arrived three hours after the baby had been born.” I said that was good timing. She said, “No, that was God.” Apparently her mother lives three states away and the baby was not due for another week. But early one morning, the mother said God woke her up and said “It is time. Get up and drive to your daughter. She is having the baby early.” So she packed her bags and got in the car and drove for two days. My friend went into labor unexpectedly a week early. And her mother showed up three hours after the delivery because God told her two days earlier that it would happen.
You can write that off as coincidence, but I could tell you stories like that for days on end. After awhile, you have to suspect that it’s not just superstition or luck. It’s not just some old parchment that people are trying to make sense of. If that’s all it was, then I wouldn’t be a part of it.
I was having lunch with a friend one day when a strange man walked up to us. He addressed my friend and said that he was instructed to meet him during an out of body experience. The stranger had been dabbling in TM. During one experience, he witnessed a tremendous battle taking place. One of the beings protected him during the battle and told him that his life was in danger and that he must go to this cafe at this time and seek out a man named Rob (my friend). He was told by the being that Rob had the truth and could save his life.
I watched a man last week who was on a breathing machine after being in the hospital. His lungs were failing due to a disease that I can’t recall the name of. But it was genetic and incurable and his younger sister had already died from it. This man was a R&B sax player. When he was diagnosed with his disease, the doctors told him that he would have to give up his music career. But God told him that his playing would bring Him glory. So while the man was in the hospital, he had his wife bring in his sax. When he played, his lung capacity went up to 95%. But as soon as he stopped, his lung capacity went down to 10%. The doctors have no explanation. They claim it is a miracle. Today, he is on a breathing machine struggling to breathe and barely able to speak. But if he starts to play, he can breathe just fine.
Let me ask you, Xeno. Have you ever watched someone being posessed? Have you ever sat inches away from them as their spine contorts and their hands curl up and they start speaking in a voice that’s not their own? Have you ever smelled the red and yellow bile that they vomit? And have you watched as the spirits loose their grip on the person and they come to their right mind, completely unaware of what has happened to them?
There is more to this life than science can explain. I’m not against science. I’m against thought control. I’m against the psychological warfare that’s being used to control people and supress the truth. I’m all for science when it truly is science, not religion masquerading as science. I believe that all the facts should be considered, not just those that our knowledge filter allows through. Not just those that institutions tell you are correct. Not just those that will maintain control for those in power.
You seem like a bright guy, Xeno, and your blog contains information that most “legitimate” news sources won’t let thorugh (for the exact reasons I’ve stated throughout this post). So I expect you to have an open mind. Don’t let a narrow view of religion that’s watered down and “safe” keep you from experiencing the grand
mystery that’s going on all around you.
Steve, thank you for your heartfelt reply. You clearly care deeply about truth, and that passion is something I respect. Let me try to respond in kind, not to argue against you but to think with you for a moment.
When I defend science, I’m not defending the institutions that sometimes hide behind it, nor the egos that insist their current model of reality must be final. As you rightly note, those are human failings — arrogance, complacency, politics. But those aren’t the essence of science. The method itself is beautifully humble. It says, “Here is what we observe, here is what we infer, and here is where we might be wrong.” Good science never claims to have all the answers; it simply tries to reduce the range of our errors.
You brought up miracles and experiences that defy explanation — and I don’t dismiss them. They’re data of a different kind: personal, subjective, and meaning-laden. The fact that they do not replicate under controlled conditions doesn’t make them unreal; it makes them non-generalizable in the scientific sense. But within the map of your own lived experience, they are as real as gravity. In that way, we could say mystical experience is first-person science — data gathered by consciousness itself about its own boundaries.
What I think separates superstition from exploration is not belief, but how we hold belief. Do we hold it provisionally, testing it against experience and open to correction, or do we hold it as immune to question? The same danger exists in both religion and science when curiosity hardens into ideology. The moment we stop being willing to update our map, we begin mistaking it for the territory.
Maybe the deepest truth is that both of us — the scientist and the mystic — are standing at the edge of the same mystery but using different instruments. The scientist uses measurement; the mystic uses introspection. Both are attempts by consciousness to understand itself and its universe. Perhaps, as Niels Bohr once suggested, the opposite of a profound truth is not a falsehood, but another profound truth.
So let’s keep talking. Let’s keep comparing maps. The territory is too vast for only one perspective to chart.
P.S. The conditions for making fossils are very rare; most species that ever existed never left fossils at all, which is why the record seems patchy. There’s good evidence for this — we can compare the vast number of known living species to the small fraction that ever fossilize today, and we see the same pattern in the geological record.
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Interesting. So if I focus on something absurd long enough, my brain will treat it as real. And if I can convince others to focus on it, they will treat it as if it’s real also. So by the same measure that’s being used to “debunk” God, can we not also debunk science?
No one can prove string theory. No one can prove many tenets of quantum theory. No one even prove evolution. But if you focus on it long enough, your brain will treat it as real. So really, what I take from this isn’t that God isn’t real, but that nothing is real. Hate isn’t real. It’s just people focusing on the idea of hate. Prejudice isn’t real. It’s just people focusing on prejudice. Racism isn’t real. It’s just people thinking about it too much. Those poor Nazi’s. If they had just spent more time contemplating happy butterflies rather than Darwin’s theory of natural selection, then we never would have had a holocaust. Of course, there really was no holocaust. There are just too many people thinking about it and therefore making something false into something real.
Mr. Waldman, with all due respect, the fact that I think about something doesn’t make it real. I can believe that I’m not 40 pounds overweight all day long. But that’s not going to make me a pound thinner. Likewise, I can doubt the existance of God, aliens, or the oppression of the Bush administration. But that doesn’t make any of those things less real. Some things in life are real regardless of what you believe about them.
The map is not the territory. Mark is not saying that thoughts create physical reality. He is saying, I think, that your focus creates your mental reality.
Distinguishing external reality from our internal reality is difficult for humans, because the only way we experience reality is indirectly.
We have only our brain’s map of the territory of reality.
That map includes real physical things like Nazis and butterflies as well as abstract things like natural selection and God.
Our maps are partially imagined and they are often wrong. We extrapolate. We fill in the blanks. People once had a faulty mental map which said the world was flat. That didn’t *make* it flat. They just lived their lives and carried on for years as if it were flat. They made some wrong decisions due to their incorrect perception of reality.
So, yes, racism and hate are real internal experiences. And yes, one assumes that if the Nazi’s weren’t blinded by hate and fear, if they weren’t fooled by blind patriotism and xenophobic flag waving drummed up by Hitler’s tricks, there would have been no action (holocaust) based on these insanities (internal perception not matching external reality).
You and Mark are saying essentially the same thing about reality, but you are speaking from different life experiences which give you different implicit beliefs, different mental filters. Please define God, Steve.
Well said, Xeno. I understand Mark’s point that when we believe something, we act on it as if it were real. It can be seen easily in the actions of a child who fears monsters in the closet. And it can be seen in the actions of citizens who give up their liberty because they fear terrorists who “hate our freedom.” Neither are real, but we act as if they were and in some regards, that’s all that matters.
But my argument is that there are realities that are not bound by our beliefs. They exist whether we believe in them or not. If God is in our mind, then if we die, will God still exist? Berkeley addressed these issues in his “Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous.” And I would side with Philonous that it is not our mind that imagines God, but it is God’s mind that imagines us. If you remove all the theists in the world, God will still exist. Just like political corruption will still exist, even if you remove all the neoconservatives.
I can define God for you, Xeno, but what good will that do? My intention is not to advance my idea of God, but rather to play devil’s advocate to those who say He doesn’t exist.
You are articulate and I appreciate the comments. This debate is of critical and universal human importance in my view. It is played out in great detail on many web sites and blogs.
The definition of God matters to me, because if God is your label for all that we do not know, then I agree with you: God certainly exists. Thus, if defined as the unknown, then God is the creator, because we do not know our origins.
If, on the other hand, God is man-shaped extra-terrestrial entity, perhaps with a white beard, omnipresent and omniscient, defined by the amalgam of conflicting oral traditions which were finally written down as the bible, then I’m skeptical. I think man made this God.
This God seems to have evolved from stories about older gods. Does Thor still exist, for example? At the root of it all I think humans labeled the unknown as “God”, anthropomorphizing this vision for their comfort. Nothing wrong with comfort, but religion leads at times to humans abusing other humans. I object strongly to this.
I agree that this issue is critical and of universal human importance. But in defining the limits of what we deem as an acceptable understanding of God, we impose an unnecessary prejudicial view on others. From your standpoint, if God is broadly defined, then it’s acceptable. But if God is more specifically defined, then it’s not. While appearing open-minded, this is nonetheless the same attitude that separates Jew from Muslim and Hindu from Christian. It says, “My view of God is superior to yours.”
I have my own view of who and what God is. And I can tell you in specific detail why I believe it. But will that serve to unite us or will it be a point of contention? If it’s the latter, why must that be so? If I am a Hindu, will you think less of me? And if I am a Catholic, will it make it that much easier for you to disregard my views? And yet I am neither.
You ask if Thor still exists. I would say that no spirit ever dies. Anthropologists like to create a notion of man before the 19th century as primitive and superstitous. Like a dumb ape, unable to comprehend his world and filling it with myth and legend to try to make sense of it. Of course, today we would never do that. We would never create popular myths to try and make sense of our world. Unless it’s religion. But state-sanctioned myths of science and “education” are perfectly acceptable and above reproach. But in reality, it’s all the same. People have not changed much over the past 10,000 years. And I am not one to believe what I’m told simply because it comes from an established organization such as a university or church. Both have interests that are not necessarily in my own best interest.
It should be clear to anyone that follows independant media that we still create popular myths. And it’s not just religion that’s doing so. We create popular myths in politics to allow inexcusable behavior at home and abroad. We create popular myths in education to avoid ethical and moral responsibility. And yes, we create religious myths in many cases to control the masses.
Xeno, I respect your opinion about God. I think you’re wrong, but I still respect your view. Yes, religion has been used to abuse other humans. But it’s not just the Muslims, Jews and Christians doing all the harm. It’s important to remember that Hitler took the occult notion of a pure Ayyan blood line and combined it with Darwin’s argument of Natural Selection to justify the Holocaust. The Reichstag didn’t give Hitler his power. It was a tool, but it wasn’t the only tool. Also key was the rejection of the Christian faith and a fervent belief that German blood contained pure Aryan DNA. The German people were fighting because they truly believed (to get back to the original point of this discussion) that they were superior humans, born to be masters of the world. If anything, religion isn’t the enemy. Bad ideas are.
You are saying basically, “I’m right and I won’t tell you why, I just am.” This is a faith based view. Science, on the other hand, can tell you why you can believe things in terms that involve observations you can make about your world.
The only observation religion offers is “Look here, see these relics, these symbols in clay. Someone wrote this stuff and it makes us feel good to believe it.” That is superstitious and naive because it neglects the fact that humans imagine things and pass on things that are not true.
Repeatable experiments form the basis of science. Religion has no such foundation. Religionists like to pretend that science is based on faith by pointing out that certain things are “just a theory”. Major theories in science, however, are based on hundreds, even thousands of repeatable observations of the physical world. The physical facts led to the theory of Natural Selection, and these facts can be directly observed.
If not for the fact that scientific method works, we could not even have this exchange because there would be no computers. It’s absurd, really. You are using tools science has given you to denounce science. The same observational methods that allowed scientists to create your computer also led to the scientific belief in evolution.
Change the brain, you change the personality. Change the brain, and you leave your body. Change the brain, and you lose your consciousness. Where and what then is the soul?
I’m not denouncing science. I’m denouncing the religion of science and those who claim that science has all the answers. The scientists I know all went to a University where they were told what to think and told what to believe, just like religious zealots who went to Synagog and came away with a head full of thoughts that weren’t their own.
I’m not denouncing Natural Selection. I’m denouncing the idea that one animal can magically transform into another. Developing an immunity or adapting to an environment is not the same as trans-species evolution. Scientists have never watched one species become another (unless its through deliberate genetic modification). The overwhelming lack of evidence (transitional forms) in the fossil record is what led scientists to develop the notion of punctuated equillibrium. They didn’t see trans-species evolution take place and they were missing the evidence from the fossil record. So they came up with a theory that said “no fossils were left because species changed into one another quickly, thereby leaving no trace.” But that is an argument from a LACK of evidence, not observed evidence. It’s like me saying that my patio is keeping away elephants and pointing to the lack of elephants as evidence it’s true.
I’m not saying that science hasn’t brought us great developments in terms of medicine and technology. I’m not saying that science is bad. ‘m saying that the scientific community claims to have all the answers but they don’t. The “facts” they so vehemently argue today will change. And then, what will they do? Will they admit they were wrong? No. hey will say that based on new “evidence” they have refined their theories. But if you challenged those theories while they were still sacred, you would be ousted and denounced as a heretic. Any casual study of the scientific community over the past 150 years will show that to be unquestionably true.
Scientists are told what is right and how they should interpret the data. Any dissent or questioning will cost you your diploma, your grant money, your reputation, etc. Consider the case of the questionable link between HIV and AIDS.
http://opposingdigits.com/vlog/?p=64
Esteemed doctors with expertise in retroviruses have denounced the link between HIV and AIDS. The facts certainly seem to suport them. But the scientific community has refused to even consider their claims. Why? Isn’t science supposed to be the quest for the truth? Isn’t science supposed to be an unbiased discipline that’s based on observation? And yet these scientists researching AIDS have observed the fact that HIV does not appear to cause AIDS. And for saying so, they were censored and their federal funding was pulled. Why? Because science IS a religion. And when you speak heresy, you are punished in the scientific community just as you would be in the religious community.
Consider the problems the Big Bang theory is having with redshift: http://www.rense.com/general61/bbang.htm Consider the problems of anomalos archeology: http://www.s8int.com/truesuppressions.html
I’m not saying science is bad. But Xeno, come on. Science isn’t the bastion of intellectual purity that you are trying to make it out to be.
Xeno, you try to paint religion as superstition. But you fail to recognize the miraculous. I was having dinner with a friend who just had a baby. She said that her mother had just left after a week long visit. I asked when she had arrived and she smiled. “My mother arrived three hours after the baby had been born.” I said that was good timing. She said, “No, that was God.” Apparently her mother lives three states away and the baby was not due for another week. But early one morning, the mother said God woke her up and said “It is time. Get up and drive to your daughter. She is having the baby early.” So she packed her bags and got in the car and drove for two days. My friend went into labor unexpectedly a week early. And her mother showed up three hours after the delivery because God told her two days earlier that it would happen.
You can write that off as coincidence, but I could tell you stories like that for days on end. After awhile, you have to suspect that it’s not just superstition or luck. It’s not just some old parchment that people are trying to make sense of. If that’s all it was, then I wouldn’t be a part of it.
I was having lunch with a friend one day when a strange man walked up to us. He addressed my friend and said that he was instructed to meet him during an out of body experience. The stranger had been dabbling in TM. During one experience, he witnessed a tremendous battle taking place. One of the beings protected him during the battle and told him that his life was in danger and that he must go to this cafe at this time and seek out a man named Rob (my friend). He was told by the being that Rob had the truth and could save his life.
I watched a man last week who was on a breathing machine after being in the hospital. His lungs were failing due to a disease that I can’t recall the name of. But it was genetic and incurable and his younger sister had already died from it. This man was a R&B sax player. When he was diagnosed with his disease, the doctors told him that he would have to give up his music career. But God told him that his playing would bring Him glory. So while the man was in the hospital, he had his wife bring in his sax. When he played, his lung capacity went up to 95%. But as soon as he stopped, his lung capacity went down to 10%. The doctors have no explanation. They claim it is a miracle. Today, he is on a breathing machine struggling to breathe and barely able to speak. But if he starts to play, he can breathe just fine.
Let me ask you, Xeno. Have you ever watched someone being posessed? Have you ever sat inches away from them as their spine contorts and their hands curl up and they start speaking in a voice that’s not their own? Have you ever smelled the red and yellow bile that they vomit? And have you watched as the spirits loose their grip on the person and they come to their right mind, completely unaware of what has happened to them?
There is more to this life than science can explain. I’m not against science. I’m against thought control. I’m against the psychological warfare that’s being used to control people and supress the truth. I’m all for science when it truly is science, not religion masquerading as science. I believe that all the facts should be considered, not just those that our knowledge filter allows through. Not just those that institutions tell you are correct. Not just those that will maintain control for those in power.
You seem like a bright guy, Xeno, and your blog contains information that most “legitimate” news sources won’t let thorugh (for the exact reasons I’ve stated throughout this post). So I expect you to have an open mind. Don’t let a narrow view of religion that’s watered down and “safe” keep you from experiencing the grand
mystery that’s going on all around you.
[Xeno’s missing reply added 20 years later]:
Steve, thank you for your heartfelt reply. You clearly care deeply about truth, and that passion is something I respect. Let me try to respond in kind, not to argue against you but to think with you for a moment.
When I defend science, I’m not defending the institutions that sometimes hide behind it, nor the egos that insist their current model of reality must be final. As you rightly note, those are human failings — arrogance, complacency, politics. But those aren’t the essence of science. The method itself is beautifully humble. It says, “Here is what we observe, here is what we infer, and here is where we might be wrong.” Good science never claims to have all the answers; it simply tries to reduce the range of our errors.
You brought up miracles and experiences that defy explanation — and I don’t dismiss them. They’re data of a different kind: personal, subjective, and meaning-laden. The fact that they do not replicate under controlled conditions doesn’t make them unreal; it makes them non-generalizable in the scientific sense. But within the map of your own lived experience, they are as real as gravity. In that way, we could say mystical experience is first-person science — data gathered by consciousness itself about its own boundaries.
What I think separates superstition from exploration is not belief, but how we hold belief. Do we hold it provisionally, testing it against experience and open to correction, or do we hold it as immune to question? The same danger exists in both religion and science when curiosity hardens into ideology. The moment we stop being willing to update our map, we begin mistaking it for the territory.
Maybe the deepest truth is that both of us — the scientist and the mystic — are standing at the edge of the same mystery but using different instruments. The scientist uses measurement; the mystic uses introspection. Both are attempts by consciousness to understand itself and its universe. Perhaps, as Niels Bohr once suggested, the opposite of a profound truth is not a falsehood, but another profound truth.
So let’s keep talking. Let’s keep comparing maps. The territory is too vast for only one perspective to chart.
P.S. The conditions for making fossils are very rare; most species that ever existed never left fossils at all, which is why the record seems patchy. There’s good evidence for this — we can compare the vast number of known living species to the small fraction that ever fossilize today, and we see the same pattern in the geological record.