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Author Topic:   What I'm reading while watching "Hideous Kinky" at 1:45 AM instead of my homework:
proxieme
unregistered
posted February 09, 2003 01:45 AM           Edit/Delete Message
(It's a bit long, but if you're bored and at a job w/ a readily available internet connection or are enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning with the TV talking heads - or the birds and the bees and the sycamore trees - you may think it worth the time. I thought some of ya'll might, that's why I posted it )

Spirituality & Health Magazine
Issue: spring 2000

What You Ask Is Who You Are
Sam Keen

I seem to be a traveler on a journey to an unknown destination. Some longing, some missing X, keeps me searching for a holy grail that is hidden just beyond the mist.

That we are mindful or spiritual animals means that we are animated by a quest for something more than bread and shelter. Our reach always exceeds our grasp. The great mono-myth of the hero with a thousand faces converts the process by which we become self-transcending into a dramatic narrative of quest and conquest in the external world. But the greatest travelers may never stray more than a few miles from home. Indeed, they may be confined to a wheelchair, as is Stephen Hawking, The road is not clay nor is the path through oaks or elms. The grail is no cup that once held wine or hemlock.

We need to translate the metaphors of quest, journey, and path into more exact language. The heroes and heroines are the men and women who ask new questions and open our minds and spirits to new possibilities.

In the beginning is the brain. And the brain is a biological phenomenon. It is organized to handle practical matters. It sees to it that we breathe when we are asleep, seek food when we are hungry, and avoid such obvious dangers as high places, loud noises, and large wild animals. But beyond programming us with basic instincts for survival and preparing us to learn primitive skills of hunting and gathering, most of the brain is unemployed. It remains asleep, awaiting the kiss of the imagination to bring it to life. It is an acorn, an oak-in-waiting, a raw potential that may be actualized in as many ways as there are unique persons. Its dance card is mostly empty. What it is to become is written neither in our genes nor our stars.

To change the metaphor, think of the brain as a vast forest that contains only a few organized enclaves with elaborate systems of connecting roadways along its outer edges (the reptilian brain and mid-brain). Imagine what we might see in an aerial photograph of medieval Germany: a few walled cities surrounded by uninhabited wilderness connected only by footpaths and primitive roads. The brain is an underdeveloped country that becomes mind when intricate neural pathways take shape, new roads are built into the interior, towns and cities emerge, and a communication system joins the newly inhabited realms of the cerebral cortex to the other kingdoms of the brain. The mind is a self-created network of crisscrossing roads leading to destinations more numerous than the stars.

What is the origin of the impulse that travels across the synapses linking neuron to neuron to form pathways where there were none? How does the kingdom of mind emerge from the uninhabited potentialities of the brain? By what magic did we escape from the prison of impulse and instinct and become freely pondering and deliberating animals? What causes fated biological entities to metamorphose into self-creating human minds? Michelangelo pictured the moment on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when God touched Adam and gave him life, but how are we to understand this in less literal and less mythological ways?

We are unfinished animals, biologically endowed at birth with a brain but destined to become self-conscious and self-creating. The informing principle of all of life, the cosmic DNA -- call it God, Nature, or the indwelling creative principle -- does a strange trick with humans. It implants an impulse that will carry us beyond its own programming. We are created to be self-transcending. What is unique about human beings is that at the heart of our DNA lies the necessity of freedom, the potential to become something that is not yet defined. We are driven to transcend old boundaries and limits, to surpass the biologically given conditions of our lives. Of necessity, we transcend "nature" — the imposed reign of instinct and automatic responses — and become creatures of mind or spirit. As missionary Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen says to Humphrey Bogart, "Nature is what we are put here to rise above."

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think of asking. The question is the helmsman of consciousness. Our minds, bodies, feelings, relationships are all informed by our questions. The complex networks ofneurons that make up a mind are as individual as our fingerprints. What makes me Sam Keen rather than Alan Greenspan are the questions chat give shape to my life. I do not wake up, spend each day and end each day thinking about interest rates, the consumer price index, or the ratio between the dollar and the yen. The questions we ask determine whether we will be superficial or profound, accepters of the status quo or searchers. The difference between Einstein and Hitler depended on the questions they asked. What you ask is who you are. What you find depends on what vou search for.

Imagine the different type and quality of life you would have if the questions you asked when you got up each morning were the following: Where can I get my next fix of heroin? How do I serve God? What will the neighbors think? What happened during the big bang when the world was created? Who will love me? How do I get power? How can we destroy our enemy? How can we end violence? Where will I spend eternity? How can I make enough money? Who are my friends? How can I be comfortable? Is my cancer curable? How can I become famous? How do we heal the Earth? Where can I get food for my children?

Becoming a Questioner
To become a questioner is to enter the philosophical life and to make a commitment to search for wisdom rather than certainty. Philosophy is a wrestling match with angels in which we are always wounded, a struggle with questions that can never be answered with any finality.

The first stage in the process of becoming a lover of questions is to discover the unconscious answers — myths, ideologies, values — that have informed our lives thus far and, therefore, what questions we have been taught to ask and to ignore.

In the beginning are the answers. From the moment of birth onward, an infant is subjected to an elaborate system of cultural indoctrination. An encompassing symbolic world of rituals, celebrations, games, modes of worship, folktales, and myths teaches the unconscious child the implicit catechism, the socially sanctified answers to questions about the meaning of life. We are taught the accepted prejudices long before we learn the skills of discernment. As the song tells us, "We have to be taught, before we are six or seven or eight, to hate all the people our relatives hate."

The majority of people in any stable culture are more or less true believers in the consensus. They reach adulthood and ask: How will I make a living? Will I marry? Have a family? What is my duty? How can I be a good citizen of my community? Most adults find answers to their questions about the meaning of life and their ultimate destiny in the shared beliefs of the people around them. They live and die within the horizons of the myth, accept the answers, the institutions, the authorities, the ideology, the heroes and villains, the values, the worldview and politics of their parents and peers.

In the unexamined life that is the lot of the majority, the questions to which the cultural consensus are answers remain unconscious. The cultural catechism is implicit within the accepted mythic horizon of symbols, rituals, heroes, and villains. Compare, for instance, the catechism that is presented in a medieval cathedral and an NFL football game. Both are mythic systems that offer implicit answers to the questions: What is the chief end of man? What gives happiness? What are the heroic virtues? One celebrates Jesus as the model of masculinity and Mary as the essence of femininity, the other the winning quarterback for the San Francisco '49ers and a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader as the archetypes of man and woman. A stained-glass window with a portrait of a saint and the Trump Tower are both advertisements for the ideal life.

The difficulty with living submerged within the cultural myth is that it tends to limit the development of the mind and spirit.

When the mind wraps itself in a security blanket of answers, the brain closes down its quest, moves away from adventure and ceases to expand its system of pathways. Thought becomes received and recycled opinion and travels round and round the familiar highways — repetition compulsion. Living within the closed circuitry of The Answer, within cultural orthodoxy, stunts the brain, sends the electric spark through the same old neural pathways. The result is a mind captive to tape loops, fixed ideas and complexes, Oedipal or otherwise. Unconscious beliefs bind us to a life of opinion, secondhand experience, and habitual ways of responding to problems and crises.

Fortunately, the human spirit is a cultural outlaw that is always smashing boundaries, violating the rules, breaking taboos, and stealing fire from the authorities. Something in us does not rest easy with easy answers. Something drives certain individuals beyond the inherited and imposed limits of their biology and culture. This restlessness has myriad names: the Logos, the image of God, the divine spark, "the exigence to transcend" (Marcel).

Whoever is touched by this divine daemon is destined to wrestle with an angel, in order to win a mind, a name, a spirit. To recover your birthright to the adventure of becoming an individual, throw the net of your inquiring mind as wide as possible. Here, for instance, are some of the great philosophical questions we must consider in order to situate our lives within the widest horizon.

Who am I? How do I become the unique self that is my destiny? How do I win my freedom from biological necessity and from the myth my culture has imposed my body, mind, and spirit? Where did I come from? What is the origin of life? My life? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why is a cow?

What is the end — the finis, the telos, the fulfillment — toward which nature (and history) is moving? What is the goal of my life?

For what may I hope? Is there a postmortem existence? Of the soul? The body? What is my vocation? What are my gifts? How do I contribute to life?

Who are my people? With whom do I belong? Who is the we of I? Who are my enemies? How close should I be to mother, father, sister, brother, wife, friend, enemy? Who is in charge? Whom should I obey? Who are the authorities? What are the rules? What ought I to do? Why?

Why is there evil? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Is there ultimate justice? Punishment, reward? What should I do to reduce the quantity of evil?

What is the map of life? What are the stages along the way? How should I conduct myself as a child, a youth, an adult, an elder?

What is wrong with me? With human beings? Why this disease? Why are we self-defeating? What would we be like if we were whole? What can we do to be healed?

Are we alone in the universe? Does God play dice with the universe? Is there a supra-human caring intelligence?

Obviously, there are no authoritative answers to these enduring questions. So, why ask them? Why not stick to questions about matters of fact — "shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings," profit and loss, and who will win the Super Bowl? We do not cultivate a questioning mind in order to receive answers but to save ourselves from a life of premature closure and cultural captivity. To love the great philosophical questions is to be reminded that the life we are given is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be explored, suffered, and enjoyed.

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proxieme
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posted February 09, 2003 02:56 AM           Edit/Delete Message
(Another interesting one: )

Spirituality & Health Magazine
Issue: Fall 1999

Science and the Mystery of it All
Frederic B. Burnham

The new sciences — like quantum physics — describe a universe so strange and unknowable it’s tempting to find God in the equations. A theologian and historian of science tells why we need to watch out.

“I believe that we will gradually come to appreciate that the things that cannot be known, that cannot be done, and cannot be seen define our universe more clearly, more completely, and more sharply than those which can.”

“Things that cannot be known … and cannot be seen.” These sound like the words of a mystic, don’t they? Actually, they are from the preface of scientist John D. Barrow’s new book, Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits (Oxford, 1998). Barrow is Professor of Astronomy at Sussex University and a highly respected popularizer of contemporary physical sciences. Like many scientists, he has begun to write and talk about the “unknowable,” the “inscrutable,” the “impossible.”

Strange, isn’t it? We have come to expect scientists to boast about the capacity of science to discover all there is to know about the universe. Now, however, they are becoming much more circumspect. Instead of writing books about “Theories of Everything,” they are penning treatises about “The Limits of Scientific Knowledge.” As Barrow suggests, what we cannot know may define the nature of reality more fundamentally than what we can know.

Why this significant reversal? It’s a complicated subject, but worth the risk of a simplified explanation. Increasingly during the twentieth century, scientists have come face to face with the complexity of the universe and the limitations of our intellectual tools: mathematics and logic. More and more of them are beginning to recognize that there may be fundamental features of the universe that are unfathomable.

For those who have put all their faith in science’s capacity to explain everything, that’s a disturbing prospect. Their worldview is threatened and they are eager to reclaim science’s former prowess. For others it is merely confirmation of the sublimity of creation for which they have nothing but the utmost awe. Those two groups will likely debate their differences ad infinitum. The real danger, I fear, lies in a third type of reaction.

For some, acknowledging the limits of science may be an irresistible excuse to mindlessly invoke the mysterious nature of reality — in short, to claim any unexplained phenomenon as proof of God. We need to avoid this temptation.

Mystery is an integral part of our spiritual lives. For many, the spiritual journey begins with that very first feeling that there is a vast unknowable reality transcending and infusing the whole creation; a presence so unmistakable, and yet incomprehensible, that we are left without words. Whatever form that kind of mountaintop experience may take in our individual journeys, there is no question that such an experience of mystery is fundamental in the life of the spirit.

But we must be careful when we speak about mystery. Like other religious terms that enjoy renewed fashion these days (angels, for example), it is easy for the public and the press to misappropriate words that have very precise theological meaning. And while quibbling over definitions may seem like an academic exercise, this kind of mistake can have disastrous consequences in the real world. As we shall see, even someone as learned as Isaac Newton fell into the trap, and the unfortunate aftermath still dogs us today.

Generally speaking, mystery is the word we employ when we don’t understand the cause of something: the outbreak of a strange new disease, a surprising reversal in the stock market, the state of the universe prior to the Big Bang, the origin of life, the existence of evil, the will of God, etc. But all mysteries are not created equal. Some mysteries are transitory. For instance, we expect a murder mystery to be solved and the case to be closed. Likewise, in science and medicine, there are enigmas that persist for decades, even centuries; but eventually an explanation appears. On the other hand, there are some mysteries it seems we will never fully fathom, like the origin of the universe or the ineffable nature of God. Distinguishing between these kinds of mystery is critical to the success of the contemporary dialogue between science and religion.

In the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton was confounded by a transitory mystery. He had discovered the laws of gravity and applied them to the motions of the planets with remarkable success. It seemed, then, that he should be able to predict the orbital motion of all the known planets in our solar system with absolute precision. But, alas, the naughty planets strayed from their predicted paths. In fact, they seemed to be losing their momentum and running down like a faulty clock, a total violation of the mechanical paradigm. Newton called these deviations “planetary perturbations.” He had no scientific explanation for such unexpected behavior. So confronted with a puzzling mystery, he made a tragic mistake: He invoked God. In fact, he came to the ironic conclusion that God was responsible for the imperfection in the mechanism. The proverbial Clockmaker had manufactured a “lemon,” a planetary system that wound down. This deviation from the mechanical norm provided an explanation for “planetary perturbations,” but it also put God in the embarrassing position of having to step in periodically to rewind the mechanism. Otherwise the whole creation would end with a mechanical whimper.

One hundred years later, the sophistication of mathematics had vastly improved. The French mathematician, Laplace, was able to take into account the complicated gravitational effect of the known planets upon one another with far more accuracy than Newton. He was able, therefore, to demonstrate that the planets actually didn’t run down, but were a self-regulating gravitational system with far more mathematical consistency and mechanical integrity than Newton had ever dreamed. In Laplace’s eyes the universe was a perfect self-correcting, self-sustaining system. Newton’s mystery had evaporated. And, unfortunately, Laplace concluded that he “no longer had any need for the God Hypothesis.” In fact, he argued that since the whole universe was totally predetermined and mathematically predictable, science could theoretically explain everything.

Boosted by Laplace’s extraordinary hubris, the scientific community soon began to believe that there was no mystery it couldn’t solve; and thus began the conceited era that is now coming to an end. Newton’s tragic commingling of science and divinity backfired. His God came to be known derisively as “the God of the gaps.” Anyone who dared to suggest that a mysterious vacuum in scientific knowledge might be filled by God became the laughingstock of the academy. In the long run the credibility of theology was badly damaged.

Newton’s mistake was simple. He assumed that wherever there is the smoke of mystery, there must also be the fire of God. But that’s not necessarily so. He confused something we didn’t understand yet with something we could never fully fathom. In his classic treatise, The Idea of the Holy (1942), Rudolf Otto argues that solutions like Newton’s to scientific puzzles such as planetary perturbations don’t even qualify as mysteries. They’re miraculous. The alleged “mystery” has a “rational,” albeit miraculous, explanation: God operates the machinery. A real mystery, on the other hand, is something truly beyond explanation, beyond thought, beyond words, totally inexplicable, something like the ineffable presence of God, or to use Otto’s phrase, the “mysterium tremendum,” nothing less.

What we can now celebrate is the fact that scientists themselves are beginning to talk about mysteries of this latter kind, about the ineffable, the inexplicable, the impossible. Mystery in its primary theological meaning is back in scientific vogue. We can rejoice and be glad in it. But to leap to theological conclusions based upon quantum mystery or medical miracle could still be a tragic mistake of historic proportions. We must always remain cautious about invoking God as a natural explanation. Instead, we should practice the awe and wonder of an alternative “m & m:” the majesterium and mysterium of the whole incredible ball of wax.

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proxieme
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posted February 09, 2003 03:11 AM           Edit/Delete Message
(I'm not still watching the flick - I've moved on to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue ... Articles're just popping up all over the place: )

Spiritual Being Seeks Practice
Richard Smoley

For a time in the mid-1980s I considered myself a Tibetan Buddhist. I faithfully attended classes at the Nyingma Institute in Berkeley, California (founded by the lama Tarthang Tulku). I practiced Buddhist meditations, studied the teachings of the Dharma, and even did prostrations — a traditional exercise in which one raises and lowers oneself 108 times a day while chanting mantras.

As far as I can see, I derived nothing but benefit from my years at the Nyingma, and I still have enormous respect both for Tibetan practice and for the rigorous logic of Buddhist doctrine. Yet at a certain point I felt I had to leave. Tibetan Buddhism began to seem to me like a magnificent but alien conceptual structure, and its veneration of the lama as an embodiment of enlightened mind cut against the sense of human equality that has been so deeply embedded in my mentality as an American. So I stopped going to the Nyingma and returned to my studies of the Western esoteric traditions, where my spiritual center has always lain.

In the years since then, I've found that my case is far from unique. Many people have taken up spiritual practices from traditions other than their own. Like many features of the contemporary spiritual landscape, this trend started on a large scale in the 1960s, when the meditative practices of Asia first became widely available in this country. One reason they caught on is that people were becoming interested in direct spiritual experience but could find little or no access to it in Western religion.

Gustave Reininger, a writer and television producer in Pacific Palisades, California, describes his recollections of that time. "I looked for any kind of contemplative practice there was," he says. What he found were "Eastern mantric practices or Zen." Reininger practiced and taught the Hindu-based Transcendental Meditation for several years until he reached a crisis in his spiritual unfolding. "I realized that to continue with an Eastern practice meant to understand that unfolding in their own metaphoric contexts, their own deities," he says. "They weren't supported by my culture. There was a nagging sense of where is it in my tradition?"'

Ihla Nation, a writer based in Boulder, Colorado, with a background in Lutheranism and Religious Science, became exposed to Hindu and Buddhist practices while pursuing a master's degree in religious studies. Although she found some of the techniques beneficial — notably chanting — she also had theological difficulties. "With Buddhism, there isn't really a God," she points out, while with Hinduism "the guru became a real issue for me, the issue of not prostrating to human beings."

Not all those who engage in the practice of another tradition ultimately find it alien. Sheila Klein, a retired school psychologist and interfaith minister in New York, has a Jewish background but considers her primary spiritual practice to be Buddhism as taught by the noted Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, which she finds to be "very compassionate and inclusive."

Diane Brook Gusic, a spiritual teacher also based in New York, grew up in a Jewish home but now focuses her spiritual work on A Course in Miracles, a popular yet enigmatic channeled text that emphasizes forgiveness as a way of undoing one's "false perception" of a divided, hostile world. Although Christian terminology is used in the course and it is claimed Jesus Christ dictated it, Gusic finds no conflict between this and her fundamentally Jewish identity. "If you asked if I still think of myself as a Jew, I still do. I practice the Course, I'm a Jew by birth or culture. I can go either to a synagogue or to a church."

Despite the dizzying eclecticism of today's spiritual scene, the thirst for spiritual experience has led followers of mainstream Western religions to search in their own heritage for techniques of prayer and meditation. Judaism has seen a tremendous resurgence of interest in its esoteric dimension known as the Kabbalah, which has a rich array of meditative disciplines. Christian teachers have turned to their ancient past for such practices as the Jesus Prayer, an Eastern Orthodox method in which the phrase "Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me" is repeated inwardly as a way of obeying St. Pauls injunction to "pray without ceasing." The Catholic monks Thomas Keating and Basil Pennington developed Centering Prayer, a method of silently resting in the presence of God, in the 1980s. They based their technique on practices outlined in The Cloud of Unknowing, an anonymous 15th-century English mystical text. Today Centering Prayer is promoted by Contemplative Outreach, an organization founded by Gustave Reininger and his associate Ed Bednar in 1983, and is widely taught and practiced in the U.S.

Even so, Western religions may not always provide the full gamut of techniques modern seekers demand. For example, it's difficult to find equivalents of bodily oriented practices such as hatha yoga or t'ai chi in Christianity. An acquaintance recently told me, "My church can offer me recreation where we try to clobber the Methodists in softball or thin our thighs, but at the Hindu meditation center across town I can learn to pray using my whole body and learn to experience myself— right now — as a temple of the Holy Spirit." Although Eastern Orthodox monasticism does include prostrations and breathing exercises, qualified teachers of these practices are hard to find in the U.S.

For the individual seeker, the chief question remains, "What's right for me?" In the first place, you're most likely to find a practice congenial if it agrees with your basic religious views, "I'm a strong theist," says Siobhan Houston, a writer and student of religions from Asheville, North Carolina, "so I wouldn't personally recommend Buddhism because I don't feel it's a complete path. I really do believe there's a divine intelligence, and having some form of relationship with that is the meaning of life." While this is often a matter of upbringing, it needn't be: Western seekers who have difficulty with the notion of a personal God may find a home in Asian religions, with their more abstract views of the divine.

Spiritual affinities run deeper than mere theology. You may find the symbolism or approach of a tradition appealing for reasons you don't entirely understand. For some, finding the right teaching can even bring about a mystical experience. Gusic describes her first encounter with A Course in Miracles at a class given by Course teacher Judith Skutch: "I saw swirls of light, and I cried and said, I'm home, I'm home."' Such affinities may seem irrational, but they may also point to a deeper way of knowing that understands what's right for you.

On a practical score, another key is finding a qualified teacher. Though books and videos purporting to teach these disciplines abound in bookstores, it is difficult to achieve long-term success without personal instruction. As in any learning process, a good teacher should have the knowledge and experience to help guide you through the pitfalls of practice. But its not just a matter of technique: many traditions say that a subtle and ineffable force is transmitted through face-to-face instruction. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, call it baraka, which literally means "blessing" but also connotes spiritual energy.

It's also valuable to find a community of like-minded people to support you. "That's terribly important in maintaining a practice — finding a community you're at home in," says Sheila Klein. Buddhism speaks of "taking refuge" in the "Triple Gem": the Buddha, the teacher; the Dharma, the teaching; and the Sangha, the community of faithful practitioners. Taking part in a spiritual community helps reinforce the practice and gives a sense of belonging to a larger whole. It can also help erode an often unhealthy preoccupation with oneself.

To take abroad view of the enterprise, one could say that todays fascination with spiritual practices itself reflects the influence of Asian religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. These tend to view effort on the seekers part (through yoga and other meditative techniques) as the key to attaining illumination. Religions like Christianity, on the other hand, with their strong notions of a personal deity, have historically tended to place more emphasis on faith and on the grace of God. And yet many people of all traditions would agree that there's a real need for viable methods of attaining direct experience of the sacred. Practicing these is a means not only of tasting the presence of the divine, but also of gaining the discipline and discernment necessary for integrating that knowledge into daily life.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richard Smoley is coauthor, with Jay Kinney, of Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (published by Penguin Arkana).

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proxieme
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posted February 09, 2003 03:13 AM           Edit/Delete Message
(Yea NDE stuff: )

Spirituality & Health Magazine
Issue: Winter 2002

Near-Death Experiences
Finding Light Where There Shouldn’t Be Any


One of the huge questions — touching the frontiers of brain science, theology, philosophy, and medicine — got a sharp nudge this year with the publication of a small study in the February issue of the cardiac journal Resuscitation. Here’s a summary.

Sam Parnia and his colleagues at Southampton General Hospital in the U.K. wanted to examine the frequency and possible causes of what have come to be called Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) in cardiac-arrest survivors. They interviewed 63 patients at their hospital over a one-year period and found that 56 had no memories from the time they were unconscious during their heart attacks. Seven did report memories, four of which fit the established criteria for NDEs — such as seeing a bright light, having feelings of peace, and/or seeing deceased relatives. (Two others had memories that didn’t quite fit the criteria.)

Now here’s what’s really intriguing: At least in the case of cardiac arrest, NDEs take place when the brain is deeply comatose and the patient has a flat EEG — in other words, a time when, according to accepted theory, there is no possibility of lucid memories. “Such patients would be expected to have no subjective experience,” say the researchers, “or at best a confusional state.” And yet they reported vivid, detailed, sustained experiences.

What does this prove about the nature of consciousness, the relation of mind and brain, or the makeup of reality? Who knows? But it does help illuminate how little we know.

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proxieme
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posted September 24, 2004 09:12 AM           Edit/Delete Message

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trillian
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Posts: 4050
From: The Boundless
Registered: Mar 2003

posted September 24, 2004 09:49 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for trillian     Edit/Delete Message
Proxie, I'm enjoying these very much, sitting at my desk, not working. But I will have to either print them out or read them in bits, no time to devote to them right now.

But thanks, sweetie.
Did you like "Hideous Kinky?" I saw "Napolean Dynamite" last evening and laughed so hard I almost peed my pants.

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