The good, the bad, and the ugly

My last post, concerning the effects of the hallucinogenic drug Salvia divinorum and its possible role as a portal to a different plane of reality, seems to lead logically to a larger question: What kind of existence do we inhabit? Salvia, after all, can cause terrifying descents into a nightmare world. Is this the true nature of things? Are we doomed to navigate a malevolent and irrational jungle? Is reality basically friendly to us … or unfriendly?

By "reality," I don't mean only the spacetime universe, but the whole shebang – every dimension, plane, and/or level of reality that exists. The whole show, the total picture. Is it ultimately a good place for us, or not so good?

Some might argue that it's entirely neutral. This I find unlikely. Almost everything in our experience has some value content, whether positive or negative, and the totality of our subjective experience at any given moment can be assessed in value-laden terms. It seems plausible that reality as a whole can also be assessed and evaluated as, on balance, either good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, rewarding or meaningless. Even if both aspects are present, as undoubtedly they are, the issue lies in determining which quality predominates.

Okay, then. First, here are some considerations in support of a basically unfriendly reality.

Earthly life – both human and animal – often entails pain and suffering. The world can be a cruel place.

People who've experimented with out-of-body experiences sometimes find themselves in disturbing and even nightmarish locales. If taken as ontologically real events, these trips suggest that other levels of reality are unpleasant or actually torturous. So-called alien abductions, which I take to be misinterpreted OBEs, are another example of frightening subjective experiences suggestive of malevolent extradimensional forces.

Even worse experiences have been reported by people who've taken psychogenic drugs. Nor can such "bad trips" be explained away as merely the incompetent experimentation of amateurs. Experienced practitioners, such as shamans on a vision quest, have been known to report terrifying visions.

Some near-death experiences feature either a terrifying void or a hellish environment populated by sadistic demons.

The dark side of the paranormal is sufficiently well recognized to have inspired many cultural taboos. People who've played with Ouija boards have reported disturbing consequences. Hauntings, poltergeists, and the low-level entities sometimes encountered in séances all indicate that some postmortem planes of reality are populated by undeveloped, mischievous, or outright malevolent beings.

This conclusion is also presented by some channeled literature, and by some messages purportedly received through electronic voice phenomena and other technology-based communication strategies.

On the face of it, the above seems like a pretty compelling collection of evidence, sufficient to show that the world is by no means a friendly place. If anything, the picture that emerges is darker even then the fatalism of arch-materialists who insist that the cosmos (which they equate with all of reality) is utterly indifferent to human life. Mere indifference would seem preferable to the hostility and madness encountered in some psychic experiments. And personal extinction might well seem preferable to an eternal existence in a bafflingly illogical, even insane paranormal realm.

Before we jump to conclusions, let's remind ourselves that we're not choosing between perfect goodness and perfect evil. No one doubts that our experiences constitute a mixture of good and bad elements. Again, the question is: What's the balance? Can the above phenomena be reconciled with a more positive view of reality?

I think they can. Here's the case for a basically friendly reality.

Although some NDEs are hellish, the vast majority are not. In fact, the overriding message of nearly all NDE's is exceedingly positive, focusing on love, forgiveness, acceptance, reunion with departed loved ones, encounters with advanced spiritual beings, and sojourns in a heavenly paradise.

This is equally true of mediumship and channeled literature. While the existence of lower realms is acknowledged, most after-death communications seem to originate in the "Summerland" environment popularized by the Spiritualist movement in the 19th century. Details vary, but the broad outlines of this idealized earthlike environment are pretty consistent. The inhabitants of Summerland present themselves as joyful and at peace. Furthermore, we are assured that the great majority of people (and even their pets) end up in this environment and not in lower realms, which are reserved for those handicapped by profoundly stunted moral and spiritual development. And even those spirits drawn to the lower realms are not doomed to stay there forever, but only until they recognize their true condition and improve themselves. Often this is as simple as realizing that they are actually dead, and then choosing to go into the light. In many cases their entrapment in the lower regions seems to be the result of willful stubbornness, a childish refusal to acknowledge the obvious facts of their situation.

Past-life regressions, especially those that claim to regress the patient to a stage between incarnations, also paint a broadly consistent picture of an orderly, beneficent system of personal growth. The suffering of earthly life is acknowledged, but treated as the price paid for spiritual evolution. Advancement results from facing adversity. In the absence of adversity, there can be no challenges and no incentive to improvement. This is not as far-fetched as it may sound. Most of us would probably agree that our greatest opportunities for personal growth came in those phases of life that were most challenging. That's when we find out what we're really made of.

Episodes of so-called "cosmic consciousness," as well as the mystical traditions of many cultures, point with near-unanimity to the conclusion that "all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." For these mystical adepts, the ills and evils of life drop away to insignificance in the face of an overwhelming sense of the rightness of things.

We might also ask ourselves why we find NDEs, mediumship, and other controversial areas of research persuasive. I think for most of us, the answer is that the results obtained follow patterns that are reasonably consistent and predictable. Raymond Moody identified a number of key elements of the near-death experience in his groundbreaking book Life After Life, and it was the regularity of these elements, showing up again and again in experiences reported by people who had never heard of the phenomenon and had never met each other, that made these cases so compelling. The same is true when mediumistic accounts of the dying process from a hundred years ago match up with first-person accounts of the near death experience reported today. (See Greg Taylor's Stop Worrying: There Is Probably an Afterlife for an especially apt example.)

In contrast, divisions and hallucinations reported by people on psychogenic drugs are far less predictable and regularized. Certain types of imagery do tend to recur; in DMT trips, for instance, insectlike creatures are often seen, while smoking Salvia often leads to the perception that the world consists of blocky geometrical shapes. The metaphysical significance of these perceptions, which can vary depending on the particular chemical being ingested, is debatable. It is certainly arguable that this imagery results primarily from the disruption of certain neural pathways. The bottom line, for me, is that hallucinogenic drugs, when considered as a whole, generate a wide variety of subjective experiences, many (if not most) of which are clearly drawn from the user's subconscious mind. People who encounter Homer Simpson on an acid trip are not likely to be meeting an actual Homer Simpson who exists on another plane of reality. The sheer variety and sometimes ludicrous idiosyncrasies of these reports make them much less believable as real ontological experiences. If NDEs and mediumistic communications were as variegated and patternless as chemically induced experiences tend to be, we probably wouldn't put much faith in them.

Finally, we might consider cosmology's anthropic principle – the idea that the universe has been fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of life and consciousness. The fact that certain physical constants must be set within extraordinarily narrow parameters in order to allow for even the possibility of organic life forms suggests either that, as maverick astronomer Fred Hoyle phrased it, "the universe is a put-up job" and "a super intellect has monkeyed with physics," or that a virtually infinite number of universes exists, only a few of which are habitable. The latter point of view seems to multiply universes beyond necessity, violating Occam's razor. If the physical world has been designed to promote life and awareness, there is presumably a purpose to it all.

Given this list of positives, our previously listed negatives can be put into a new perspective. The pain of earthly life (which, by the way, is normally balanced to some extent by pleasure) can be seen as a small part of a larger plan and as serving a useful purpose in promoting spiritual growth. Lower-level entities and realms may be marginal at best, involving only a small segment of reality, most of which is far more benevolent. The terrifying visions brought on by psychogenic drugs may reflect a malfunction of the brain, a flood of subconscious imagery, or (if we insist that users are encountering another plane of reality) temporary access to some low-level spiritual realm – precisely the sort of murky, menacing region that the uninitiated are warned to avoid. (Hence the frequent cautions against fooling around with Ouija boards and violating other taboos.)

In short, while either of the two positions is defensible, I think the hypothesis of a basically friendly reality covers more of the available evidence. This is not to downplay the undoubted negatives that psychic explorers have encountered. But on balance, the negatives seem outweighed by the positives. The scale, I think, tips ultimately in favor of a benevolent reality (with a dark side), rather than a grim, despairing reality (with occasional deceptive glimmers of light).

Comments

[Art]

"Some near-death experiences feature either a terrifying void or a hellish environment populated by sadistic demons." - Michael Prescott//
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Which are projections from their own mind. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead they tell the newly departed to not be afraid of the demons they encounter because they are only projections of their own mind.

I think Howard Storm's demons were conjured up by his own mind because he had been raised early on as a pentecostal and those images had been imprinted in his mind by over zealous pentecostal Sunday School teachers and so when he found himself dead after having been a self avowed atheist he that that demons are what he should see.

No matter how we identify ourselves in this life after we die there are all kinds of memories and images in our mind and they come to the surface and after we get on the other side we are able to access all of our memories, not just the most recent but memories going all the way back to the beginning of our life.

In one NDE I had read the author said "I thought of a mountain I had seen as a child and there it was the mountain, and not just the mountain but a magnificent most colorful mountain." Our memories become what we see in the place we call heaven.

[Michael Prescott]

"And remember, for those of us who aren't wearing blinders, "what we're experiencing right now" includes psi in all its many forms." - Bruce

This is one reason I find the information hypothesis potentially fruitful. With a hard drive, you can read data in your current partition (your normal, everyday experience); read data in other partitions (telepathy); randomly access data by performing a search (remote viewing); get an overview of all data paths (precognition); or rewrite/overwrite data (PK).

The above assumes that telepathy consists of accessing the objects of another person's awareness rather than his/her awareness per se. (Which I think is probably the case.) That is, the other person's informational matrix is accessed, rather than his or her I-thought. But the info-matrix and I-thought are, to some extent, entangled, which is why personality, memories, etc. survive physical death. The individual I-thought, which is immortal, serves as a kind of attractor for these data points.

Remote viewing experiments performed by the government in the Star Gate program often involved giving the test subject geographical coordinates. By identifying the target in mathematical terms, the experimenters were able to get the remote viewer to home in on it, which suggests to me that the remote viewer was unconsciously (or super-consciously) accessing an informational database.

Precognition, in this model, would entail taking an overview of the available pathways encoded on the disk and focusing on the most probable one. Because each path ramifies into many paths, which in turn ramify into many more, it would be easier to assess the probabiloty of near-term events. We would expect precognition to be pretty accurate for events occurring in the next few seconds, less relisbld for events occurring a day or two from now, and not at all reliable for longer-term events. This does appear to be the case, which is one argument against the idea that everything is predetermined (if it were, one might expect all events to be equally predictable).

[Eric Newhill]

Michael,
I Like your laser reader, etc analogy. It's really pretty much what I was saying with my lock and key analogy up thread; only better.

Regarding precognition, I think there may be more than one type. One type would be based on probabilities, as you suggest. Another type, however, may indeed be some kind of fate. There could be other types; like psi involving subconscious decisions that can be tapped into out on the "cloud".

A lab experiment, like Stargate it seems to me, would tend to not be focused on fate based precognition for various reasons.

My own experience is that precognition of very specific fluke, yet serious, events can occur a few months prior to the event. Mostly though, precog, for me, is within 48 hours.

[Roger Knights]

Here’s something I read on the web the other day:
“Is the glass half-full or half-empty? An engineer would say the glass is too big.”

[Juan]

Don't forget: it is only in transcendent states that we get to see the whole picture.

But even with all the transcendental experiences during history we could not solve problems of engineering or medical sciences. In other words, we also need a view that is not so holistic, more scientific and reductionist, in the sense of not focusing the entire picture, but only smaller portions of reality.

[Bruce Siegel]

Juan said:

"In other words, we also need a view that is not so holistic, more scientific and reductionist, in the sense of not focusing the entire picture, but only smaller portions of reality."

Which is one way of describing why Source chooses to partition itself into you, me, and everyone and everything else.

This latest account on the NDERF site nicely recounts the experience of rejoining the larger self:

http://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1stefania_s_nde.html

[Roger Knights]

"2 Everything is Here/Now."

"We are here and it is now. Beyond that all human thought is moonshine."
—H.L. Mencken

[Kathleen]

It seems to me that essentially we all come from the same source (God, a Universal power, etc.), but the practicalities of physical life obscure that. That is, for example, in the wild, stallions fight with other stallions in order to mate with a herd of mares, thus ensuring that the genes of the stallion most capable of defending the mares and young from predators is passed on. The mechanism of evolution seems to obscure the underlying reality.

Also, I've been thinking a lot lately of what I don't have a name for, but is close to a sense of feeling the history of a place. The writer Gary Zuvak notes this in his book "The Seat of the Soul." He notes that the weight of human feeling can actually be felt in older historical places, such as Europe, but that it is much lighter in the New World, as in Montreal. I've been in both places, and found he was exactly right. If anyone has experienced something similar, I would love to hear about it.

[Bruce Siegel]

Kathleen:

"It seems to me that essentially we all come from the same source (God, a Universal power, etc.), but the practicalities of physical life obscure that."

Exactly—just as they were designed to do. So that we may have a different sort of experience here in the physical, and be convinced of its authenticity. It's the props that make the play seem real.

[Bruce Siegel]

To complete my last thought: And surely the most significant of those props are time and space.

[Ian Wardell]

For those who might be interested, I've just published a review of "the myth of an afterlife" A 5,000 word version, and link to a 13,000 word version.

http://ian-wardell.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/a-review-of-myth-of-afterlife.html

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Ian,
I'd like to leave a comment on your page but the sign in process is too complicated. Phineus Gage was a very good looking young man, who became disfigured. Don't you think he would react with anger and change of mood and that it had nothing to do with brain function? He basically lost a good life, home and family. His chances of attracting some female to marry would be reduced considerably. I think that a change in attitude and mood, and descent into alcoholism might be a normal response having nothing to do with any damage to his brain. - AOD

[Ian Wardell]

@AOD
I don't understand your comment. That *what* had nothing to do with brain function?

[Michael Prescott]

I think AOD's point is that Gage's radical personality change, which is conventionally attributed to brain damage caused by the railroad spike that impaled his skull, may have been simply a natural reaction to his disfigurement.

It's an interesting idea, although certainly there are many cases in which brain damage (or changes in brain chemistry) can cause personality changes. Dementia patients, for instance, can start issuing profanities or racial slurs and can become violent, even though they previously would never have talked or behaved that way. Even alcohol can alter the personality temporarily - many people become more boisterous, outgoing, or aggressive when intoxicated.

[Ian Wardell]

Keith Augustine, by far the most prolific contributor to "The Myth of an Afterlife", doesn't like my review.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/RUOLM1707T2HJ/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B00UV3VFW8

He says one doesn't need to be a materialist to disbelieve in an afterlife. In fact I constantly reiterate this point, at least in the 13,000 word version. I don't think he's even bothered reading that version (which is my original proper version).

I have been through these points he makes time and time again with him. It gets tedious having to continually repeat myself time after time.

The only thing new is where he comments:

//consider giving professional reviews written in accordance with professional editorial standards more weight than those of random amazon customers with an axe to grind when deciding whether or not a book is worthwhile.//

I certainly don't think that people should necessarily give more weight to professional reviews. People should give weight to those reviews that appear to be well thought out, that consider all relevant aspects, that are comprehensive etc.

Incidentally, I have kind words to say about Keith. In the longer review I say:

//I’ve only touched on a few of the difficulties that Keith Augustine raises against the interpretation of NDEs as being a gateway to an afterlife, and I’ve suggested some responses. In so doing I’m not at all saying that these difficulties are without merit. I’m merely sketching the obvious responses. And I think it makes for an interesting debate that is far removed from the countless books on NDE’s from proponents of an afterlife who blithely ignore all such apparent discordant evidence. It is also far removed from what skeptics’ typically write on this subject who, almost without exception, simply lack the necessary knowledge to give an informed opinion. Keith Augustine’s thoughts on the evidential value of NDE’s make a refreshing change and people really should take note of them.//

[Amos Oliver Doyle]

Yes, that was my suggestion Michael. I guess I was also thinking about those people who had half of their brain removed and those people with hydrocephalus who were found to have a millimeter of so of brain tissue who reportedly were still able to function normally. - AOD

[Michael]

A very well written, very readable and concise overview of all the important arguments, it's a gem. I also particular liked 'believer beware', that's a while ago but was also spot on.

[Art]

Alcohol is a central nervous system depressant and the first part of the brain that it suppresses is the part that controls inhibitions. It only takes a small amount of alcohol to affect our behavior and motor control.

That is also why people who have been drinking think they can still drive and also why people are more likely to have unprotected sex while drinking. That is also why the more a mean drunk drinks the meaner and more belligerent they become.

Alcohol also suppresses the p53 cancer suppressor gene and why people who drink are more likely to get liver, breast, pancreatic, and breast cancer.

[Saj Patel]

Sadly came much too late to this conversation, I'll just quote Calvino as I suspect much what we think we see "beyond the Veil" is the Veil-as-Mirror:

"In Eudoxia, which spreads both upward and down, with winding alleys, steps, dead ends, hovels, a carpet is preserved in which you can observe the city's true form. At first sight nothing seems to resemble Eudoxia less than the design of that carpet, laid out in symmetrical motives whose patterns are repeated along straight and circular lines, interwoven with brilliantly colored spires, in a repetition that can be followed throughout the whole woof. But if you pause and examine it carefully, you become convinced that each place in the carpet corresponds to a place in the city and all the things contained in the city are included in the design, arranged according their true relationship, which escapes your eye distracted by the bustle, the throngs, the shoving. All of Eudoxia's confusion, the mules' braying, the lampblack stains, the fish smell is what is evident in the incomplete perspective you grasp; but the carpet proves that there is a point from which the city shows its true proportions, the geometrical scheme implicit in its every, tiniest detail.

It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.

An oracle was questioned about the mysterious bond between two objects so dissimilar as the carpet and the city. One of the two objects -- the oracle replied -- has the form the gods gave the starry sky and the orbits in which the worlds revolve; the other is an approximate reflection, like every human creation.

For some time the augurs had been sure that the carpet's harmonious pattern was of divine origin. The oracle was interpreted in this sense, arousing no controversy. But you could, similarly, come to the opposite conclusion: that the true map of the universe is the city of Eudoxia, just as it is, a stain that spreads out shapelessly, with crooked streets, houses that crumble one upon the other amid clouds of dust, fires, screams in the darkness."

[Saj Patel]

Ah one more thing that hopefully is a worthwhile contribution:

Just wanted to add Myer's thoughts on Consciousness & Time, as it gets into the question of free will, our Higher Self (Holy Guardian Angel?), and probably futures:

-F. W. H. Myers on the Subliminal Self-

https://www.esalen.org/sites/default/files/resource_attachments/Ch-14-Supp-Myers.pdf

[doubter]

Ian Wardell said: "... it (Kieth Augustine's critique of NDEs as evidence of an afterlife) is also far removed from what skeptics’ typically write on this subject who, almost without exception, simply lack the necessary knowledge to give an informed opinion. Keith Augustine’s thoughts on the evidential value of NDE’s make a refreshing change and people really should take note of them."

As for Keith Augustine's objections to NDEs being indications of the existence of an afterlife, I think the veridical evidence of many accounts is pretty overwhelming. This evidence simply can't even remotely reasonably be contended to have been either unconsciously or consciously invented by the experiencers or the investigators. This evidence trumps Augustine's various criticisms. This area is exhaustively covered in The Self Does Not Die: Verified Paranormal Phenomena from Near-Death Experiences, by Titus Rivas, Anny Dirven, and Rudolf H. Smit. I agree with Michael's review of this book (at http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2016/08/book-review-the-self-does-not-die/comments/page/2/#comments ), in which he said,

"....the sheer number of them (veridical NDE cases) and the obvious efforts that have been made to substantiate the patients' accounts add up to a powerful argument for the significance of NDEs – not as the hallucinations of a traumatized brain, but as ontologically real events".

[Kamo]

Years ago, I thought that the mind equaled the brain and materialism was a hard fact. And anybody who says otherwise, is wishful thinking and desperate for some sort of afterlife. Especially after reading a couple of articles on this person’s blog I’ve stumbled upon
here: https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/06/a-model-of-how-geometric-hallucinations.html

And this: https://www.samwoolfe.com/2013/08/scientific-explanations-of-near-death.html

But then I realized that some “skeptics” won’t accept anything against the materialism worldview no matter the evidence. It took me a while to realize that.

[JR]

Just came across this article which is fantastic, in the best sense, judging by its beginning:

Harry Brower Sr. was lying in a hospital bed in Anchorage, Alaska, close to death, when he was visited by a baby whale......

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science/talking-to-whales-180968698/

[Art]

\\"As for Keith Augustine's objections to NDEs being indications of the existence of an afterlife, I think the veridical evidence of many accounts is pretty overwhelming."//
-----------------------

I wonder if Keith Augustine knows about the connection between NDES and the Holographic Universe theory? Like if he has read The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, and Chapter 12 of Ken Ring's book Life At Death, and chapter 6 of Dr. Melvin Morse's book Where God Lives, and if he understands the implications of this connection between NDEs and the holographic universe theory and what it means?

I have read literally thousands of NDE descriptions and I'd say about a third of them make some reference to the holographic nature of the place they visited?

How does Keith explain this away? Does he even understand it? I find this connection between NDEs and the holographic universe theory even more evidential than the veridical evidence that NDE'ers have seen in their out of body experiences. It can't just be coincidental.

[kajf2h7gg]

What kind of existence do we inhabit?

It depends on your brain chemistry.

I do not consider this to be a logical proposition. The answer is not objectively one or the other. You can't prove it by logical analysis and you shouldn't look for an answer in logic. If you want the universe to be nurturing, you should try to alter your brain chemistry. Studying spirituality can sometimes alter your brain chemistry (see "Notes" here). but a direct approach to hacking your brain chemistry can also be effective.

The reason I say this is because people do not make decisions or choose beliefs based on logic. They do so for other reasons. They can be persuaded but they are not persuaded by logic they are persuaded by other means. We use reason only after the fact to defend our beliefs and decisions.

In an interview on FoxNews@Night with Shannon Bream on March 19, 2018, Scott Adams explained that people don't use logic to make decisions even though we think we do. (2:59: https://youtu.be/vLhcrbtbCEg?t=2m59s):

We humans ignore facts but we think we don't. The great illusion of life is that we're rational beings making rational decisions most of the time. But when you become a hypnotist, the first thing you learn is that that's backwards and that mostly we're deciding based on our team, our feelings, our emotions, irrational reasons, we make our decision and then we rationalize it no matter how tortured that rationalization is."

University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt expressed similar views in his book The righteous Mind. He wrote that people don't use reason to form their beliefs, they use reason to justify their beliefs which they form for emotional reasons. William Saletan described Haidt's views in the Sunday Book Review:

Why Won’t They Listen? ‘The Righteous Mind,’ by Jonathan Haidt By WILLIAM SALETAN SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW MARCH 23, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/review/the-righteous-mind-by-jonathan-haidt.html

The problem isn’t that people don’t reason. They do reason. But their arguments aim to support their conclusions, not yours. Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others.

[Matt Rouge]

Saj Patel,

I appreciated the intro to "Invisible Cities." I'm going to check that book out. Do you recommend any particular translation?

[Matt Rouge]

kajf2h7gg,

What you wrote has a lot of merit. Minds are definitely hard to changes, and humans are very good at what used to be called, unapologetically, "apologetics": picking a belief system and defending it every which way but loose.

I find Trump enabler Adams hard to take. If he feels that reason isn't going to convince anyone, then why is he bothering to make arguments?

I think reason does have a lot of power, but it's true that it is not the only power. Direct experience is more powerful still.

[Roger Knights]

"Reason doesn’t work like a judge or teacher, impartially weighing evidence or guiding us to wisdom. It works more like a lawyer or press secretary, justifying our acts and judgments to others."

IOW:

"Men are rather reasoning than reasonable animals, for the most part governed by the impulse of passion."
—Alexander Hamilton