Due to the unfathomable success of Richard Wiseman's books, most recently Paranormality, I have found myself explaining the errors in his book more often than I would like, particularly because I made an extensive review of the book earlier in this blog. A far better book on the same subject is Robert McLuhan's Randi's Prize. It's one thing to complain about the quality of evidence based on legitimate grounds, but quite another to pretend it doesn't exist at all as some skeptics like to do. When it comes to veridical OBEs however, they kind of have a point.
It isn't that such things don't exist in the academic literature, but there aren't very many of these accounts outside of popular books, like Robert Monroe's Journeys out of the body or my Dreamer: 20 years of psychic dreams and how they changed my life (note to self: shorter title next time). Another thing not often found in academic journals are accounts of spontaneous cases. The result is that the records I have in my dream journals are much stronger and more numerous than anything I've been able to find in academic journals. There is a problem however, that these are spontaneous experiences, and such things are frowned upon by researchers. I think I've designed a methodology for analyzing them that defeats the complaints, but we'll know for sure in a few months after the papers I wrote on the subject have been through peer review.
The method is quite simple: each entry is considered in the harshest possible light. They are treated in a demonstrably unfair manner that cannot possibly be considered as conducive to a positive result, yet the stronger examples survive the test. It is this sturdiness that gives me real confidence in my analysis of the veridical dreams I've had, and even to some of the non-veridical items such as those involving God and other religious figures.
I've had some criticisms of my book because I included a few chapters on these religious subjects, but ultimately that is what the book was about. My study of the dreams has shown me that mere evidence of paranormality is not very useful. More than that, without including the religious material, it is impossible to see the purpose of the veridical material. I continue to find it interesting that a person can be amazed by a simple veridical OBE or precognitive dream, then turn stubborn when God is mentioned. They are part of the same message and should be seen as connected. It isn't as if I didn't suffer from the same fault at one time, but having turned the corner on that issue a few years ago, it is becoming more difficult to remember the justification for it. Looking back on it now I think it came down to peer pressure.
AP
Saturday, 17 September 2011
Saturday, 13 August 2011
To meditate...or play a video game
Over the past year or so, I have been given some messages from a person I met through a forum I post on regularly. She has some remarkable psi experiences in her life, interesting enough to warrant some trips out to some laboratories to see what is going on. For this reason and some others, I felt bound to take the messages seriously. In each, she said that a ghost or spirit guide had approached her to say that I was supposed to be meditating. In a recent conversation, she says that she knows now that if a spirit guide starts talking about meditation, it's a message for me.
I've had similar messages in my dreams, also from spirit guides, both before and after my friend starting giving me similar messages. At first I did try to meditate, but before long the daily grind took over and I wasn't doing it any more. Instead, I was going to work, giving feedback to students, and working on my PhD. Every month or so I might have a day to myself that I could use for meditation. Instead, I liked to play a game of Civilization V. That doesn't sound very spiritual, and the reasons are even less so. The urge to play would often come from seeing some bit of history in the news, like a story about the pyramids, and then I would want to build in Civ V. Other times I just wanted to conquer countries. The motive for this was usually that the French had beat me to the pyramids, or the Germans had attacked without provocation in the last game, so I would want to have another shot at them by playing again. This is where my meditation time was going.
One thing I'd like to think I've learned from my dreams is that we do shape our lives by our actions. If that is the case, what is the effect of shaping mine with these video games? It may be kind of relaxing, but it certainly doesn't come close to meditation. Is it useful? I've beaten the game so many times that there isn't much more to get out of it, though I still enjoy the game. How is entertainment quantified against utility? Don't I deserve some rest once a month?
I think I should get back to meditating. It is a good mental discipline, it won't keep me up until 6am (as happens in Civ V), and maybe those ghosts will stop bothering my friend.
AP
I've had similar messages in my dreams, also from spirit guides, both before and after my friend starting giving me similar messages. At first I did try to meditate, but before long the daily grind took over and I wasn't doing it any more. Instead, I was going to work, giving feedback to students, and working on my PhD. Every month or so I might have a day to myself that I could use for meditation. Instead, I liked to play a game of Civilization V. That doesn't sound very spiritual, and the reasons are even less so. The urge to play would often come from seeing some bit of history in the news, like a story about the pyramids, and then I would want to build in Civ V. Other times I just wanted to conquer countries. The motive for this was usually that the French had beat me to the pyramids, or the Germans had attacked without provocation in the last game, so I would want to have another shot at them by playing again. This is where my meditation time was going.
One thing I'd like to think I've learned from my dreams is that we do shape our lives by our actions. If that is the case, what is the effect of shaping mine with these video games? It may be kind of relaxing, but it certainly doesn't come close to meditation. Is it useful? I've beaten the game so many times that there isn't much more to get out of it, though I still enjoy the game. How is entertainment quantified against utility? Don't I deserve some rest once a month?
I think I should get back to meditating. It is a good mental discipline, it won't keep me up until 6am (as happens in Civ V), and maybe those ghosts will stop bothering my friend.
AP
Saturday, 23 July 2011
Why psi matters
On Monday I will be giving a talk at another dream conference. Unlike the talks I gave earlier in the month in Kerkrade, I will have a full two hours to talk about some of my experience with psi dreams. It will take all of this time to lead up to answering a question that should take all of one minute or less to provide: why does psi matter? The question is on my mind because of an on-air conversation I recently had with the UK's Pete Price, the host of a popular talk show. He asked me the question, just as many other people have asked me before. For the first time, I think I knew at least a portion of the answer. You can listen to the interview here.
Some listeners first need to see that there is a reason to suspect that there is such a thing as psi. That will take about one hour and fifty-nine minutes of the talk. Why psi matters, on the other hand, can be stated quite simply, but can also open the door onto a very long conversation. Strangely enough, that conversation is often like the first section of the talk I tend to give because it will be a demand for proof.
What it comes down to is this: psi does happen and there is evidence to demonstrate it. Secondly, it happens because we are not purely physical beings. One could even say we aren't even partly physical beings in the same way that we aren't "partly" an automobile simply because we get inside of them when we want to drive. Psi is the natural mode of communication and action for our non-physical selves.
Psi can be looked at as a meaningless side effect, as the Hindus say it is when the describe it as a siddhi, but it is a bit more than that. Psi allows communication with other beings who know more than we do about certain things. This is why psi matters. Psi, as it is popularly conceived as a kind of music hall magic trick, is not that useful. Even if you take it to the extreme of that kind of thinking, winning the lottery for instance, it only brings material rewards. This has no permanent utility and may be considered irrelevant in the face of far more important things, such as developing a sense of compassion, mercy, and charity. Even as a way to enhance one's spiritual insights, psi is more useful on a genuinely practical level than any amount of gambling winnings.
AP
Some listeners first need to see that there is a reason to suspect that there is such a thing as psi. That will take about one hour and fifty-nine minutes of the talk. Why psi matters, on the other hand, can be stated quite simply, but can also open the door onto a very long conversation. Strangely enough, that conversation is often like the first section of the talk I tend to give because it will be a demand for proof.
What it comes down to is this: psi does happen and there is evidence to demonstrate it. Secondly, it happens because we are not purely physical beings. One could even say we aren't even partly physical beings in the same way that we aren't "partly" an automobile simply because we get inside of them when we want to drive. Psi is the natural mode of communication and action for our non-physical selves.
Psi can be looked at as a meaningless side effect, as the Hindus say it is when the describe it as a siddhi, but it is a bit more than that. Psi allows communication with other beings who know more than we do about certain things. This is why psi matters. Psi, as it is popularly conceived as a kind of music hall magic trick, is not that useful. Even if you take it to the extreme of that kind of thinking, winning the lottery for instance, it only brings material rewards. This has no permanent utility and may be considered irrelevant in the face of far more important things, such as developing a sense of compassion, mercy, and charity. Even as a way to enhance one's spiritual insights, psi is more useful on a genuinely practical level than any amount of gambling winnings.
AP
Thursday, 30 June 2011
Rolduc, a conference, and Robert Waggoner
I just returned from a very pleasant stay in the beautiful abbey of Rolduc, in the Netherlands, for the International Association for the Study of Dreams annual conference. The abbey is located a short distance from the train station if measured by the inexpensive taxi ride to their grounds, but it seemed so much farther because of its ancient self-contained beauty. Inside the massive stone courtyard, one already feels isolated from the rest of the modern world, and this despite a number of automobiles parked there. Step into the building and then walk out onto the patterned brick paving leading to their gardens and you will feel thrust backwards a couple hundred years in time. Juvenile pears and apples grow quietly in shady trees under a gentle mist, and to the side, other crops, ornamental bushes, enormous whispering trees, and a small graveyard effectively cancel out the noise of busy thoughts.
The purpose of my trip was to present a couple of lectures on psi dreams. The first was about the validation of spiritual dreams, if this is even possible, and the second concerned my observations about the fact that many seemingly symbolic dreams are not symbolic dreams at all. Due to an unintended impression created when I checked the A/V equipment for my presentation, some of the people there came to consider me "the A/V guy", and I was asked to assist several people with their presentations also. I briefly had the impression that other attendees knew me better as the person who knew how to make the remote work (by plugging in the USB antenna) than as the presenter of a couple of presentations on his psi dreams.
One of the room monitors for my talk was IASD president Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the inner self. I didn't discuss his book with him when we first met, at least partly because I wasn't too interested in lucid dreams. As far as I was concerned, the term "lucid dream" was just a fancy gimmick designed to artificially create interest in a not-particularly-interesting subject. He seemed pleasant enough, but I'd read enough to be turned off by the idea of turning dreams into amusement parks by practicing techniques that allow dreamers to manipulate the content of their dreams. This had nothing to do with Waggoner, as I found out just hours before I had to leave the conference to return home.
My last presentation was one of four, all done together. This meant that whether I liked it or not (and I didn't mind) I would have to listen to the other three in addition to giving my own. To my surprise, Waggoner not only offered to help advance my slides for me when the remote turned up missing, but then he got up to give his own talk and asked me to do the same for him. In this way I not only had an opportunity to hear him talk about lucid dreaming, but really had to pay attention, or risk making a mistake with the slides. Considering that I wasn't enthusiastic about his subject, I thought it was ironic to play a role in his presentation. The irony changed to something else when I realized that his take on lucid dreaming was quite different from what I expected.
The first thing Waggoner did was to say that if a person uses the lucid state in a dream to manipulate it, they are likely disturbing whatever legitimate and valuable information it may contain. This was exactly my argument against being interested in lucid dreams. They only encouraged the destruction of legitimate dream elements, or rather, if focused on for that purpose, that is the result. In one stroke then, I was disarmed. Waggoner went on to discuss his own study of lucid dreaming. To my ears, it sounded very much like my own road to discovering that legitimate information, oftentimes of genuine spiritual value, is conveyed in dreams. After listening for awhile, his lucid dream interactions sounded more and more like a kind of dream meditation, and worthy of any meditation expert.
After listening to his talk, and then having a short conversation with him afterward, I believe he has made some genuinely valuable observations and written about them in his book. My dreams are sometimes lucid, and sometimes they are good quality dreams, but not always. When they aren't, it is always because I interfere with the existing dream content by consciously manipulating it. In the good quality lucid dreams, I am more passive and observe what is presented to me. What Waggoner describes in his writing, is how he discovered that he can be active without destroying the dream, in order to better understand the dream that is there, rather than for mere entertainment. This is an interesting take on the subject, and one worth knowing more about. His website can be found here.
AP
The purpose of my trip was to present a couple of lectures on psi dreams. The first was about the validation of spiritual dreams, if this is even possible, and the second concerned my observations about the fact that many seemingly symbolic dreams are not symbolic dreams at all. Due to an unintended impression created when I checked the A/V equipment for my presentation, some of the people there came to consider me "the A/V guy", and I was asked to assist several people with their presentations also. I briefly had the impression that other attendees knew me better as the person who knew how to make the remote work (by plugging in the USB antenna) than as the presenter of a couple of presentations on his psi dreams.
One of the room monitors for my talk was IASD president Robert Waggoner, author of Lucid Dreaming: Gateway to the inner self. I didn't discuss his book with him when we first met, at least partly because I wasn't too interested in lucid dreams. As far as I was concerned, the term "lucid dream" was just a fancy gimmick designed to artificially create interest in a not-particularly-interesting subject. He seemed pleasant enough, but I'd read enough to be turned off by the idea of turning dreams into amusement parks by practicing techniques that allow dreamers to manipulate the content of their dreams. This had nothing to do with Waggoner, as I found out just hours before I had to leave the conference to return home.
My last presentation was one of four, all done together. This meant that whether I liked it or not (and I didn't mind) I would have to listen to the other three in addition to giving my own. To my surprise, Waggoner not only offered to help advance my slides for me when the remote turned up missing, but then he got up to give his own talk and asked me to do the same for him. In this way I not only had an opportunity to hear him talk about lucid dreaming, but really had to pay attention, or risk making a mistake with the slides. Considering that I wasn't enthusiastic about his subject, I thought it was ironic to play a role in his presentation. The irony changed to something else when I realized that his take on lucid dreaming was quite different from what I expected.
The first thing Waggoner did was to say that if a person uses the lucid state in a dream to manipulate it, they are likely disturbing whatever legitimate and valuable information it may contain. This was exactly my argument against being interested in lucid dreams. They only encouraged the destruction of legitimate dream elements, or rather, if focused on for that purpose, that is the result. In one stroke then, I was disarmed. Waggoner went on to discuss his own study of lucid dreaming. To my ears, it sounded very much like my own road to discovering that legitimate information, oftentimes of genuine spiritual value, is conveyed in dreams. After listening for awhile, his lucid dream interactions sounded more and more like a kind of dream meditation, and worthy of any meditation expert.
After listening to his talk, and then having a short conversation with him afterward, I believe he has made some genuinely valuable observations and written about them in his book. My dreams are sometimes lucid, and sometimes they are good quality dreams, but not always. When they aren't, it is always because I interfere with the existing dream content by consciously manipulating it. In the good quality lucid dreams, I am more passive and observe what is presented to me. What Waggoner describes in his writing, is how he discovered that he can be active without destroying the dream, in order to better understand the dream that is there, rather than for mere entertainment. This is an interesting take on the subject, and one worth knowing more about. His website can be found here.
AP
Friday, 3 June 2011
Veganism and disbelief
I've had a vegan diet since September of 1984. That is almost twenty-seven years since I last had any meat, fish, or dairy products. I became vegetarian very soon after leaving home to go to college when I was 18, and within months, was vegan. At the time I didn't understand the difference between the two, nor did I become vegetarian or vegan on purpose. What happened is that when no one was putting meat dishes in front of me, and I was free to select whatever looked appealing at the store, it didn't occur to me to buy meat products. Maybe it was because I didn't want to cook, but don't think that was it. In the first few months after leaving home, my stepmother brought me some raw ham. I ate it raw, "Henry the eighth style" as my disgusted roommate liked to say. But then it was gone and I didn't replace it. By the time my stepmother came by with another non-vegetarian dish--pizza--I realized I didn't like that kind of food, and never had. I'd tolerated it for the sake of the people around me, that is all.
As a newly independent adult, I decided to eat what I wanted to, so I turned down the pizza. Over the course of the next few months I made some more discoveries. Milk always made me want to spit. It finally occurred to me that if I didn't drink milk, I wouldn't have to worry about this uncomfortable problem. Then, perhaps because I no longer had milk coating my throat, I noticed that cheese left a burning, raw sensation in my throat, so I stopped eating that also. I'd never eaten eggs except under extreme duress (because I have always hated them). Trying to get me to have a bite was like trying to get a cat into a bath full of water. So, with the milk and cheese gone, and the meat given up months before, the only remaining dairy in my diet was yogurt. I gave that up shortly after starting school at Art Center, about a year after leaving home, and just before I turned 19.
Since then, I have had to defend that decision many times. These days I just about say, politely, "leave me alone" when asked, but in the old days I had some long discussions about the subject. My position was much weaker when I was young because I had not done any reading on the subject and knew of only a few real living vegetarians I could point to as people who hadn't dropped dead of the suspicious diet. One man I knew was a registered nutritionist. He gave me three years to live. I wasn't particularly worried, but when the three years were up and I was still alive, I did notice. Relatives and friends insisted that I had to go back to eating meat, or at least fish, or just an egg or some milk. They said I wouldn't get enough B-vitamins without these things and would eventually waste away and keel over.
I didn't want to eat anything else because I didn't like anything else. However, these persistent attempts to assist me out of my intransigence inspired me to do a little reading on the subject and to notice a few relevant facts. I read about the Hunza indians, vegetarians or vegans all, and that they they had the longest life span of any known human population in the world. Or an athletic tribe of Brazilian jungle-dwellers, or the many vegetarians of India who seemed to avoid death at an early age despite a vegetarian or vegan diet. Ironically, the malnourished of India are less likely to be vegetarian than those who are free of concern about starvation because vegetarianism is a fixture of the Brahmin caste--the highest, most affluent caste--of India. The lower castes, including the poverty-stricken "untouchables" are allowed to eat meat, and do. But never mind that, years passed, and I became more athletic, and healthier, than I had been before I was vegan. I even gained weight. I am less skinny today than when I wasn't a vegetarian, though I am still slender by most measures.
So after almost 27 years of being vegan, and a little over 27 years of vegetarianism, the issue still comes up. What fascinates me is the level of denial that goes into the explanations I hear for my continuing ability to remain alive. The most common trigger for a conversation is if I have a headache, hay fever, or an occasional cold. "Ah, well if you ate meat, it would go away. Clearly your immune system is weakened." I used to get this from an old friend who was sick far more often than I was. One friend said that being vegan would sap my energy, yet I put in much longer hours than he ever did, and got less sleep, and could walk on my hands for recreation (but he couldn't.) My in-laws thought I wouldn't be able to have children. If headaches were caused by veganism, aspirin companies would go out of business.
I'm 45, almost 46, and am still quite active, have all my hair, and don't need glasses. I work longer hours than my colleagues and may still get less sleep. Nevertheless, I need to start eating meat "to be healthier" they say. This reminds me of something I was told by C.C. Wang, my wife's grandfather. He was visited in New York by a famous monk. This man was almost 80 years old, but could do a handstand balanced on just two fingers of each hand. He performed this feat in C.C.'s living room. This man was a lifelong vegetarian. C.C. told me that he died a few years later at the age of 88. "Think how much longer he might have lived, a man like that, if only he hadn't been vegetarian!" I've been told that the only reason I'm still alive is that I ate meat when I was younger. Never mind that there probably isn't even a single cell of that remaining after 27 years, what of the people who were lifelong vegetarians, like the Chinese monk, or the Brahmins of India. You can't even say that they inherited meat-nutrition from their vegetarian mothers.
Never mind the fact that the world's largest land animals (giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses) are all vegetarian from birth, and vegan after being weaned. Clearly, health, size, and athleticism do not depend on the consumption of flesh. And yet, there is this popular notion in western countries that it is necessary. This view is so prevalent, that serious effort must be made to explain the living vegetarians in this world, but the results are hardly credible. And yet! For lack of anything else that makes sense, many accept those explanations regardless.
Is this any different to disbelief in psi, the supernatural, or God? I don't think so. The same ridiculous explanations are trotted out, but they all come down to this: "either it didn't happen or it's a hoax." That is about the same as "You have three years to live" because you are vegetarian. These kinds of things can only be said in complete ignorance. One might even say, innocence.
AP
As a newly independent adult, I decided to eat what I wanted to, so I turned down the pizza. Over the course of the next few months I made some more discoveries. Milk always made me want to spit. It finally occurred to me that if I didn't drink milk, I wouldn't have to worry about this uncomfortable problem. Then, perhaps because I no longer had milk coating my throat, I noticed that cheese left a burning, raw sensation in my throat, so I stopped eating that also. I'd never eaten eggs except under extreme duress (because I have always hated them). Trying to get me to have a bite was like trying to get a cat into a bath full of water. So, with the milk and cheese gone, and the meat given up months before, the only remaining dairy in my diet was yogurt. I gave that up shortly after starting school at Art Center, about a year after leaving home, and just before I turned 19.
Since then, I have had to defend that decision many times. These days I just about say, politely, "leave me alone" when asked, but in the old days I had some long discussions about the subject. My position was much weaker when I was young because I had not done any reading on the subject and knew of only a few real living vegetarians I could point to as people who hadn't dropped dead of the suspicious diet. One man I knew was a registered nutritionist. He gave me three years to live. I wasn't particularly worried, but when the three years were up and I was still alive, I did notice. Relatives and friends insisted that I had to go back to eating meat, or at least fish, or just an egg or some milk. They said I wouldn't get enough B-vitamins without these things and would eventually waste away and keel over.
I didn't want to eat anything else because I didn't like anything else. However, these persistent attempts to assist me out of my intransigence inspired me to do a little reading on the subject and to notice a few relevant facts. I read about the Hunza indians, vegetarians or vegans all, and that they they had the longest life span of any known human population in the world. Or an athletic tribe of Brazilian jungle-dwellers, or the many vegetarians of India who seemed to avoid death at an early age despite a vegetarian or vegan diet. Ironically, the malnourished of India are less likely to be vegetarian than those who are free of concern about starvation because vegetarianism is a fixture of the Brahmin caste--the highest, most affluent caste--of India. The lower castes, including the poverty-stricken "untouchables" are allowed to eat meat, and do. But never mind that, years passed, and I became more athletic, and healthier, than I had been before I was vegan. I even gained weight. I am less skinny today than when I wasn't a vegetarian, though I am still slender by most measures.
So after almost 27 years of being vegan, and a little over 27 years of vegetarianism, the issue still comes up. What fascinates me is the level of denial that goes into the explanations I hear for my continuing ability to remain alive. The most common trigger for a conversation is if I have a headache, hay fever, or an occasional cold. "Ah, well if you ate meat, it would go away. Clearly your immune system is weakened." I used to get this from an old friend who was sick far more often than I was. One friend said that being vegan would sap my energy, yet I put in much longer hours than he ever did, and got less sleep, and could walk on my hands for recreation (but he couldn't.) My in-laws thought I wouldn't be able to have children. If headaches were caused by veganism, aspirin companies would go out of business.
I'm 45, almost 46, and am still quite active, have all my hair, and don't need glasses. I work longer hours than my colleagues and may still get less sleep. Nevertheless, I need to start eating meat "to be healthier" they say. This reminds me of something I was told by C.C. Wang, my wife's grandfather. He was visited in New York by a famous monk. This man was almost 80 years old, but could do a handstand balanced on just two fingers of each hand. He performed this feat in C.C.'s living room. This man was a lifelong vegetarian. C.C. told me that he died a few years later at the age of 88. "Think how much longer he might have lived, a man like that, if only he hadn't been vegetarian!" I've been told that the only reason I'm still alive is that I ate meat when I was younger. Never mind that there probably isn't even a single cell of that remaining after 27 years, what of the people who were lifelong vegetarians, like the Chinese monk, or the Brahmins of India. You can't even say that they inherited meat-nutrition from their vegetarian mothers.
Never mind the fact that the world's largest land animals (giraffes, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses) are all vegetarian from birth, and vegan after being weaned. Clearly, health, size, and athleticism do not depend on the consumption of flesh. And yet, there is this popular notion in western countries that it is necessary. This view is so prevalent, that serious effort must be made to explain the living vegetarians in this world, but the results are hardly credible. And yet! For lack of anything else that makes sense, many accept those explanations regardless.
Is this any different to disbelief in psi, the supernatural, or God? I don't think so. The same ridiculous explanations are trotted out, but they all come down to this: "either it didn't happen or it's a hoax." That is about the same as "You have three years to live" because you are vegetarian. These kinds of things can only be said in complete ignorance. One might even say, innocence.
AP
Sunday, 22 May 2011
Religion and belief
Because some of my dreams contain imagery that is concordant with Christian expectations (see examples here) several people have identified my dreams as Christian-inspired. If that is the case, I don't mind, but I don't think it is true. This same type of mistake is apparent in conversations about God with people who are atheistic or agnostic. The problem is that various religions have defined God in their own way and i so doing, have established limitations regarding what God is, what he will or won't do, and what he looks like. Having created this definition, the religion becomes synonymous with the things it endeavors to describe.
It makes some conversations rather frustrating, because I do not consider myself Christian, despite having been baptized twice. The first time was as a new baby Catholic--one who became an atheist very quickly--and the second was in a Messianic Christian church. The latter occasion was prompted by my sincere desire to understand religious issues, particularly as they related to my dreams. At the time I didn't know the subject well enough to know if I had serious differences with the church, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the purpose of learning more. Later, I discovered that many differences existed. I didn't care too much about this, but these differences are important to most people in Christian or Messianic congregations.
To back up a bit, the non-believers who have expressed an opinion on this declare that the "Christian" content of my dreams is the product of cultural ambiance or leakage from my wife, who is Christian. This argument looks great as long as it isn't compared to the facts, which refute it rather well. This is important because these specific dreams are significant to me in part because I had them first and then learned how they fit into existing theological constructs. It did not work the other way around. I am confident of this, despite the supposed all-pervasiveness of Christian-themed information in America, because my early life did an excellent job of avoiding all this information. As for my wife, we never discussed religion at all. I did not go to church with her, and I didn't sneak a peek in her Bible. She did give me a Bible at one point, and I read part of Matthew before getting bored and putting it down.
Beyond this, I'd seen a lot of paintings by Catholic artists. Based on these, my understanding of Christianity was that Moses might have been Jesus' disciple, Jesus was crucified, there was a "last supper" of some kind (I didn't connect it to the crucifixion), and some guy named Stephen was shot full of arrows for some reason. I was aware that Paul was crucified upside-down, that David slew a giant named Goliath, that someone's head was given to a woman on a silver platter. I recognized the images, but had no idea what they meant, what the context was, or how they fit together. I had no idea that the majority of Catholic art focused on events in the last three days of Jesus' life, and had no idea how the pieces fit together. I got the flight into Egypt mixed up with the Exodus, in both cases aware only that Egypt and fleeing people were involved, including Jesus and Moses, who I still didn't realize lived in vastly different time periods.
The subject matter of my dreams is most closely connected with the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Exodus, Genesis, and Revelation. Although there are numerous paintings based on material from the last three of these, I don't know of any from the first two. Also, The images in my dreams are not about the scenes we all recognize from paintings in art history books, nor are any of the dreams simple recreations of familiar material. Instead, they are original but consistent with what is found in various parts of the Bible, and in most examples, there are no great popular depictions of what might be considered source material for the dreams I've had.
Admittedly, I did attend a summer camp once that was sponsored by a Christian group. It was for the benefit of needy children as a way for kids to get outside and have a nice couple of weeks during summer. The price was right, so my mom sent my sister and I off to this place. I couldn't stand the religious stuff, so I avoided the counselors around the campfires and anywhere else I could get away from them. I enjoyed the hiking, the camping, and the crafts, but diligently avoided dealing with their ulterior motive for bringing us all there: to enlighten us about God. I got trapped twice into listening to a thirty-minute Bible reading. On the second of those occasions I had a horrible nightmare about Satan. I immediately blamed it on the Christian camp counselors, for reading scary stories out of the Bible to us kids. I'm satisfied that one dream was influenced by environmental ambiance, but take note there was nothing subtle about it. It wasn't like subliminal advertising in a Coca-cola advertisement. They were sitting right in front of us reading directly from the Bible. That is the only truly overt example I have. Some aspects of that dream were very peculiar, but I'll save that for later.
In 2005 I had a dream that I call "The Book." The Book dream did not reference a Bible or even God directly, but I saw a book written by the most powerful author of all creation. I saw his words become things as they spilled out of the book and became the entire history of the cosmos. That is the dream that made me decide to go to church and start exploring these religious dreams further. I was almost 40 years old when I had that dream, but the religious dreams started much earlier than that. The camp incident was age 10, a dream of angels and heaven came to me at 16 or 17, I first saw God in a dream when I was about 24, and I'd seen Jesus in a few dreams a year before that. And they have continued to appear regularly ever since.
Some time before I first went to church for the purpose of exploring the possibility that my dreams might have some legitimate connection to theological ideas, I had come to the conclusion that God had to exist. However, I thought of God as existing well outside of any known religion. The idea of an inerrant Bible made no sense to me, nor did I agree with the notion that any one religion was necessary and excluded all others. Because of those two assumptions, I never explored any religion at all until I had that dream in 2005 at the age of 40.
When I did start looking, I was amazed by the large number of parallels I found in the Torah and NT, though primarily the Torah. This is why I went to a Messianic church, because of their emphasis on the Torah. Also, I found that many of the things in my dreams were seriously in conflict with major portions of Christian doctrine. It is because of these differences that my dreams cannot be considered a representation of Christian doctrine or thought, even if I do think they are consistent with the Torah origins of Christianity.
According to my dreams, (and numerous studies by Ian Stevenson) reincarnation is a fact. This means that spirits do not sleep in Abraham's bosom until judgment day, and also that spirits who are not "with Abraham" are not necessarily evil as a consequence. This also creates questions about the validity of one religion being superior to all others. If a Christian can be reborn as Jewish, Buddhist, or something else--and vice versa--then it casts some doubt on the validity of death bed conversions. I see Jesus and God in my dreams, and on one occasion, together. They are not the same being, but distinctly separate. Not only that, but the difference between the two is like a candle to the sun, even if that candle is like a sun in comparison to the majority of humanity (and that is how it is.) Thus, I cannot accept the Holy Trinity, another cherished principle of many Christian denominations. There are many other things, all of which puts me well outside the confines of any given church, yet I am at the same time deeply sympathetic for people who at least try to understand God and their obligations to him by going to church.
What this means is that I will speak favorably about religion even though I am aware of at least some of its errors. This does not make me a spokesman for any religion because I plainly do not speak for them. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is that God is real and we should do our best to satisfy our obligations to him, all of which are benevolent in nature.
AP
It makes some conversations rather frustrating, because I do not consider myself Christian, despite having been baptized twice. The first time was as a new baby Catholic--one who became an atheist very quickly--and the second was in a Messianic Christian church. The latter occasion was prompted by my sincere desire to understand religious issues, particularly as they related to my dreams. At the time I didn't know the subject well enough to know if I had serious differences with the church, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the purpose of learning more. Later, I discovered that many differences existed. I didn't care too much about this, but these differences are important to most people in Christian or Messianic congregations.
To back up a bit, the non-believers who have expressed an opinion on this declare that the "Christian" content of my dreams is the product of cultural ambiance or leakage from my wife, who is Christian. This argument looks great as long as it isn't compared to the facts, which refute it rather well. This is important because these specific dreams are significant to me in part because I had them first and then learned how they fit into existing theological constructs. It did not work the other way around. I am confident of this, despite the supposed all-pervasiveness of Christian-themed information in America, because my early life did an excellent job of avoiding all this information. As for my wife, we never discussed religion at all. I did not go to church with her, and I didn't sneak a peek in her Bible. She did give me a Bible at one point, and I read part of Matthew before getting bored and putting it down.
Beyond this, I'd seen a lot of paintings by Catholic artists. Based on these, my understanding of Christianity was that Moses might have been Jesus' disciple, Jesus was crucified, there was a "last supper" of some kind (I didn't connect it to the crucifixion), and some guy named Stephen was shot full of arrows for some reason. I was aware that Paul was crucified upside-down, that David slew a giant named Goliath, that someone's head was given to a woman on a silver platter. I recognized the images, but had no idea what they meant, what the context was, or how they fit together. I had no idea that the majority of Catholic art focused on events in the last three days of Jesus' life, and had no idea how the pieces fit together. I got the flight into Egypt mixed up with the Exodus, in both cases aware only that Egypt and fleeing people were involved, including Jesus and Moses, who I still didn't realize lived in vastly different time periods.
The subject matter of my dreams is most closely connected with the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Exodus, Genesis, and Revelation. Although there are numerous paintings based on material from the last three of these, I don't know of any from the first two. Also, The images in my dreams are not about the scenes we all recognize from paintings in art history books, nor are any of the dreams simple recreations of familiar material. Instead, they are original but consistent with what is found in various parts of the Bible, and in most examples, there are no great popular depictions of what might be considered source material for the dreams I've had.
Admittedly, I did attend a summer camp once that was sponsored by a Christian group. It was for the benefit of needy children as a way for kids to get outside and have a nice couple of weeks during summer. The price was right, so my mom sent my sister and I off to this place. I couldn't stand the religious stuff, so I avoided the counselors around the campfires and anywhere else I could get away from them. I enjoyed the hiking, the camping, and the crafts, but diligently avoided dealing with their ulterior motive for bringing us all there: to enlighten us about God. I got trapped twice into listening to a thirty-minute Bible reading. On the second of those occasions I had a horrible nightmare about Satan. I immediately blamed it on the Christian camp counselors, for reading scary stories out of the Bible to us kids. I'm satisfied that one dream was influenced by environmental ambiance, but take note there was nothing subtle about it. It wasn't like subliminal advertising in a Coca-cola advertisement. They were sitting right in front of us reading directly from the Bible. That is the only truly overt example I have. Some aspects of that dream were very peculiar, but I'll save that for later.
In 2005 I had a dream that I call "The Book." The Book dream did not reference a Bible or even God directly, but I saw a book written by the most powerful author of all creation. I saw his words become things as they spilled out of the book and became the entire history of the cosmos. That is the dream that made me decide to go to church and start exploring these religious dreams further. I was almost 40 years old when I had that dream, but the religious dreams started much earlier than that. The camp incident was age 10, a dream of angels and heaven came to me at 16 or 17, I first saw God in a dream when I was about 24, and I'd seen Jesus in a few dreams a year before that. And they have continued to appear regularly ever since.
Some time before I first went to church for the purpose of exploring the possibility that my dreams might have some legitimate connection to theological ideas, I had come to the conclusion that God had to exist. However, I thought of God as existing well outside of any known religion. The idea of an inerrant Bible made no sense to me, nor did I agree with the notion that any one religion was necessary and excluded all others. Because of those two assumptions, I never explored any religion at all until I had that dream in 2005 at the age of 40.
When I did start looking, I was amazed by the large number of parallels I found in the Torah and NT, though primarily the Torah. This is why I went to a Messianic church, because of their emphasis on the Torah. Also, I found that many of the things in my dreams were seriously in conflict with major portions of Christian doctrine. It is because of these differences that my dreams cannot be considered a representation of Christian doctrine or thought, even if I do think they are consistent with the Torah origins of Christianity.
According to my dreams, (and numerous studies by Ian Stevenson) reincarnation is a fact. This means that spirits do not sleep in Abraham's bosom until judgment day, and also that spirits who are not "with Abraham" are not necessarily evil as a consequence. This also creates questions about the validity of one religion being superior to all others. If a Christian can be reborn as Jewish, Buddhist, or something else--and vice versa--then it casts some doubt on the validity of death bed conversions. I see Jesus and God in my dreams, and on one occasion, together. They are not the same being, but distinctly separate. Not only that, but the difference between the two is like a candle to the sun, even if that candle is like a sun in comparison to the majority of humanity (and that is how it is.) Thus, I cannot accept the Holy Trinity, another cherished principle of many Christian denominations. There are many other things, all of which puts me well outside the confines of any given church, yet I am at the same time deeply sympathetic for people who at least try to understand God and their obligations to him by going to church.
What this means is that I will speak favorably about religion even though I am aware of at least some of its errors. This does not make me a spokesman for any religion because I plainly do not speak for them. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is that God is real and we should do our best to satisfy our obligations to him, all of which are benevolent in nature.
AP
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Radio and other appearances
This is to announce that a recent interview with me can be found by following this link. There are a few more coming up, including Second Sight NYC at 6PM this Thursday EST.
I just answered a post on the Skeptico.com forum that really had me scratching my head for a little while. The writer, who I am thankful to for his comments, asked why I didn't discuss the "junk dreams" mentioned in my book at any great length. He said that even these may have value, so they should be treated as worthless. He may be right about that, but my book was about the paranormal dreams, not the ones that looked like they weren't regardless, it made me think of things that could have been said about them in relation to traditional ideas on what dreams mean, what they are, and what is to be expected of them.
I have looked at them in this light, but not at the level of detail or degree of scrutiny to produce any meaningful insights. With this in mind, I'm going to take a look at them from that angle the next chance I get and see what comes of it.
Sorry for the short post, but will try to make up for it later.
AP
I just answered a post on the Skeptico.com forum that really had me scratching my head for a little while. The writer, who I am thankful to for his comments, asked why I didn't discuss the "junk dreams" mentioned in my book at any great length. He said that even these may have value, so they should be treated as worthless. He may be right about that, but my book was about the paranormal dreams, not the ones that looked like they weren't regardless, it made me think of things that could have been said about them in relation to traditional ideas on what dreams mean, what they are, and what is to be expected of them.
I have looked at them in this light, but not at the level of detail or degree of scrutiny to produce any meaningful insights. With this in mind, I'm going to take a look at them from that angle the next chance I get and see what comes of it.
Sorry for the short post, but will try to make up for it later.
AP
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)