Blackmore / Ph.D. / Burk Mysteries of Knowledge Beyond Our Senses

Dialogues with Courageous Scientists
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-0-938795-64-3
Verlag: Equality Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 406 Seiten

The Mysteries of Knowledge Beyond the Senses: Dialogues with Courageous Scientists reports on the current research and personal characteristics of 22 visionaries from the US and the UK. They reveal information about learning from other dimensions, altered states of consciousness, extrasensory perception, dreams, near-death experiences, remote viewing, parapsychology, etc. Vanguard scientists believe there is more than what we see and are formulating a non-materialist paradigm that expands human potential, including mind and matter interaction. Going against the dominant worldview evokes ridicule, as in 'Why study flying pigs?' The book explores the personal backgrounds of the scientists to find out why they are so courageous. We learn that there are other dimensions that allow for enhanced abilities, based on extensive interviews by Gayle Kimball, the award-winning author of 20 books who does clairvoyant work as well as research. The trilogy includes books about the mysteries of reality and healing.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Blackmore, Susan

Ph.D.,

Burk, Larry

Hurtak, James

Hurtak, Desiree

Leseproben

Susan Blackmore, Ph.D.
A Skeptic’s View of Consciousness
  Photo used by permission       You were born July 29, 1951, in London, which makes you a Leo. I know you’re not a believer in astrology, but do you identify with any Leo traits? I did once upon a time read about that sort of thing and I think there were some characteristics that I had. I have done some research on astrology which just confirms some of my greatest fears which is that people bend themselves toward what they think they are supposed to be according to astrology. We know from hundreds of experiments that astrology can’t predict which partners you’ll get along with or what your life will be like or anything else. Millions of Indians think otherwise and use astrology as an aid in choosing a marriage partner. Even worse, I think they can mold their children. “Oh, he’s going to be a little Leo so that means he’ll be….” It’s true that if you tell teachers, “This group of children is brilliant and this one is just average,” the ones the teacher thinks is brilliant will perform better. Absolutely, exactly that. What’s your Myers-Briggs type? INTJ, but that sort of thing doesn’t really interest me. In the classic extraversion-introversion test, I’m just weird because people always just assume from my behavior that I’m extrovert, yet I come out on the questionnaires to be an introvert. Questions like, “In the evening would you rather go out to a party and have fun or sit at your desk working?” I’d rather sit at my desk working. Why would I rather go to a party and waste time? I want to get on with my life. What about your birth order? I’m asking because a “rebel scientist” study found people who are not conformists tended to be later-borns. I read that research too. I’m a first-born. Like the majority of the visionary scientists. I have a sister two and a half years younger and a brother eleven years younger. What about your childhood led you to Oxford? Girls probably weren’t in a large segment of the student population when you went. No, it was one to eight. It was fantastic. The downside was there were only three women’s colleges and they were all-women but loads and loads of men’s colleges. It was a year after I left that they changed that. I was the last person in Oxford to be rusticated, which means sent away from Oxford to the country for the rest of the term for being found with a man in my room. When my daughter went to Oxford, they were told they could only have two men in their room at a time. It’s changed that much. Your question about how I got there is very hard to say. My father was a well-to-do businessman. My dad didn’t expect his wife to work so she was a housewife. I was sent to a vile awful boarding school, but I discovered there that I was bright, which was my way of coping with life when I thought all the other girls hated me. My way to survive was to work harder and become top in physics and chemistry, although at a girls’ boarding school in the 1960s this does not make you popular. Nevertheless, it was the only thing that I could put my energies into, so I did well on my A levels. At one point, I thought I wanted to be a doctor and my mom badly wanted me to be a doctor, but I had a realization in the middle of the night in my dormitory bed that I would be terrible as a doctor. It felt as if my whole future life was closing in on me—to be in hospitals with ill people all the time and I’d probably marry another doctor. I was in terrible trouble with my parents and the school and I had to change A level subjects, which I did. My biology teacher said, “You love biology, I know. But don’t study biology at university because biology is basically all done now.” What an extraordinary thing to say! Of course in the 1950s the structure of DNA had been discovered but she couldn’t have imagined where that would lead. So she said, “Why don’t you do psychology?” I loved it. I stayed on an extra term and did the Oxbridge exams, which you had to do in those days, and I got to Oxford, which was wonderful. I loved it there and loved the work as well. That’s where I had strange experiences and I ran the Oxford University Society for Psychical Research for three years. Why was boarding school horrendous? A lot of people of my age, my husband included, have been harmed by their boarding schools. Sleeping in a room with four or five other girls with very strict rules, the bell went off at 6:50 and you had to get up, get dressed, strip the bed, and arrange your few things in a certain way. You had a dressing table where you were only allowed five things, one of which had to be a picture of your parents. You had to run ‘round the outside of the whole school and then sit at your breakfast place at 7:30. You had to be in class all day with two hours of sports every afternoon. Lessons were until 7:00 PM, then supper and one hour of free time before bed. You were not allowed to take any books to your bedroom. After lunch, you changed from grey socks and skirt into white socks and a mauve dress in preparation for being a “lady.” We had no privacy and no fun, with weekends with absolutely nothing to do. I was constantly in trouble and considered naughty. Does that give you an idea of what it was like for six or seven years? It sounds like a prison. Oh, absolutely. Young Indian women in university still have those kinds of restricted, medieval rules in their dormitories. I sympathize. In your first year at Oxford, one evening you were smoking hash, doing the Ouija board, sleep-deprived, and had an OBE that triggered your interest in paranormal parapsychology. Then, later you realized that it was caused by sleep deprivation and smoking hash. The Swiss neurosurgeon Olaf Blanke discovered it has to do with the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) in the brain. What did you conclude over time that caused that mystical astral travel OBE? When you say later, we are talking 45 years later since the discovery of the TPJ was in 2002. That set off a slew of research on OBEs, which is fantastic. Since I had that experience in 1970, the topic of OBEs has been fringe, even as far as parapsychology was concerned. Now, there are serious scientists working on it, which is why I wrote my 2019 book Seeing Myself: The New Science of Out of Body Experiences. All those decades in between I was floundering. I wrote a book in 1982 doing my best to try to understand, “Could it be natural or could it be a brain-based thing or does it really mean something has left the body?” When I was flying over the roofs of Oxford, when I looked the next day, what I had seen wasn’t accurate, but those things didn’t bother me at the time. I just thought the astral world is a bit different from the physical world. When I descended down into an island with a hundred trees, I thought afterwards, well, you wouldn’t count the trees. Then, I thought the astral world is full of thought-forms with this ambiguity and ambivalence. My book talked about how relaxation and cutting off input from the senses and going into your own mind could conceivably lead you to adopt a bird’s eye view, which is quite common in dreams. I did studies that showed that people who often dream in bird’s eye view, more often have OBEs. I‘ve concluded that OBEs are nothing more than a disruption in the body’s schema, the essential map that we all have of our own body, which is maintained by activity in the TPJ and connects with our memories and sense of self. Once we knew about this, from Blanke’s work, everything fell into place. Every animal that moves needs a body schema. The brain is constantly tracking the head is here, the arms are here. It has to be kept in touch all the time with what you are seeing and what you are feeling …because otherwise you might fall down or collapse. Yes, exactly. So, the body schema constantly interacts with sensory input. Then, you feel as if you are in your body. How could that go wrong? One possibility is cutting off the sensory input or a lack of oxygen in the brain and so on. This is how we come to have OBEs. Your sensation of flying to New York during that experience was caused by an improper functioning of that part of the brain? Is it similar to what happens in dreams? It’s similar to lucid dreams but it’s not very similar to ordinary dreams. I think anyone who has lucid dreams, which is something like 40% of the population, will know that feeling when you become lucid and realize it is a dream. Then, you can see so clearly and everything becomes bright and vivid. Very often you can control the dream and say I’m going to turn that monster into a cuddly pussycat or whatever you like. You know that your brain is capable of producing wonderful, vivid, rich imagery including emotions and sounds. We know that some people are awake when they have OBEs. Some are on the verge of sleep, maybe stage one sleep. Many people are wide awake, as I was, sitting up and talking. One of the things I’ve discovered from the recent research is that people who have a very hyperactive cortex—like me—are much more likely to have OBEs. I’m terribly sensitive to flashing patterns and noises, due to hyperactivity in the sensory cortex. If you get hyperactivity in the TPJ that disturbs the body schema, then you are more likely to have OBEs. Sleep deprivation and electrical stimulation with electrodes in the brain can cause that random activity. Cannabis can, too. What happens is that the poor brain is...