9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down

This is a worthy review of human perception and orders one's approach to living. It is fair to say that all can reach similar positions over enough time and with enough experience.  It is better though to have a list such as this acting as a road map to guide one's thinking and general introspection.  

It is one thing to study theory, but quite another to experience theory.

Thus if any of this gives you pause, set it aside but make sure you soon revisit it to understand what you are missing. .

 

 

9 Mind-Bending Epiphanies That Turned My World Upside-Down

 http://www.raptitude.com/2010/10/9-mind-bending-epiphanies-that-turned-my-world-upside-down/

Over the years I’ve learned dozens of little tricks and insights for making life more fulfilling. They’ve added up to a significant improvement in the ease and quality of my day-to-day life. But the major breakthroughs have come from a handful of insights that completely rocked my world and redefined reality forever.

The world now seems to be a completely different one than the one I lived in about ten years ago, when I started looking into the mechanics of quality of life. It wasn’t the world (and its people) that changed really, it was how I thought of it.

Maybe you’ve had some of  the same insights. Or maybe you’re about to.

1. You are not your mind.

The first time I heard somebody say that — in the opening chapter of The Power of Now —  I didn’t like the sound of it one bit. What else could I be? I had taken for granted that the mental chatter in my head was the central “me” that all the experiences in my life were happening to.

I see quite clearly now that life is nothing but passing experiences, and my thoughts are just one more category of things I experience. Thoughts are no more fundamental than smells, sights and sounds. Like any experience, they arise in my awareness, they have a certain texture, and then they give way to something else.

If you can observe your thoughts just like you can observe other objects, who’s doing the observing? Don’t answer too quickly. This question, and its unspeakable answer, are at the center of all the great religions and spiritual traditions.

2. Life unfolds only in moments.

Of course! I once called this the most important thing I ever learned. Nobody has ever experienced anything that wasn’t part of a single moment unfolding. That means life’s only challenge is dealing with the single moment you are having right now. Before I recognized this, I was constantly trying to solve my entire life — battling problems that weren’t actually happening. Anyone can summon the resolve to deal with a single, present moment, as long as they are truly aware that it’s their only point of contact with life, and therefore there is nothing else one can do that can possibly be useful. Nobody can deal with the past or future, because, both only exist as thoughts, in the present. But we can kill ourselves trying. 

3. Quality of life is determined by how you deal with your moments, not which moments happen and which don’t.

I now consider this truth to be Happiness 101, but it’s amazing how tempting it still is to grasp at control of every circumstance to try to make sure I get exactly what I want. To encounter an undesirable situation and work with it willingly is the mark of a wise and happy person. Imagine getting a flat tire, falling ill at a bad time, or knocking something over and breaking it — and suffering nothing from it. There is nothing to fear if you agree with yourself to deal willingly with adversity whenever it does show up. That is how to make life better. The typical, low-leverage method is to hope that you eventually accumulate power over your circumstances so that you can get what you want more often. There’s an excellent line in a Modest Mouse song, celebrating this side-effect of wisdom: As life gets longer, awful feels softer.

4. Most of life is imaginary.

Human beings have a habit of compulsive thinking that is so pervasive that we lose sight of the fact that we are nearly always thinking. Most of what we interact with is not the world itself, but our beliefs about it, our expectations of it, and our personal interests in it. We have a very difficult time observing something without confusing it with the thoughts we have about it, and so the bulk of what we experience in life is imaginary things. As Mark Twain said: “I’ve been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” The best treatment I’ve found? Cultivating mindfulness.

5. Human beings have evolved to suffer, and we are better at suffering than anything else.

Yikes. It doesn’t sound like a very liberating discovery. I used to believe that if I was suffering it meant that there was something wrong with me — that I was doing life “wrong.” Suffering is completely human and completely normal, and there is a very good reason for its existence. Life’s persistent background hum of “this isn’t quite okay, I need to improve this,” coupled with occasional intense flashes of horror and adrenaline are what kept human beings alive for millions of years. This urge to change or escape the present moment drives nearly all of our behavior. It’s a simple and ruthless survival mechanism which works exceedingly well for keeping us alive, but it has a horrific side effect: human beings suffer greatly by their very nature. This, for me, redefined every one of life’s problems as some tendril of the human condition. As grim as it sounds, this insight is liberating because it means: 1) that suffering does not necessarily mean my life is going wrong, 2) that the ball is always in my court, so the degree to which I suffer is ultimately up to me, and 3) that all problems have the same cause and the same solution.

6. Emotions exist to make us biased.

This discovery was a complete 180 from my old understanding of emotions. I used to think my emotions were reliable indicators of the state of my life — of whether I’m on the right track or not. Your passing emotional states can’t be trusted for measuring your self-worth or your position in life, but they are great at teaching you what it is you can’t let go of. The trouble is that emotions make us both more biased and more forceful at the same time. Another survival mechanism with nasty side-effects.

7. All people operate from the same two motivations: to fulfill their desires and to escape their suffering.

Learning this allowed me to finally make sense of how people can hurt each other so badly. The best explanation I had before this was that some people are just bad. What a cop-out. No matter what kind of behavior other people exhibit, they are acting in the most effective way they are capable of (at that moment) to fulfill a desire or to relieve their suffering. These are motives we can all understand; we only vary in method, and the methods each of us has at our disposal depend on our upbringing and our experiences in life, as well as our state of consciousness. Some methods are skillful and helpful to others, others are unskillful and destructive, and almost all destructive behavior is unconscious. So there is no good and evil, only smart and dumb (or wise and foolish.) Understanding this completely shook my long-held notions of morality and justice.

8. Beliefs are nothing to be proud of.

Believing something is not an accomplishment. I grew up thinking that beliefs are something to be proud of, but they’re really nothing but opinions one refuses to reconsider. Beliefs are easy. The stronger your beliefs are, the less open you are to growth and wisdom, because “strength of belief” is only the intensity with which you resist questioning yourself. As soon as you are proud of a belief, as soon as you think it adds something to who you are, then you’ve made it a part of your ego. Listen to any “die-hard” conservative or liberal talk about their deepest beliefs and you are listening to somebody who will never hear what you say on any matter that matters to them — unless you believe the same. It is gratifying to speak forcefully, it is gratifying to be agreed with, and this high is what the die-hards are chasing. Wherever there is a belief, there is a closed door. Take on the beliefs that stand up to your most honest, humble scrutiny, and never be afraid to lose them.

9. Objectivity is subjective.

Life is a subjective experience and that cannot be escaped. Every experience I have comes through my own, personal, unsharable viewpoint. There can be no peer reviews of my direct experience, no real corroboration. This has some major implications for how I live my life. The most immediate one is that I realize I must trust my own personal experience, because nobody else has this angle, and I only have this angle. Another is that I feel more wonder for the world around me, knowing that any “objective” understanding I claim to have of the world is built entirely from scratch, by me. What I do build depends on the books I’ve read, the people I’ve met, and the experiences I’ve had. It means I will never see the world quite like anyone else, which means I will never live in quite the same world as anyone else — and therefore I mustn’t let outside observers be the authority on who I am or what life is really like for me. Subjectivity is primary experience — it is real life, and objectivity is something each of us builds on top of it in our minds, privately, in order to explain it all. This truth has world-shattering implications for the roles of religion and science in the lives of those who grasp it.

***

In my life, empowering new perspectives like these come mostly from reading what others have written. Recommended reading on these concepts:

AIDS Pandemic Has Reached Tipping Point

This is great news. It has taken thirty five years to get here, but the down slope should become much quicker.   Most should have been eradicated inside of twenty years or much sooner.  Then we have a long decline caused by waiting for stable victims to simply die of other causes.

 There is still plenty of work to do, but one day the disease will actually be extinct.  That could take a very long time though because of specific vulnerable populations who act as a reservoir.

Over 70,000,000 have been infected and half are still with us.  It could have been far far worse.  Education has stopped most of it, but disease management has saved most lives.

.  .

AIDS campaigners say pandemic has finally reached tipping point

BY KATE KELLAND

LONDON Mon Dec 1, 2014

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/12/01/health-aids-idINKCN0JF14320141201

(Reuters) - The world has finally reached "the beginning of the end" of the AIDS pandemic that has infected and killed millions in the past 30 years, according to a leading campaign group fighting HIV.

The number of people newly infected with HIV over the last year was lower than the number of HIV-positive people who joined those getting access to the medicines they need to take for life to keep AIDS at bay.

But in a report to mark World AIDS Day on Dec. 1, the ONE campaign, an advocacy group working to end poverty and preventable disease in Africa, warned that reaching this milestone did not mean the end of AIDS was around the corner.

"We've passed the tipping point in the AIDS fight at the global level, but not all countries are there yet, and the gains made can easily stall or unravel," said Erin Hohlfelder, ONE's director of global health policy.

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS is spread via blood, semen and breast milk. There is no cure for the infection, but AIDS can be kept at bay for many years with cocktails of antiretroviral drugs.

United Nations data show that in 2013, 35 million people were living with HIV, 2.1 million people were newly infected with the virus and some 1.5 million people died of AIDS. By far the greatest part of the HIV/AIDS burden is in sub-Saharan Africa.

The AIDS pandemic began more than 30 years ago and has killed up to 40 million people worldwide.

The United Nations AIDS agency, UNAIDS, says that, by June 2014, some 13.6 million people globally had access to AIDS drugs, a dramatic improvement on the 5 million who were getting treatment in 2010.

"Despite the good news, we should not take a victory lap yet," said Hohlfelder.

She highlighted several threats to current progress, including a $3 billion shortfall in the funds needed each year to control HIV around the world.

"We want to see bold new funding from a more diversified base, including more from African domestic budgets," she said.

ONE also noted that HIV is increasingly concentrated among hard-to-reach populations such as injecting drug users, gay men and sex workers - groups who are often stigmatised and have trouble accessing treatment and prevention services.

Precognition: How Our Body Reacts Up To 10 Seconds Before Events Happen

This  works shows us that the body and surely the automatic response system centered on our gut can react to upcoming events within a one through ten second time window.  that is enough time to dump adrenaline into ones system and to then explode into activity.  Thus we have an even better understanding of instinctive threat avoidance.  

The open problem there was that rational actions take place without interrferance from the conscious mind.  This is most dramatic regarding bear avoidance in which the person shoots up a tree.  For that to happen properly, one must evaluate available options and then act.  That typically takes seconds at least yet in this situation it is effectively instant.


More importantly, this shows us that information does flow backward in time at short ranges or more correctly information is shared by the future through to the known past.  This is important and valuable.  We need to be more conscious of this.  Better it provides a rigorous explanation to myself in which i avoided a damaging accident.  I once stopped a car length short of a cross walk with zero possible warning and no history of ever doing anything of the kind before, in order to watch a car hurtle in front of me making an illegal turn out of the wrong lane.  This was impossible to anticipate or physically see.


I have experienced less compelling examples as well.



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Precognition: How Our Body Reacts Up To 10 Seconds Before Events Happen

Arjun Walia,

http://www.wakingtimes.com/2014/11/29/precognition-science-shows-body-reacts-events-10-seconds-happen/


Over the past few decades a significant and noteworthy amount of scientific research has emerged contributing to the notion that human precognition could very well be real, and that we all might possess this potential -amongst various other extended human capacities. Thanks to the research by various scientists presented in this article, extended human capacities are beginning to exit the realm of superstitious thinking, delusion and irrationality and find their way into the world of confirmed phenomena. Claims of precognition or “future telling” have occurred “throughout human history in virtually every culture and period.” 


It’s not hard to see why we are so fascinated with these concepts, they are embedded in popular culture today throughout various outlets such as movies -which can sometimes be counter productive given the fact that they are merged with fictional stories and events. Similar to the extraterrestrial phenomenon, the validity of these concepts seems to shrink due to the fact that they are “just movies.” Although the stories that accompany these types of phenomena in movies is probably largely factious, the concepts do hold some validity. Let’s examine the truth behind pre cognition and claims of “future telling.”
The Science


“There seems to be a deep concern that the whole field will be tarnished by studying a phenomenon that is tainted by its association with superstition, spiritualism and magic. Protecting against this possibility sometimes seems more important than encouraging scientific exploration or protecting academic freedom. But this may be changing.” ~ Cassandra Vieten, PhD and President/CEO at the Institute of Noetic Sciences 


So what exactly is precognition? It’s basically the ability to have a premonition of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known process. It’s the influence of a future event that has yet to take place on an individuals responses. These responses can come in the form of their biology, they can be conscious responses the individual is aware of, or they can be non-conscious responses that the individual is not aware of (which is mostly the case when it comes to the scientific examination of pre cognition) and more.


“Pre cognition refers to the noninferential prediction of future events.” 


A recently published study (meta analysis) in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience titled “Predicting the unpredictable: critical analysis and practical implications of predictive anticipatory activity” examined a number of experiments regarding this phenomenon that were conducted by several different laboratories.


These experiments indicate that the human body can actually detect randomly delivered stimuli that occur 1-10 seconds in advance. In other words, the human body seems to know of an event, and reacts to an event that has yet to occur. What occurs in the human body before these events are physiological changes that are measured regarding the cardiopulmonary, the skin, and the nervous system. (1)


It’s important to note that these types of responses to future events that are measured in the body are unconscious responses, meaning that the subject (human) is not aware that they are actually taking place. So it is a form of pre cognition, but not full blown conscious premonitions.


The fact that changes in our physiological activity in the autonomic nervous system changes and prepares for future events is remarkable, and the fact that this is “unconscious precognition” should not take away from the fact that it helps us better understand the phenomenon of conscious precognition in a scientific sense. We are still waiting for science to catch up and provide an explanation for conscious precognition, regardless of whether the phenomenon has been observed or not.


More than 40 experiments investigating this phenomenon in humans have been published over the past 36 years (including: Hartwell, 1978; Radin et al., 1995, 2011; Bierman and Radin, 1997; Radin, 1997, 2004;Don et al., 1998;Bierman, 2000; Bierman and Scholte, 2002; McDonough et al., 2002;Spottiswoode and May, 2003; McCraty et al., 2004a,b; Sartori et al., 2004; May et al., 2005;Tressoldi et al., 2005, 2009, 2011; Radin and Borges, 2009; Bradley et al., 2011). This is what promoted the meta-analysis.


The analysis concluded that:


“The predictive physiological anticipation of a truly randomly selected and thus unpredictable future event, has been under investigation for more than three decades, and a recent conservative meta-analysis suggests that the phenomenon is real.” (1)


Another recently published paper via the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Cornell university professor Dr. Daryl J. Bern suggests that precognition may be real. Dr Bern is a leading social psychologist and has been well-respected throughout his long and esteemed career. So his work suggesting that precognition may be real is quite a large leap for this type of phenomenon.(2)


Dr. Bern’s study outlines nine experiments that involved more than 1000 participants that “test for retroactive influence by time reversing well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur.” (2)


After going through and examining these experiments, Dr. Bern concluded that all but one of them yielded statistically significant results. The paper and experiments are provided within the sources listed.


Again, pre cognition has been well documented and observed in laboratories all over the world. Just because there is a lack of ability for psi research to provide an explanation for the observed phenomena does not discredit the phenomenon itself.


“Historically, the discovery and scientific exploration of most phenomena have preceded explanatory theories, often by decades or even centuries.” ~Dr. Bern (source pg 3)


Another study from Dr. Dean Radin, one of the several authors noted in the first study used in this article conducted four double blind experiments that also show that some intuitive hunches, measured by fluctuations in the autonomic nervous system involve unconscious perception of future events that have yet to occur, and the experiments supported this idea.(3)


Another significant study (meta-analysis) that was published in the Journal of Parapsychology by Charles Honorton and Diane C. Ferrari in 1989, examine a number of studies that were published between 1935 and 1987. The studies involved attempts of individuals to predict “the identity of target stimuli selected randomly over intervals ranging from several hundred million seconds to one year following the individuals responses.” These authors investigated over 300 studies conducted by over 60 authors, using approximately 2 million individual trials by more than 50,000 people. (4)


It concluded that their analysis of precognition experiments “confirms the existence of a small but highly significant precognition effect. The effect appears to be repeatable; significant outcomes are reported by 40 investigators using a variety of methodological paradigms and subject populations. The precognition effect is not merely an unexplained departure from a theoretical chance baseline, but rather is an effect that covaries with factors known to influence more familiar aspects of human performance.” (4)

Why is this type of precognition unconscious? And does it have the potential to become conscious?


Again, as mentioned earlier in the article, the science behind precognition refers to unconscious precognition. This means that the response to future events prior to when they happen is measured through physiological changes, and that seems to be quite clear.


But why should this be the case? If our body (parts of our nervous system) can obtain information about events seconds in the future, why would we not have the inability to not make this information conscious? Maybe we do have that potential.


Researchers in the first study used in this article suggest that this might be the case because the information is not useful, similar to the majority of information that is usually processed unconsciously. They also suggest that the conscious mind may not be able to make such quick decisions. They state “it might be evolutionarily advantageous for unconscious processing to assess upcoming events, filter them, mobilize resources, and only then inform conscious awareness.”(1)
Parapsychological Phenomenon, Consciousness & How They Relate To The Nature Of Our Reality


Precognition is one small aspect of a much larger body of what is termed as parapsychological phenomenon. For more information from CE on some areas of this larger body of information you can check out this article:


Scientific Studies That Prove Consciousness and Our Physical Material World Are Somehow Intertwined.


If you want to further your research even more, a great place to start would be the The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)


Sources:

(1) http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/full#B22

(2) http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf

(3) http://www.deanradin.com/FOC2014/Radin2004Presentiment.pdf

(4) http://www.deanradin.com/FOC2014/Honorton1989precogMA.pdf

About the Author


Arjun Walia – I joined the CE team in 2010 and have been doing this ever since. There are many things happening on the planet that don’t resonate with me, and I wanted to do what I could to play a role in creating change. It’s been great making changes in my own life and creating awareness and I look forward to more projects that move beyond awareness and into action and implementation. So stay tuned, arjun@collective-evolution.com

Fantastically Wrong? The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System

 

 

 

 

 

 

We know that it is impossible to live on the surface of anything else in the solar system in the physical form of someone adapted to Earth conditions.  however we also now know that all such physical life is operated by a much more robust spirit body that has no difficulty whatsoever living anywhere it wants although the sun and the deep rocks may be unattractive.  

Thus a massive population of human spirits is plausible and massive populations of others in spirit form is also possible using the same rules.  We already know that so called alien encounters are typically in spirit form even if closeness is facilitated by an actual craft.  This phenomena has many reports that i had no understanding of until we resolved the nature of dark matter and of spirit itself.

Thus we go from fantastically wrong to a completely new perception.  Add in the extra consideration that humanity can physically occupy all manner of crustal rock in deep silos that could be a mile deep on earth and miles deep in other crustal rocks and the numbers start of add up even there.

Such a stack could easily provide a window seat for at least fifty thousand residences per mile of depth while occupying a quarter of a square kilometer which is generous.  Thus we jump to population densities that could easily approach one million individuals per kilometer.   This is not even trying and it suggests that we can place on the moon alone  - 38,000,000 square kilometers around 38,000,000,000,000 individuals.  This is 38 trillion so our nineteenth century speculator may actually have come up short for even the moon.

Fantastically Wrong: The Scientist Who Thought 22 Trillion Aliens Live in Our Solar System

By Matt Simon
12.10.14 |

 

http://www.wired.com/2014/12/fantastically-wrong-thomas-dick/

Does Saturn have life on it? If you count gas as life, then yeah, sure.

In 1837, the Scottish scientist Thomas Dick had a big idea. A really, really big idea: Build “a huge triangle or ellipsis of many miles in extent, in Siberia or any other country.” He figured that because there are some 22 trillion aliens living in our solar system, 4.2 billion of which are on the moon, even if they don’t have telescope technology to spy the triangle, surely some would have eyes powerful enough to see it unaided. Perhaps realizing just what a big idea this was, he added, “Schemes far more foolish and preposterous than the above have been contrived and acted upon in every age of the world.”

Here’s what Dick figured. At the time, there were an average of 280 people per square mile in England. And because he thought every surface of our universe bears life, it would naturally occur at roughly the same population density. So from comets and asteroids to the rings of Saturn, if you knew how big something was, you could guess how many beings live there. Thus, Jupiter would be the most populated object in the solar system, with 7 trillion beings. The least populated would be Vesta, the second largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, tallying just 64 million.

Dick, you see, was a very religious man, but also a voracious scientist, one of the last of the so-called natural theologists, who looked for signs of God’s influence in nature. For Dick, it simply did not make sense for God to have created the cosmos just to have it sit around unoccupied. There must be creatures out there capable of enjoying its beauty, because God wants all his work appreciated.

Well thanks very much, Thomas. Nice of you to say. Wikimedia

In his book Celestial Scenery, which when it isn’t rambling is actually quite interesting, Dick writes: “This is a conclusion which is not merely probable, but absolutely certain, for the opposite opinion would rob the Deity of the most distinguishing attribute of his nature, by virtually denying him the perfection of infinite wisdom and intelligence.”

If you think waterfalls and sunsets here on Earth are neato, Dick promises you’ll be floored by what you’d see on other planets. “What should we think of a globe appearing in our nocturnal sky 1,300 times larger than the apparent size of the moon, and every hour assuming a different aspect?” he asked. “What should we think of a globe filling the twentieth part of the sky, and surrounded with immense rings, in rapid motion, diffusing a radiance over the whole heavens?” It’s a lovely image, isn’t it? These are also scenes we see realized in modern sci-fi—from a brain that was ticking fully two centuries ago.

You might think that living on other worlds might be difficult, but Dick assures us they’re arranged much like Earth, with mountains and valleys and such. The moon in particular has “an immense variety of elevations and depressions,” and while we can’t directly observe such features on Jupiter, Saturn, or Uranus, given their distance, when light hits them it reveals “the spots and differences of shade and color which are sometimes distinguishable on their disks,” thus betraying the uneven surfaces underneath. (We know today, of course, that these are all in fact gas giants.)

The gas giants aren’t really this close to each other. They have pretty big personal space bubbles.  

God also provides atmospheres on other planetary bodies, “but we have no reason to conclude that they are exactly similar to ours.” Mars’ atmosphere, for example, is denser than our own, bestowing the planet that lovely red hue (it’s actually less dense). Others may be so thin that they allow their inhabitants to “penetrate much farther into space than we can do,” with the added bonus that such an atmosphere could “raise their spirits to the highest pitch of ecstasy, similar to some of the effects produced on our frame by inhaling that gaseous fluid called the nitrous oxyde.” Yes, he actually wrote that, complete with the superfluous “the,” like your grandpa decrying “the hip-hop” and “the reefers.”

There is, though, the rather glaring problem of the crushing gravity of a planet the size of Saturn. But Dick posits that “the density of Jupiter is little more than that of water, and that of Saturn about the density of cork.” Jupiter, therefore, would have a gravity only twice as great as Earth’s—not so terrible in the grand scheme of things.

For as bizarre as all this may seem, notice how scientific Dick was about his theory. This was not mere daydreaming. He had numbers, and he had principles, and with them he formulated a wildly wrong idea, but nevertheless pieced it together fairly logically. And he wasn’t even the first scientist to argue that life existed elsewhere in our solar system. Far from it: It was none other than the famed astronomer William Herschel who argued that not only was there life on every planet, but on the sun as well. That blinding glow we see is simply a luminous atmosphere hiding a rocky surface that teemed with life.

And oddly enough, it was Herschel’s son John who indirectly eclipsed Dick in an epic way.

According to Paul Collins in his book Banvard’s Folly: Thirteen Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World, on August 21, 1835, the New York Sun dropped a bombshell of a story: Astronomer Sir John Herschel had erected an enormous telescope in South Africa that could magnify celestial bodies an astounding 42,000 times. And when he pointed it at the moon he saw a field of poppies.

It was all just a hoax, but the issue sold like mad. And so, four days later, the paper dropped another bombshell: Herschel next saw bison on the moon. And not just bison, but monsters of “bluish lead color, about the size of a goat, with a head and beard like him, and a single horn, slightly inclined forward from the perpendicular.” Not only that, but bipedal beavers as tall as humans. Based on the Sun’s account, Collins describes them “skating gracefully among their villages of tall huts, which all had chimneys, showing them to be acquainted with the use of fire.”

Then on August 28th came the kicker. Herschel had spotted humans up there on the moon—4-foot-tall humans “with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane,” the Sun reported. They had built giant sapphire pyramids, and apparently had a fondness for cucumbers. Perhaps more importantly for the hoaxster journalists—Richard Adams Locke (a descendent of philosopher John Locke) and Sun publisher Moses Beach—The New York Times and New York Evening Post endorsed the claims as entirely plausible. So it seemed a good a time as any for the men to compile their stories into a book: Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope, 60,000 copies of which sold out in a flash.

Notice the whatcha thinkin bout bat person at lower left. Wikimedia

Locke eventually made the mistake of confiding his secret to a journalist friend (as if you needed another reminder not to trust journalists with secrets), and the whole thing fell to pieces. The Sun, ever the champion of the public good, claimed, no joke, that it was actually all a public service… to get the nation to stop worrying so much for a second about that whole slavery thing.

John Herschel, supposed discoverer of life on the moon and a 24/7 party animal. Julia Margaret Cameron/Wikimedia

Dick died in 1857, and his books on the many beings of the universe went out of print not long after, due at least in part, according to Collins, to the fact that “Dick’s narrative became almost less credible than Locke’s.” The compiled newspaper hoaxes went through five editions, the last published in 1871.
And just two years after Dick’s death, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Dick’s brand of natural theology, long on the wane, would not survive it. Darwin had put forth a shocking theory (for Victorian minds, at least) that explained life as we know it without a creator. Even true scientists with strong allegiances to God, like Richard Owen, who famously battled Darwin’s blasphemous idea to his death, were snuffed by the intellectual tsunami that was evolution by natural selection.

Today it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the solar system is home to 22 trillion beings scattered across the planets and asteroids (unless they’re microbes). But one of Dick’s ideas strikes me as particularly insightful: Intelligent inhabitants of Venus are blessed by God with enormous mountains, which they might climb to enjoy the vista. OK, not that bit specifically, but the idea that we “need not imagine there will be any great difficulty in ascending such lofty eminences; for the inhabitants of such worlds may be furnished with bodies different from those of the human race, and endowed with locomotive powers far superior to ours.”

Today, we expect the very same of our aliens. No, we don’t have any evidence of their existence, but we can be pretty confident that if it were possible to survive the insanely hot surface of Venus, life would have to look a whole lot different than what we have on Earth. More realistically, we can only imagine what life might look like in the icy seas of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

I’m willing to bet it isn’t bipedal beavers, though.

References:

Collins, P. (2001) Banvard’s Folly: 13 Tales of People Who Didn’t Change the World. Picador, New York, NY.
Dick, T. (1845) Celestial Scenery. Edward Biddle: Philadelphia, PA.

Ball Lighening with Louis Proud

This is not about the continuum or other language gymnastics. It is about ball lightening.  We have posted on this before and there the author proposed that we were dealing with a stripped ball of nuclei.  In the end it is a good maybe. 


With our fresh understanding of dark matter we have more flexibility.  Dark Matter has the dimensionality of the electron and may be a pairing that is naturally neutral.  I am hesitant naming them yet because options do exist that needs to be tested out in simulation.  However it is clear that they must be effectively neutral with low level ability to interact.


Thus, the simple expedient of a 'electron' pair adding a free electron provides a powerful tool to move electrons in mass and to work with them.  In fact it is useful for completely rewritting our present understanding of electricity.


Thus a lightening bolt and a lightening ball are both gases naturally saturated with electron saturated Dark Matter.  Movement is facilitated by the creation of wave guides to provide boundaries.

What is eliminated is the problem of electronic repulsion.  It is now close to neutral.  That was the theoretical issue and we suddenly do not have to deal with it.


Strange Electromagnetic Dimensions: The Science of the Unexplainable

November 25, 2014

Louis Proud

This article is an excerpt from Louis Proud’s new book Strange Electromagnetic Dimensions: The Science of the Unexplainable – Chapter 7: The Fifth Force

Once relegated to the realm of myth and imagination, ball lightning has gradually gained acceptance among scientists as a real—albeit rare, fleeting, and elusive—aerial phenomenon. Although it’s not unheard of for ball lightning to be seen during perfect weather, it’s generally associated with thunderstorms, typically occurring near the ground after an incident of cloud-to-ground lightning.

Ranging in size from one half inch to many meters in diameter, ball lightning can occur in a variety of different colors, the most common being red, orange, and yellow. It’s luminous enough to be seen clearly in daylight; rarely is it dazzling. Most instances of ball lightning last only ten seconds or less; instances of more than a minute are rare. Often the object is accompanied by a hissing sound and distinct odor resembling ozone, burning sulfur, or nitric oxide. In most cases, the object will be seen to move about and then vanish, decaying either explosively or silently. “After the ball has decayed, it is sometimes reported that a mist or residue remains,” Martin Uman explains. “Occasionally a ball lightning has been observed to break up into two or more smaller balls.”1

Countless theories have been advanced to explain the existence of ball lightning. One such theory views the phenomenon as magnetic field induced hallucinations caused by being in close proximity to a lightning strike. However, without overlooking the possibility that there may be many different types of ball lightning, each with its own mechanism of production, the phenomenon can best be explained as a form of high-density plasma. While some of the attempts by physicists to create ball lightning in the laboratory have yielded intriguing results, so far none of them have come close to producing anything as spectacular and awe-inspiring as that which nature produces herself.

Proving that ball lightning is physically real is the fact that numerous cases exist where the object has left behind traces of physical damage, such as by burning or melting objects in the vicinity, or by injuring or killing people and animals. There are cases where ball lightning has left perfectly circular holes in panes of glass, in some cases by melting a hole straight through the glass; in other cases by removing a circular piece of glass as though by means of a glass cutter. It’s possible, too, for ball lightning to pass straight through a pane of glass—or wall, ceiling, or floor—without the least amount of hindrance. It can even enter a room by squeezing through the keyhole of the door, adjusting its shape in order to fit. Just as mysterious, ball lightning has a tendency to enter homes via the chimney.

A family panics as ball lightning enters their home (from The Aerial World by G. Hartwig, 1886.) Image courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Putting aside for the moment the more spectacular characteristics of the phenomenon, let’s take a look at a typical incident of ball lightning, as reported by E. Matts of England on November 10, 1940:

“I was working at the far end of my garden; the weather was normal, no rain, [and] no signs of thunder. Suddenly I seemed to be in the centre of intense blackness and looking down [I] observed at my feet a ball about 2 ft. across. It was of a pale blue-green colour and seemed made of a mass of writhing strings of light, about 1/4 in. in diameter. It remained there for about three seconds and then rose, away from me, just missing a poplar tree about 3 ft. away. It cleared the house by about 20 ft. and landed at the rear of the Weavers Arms on the Bell Green road, a distance of about 1/4 mile. There was a loud explosion and much damage was done to the public house.”2

Sometimes ball lightning materializes inside homes, airplanes, and other types of enclosures, suggesting as a possible mechanism of production some form of electrostatic induction. The following case took place in 1960 onboard a KC-97 U.S. Air Force tanker en route to Nevada:

“As I was concentrating on the instruments on the panel (no outside visual references were visible) a ball of yellow-white color approximately 18” in diameter emerged through the windshield center panels and passed at a rate about that of a fast run between my left seat and the co-pilot’s right seat, down the cabin passageway past the Navigator and Engineer. I had been struck by lightning two times through the years in previous flights and recall waiting for the explosion of the ball of light! I was unable to turn around and watch the progress of the ball as it proceeded to the rear of the aircraft, as I was expecting the explosion with a full load of JP-4 fuel aboard and concentrated on flying the aircraft. After approximately 3 seconds of amazingly quiet reaction by the 4 crew members in the flight compartment, the Boom operator sitting in the rear of the aircraft called on the interphone in an excited voice describing a ball of fire that came rolling through the aft cargo compartment abeam the wings, then danced out over the right wing and rolling off into the night and clouds! No noise accompanied the arrival or departure of the phenomenon.”3

By far the strangest ball lightning reports are those where the object displays apparent intelligence. According to Paul Snigier (1943–2008) in his book Ball Lightning: Paradox of Physics (2004), “Although many balls act dumb, others exhibit puzzling behavior that seems almost supernatural and quasi-intelligent. Some balls chase people across fields and up or down stairs. A few circle people, spiraling up from the knee level to the head and then dart out the nearest window or up a chimney, then explode.”4 Snigier, who wrote Ball Lightning under the pseudonym Paul Sagan, worked as an electrical engineer for Raytheon and Texas Instruments, later becoming editor of the computer magazinesMini Microsystems and Digital Design.

Featured in Paul Devereux’s book Earth Lights Revelation is a clear and credible report of seemingly intelligent ball lightning. The report was sent to Devereux by a University of Illinois industrial design professor named William Becker. Becker’s ball lightning encounter took place in the summer of 1958, while on a canoeing trip with five high school friends in a region north of Grand Marias, Minnesota. At one point during the trip, the weather turned bad, forcing Becker and his friends to seek shelter in an abandoned cabin. Becker and one of his friends made themselves comfortable in the back room of the cabin; the others occupied the remaining rooms.

Before long the rain outside had turned into a downpour and the sky had darkened considerably with the onset of evening. Becker opened the window a crack to emit some of the heat that had accumulated in the room throughout the day. A moment later, he and his friend saw “what looked like a flashlight moving around outside the opened window.”5 At first Becker assumed he was witnessing a prank perpetrated by a member of the group. He picks up the story:

“To our complete amazement, the ‘flashlight’ illumination began to squeeze through the open, one-inch crack above the window sill. As we watched, a ‘bubble’ of light emerged from the space in the open window and slowly floated into the room. The lightball I estimated to be just larger than a basketball. It hung in the air a moment and seemed to be making a lot of rapid short movements which added up to overall ‘smooth’ motions.

“The ball had a bright outer perimeter of yellow-white light with an inner core of darker orange light. As it moved from the window on my right to just in front of me, I saw what looked like ‘worms’ or short ‘strings’ of light writhing at its center. It made no sound, but slowly descended towards the floor where an old black and white, Indian-style rug still lay inside the door. Inexplicably, the lightball moved down just over the rug, and as it continued across the room from my right to my left, it ‘traced’ or followed the dark patterns in the rug on its course. It then slowly proceeded towards the end of the room where it angled away and shrunk in size as if finding an escape hole in the corner kick boards. In a moment, it was gone.”6

Before Becker and his friend had time to discuss the astonishing incident, they heard from behind the wall of the room “a sharp piercing report, like a loud firecracker.”7 The following day they found, at the location where the explosion had occurred, some damage in the form of a broken drain pipe connection. It is Becker’s hypothesis that “lightning must have interacted with some of the many copper deposits in the area to produce the ball.”8

“If not a rational skeptic, your author could suspect that fireballs might be a transient life form with some form of “alien” intelligence,” Snigier adds. “Perhaps DNA-based life is not the only form of life on earth. If so, then are fireballs non-carbon-based life forms?”9

The notion of ball lightning as non-carbon based life forms is not as outrageous as it sounds. In fact, a number of erudite UFO researchers view both ball lightning and their “cousins” earth lights as “plasma-based” life forms indigenous to Earth.

I wish to conclude our discussion on ball lightning with the following quote by William R. Corliss (1926–2011), a respected physicist and author of books on scientific anomalies: “Perhaps the intense electrical forces occurring during some thunderstorms somehow distort our space-time continuum and provide a fleeting glimpse into some unknown cosmos. Ball lightning is strange enough to stimulate such wild thoughts.”10

Footnotes

1. Uman, M. A., All About Lightning, Dover Publications, Inc., US, 1971, 129.

2. Corliss, William R., Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, Gramercy Books, US, 1977, 19. (Report originally appeared in Weather, 19: 228, 1964.)

3. Uman, M. A., “Some Comments on Ball Lightning,” Journal of Atmospheric and Terrestrial Physics, Vol. 30, No. 6, 1968, 1245–1246.

4. Sagan, Paul, Ball Lightning: Paradox of Physics, iUniverse, Inc., US, 2004, 3.

5. Devereux, Paul, Earth Lights Revelation, Blandford Press, UK, 1989, 15.

6. Ibid, 15.

7. Ibid, 15.

8. Ibid, 15.

9. Ibid, 280.

10. Corliss, Handbook of Unusual Natural Phenomena, 18.

Reprinted, with permission of the publisher, from STRANGE ELECTROMAGNETIC DIMENSIONS © 2015 Louis Proud. Published by New Page Books a division of Career Press, Pompton Plains, NJ. 800-227-3371. All rights reserved. Click here to order the book.