Probably no topic so divides science and the “new age” as UFOs. A recent column in Astronomy Magazine entitled, “Let’s cut the UFO crap,” makes the point that it is only naivete about the cosmic distant scale than allows people to believe in UFO’s. This is a powerful argument when one considers distant scales. The closest star to the Earth other than the sun is Alpha Centauri, which 4.37 light years — or over 25 trillion miles away. An extremely fast spacecraft traveling at 100,000 mph (the record for a manned spacecraft is just under 40,000 mph) would take about 28,000 years to reach the Alpha Centauri planet. And this is the closest possible one. So from this perspective, the notion that alien spacecraft are roaming the sky, darting in and out of our vision, waiting for the right moment to land, seems preposterous. The scientific case builds...
...
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, the author of many popular science books, and a regular columnist in Scientific American. In his book, The Believing Brain, he tries to explain how the common person comes to believe in strange things, such as God, miracles, Heaven, the survival of the soul after death, and psychic phenomena. According to Shermer, “reality exists independent of human minds, but our understanding of it depends upon the beliefs we hold. ” (Believing Brain, 5). In a tell-tale sign of his materialistic tendencies, he criticizes claims of psychic phenomena by stating that “until psi proponents can explain how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender’s brain can pass through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response. ” (Id. 149). (This is materialistic because Shermer assumes that mindless particles are the source of reality and anything that cannot...
...
A synchronicity is a rare coincidence that suggests “something is up.” We all have them and it is fun to record them as they happen and then to go back and see if they seem as strange as when they first occurred. For example, I was researching regulations at Lake Carroll, Illinois on whether boat lifts were allowed in docking areas. That evening I received an email from a work colleague entitled, “The Boatlifters: The Story of 9-11.” I was reading the book, His Excellency, by Joseph Ellis and came across the word, “ukase,” which I had never seen before. The next day, the word of the day on the elevator news screen was —– ukase, a Russian word meaning directive. I was on the phone with a contractor and was giving him my wife’s name, “Suzanne” and said it was spelled like Suzanne Sommers. At that moment he expressed...
...
If we want to find the source for what ails the human mind — and by that I mean the world at large — it is that our mind, on the most fundamental level, is deeply in conflict. Finding the source for an ailment is the key to curing it, whether the ailment is a sore from a splinter or a world-mind in conflict. The conflict is that we are living precariously balanced between two incompatible worldviews: the world as machine and the world as spirit. And science, the leading architect of our worldview, knows the world-as-machine model is wrong, but it is not quite ready to advertise this fact. By “world-mind,” I mean our modern mindset, also known as the scientific worldview. The reason why this worldview is important is because it is the most fundamental lens through which we see the world; it filters everything else we see, touch,...
...
A forewarning: This blog will advance a radical position, by which I mean a position that is a lot different than the one currently in vogue in mainstream science. But as Einstein so famously said, we cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. So this blog approaches the topic of aging from a different level of consciousness. Let’s see what happens. Google is one of the world’s most successful, admired, and richest companies. But its investment in traditional pharmaceutical treatments to slow down the aging process shows that wisdom in technology does not always translate into wisdom in metaphysics. Google is far ahead of the curve technologically, but behind the curve in understanding where human consciousness is heading. (I said this would be a radical blog.) Its investment in pharmaceutical treatments to slow down the aging process assumes the body is a machine...
...