Category: link

As Luck Would Have It …

After several days (and nights) working over the main pages of this site, catching up, I got around to adding a link to John Beckett’s blog, Under the Ancient Oaks, in the Reading Room. He always has something useful to me. I randomly picked an older post of his that I hadn’t read, and it went to the heart of my musings.

Shall I call it Divination via Beckett, a version of the old method of opening the Bible to a random page and taking to heart what you read there?

What is Seen Cannot Be Unseen was right on.

A sign I used to see with some regularity said “In God we trust – all others pay cash.” It was intended as a comment on the realities of cashflow in a small business, but in a completely different context it explains the worldview of mainstream Western society. That is, it’s nominally Christian but highly materialist.

Most people don’t think deeply about spiritual matters. They pay them lip service, particularly when they’re used to justify their preferred cultural and political positions. They pray when they’re in trouble, but not otherwise. The nature of the divine? What comes after death? Why we’re here? Nobody’s got time for that.

When it comes down to it, they really don’t believe in ghosts, or demons, or even Gods. When they experience something that points toward the existence and agency of spiritual persons, they look for “a rational explanation” (by which they mean one grounded in materialism) and if they can’t find one, they’ll make one up.

But sometimes, people experience something that defies a materialist explanation. They have an encounter with a God, or an other-than-divine spirit, or they see magic work in a way that can’t be denied.

All of a sudden they’re confronted with the fact that the world is a lot bigger and a lot stranger than they thought it was.

And we know what happens when most people are presented with evidence that their core beliefs and opinions are false. They deny the evidence and double down on what they’ve always assumed was true. They tell themselves it was a coincidence, a trick of the light, their imagination.

But deep down, they know what they saw, what they heard, what they experienced. They may not have the context to interpret it properly, but at some level they know it’s real.

And it scares the hell out of them.

John Beckett: “What is Seen Cannot be Unseen” 13 January 2022

Meaning and Understanding

At the heart of our understanding of All That Is — the Universe around us, the Gods, the daily news — is cognition. How we think. What our minds do with what our senses offer as input and what we have already processed and stored, whether we remember it or not. And it turns out that humankind developed our current capabilities in cognition over eons — indeed, we wouldn’t expect it to be any other way, but, of course, we take it for granted.

The video below is the first in a series by Prof. John Vervaeke, of the University of Toronto Psychology Department and Cognitive Science Program, laying out the details of our human cognitive development against the history of human development.

And this brought to my mind the course in Pagan Apologetics I took at Cherry Hill Seminary, taught by Dr. David Oringderff of Sacred Well Congregation, the premise of which was that Paganism is the indigenous religion of humankind.

There is a lot of content in this video, delivered in straight lecture style in front of an almost-useless whiteboard. Conveniently, YouTube lists the books Vervaeke mentions:

  • Michael Anderson – After Phrenology: Neural Reuse and the Interactive Brain
  • Barry Boyce (Editor) – The Mindfulness Revolution: Leading Psychologists, Scientists, Artists, and Meditation Teachers on the Power of Mindfulness in Daily Life
  • Andy Clark – Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence
  • Michel Ferrari and Nic Weststrate (Editors) – The Scientific Study of Personal Wisdom: From Contemplative Traditions to Neuroscience
  • Harry Frankfurt – On Bullsh*t
  • David Lewis-Williams – The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
  • L. A. Paul – Transformative Experience
  • Massimo Pigliucci – How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life
  • Matt Rossano – Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved
  • Daniel Siegel – Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation
  • Steve Taylor – Waking From Sleep: Why Awakening Experiences Occur and How to Make Them Permanent
  • John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic – Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis
  • Michael Winkelman – Shamanism: A Biopsychosocial Paradigm of Consciousness and Healing
  • Susan Wolf – Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

Just as we did in Pagan Apologetics, Vervaeke looks back to our primitive human ancestors, the physical traces they left, and the differences between those who came before and those who came after. He focuses in this episode on the transition from the middle- to the upper- paleolithic, about 45,000 years ago, as the Neanderthal population faded out and the human population expanded out of Africa.

What I want to do is point to a time when many people think our humanity, the kind of people we are now, came into form. Not fully like the way it is now, because of course there’s been lots of historical and cultural processes, but the kind of humanity that we would recognize as “us” and how much this was bound up with meaning making in the way that I’ve been talking about.

Episode 1

This episode is just under one hour, and it moves quickly. The second half gets into the details of the upper paleolithic transition, focusing on the work of the shaman, on ritual, and on the various ways of knowing. It is better experienced than read, but the transcripts are available.

Beltane for Kids

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/paganfamilies/2015/04/beltane-for-kids/

Love – love is a huge part of Beltane, and it’s not just sexual or love for a partner.  Talk to your children about their love for family, friends, and the world around them.  Plan a ritual involving a brother/sister deity pair, or a parent/child relationship.  Celebrate that love comes in many forms.

Passion – what is your child passionate about?  Sexual passion is certainly not the only kind there is!  What is your child strongly interested in, fiercely dedicated to?  Do they spend hours practicing piano, drawing pictures, writing stories?  Turn that into a ritual!  Invite the patron deities of what they’re passionate about, ask for their blessings on your child – this will help them understand the concept a thousand times better than attending a symbolic Great Rite.

Creativity – when you break it down far enough, the magic of fertility is all about an act of creation.  Plan a rite that features a craft of activity that gives your child an opportunity to make something, to bring something new into the world.  It can be anything!  Plant a few seeds, sculpt with salt dough, anything your child will be excited and proud to have made.  Younger children may not understand the magic and mystery inherent to baby-making, but making an awesome finished product from simple ingredients is just as magical for them!

About Molly Khan

Molly Khan is a writer, student, and mother of three from the Midwest prairie. She is a founding member and liturgist for Prairie Shadow Protogrove, ADF. She writes about her joys and struggles as a mother and a Heathen Druid, as well as her experiences raising children in an interfaith household at thepagangrove.blogspot.com.

Scale of the Universe — NASA APOD 14 January 2012

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140112.html

What does the universe look like on small scales? On large scales? Humanity is discovering that the universe is a very different place on every proportion that has been explored. For example, so far as we know, every tiny proton is exactly the same, but every huge galaxy is different. On more familiar scales, a small glass table top to a human is a vast plane of strange smoothness to a dust mite — possibly speckled with cell boulders. Not all scale lengths are well explored — what happens to the smallest mist droplets you sneeze, for example, is a topic of active research — and possibly useful to know to help stop the spread of disease. The above interactive flash animation, a modern version of the classic video Powers of Ten, is a new window to many of the known scales of our universe. By moving the scroll bar across the bottom, you can explore a diversity of sizes, while clicking on different items will bring up descriptive information.

A Ritual for the Elements

http://witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/to-be-a-witch/a-ritual-for-the-elements.html

Posted to Witches and Pagans blog by Gwion Raven on Thursday, 16 April 2015

Working with the Elements is a core piece of magic I teach in the Reclaiming Tradition. I revisit this work every so often as a teacher and as a student. In my last five articles I’ve chronicled my explorations with Air, my connections with Fire, my dive into Water, my complex dance the Earth and finally finding myself standing in the Center.

for the full ritual on this site, click:

A Ritual for the Elements

Science proves God (MIT) by Gerald Schroeder, PhD

Published on August 2, 2014

 

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Gerald Schroeder is a scientist with over thirty years of experience in research and teaching. He earned his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Doctorate degrees all at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with his doctorate thesis being under the supervision of physics professor Robley D. Evans. This was followed by five years on the staff of the MIT physics department prior to moving to Israel, where he joined the Weizmann Institute of Science and then the Volcani Research Institute, while also having a laboratory at The Hebrew University. His Doctorate is in two fields: Earth sciences and physics.

Schroeder’s formal theological training in biblical, talmudic and kabalistic interpretation includes fifteen years of study under the late Rabbi Herman Pollack, Rabbi Chaim Brovender and Rabbi Noah Weinberg, of blessed memory.

The scientific career that Schroeder chose has given him varied and often unusual experiences. In his work with nuclear disarmament, he has been present at the detonation of six atomic bombs. Work in control of radioactivity has put him hundreds of meters below ground in U.S. and foreign uranium mines. Within this research, he invented and had patented the first real time monitor for airborne alpha beta gamma emitters. The government of the People’s Republic of China, during the decade before it established direct contacts with Israel, was willing to overlook his Jerusalem address and had him as a frequent advisor. He also has consulted for agencies of the governments of Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, USA. Invitations for him to lecture have come from around the world. He has over 60 publications in the world’s leading scientific journals on topics ranging from the radon atmosphere of the moon (in Science) to the metabolism of mother’s milk (in Nutrition Reports International). The results of Schroeder’s work have been reported in Time, Newsweek, Scientific American and in newspapers as far apart as Boston and Adelaide. His formal training in chemistry, physics and the Earth and planetary sciences provides the basis for the broad scientific perspective he brings to his books and lectures.

For the past twenty-five years, Dr. Schroeder has also pursued a study of ancient biblical interpretation. An ability to handle the biblical material in the original languages allows him to tap the subtle depths contained in the original texts. These nuances are often missed when working with translations. The uniqueness and success of Schroeder’s approach integrating biblical and scientific knowledge is demonstrated by the success of his first book, Genesis and the Big Bang (published by Bantam Doubleday), and the wide acclaim for his second book The Science of God (published by The Free Press of Simon & Schuster and Broadway Books of Bantam Doubleday) which was on the Barnes & Noble list of non-fiction best sellers and was Amazon.com’s best selling book in the field of physics/cosmology for all of 1998. This was followed by The Hidden Face of God, discovering the unity that binds all existence (published by The Free Press of Simon & Schuster). His book, God According to God, A scientist proves we’ve been wrong about God all along, was published in May 2009 with HarperOne and has enthusiastic endorsements by leading theologians, both Jewish and Christian, and a Noble Laureate scientist.

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http://geraldschroeder.com
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