She Brings Wicca to Psychotherapy With Tangible Results |329|

thx Malf. I take back everything I've said about skeptics never changing their mind :)

Heh... I really enjoyed how you (respectfully) pushed Dr Kent to justify her position, and look forward to more shows in this style. No more free passes :) Folks with well thought out positions should have nothing to fear.

Her take (that her experience trumps all else) is difficult to wrangle but you handled it well. I could tell you got frustrated at times and maybe it reminded you of what the (so called) skeptics are sometimes up against when confronted with this type of thinking.
 
Well not so much as they are all suspect but taken together it's not clear what's real and what's not.

That people see Jesus, a figure who likely has some of the highest levels of global recognition, during NDEs isn't at all surprising. Counter this with the commonality of seeing a Harlequin Trickster when on DMT.

Admittedly even there you have the possibility, especially now, of people expecting such a figure to appear but this unusual commonality seems much more striking to me than people seeing Jesus? Especially when it occurred in earlier times before the internet really got off the ground. (There may even be a pre-internet recording of these Trickster sightings but haven't been able to track down a copy of the study.)

Nice post. How do people who say they've seen Jesus know they've seen Jesus? Did he look like the classical painters' representations? Was he black? Was there a resemblance to Robert Powell?

These are important questions.
 
I think that with someone like Jane Kent, it is probably best to listen and draw whatever conclusions you want to draw afterwards - she clearly wasn't going to engage in a philosophical discussion.

However, I think I'd have liked to hear more about her successes with her patients.

David
 
Before this comment, there was this:



↑ This exchange convinced me that she was just following you around, exploiting an opportunity to express her stance on Christianity without having a concrete idea of what the concept of CC really is.

I don't have a concrete idea of what the mental CONCEPT of CC is either. And I've had one NDE and several OBE's (which, btw, happened to me exactly as she described...beginning with vibrations). I did have one experience where I "merged with a golden being"....and woke up feeling exhilarated. Is that what Christ Consciousness FEELS like? My own opinion/interpretation of Christ consciousness is that it perhaps FEELS like a super-numinous ecstatic joyous experience with another "more than human" being. If so, then I had that experience, but was not compelled to identify the "golden being" as Christ. (Actually, the name Michael came to me as a name.) On the other hand, did my experiences cause a spiritual transformation? You bet.
While I enjoyed the interview, Alex, I had a difficult time when you were giving her the "hard ball" treatment. It all sounded a bit like a tautology...couldn't really understand what you were trying to get at.
 
Perhaps he means dreams? The way in which projections like nightmares can increase pulse rate and anxiety up to morbidly high levels.

No, I actually went on a whole speal about what I defined the Kruger effect as in my post. I can only assume you didn't read that far considering it was more than a paragraph of description of the phenomenon as I have encountered it thus far.

I can't find any mention of The Kruger Effect. Can you point to some reference?

I can't point to any other reference, it's something I've encountered myself and defined myself as a result. I don't fully understand it yet and studying it is not particularly easy. But I named it after Freddy Kruger of Nightmare on Elm Street fame. Ironically I have never had the Kruger Effect happen via a dream. Or at least not that I have managed to confirm. But many through consciious, waking projection which were also much easier to confirm.
 
Are you unaware of the NDE experience, in which a substantial proportion of people who suffer a cardiac arrest (or are otherwise close to death) experience a separation of their consciousness from their body? Once out of their body, the report seeing their body, and then travel to another place. The OBE experience (which Jane described) is also reported by many people, though much less common than NDE's (I think).

And so I state again, it depends on our respective definitions of materialism. I don't believe any of that neccessarily cannot be considered materialistic. Assuming the definition is that of some form of universal mathematical laws that arbitrate interactions between things. Even if those universal laws are themselves arbitrary. I've gone through OBE's and the like myself, that's what I train myself to do, but I don't see a reason to consider it separate from the idea of the body. At most i conside it just another material no diffrerent than how copper has different properties than carbon. I see no reason to shove it off into it's own special little corner and act like it's any different.

There are plenty of people who have scientific acreditation, who hold all sorts of views.

Back to the cop analogy, is a police officer who goes around murdering and stealing really a police officer? B

ecause if not, then it means there's certain vies and beliefs that one must neccessarily hold in order to meet the definition of a title and there are also some views that they must neccessarily not hold. A scientist that does not believe in the scientific method is not a scientist.

Are you suggesting that we just allow anyone off the streets to consider themselves a scientist?Are you suggesting we do not debate claims and weigh evidence because "oh it might hurt someone's feeings?" Are you saying we should not hold people to account and have standards of what is considered scientific and what is not because people have all sorts of views?

We want discussion here, not verbal aggression, so please moderate your tone

And I want standards to be upheld. I expect and demand that people rip into me the same way I ripped into her arguments if I was acting that hypocritically. Because I care about myself and what I am trying to achieve. I also care about the other people genuinely trying as well that get hurt by association because lazy people let standards slip. If someone is too fragile to handle the critique and critisism and can only focus on things like the tone of voice rather than the points I state then they don't really care about improving and learning. They just want to be told that they've improved and learned.

I did take your advice and posted in the intro section though, go check it out if you want to know a little more about me.
 
you've gotten to the heart of it here! my take is that every great spiritual master past and present has taught that "love and selfless service towards others" is the path.... but you disagree... ok, at least we've honed in on the issue.

I don't know if I neccessarily dissagree, just that it is somewhat irrational to say that love and selfless service are "the point" of all of this. doing so neccessarily limits reality by explicitly stating that if you are not living your life that way then you are somehow intrinsically wrong. Stating that it is effectively part of the laws of physics. However if this were the case you should not be able to find any exceptions to the rule, and yet you do. For example, wolves will take down a moose and begin eating it's stomach while the moose is still alive, not exactly loving or "humane" is it? People hurt other people for any number of reasons, often believing that they're doing the right thing, hence the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." But not always, some people hurt others because they find it fun, thus directly disobeying the idea that the point of life or the purpose of the universe is love and selfless service towards others. since this is the case it cannot be a rule at all, at best just a subjective suggestion.

There's a common idea amongst many martial arts that you train to acquire the power to hurt others in the hopes that you will never need to use it. So far the only evidence I've ever found of anything approaching an absolute rule of the universe is that power determines everything, Although power is a very complex multifactoral dynamic measure. Despite that the rule seems to hold that whoever has the most power, gets their way, regardless of what they believe or how others feel about it. However it is also true that whoever applies their power most accurately wastes the least. I.e the more you work with how things really are, not your own feelings, the more you are able to achieve with less effort. So far in my own training complete neutrality seems to be the most accurate and objective view of reality. Which is somewhat paradoxical when you are trying to achieve goals. I didn't get into this in my comment in the introductions thread but a huge amount of the effective methods I've developed more or less boil down to "Acknowledging reality for the purpose of rejecting it."

In other words, even if someone want's life to be about love and selfless service towards others, they still need to recognize that it's not about that at all in order to be most effective.
 
No, I actually went on a whole speal about what I defined the Kruger effect as in my post. I can only assume you didn't read that far considering it was more than a paragraph of description of the phenomenon as I have encountered it thus far.
Do you mean a tulpa? A manifestation of individual or group anxiety or aspiration?
 
Back to the cop analogy, is a police officer who goes around murdering and stealing really a police officer? Because if not, then it means there's certain vies and beliefs that one must neccessarily hold in order to meet the definition of a title and there are also some views that they must neccessarily not hold. A scientist that does not believe in the scientific method is not a scientist.
Well if you see it as your job to police this forum (as opposed to discuss your views), then you will soon be out!
Are you suggesting that we just allow anyone off the streets to consider themselves a scientist?Are you suggesting we do not debate claims and weigh evidence because "oh it might hurt someone's feeings?" Are you saying we should not hold people to account and have standards of what is considered scientific and what is not because people have all sorts of views?
My view is that over the last 80 years or so, science has deliberately distanced itself from many of the things we discuss here. Before that, some of our greatest scientists - Pauli, and Schrödinger, to name but two, took a keen interest in such matters. If they were alive now, they would be ostracised within science for such views, and yet there has been no great proof obtained in the intervening years that concepts such as consciousness free of the body are false.

Some issues are inevitably subjective. For example, you say you have had an OBE, but you could not prove that assertion to someone who didn't believe in such things - indeed some would attack you for making an unscientific claim!. I feel that someone like Jane Kent should be listened to for her experiences, and really the only way to evaluate her work would be to obtain some statistics on the proportion of people that she manages to help/cure. Listening respectfully to a podcast such as hers, does not imply total agreement, but it makes one aware of another strand of human experience that may or may not be valid.

Some people with mental problems get very little help from conventional medicine - that sounds as if it was the case for the first patient she discussed - and anyone who can make progress with such troubled patients has to be taken seriously.

The root problem here, is that science has a very shaky grasp of the nature of consciousness. Some would like to think of consciousness as a sort of computation performed with 'wetware' rather than hardware! One obvious problem with that idea is that there is zero reason to expect that a computer running some algorithm would actually have experiences (qualia) - though of course, it could be made to pretend to some extent - printf("Ouch - that hurt!\n") if you like!

Unfortunately, the idea that consciousness is confined to the brain, and is in effect some sort of computation, has become so ingrained, that all the evidence that indicates this is not so, gets ignored. For example, Dean Radin has performed a long series of experiments (replicated by others) that show that people become subconsciously aware of an upcoming shock for a period of about 2-3 seconds prior to the event. His experiments are run by computer, and he uses skin conductance to measure the state of arousal, and the computer uses a genuinely random number generator (i.e. one based on quantum randomness) to decide what to present to the subject after the excess arousal has been measured! The effect is known as presentiment.

Part of this forum is devoted to the shortcomings of modern science - as for example, in Alex's book. We discuss science a lot here, but we sure as hell don't worship it uncritically!

David
 
...but this unusual commonality seems much more striking to me than people seeing Jesus?
I don't think these kind of comparisons are every going to be quantifiable/verifiable/meaningful. seems to me like we're better off accepting that both are realities of the extended consciousness realm.
 
You've already threatened to boot this guy a couple of times and all he has done is displayed a bit of zealousness. Tone down the moderation a notch, please.
kinda agree. he was just taking Jane to task... fair game... whether justified or not.
 
Heh... I really enjoyed how you (respectfully) pushed Dr Kent to justify her position, and look forward to more shows in this style. No more free passes :) Folks with well thought out positions should have nothing to fear.
agreed. thx to you and others who have nudged me in this direction.
 
Nice post. How do people who say they've seen Jesus know they've seen Jesus? Did he look like the classical painters' representations? Was he black? Was there a resemblance to Robert Powell?

These are important questions.
this is a bit of a materialist trap... I mean, if yr accepting that these folks are having non-brain, after-death experiences, then it doesn't make a lot of sense to grill them on which Jesus (i.e. version of Christ consciousness) they saw.
 
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I don't have a concrete idea of what the mental CONCEPT of CC is either. And I've had one NDE and several OBE's (which, btw, happened to me exactly as she described...beginning with vibrations). I did have one experience where I "merged with a golden being"....and woke up feeling exhilarated. Is that what Christ Consciousness FEELS like? My own opinion/interpretation of Christ consciousness is that it perhaps FEELS like a super-numinous ecstatic joyous experience with another "more than human" being. If so, then I had that experience, but was not compelled to identify the "golden being" as Christ. (Actually, the name Michael came to me as a name.) On the other hand, did my experiences cause a spiritual transformation? You bet.
yr making my point :)
1. when we talk about NDErs who encounter Jesus/Christ, we're not talking about a physical/historical being... by definition we're talking about some kind of spirit being... easier to call it Christ consciousness.
2. beyond that it's up to the NDEr/OBEr/Mystic to tell us what they mean... we're in the "something like Christ" space.

then again, as you report, most folks don't identify the figure/feeling/spirit-being as being "Jesus"... and that's ok too.

While I enjoyed the interview, Alex, I had a difficult time when you were giving her the "hard ball" treatment. It all sounded a bit like a tautology...couldn't really understand what you were trying to get at.
disagree... without the hardballing I never would have gotten to the "Jesus didn't exist so these people can't possibly be seeing him" silliness.
 
I don't think these kind of comparisons are every going to be quantifiable/verifiable/meaningful. seems to me like we're better off accepting that both are realities of the extended consciousness realm.

Well it could be neither.

Yet I do think if something unexpected, not in the culture, is shared between people during anomalous experiences it is quantifiably more interesting than people seeing a figure that is globally famous and expected by many to appear in the afterlife.
 
I don't know if I neccessarily dissagree, just that it is somewhat irrational to say that love and selfless service are "the point" of all of this. doing so neccessarily limits reality by explicitly stating that if you are not living your life that way then you are somehow intrinsically wrong.
I see what yr getting at. this is an interesting topic and one that I'm working on (skeptiko show-wise) right now. so right, I agree, wolf in the forest is ok with me... abducting children for sexual exploitation and murder is not:

We don't look at this stuff because we don't want it to be true, but I think it's a mistake to look away. we have to be very grounded in this reality (i.e. evil... maybe evil that mirror/mixes-with evil in spirit realms)... and be willing to look at where these tentacles reach.
 
kinda agree. he was just taking Jane to task... fair game... whether justified or not.
Well this is what I objected to.
Jane, you're an ideologue, just by having a belief in such a ridiculous and easily disprovable false dichotmy as "Good" and "Evil" you have proven you're an ideologue. But of course you went further with the also undefined concepts of "Masculine" and "Feminine." I'd expect someone who is claiming the title of "Doctor" to understand the importance of operational definitions in scientific study particularly during an interview on the subject you claim to have knowledge of.
She doesn't 'claim' the title of doctor, I assume she genuinely has a PhD! I am sure that when she agreed to the interview, she expected to ignite a brisk discussion, but not to be attacked personally - particularly when she was very non-aggressive herself.

I don't want to ban him, I just want him to realise that being rude to someone on here just because they have a vastly different point of view, can quickly become very unpleasant.

David
 
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I don't know if I neccessarily dissagree, just that it is somewhat irrational to say that love and selfless service are "the point" of all of this. doing so neccessarily limits reality by explicitly stating that if you are not living your life that way then you are somehow intrinsically wrong. Stating that it is effectively part of the laws of physics. However if this were the case you should not be able to find any exceptions to the rule, and yet you do. For example, wolves will take down a moose and begin eating it's stomach while the moose is still alive, not exactly loving or "humane" is it? People hurt other people for any number of reasons, often believing that they're doing the right thing, hence the phrase "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." But not always, some people hurt others because they find it fun, thus directly disobeying the idea that the point of life or the purpose of the universe is love and selfless service towards others. since this is the case it cannot be a rule at all, at best just a subjective suggestion.
I think the essence of this, is that physics only deals with physical matter. It is really hard to see how consciousness fits into the physical world (except perhaps by collapsing the wave function!), and a lot of people feel that it doesn't - that it is generated in a non-physical realm where the laws, if any, are about conscious things - inter-personal relations, love, hate, selflessness, ideas etc. This concept makes sense of a lot of phenomena such as NDE's and OBE's.

I think the examples you give is not humane, and I think there is a tension between good and evil. I don't think Jane was denying that. The problem is that all science can really say about the wolf would be that it evolved a good strategy for feeding itself and its young, or that the whole process is an example of the time evolution of the laws of physics - neither seems very useful!

Why not describe your own OBE (was it just one) and tell us how you rationalise what you experienced.

David
 
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