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What Are You Reading?

#1
Yazata Offline
I've started reading 'Being a Dog' by Alexandra Horowitz.

https://www.amazon.com/Being-Dog-Followi...1476795991

The book is very well written and reads more like a novel than a science book. It flows effortlessly and doesn't seem like work.

It's basically about the dog's extraordinary sense of smell. I found it at the library and as I'm growing increasingly interested in comparative cognition (how other sentient beings think, from the animals around us to hypothetical space-aliens), I picked it up.
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
My most recent book I read was "The Super Natural: A New Vision Of The Unexplained". It was written by Whitley Strieber and Jeffery Kripal, each chapter alternating in their authorship.

https://www.amazon.com/Super-Natural-New...1101982322

The book was a sort of two-pronged phenomenology of the supernatural, taken in the broad nontheistic sense of non-human interdimensional or earthbound beings that have a long history of interacting with the human race. The Strieber chapters were exciting musings over his and others' experiences in his upstate New York cabin over a period of about a year dealing with aliens, blue dwarves, and ghosts of dead people. The Kripal chapters amounted to hermeneutical and nuanced interpretations of those experiences in mythopoetic and spiritual terms. I came away from all this with a stronger assurance of the existence of the supernatural albeit a more confusing and mystified sense of "who" these beings are. The central point of the book is that they are in fact us and represent a higher evolving awareness of our metaphysical humanity. A familiarity with Jungian psychology is helpful here. I quote the Amazon review of book:
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"Whitley Strieber (Communion) and Jeffrey J. Kripal (J. Newton Rayzor professor of religion at Rice University) team up on this unprecedented and intellectually vibrant new framing of inexplicable events and experiences.

Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors--one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar and "renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies" (The New York Times)--deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life.

Their suggestion? That all kinds of "impossible" things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all: rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably more weird, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem "impossible."

The Super Natural considers that the natural world is actually a "super natural world"--and all we have to do to see this is to change the lenses through which we are looking at it and the languages through which we are presently limiting it. In short: The extraordinary exists if we know how to look at and think about it."
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#3
Ben the Donkey Offline
MR, This planet is going to do the big Kablooey, at some point. I'm sure you know that.
Believing in ghosts and the supernatural isn't going to change that, really.

Studying methods of propulsion and generational star ships might, though.
And that's the difference, really.
You believe in the supernatural - ok, that's fine.
Others believe in continuation of the species. That's fine too. There are more than a few who think those two beliefs aren't necessarily confrontational.

But only one of those approaches is going to lead to the survival of the species, at this point in time and according to our current understanding and knowledge.

It isn't yours. Those ghosts aren't giving us any information on how to survive apocalypses. From all descriptions I've read, they're pretty much only concerned with communicating how they arrived at their own. 
You know, I was unfairly accused and such, which.. well., you can hear that any time you like if you turn up at a high-security gaol. And stray there overnight.
Or you might hear from someone calling themselves a spirit communicator who happened to take a hotel room at the beaches around Dieppe circa 1943. 

Or, they call me the Wild Rose, but my name was Eliza Jane, or some such. 

Oh, and then there's the Aliens. Who are basically concerned only with our anatomy, for whatever reason. Maybe they're trying to warn us about something. 
Even though the Greenpeace movement seem to have things pretty much in hand at this point in terms of believeability. 
Because those Dolphins are far more in danger than we ever were, you know. Actually, fuck the Dolphins, let's talk about Frogs. Because they're disappearing far more quickly, and that has nothing to do with the domestic Cat, which murders species at a rate of... fuck that, cats are cute and cuddly. Did the Aliens have anything to do with Cats? Fuck them if they did. Murderous bastards. Cats and Aliens both. And Ghosts. Ghosts never had any good words to say about cats, did they.
Alright, maybe I don't mind ghosts too much. Fuck Cats. And maybe I don''t mind Aliens who are far more concerned with dissecting Frogs because they're going to disappear before we do. Or the Cats do. 
Or... anyway, (not so) sure you get my point. 
 
Or maybe they're only concerned with telling us we're all doomed unless we sort shit out, which is... well, pretty much the same thing we've been hearing from the human population since... decades ago. You know, scientists and wotnot. 

So unless you can come up with some conjecture relating to how exactly believing in ghosts is going to get us off this doomed rock, then.... what, exactly, are you trying to do?
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#4
Magical Realist Offline
(Mar 10, 2017 04:30 PM)Ben the Donkey Wrote: MR, This planet is going to do the big Kablooey, at some point. I'm sure you know that.
Believing in ghosts and the supernatural isn't going to change that, really.

Studying methods of propulsion and generational star ships might, though.
And that's the difference, really.
You believe in the supernatural - ok, that's fine.
Others believe in continuation of the species. That's fine too. There are more than a few who think those two beliefs aren't necessarily confrontational.

But only one of those approaches is going to lead to the survival of the species, at this point in time and according to our current understanding and knowledge.

It isn't yours. Those ghosts aren't giving us any information on how to survive apocalypses. From all descriptions I've read, they're pretty much only concerned with communicating how they arrived at their own. 
You know, I was unfairly accused and such, which.. well., you can hear that any time you like if you turn up at a high-security gaol. And stray there overnight.
Or you might hear from someone calling themselves a spirit communicator who happened to take a hotel room at the beaches around Dieppe circa 1943. 

Or, they call me the Wild Rose, but my name was Eliza Jane, or some such. 

Oh, and then there's the Aliens. Who are basically concerned only with our anatomy, for whatever reason. Maybe they're trying to warn us about something. 
Even though the Greenpeace movement seem to have things pretty much in hand at this point in terms of believeability. 
Because those Dolphins are far more in danger than we ever were, you know. Actually, fuck the Dolphins, let's talk about Frogs. Because they're disappearing far more quickly, and that has nothing to do with the domestic Cat, which murders species at a rate of... fuck that, cats are cute and cuddly. Did the Aliens have anything to do with Cats? Fuck them if they did. Murderous bastards. Cats and Aliens both. And Ghosts. Ghosts never had any good words to say about cats, did they.
Alright, maybe I don't mind ghosts too much. Fuck Cats. And maybe I don''t mind Aliens who are far more concerned with dissecting Frogs because they're going to disappear before we do. Or the Cats do. 
Or... anyway, (not so) sure you get my point. 
 
Or maybe they're only concerned with telling us we're all doomed unless we sort shit out, which is... well, pretty much the same thing we've been hearing from the human population since... decades ago. You know, scientists and wotnot. 

So unless you can come up with some conjecture relating to how exactly believing in ghosts is going to get us off this doomed rock, then.... what, exactly, are you trying to do?

So we shouldn't believe in paranormal beings or aliens because it doesn't keep the world from blowing itself up? That doesn't follow at all. I believe in lots of things that doesn't give me knowledge of how to attain world peace. Rocks. Trees. Stars. You believe in real things because they are real, not because your belief gives you some practical knowledge on making the world a better place.
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#5
Ben the Donkey Offline
No idea, MR.
Last night was a full on blackout drunk, woke up this afternoon trying to remember where I'd been and what I wrote.

That one above was a doozy... You can safely ignore it Smile
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#7
C C Offline
(Mar 8, 2017 09:02 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: My most recent book I read was "The Super Natural: A New Vision Of The Unexplained". It was written by Whitley Strieber and Jeffery Kripal, each chapter alternating in their authorship.

https://www.amazon.com/Super-Natural-New...1101982322

[...]

Their suggestion? That all kinds of "impossible" things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all: rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably more weird, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem "impossible."

The Super Natural considers that the natural world is actually a "super natural world"--and all we have to do to see this is to change the lenses through which we are looking at it and the languages through which we are presently limiting it. In short: The extraordinary exists if we know how to look at and think about it."


There was a tendency in the 20th century to expand "natural" to embrace everything or make it synonymous with total existence. Never mind such an eccentric act of scientism thereby rendering expressions like "natural world" redundant or turning them into useless distinctions. The semantic shift may or may not have been partially influenced by the 19th and early 20th-century neo-Kantians introducing a trend of erroneously conflating entities and agencies of physics with Kant's "things in themselves".

Add to that to some elements from another review of the book below, about a "Kantian cut". Thus the latter seems to emanate a vague aura of having fallen more out of the above mutilations rather than the original Kantian philosophy. But OTOH, statements like the bracketed two which follow are very much in line with the German philosopher's epistemological orientation of examining the internal structure of concepts (for inter-consistency, etc), and arguing for their necessity or lack of such, without concern for ontological status. [... “it is not necessary to believe in such things as flying saucers, aliens, ghosts, and other unexplained phenomena in order to study them” (...and...) "neither are Kripal and Strieber saying, believe this or believe that. On the contrary; Kripal says, make that cut. 'Do not believe what you believe.'"]

Otherwise, Kant would deem "natural" as not subsuming all potential existence but instead pertaining to the regularities of the experienced world -- not just what is observed but anything science theorized about or indirectly detected (a kind of internally progressing metaphysics, in contrast to a traditional direction dealing with the transcendent). The bottom line is that if a discovery conforms to quantitative patterns and exhibits space / time characteristics or features such coordinates (has location in a "place" like our bodies), then it is amenable to scientific investigation (natural). So with respect to "spooky phenomena" being just that (phenomenal, not "super"-sensible) they could indeed be tentatively subsumed under natural. But if quantitatively anomalous and without lab predictability it's unlikely science could still ever accept such as valid (the categorization resists being maintained long-term).

What would firmly NOT be "natural" (in the original Kantian outlook) is the trans-faculties provenance of any events that would remain perpetually unorthodox to science. Of course, the same could be said for the ultimate provenance of our own everyday appearances, but the latter are at least realized in a stable and accountable way in the experience world -- they have handles which science can grasp. The whole point of methodological naturalism is to treat spatiotemporal phenomena as causes of each other (a system of inter-dependence or external relationships, rather than "things in themselves").

Excerpts from that other aforementioned review:

[...] Should you still feel bristling hostility, as many educated readers do at the mere mention of such subjects as UFOs and “the visitors,” that’s normal. Soldier through the discomfort, however, and you may be able to open a door from the comfy cell of mechanistic materialism onto vast, if vertiginous vistas of reality itself—and not to the supernatural but, as Kripal and Strieber would have it, the super natural. That door does not open with a key but with what Kripal terms a cut—as provided by Immanuel Kant, that most emminent of bewigged German philosophers. More about the “Kantian cut” in a moment.

[...] Now to the Kantian cut. It is to distinguish between the appearances of things and what may actually lie behind them. In making that cut, we recognize that while our physical senses provide us with essential survival-oriented information, in no way do they even begin to convey to our consciousness awareness the totality of reality. As Kripal writes, this cut “is a very reasonable and appropriate response to our actual situation in the cosmos.” Furthermore, “Once one makes such a cut, one can, in principle, take any religious experience or mythical world seriously and sympathetically without adopting any particular interpretation of it, much as one suspends disbelief to enjoy a good novel or watch a science-fiction movie.”

Put yet another way: if we can simply look at such experiences as Strieber’s, sit with them, consider them “seriously and sympathetically, without adopting any particular interpretation”—we can then, to quote Kripal again, “begin to study their patterns, histories, narrative structures, sexual dimensions, and philosophical implications.” The Kantian cut thus gives us the power to then spiral up to a broader, richer view. It is an astonishing power.

I know precisely what Kripal means— not that I have any stories about “the visitors”; my encounter was with a mystical text. Nearly a decade ago, in the Francisco I. Madero archive in Mexico’s National Palace, I happened upon his secret book, Manual espírita (Spiritist Manual). Given that Madero was the leader of Mexico’s 1910 Revolution— the first major Revolution of the 20th century and a crucible of modern Mexico— and that he served as President of Mexico from 1911 to 1913, it struck me like thunder that, after two decades of living in and writing about Mexico, I had not known that Madero was a Spiritist medium. [...] Spiritist Manual, is an evangelical work proclaiming that, in my words summarizing Madero’s: “We are not our physical body; we are spirits, and as such we are immortal and we are destined, lifetime by lifetime, not by any ritual intermediated by clerics, but by freely chosen good works, to evolve into ever higher levels of consciousness and so return to God.”

[...] The odyssey I recount is not only Madero’s, but my own into that vast and vertiginous view made possible by my having made, and inviting the reader to make, the Kantian cut— although I did not use that term. I cracked open the door to greater understanding, not by embracing, nor by rejecting Madero’s philosophies and assertions, but by accepting—simply accepting— that what I understand to be reality and what it actually is are not necessarily the same thing because I, like any human being, with wondrous yet rangebound senses and brain, cannot comprehend the fullness and every last quarky detail of the cosmos.

[...] Kripal writes, “many of the things that we are constantly told are impossible are in fact not only possible but also the whispered secrets of what we are, where we are, and why we are here.” But neither are Kripal and Strieber saying, believe this or believe that. On the contrary; Kripal says, make that cut. “Do not believe what you believe.”

But whatever you believe, or not, that is a story. And stories are what make us human. And being human— for that matter, being able to read and write books, and so catch and hurl packages of thought from across one axis of time and space to multiple others— is both super and natural. As Kripal and Strieber insist: super natural.
http://literalmagazine.com/the-super-natural/
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#8
Magical Realist Offline
Excellent summary. I have for a while been searching for a way to integrate the extraordinary into my life without going hogwild and believing in it like some religion or ideology. Terence McKenna put it this way: “My technique is don’t believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.” This "making the cut" of Kripal's or "bracketing" of phenomenology is something I can live with. I am permeated by the natural and the physical. I rise up from a loom of syntactical sparks and meat juices to encounter concete being on an everyday basis. The anomalous cannot exclude the brute facts of our carnality. We are flesh and bone navigating thru of material world of laws and regularities. So I will believe as little as I can so as to remain open to what this given embeddedness in matter and language reveals to me. The key is a deliberate openness to anything without losing my marbles over it. To ground myself in the phenomenal while not closing myself off from the intermittant incursions of the noumenal.
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#9
Magical Realist Offline
Currently reading "The Invisible College" by Jacques Vallee. So far in his typical style he leads you on with tantalizing patterns across the wide spectrum of the UFO experience. In these cases it is related to physiological changes of the body and personality changes as well as resultant paranormal and psychic phenomena. I will return to this thread after reading this to do a report on it. It is yet another thrilling balloon ride over a strange landscape with one the most informed minds in the field of ufology.
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#10
Magical Realist Offline
Well...I learned much from this book. But once again I am more in the dark about the identity of the ufonauts. Taken thru a history of ufo encounters resulting in cults and prophecies of the apocalypse, thru the Fatima miracles, the miracles at Lourdes, the virgin of Guadalupe, Joseph Smith and his magical plates, and even modern day ufo communications like SPECTER thru the mediation of Uri Geller and company, I come away from all this with the suspicion that we are dealing here with cosmic tricksters of great perhaps technologically-enhanced power. The displays are impressive and awe-inspiring, but their messages are half truths mixed up with nonsense. What is the purpose of all this? Vallee speculates it is some collectively conscious control system of our society and has been going on since the beginning of time, even as far back as with the Phoenicians. I'm disappointed that the more I learn about ufos the less I seem to know what they are up to. The book was abit dated, featuring a chapter all about that con Uri Geller and his debateable powers. Not quite the thesis I was expecting, but nonetheless a net increase in my overall knowledge of this subject and a renewed appreciation for its enormous complexity.
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