science – Cubilone's Dimension

REVIEW: MUCHAS VIDAS, MUCHOS MAESTROS

Muchas Vidas, Muchos Maestros by Brian L. Weiss
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Este libro se me sugirió de Fede, un uruguayo que conocí por suerte en el candombe de un domingo como todos los otros. Dijo que cambió su vida y le hizo pensar en su “misión de vida”, que para él era algo como ofrecer el amor a los otros en cualquier oportunidad. Sólo unos días después, lo ví en la librería Moebius al lado de la Posada al Sur donde viví cuando estaba en Montevideo, y era casi la mitad del precio de todos los otros libros. No podía no comprarlo.

Bueno, claro que me interesaba el tema, y aunque no podía entender todo, como sigo aprendiendo el idioma español, creo que era un libro bién escrito. Quiero decir que la manera de escribir de señor Weiss era simple pero comunicaba mucho.

Estoy en una fase cuando estoy leyendo muchos libros y material sobre la reencarnación, y algunas veces lo que se encuentra en un libro se contradice por lo que hay en otros. Diferentemente dicho, lo más que investigas, lo más dificil es encontrar fuentes válidas que tienen algo que ver entre ellos en los detalles. Creo en la reencarnación, pero no creo que Muchas Vidas sea el mejor libro para presentar el tema y su profundidad verdadera a alguna persona que ya no está convencida y que mira a la cuestión con un mente crítico, tan por su falta de algún tipo de prueba (quién es Catherine?) como por la impresión que intenta de darnos, que es un libro escrito por un psiquiatra, es una impresión que sin embargo no puede sostener. Este estilo me hizo preguntarme si todo esto realmente sucedió. Parece un mito, una historia basada en hechos reales y como todas las historias similares, es dificíl separar en ella lo verdadero de lo falso. Por eso no valen como pruebas sino como inspiraciones, y esto es sin duda algo muy personal y no cuantificable.

En todo caso, todavía era una lectura interesante con puntos espirituales válidos y con valor para ver la vida por otros ojos, como si el hecho de la inmortalidad del espíritu fuera un hecho indudable, y todo esto la verdá me está poniendo a pensar cada vez más.

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REVIEW: CONVERSATIONS WITH GOD

Conversations With God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Vol. 1 by Neale Donald Walsch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t remember where I first heard about this book. I think it was High Existence and one of their many articles/lists on the books that will “violently shift your perspective” or some such. What sealed it for me was when I listened to a podcast (Positive Head Episode #12) where the site’s founder, Jordan Lejuwaan, was invited. When he was asked to name a book he’d take with him on a deserted island, he replied with little hesitation: “Conversations with God.” The best part? The host agreed with him!

Now, these are people who are very much against religion as we understand it and the way we talk about it in public discourse. When I first heard of this book, I recall that I, too, was very skeptical, just judging by the title: “who is this guy with this frankly messianic, banal idea of speaking to God and transcribing the conversation?” It seemed silly, like something belonging to the Middle Ages, certainly not our supposedly progressive-thinking world. Mind you, I’m trying to offer you what had been my automatic thoughts, which I might not actually agree with on a more conscious, rational level.

Having read a badly converted .mobi version of the .pdf I managed to find online on my Kindle—just another hi-tech mode of delivery—, I can now confidently say the following:

If somebody told me: “man, this book contains the words of God”, if I could somehow be certain that they were speaking the truth, and if I did put my prejudices aside, my prejudices that come from growing up in a society built on soul-crushing organised religions that are deadly serious and strict about what God is supposed to be, the contents of this book are close to what I would ideally expect to find. In that way it leaves nothing to be desired. It has a certain something that truly feels divine, superhuman, an oriental or pagan worldview that does not deny people (of all sexes!) our body and all the fun things we can do with it. Here we have God joking around, pronouncing hedonism and all kinds of sex as holy, right next to unconditional love and our calling to be Who We Really Are, which as I understand it means that we become God by creating with our lives the best, most fulfilling, creative and loving version of ourselves.

This book wasn’t pretentious, nor dogmatic, nor close-minded. It was nothing of what you’d come to expect from what we call religion. It does have a lot of common points with Jesus Christ’s teachings as they have reached us today (which are pretty much the same across the board and across historical and famous spiritual teachers), but the book is certainly not Christian, which is a good part of the reason why you needn’t look farther than other reviews of this book on Goodreads to see Christian followers denouncing the book left and right, flat-out refusing to read it because it will supposedly challenge their faith. People, if you want to be devout and pious, at least try to do it right.

I don’t know who or what it was who spoke to Mr. Walsch. I have no idea if it was God, whatever God is or might be. It could be the writer just talking to himself, but why would that make it impossible it to have been God speaking through him? It all depends on how we define God. I’m a realisation of God writing this review right now, you are a realisation of God by reading it, and you are a realisation of God no matter what your response to it is.

I’ve recommended this book to many people already, and I recommend it to you too. It really doesn’t matter what your creed is or what you might be proud of calling a lack of one; contrary to my strong thoughts on what ancient organised religions believe we should be doing with our lives, I cannot see a reason why following this book’s advice would make your life anything but better. Even if you’re an atheist who believes in scientism, I do think that reading this book would do you good. In fact, I’d say that rejecting it without thought would just prove a certain amount of closed-mindedness in you and make you dangerously similar to those aforementioned hardcore “Christians” who feel proud of themselves for refusing to read a book. Doesn’t that make you uncomfortable?

While we’re at it, let me share with you a closing thought that came to me yesterday. We accept that organised religion is a powerful entity—much less so now than in the past, but let’s say that they still have no problem of capturing the imagination of billions. Now, organised science, what we’d call the mainstream scientific dogma—just follow the money—they have power not only over the minds of billions, but also actual power, mainly expressed through the activities of huge techno-corporations that have been setting the rules and the paradigm. Both organised religion and organised science are supposed to be superhuman, and therefore have a duty to be neutral and above the petty realm of “human weakness”.

We know that organised religion is full of scumbag priests and other subcategories of clergy. So what is it exactly that protects organised science from similar “infiltration”? Both fields promise mountains of money and prestige. How can one safely rest his or her faith with one over the other as the ultimate representative of an accurate and objective world theory? It seems to me that what it takes to be religous is faith and an ability to reject the proof that lies in the material world, it takes an equal but opposite(?) amount of faith and ability to reject the proof that lies in the material world to be an atheist.

Heh, look at me, never missing a chance to attack scientism!

I’ll say it again: if reading, enjoying and feeling inclined to follow or at least consider the life advice contained within Conversation with God makes me “religious”, there, done: I’m religious. If you are unable to tell the difference between the frankly liberating information contained in this book and what has passed off as religion for far too long in the world at large, then that is something you’ll have to sort out by yourself, I’m afraid.

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REVIEW: UNBELIEVABLE

Unbelievable: Investigations into Ghosts, Poltergeists, Telepathy, and Other Unseen Phenomena from the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory by Stacy Horn

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There used to be a Parapsychology lab at Duke University. It started working during the Interwar period and closed down sometime in the ’70s. Its figurehead was a man named J.B. Rhine. His goal was to scientifically prove the existence and significance of ESP and psi phenomena. Unbelievable is a journalist-style investigation into the story of that lab, the people who manned and womanned it and its discoveries.

We all know today that no such concrete proof exists. That, however, is not so because there are no cases that could suggest their existence. Rhine’s work included many interesting cases, most featured in this book, that seem to have been truly paranormal, in the sense that they’re still inexplicable in the conventional sense. For example, take the case of Hubert Pearce, who scored so consistently highly in the card tests, the only explanation barring ESP would be fraud — and that is, of course, what critics insist all this amounts to. The math checks out, the guidelines were followed, but the research was scarcely taken seriously. It is understandable, however. The effects of telepathy, ESP or psychokinesis were detected in multiple instances, but no kind of underlying theory was ever properly produced. But wow, imagine what kind of shit that would’ve got.

My opinion is that, ultimately, sadly but inevitably, no kind of evidence would have convinced the critics. Rhine’s life work was a doomed effort, as many people at his side also concluded by the end. How can you recreate the conditions, usually emotionally charged situations together with other highly subjective variables, to consistently produce ESP-related phenomena in the lab? Until we (somehow) change scientific methodology to include what’s left outside the lab, in order to make it more lifelike and less sterile, science will have very little room reserved for ESP and related effects. That, and it needs a theory.

In any case, apart from the fact that this book is a handy reference for the studies that were the foundations for the scientific inquiry into the paranormal, it was a book that tells a story. A story that is still valuable today, because for all that’s changed from the middle of last century, little really has. The paradigm hasn’t shifted as much as other kinds of progress could warrant. But remember, half a century or seventy years really isn’t such a long period of time. Who knows what science, physics and consciousness studies in a few centuries will have to say about the matter.

Got this book at Green Library last year.

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REVIEW: THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(It’s already been almost three months since I finished this one… just for you to get an idea of how slowly things are making the passover from my life to the ‘mension these days.)

Reading the Book of the Damned on the book-damning device.

Below you will find an assortment of highlights from The Book of the Damned pulled from the clipping file of my Kindle. Convenient, that. You can find the same super-version of the book as the one I read for free on Amazon. I’m still not sure if it’s a best-of, Charles Fort’s collected works, or what… There seems to be at least some content which doesn’t match up with the text found on his four books as found separately.

Anyway, back to the quotes:

The data of the damned. I have gone into the outer darkness of scientific and philosophical transactions and proceedings, ultra-respectable, but covered with the dust of disregard. I have descended into journalism. I have come back with the quasi-souls of lost data. They will march.

—

The power that has said to all these things that they are damned, is Dogmatic Science.

—

All sciences begin with attempts to define. Nothing ever has been defined. Because there is nothing to define. Darwin wrote The Origin of Species. He was never able to tell what he meant by a “species.” It is not possible to define. Nothing has ever been finally found out. Because there is nothing final to find out. It’s like looking for a needle that no one ever lost in a haystack that never was—

—

The novel is a challenge to vulgarization: write something that looks new to you: someone will point out that the thrice-accursed Greeks said it long ago.

—

It may be that in the whole nineteenth century no event more important than this occurred. In La Nature, 1887, and in L’Année Scientifique, 1887, this occurrence is noted. It is mentioned in one of the summer numbers of Nature, 1887. Fassig lists a paper upon it in the Annuaire de Soc. Met., 1887. Not a word of discussion. Not a subsequent mention can I find. Our own expression: What matters it how we, the French Academy, or the Salvation Army may explain? A disk of worked stone fell from the sky, at Tarbes, France, June 20, 1887.

—

My notion of astronomic accuracy: Who could not be a prize marksman, if only his hits be recorded?

—

But what would a deep-sea fish learn even if a steel plate of a wrecked vessel above him should drop and bump him on the nose? Our submergence in a sea of conventionality of almost impenetrable density. Sometimes I’m a savage who has found something on the beach of his island. Sometimes I’m a deep-sea fish with a sore nose.

Charles Fort was a trailblazer. What we call today paranormal or occult, together with all the relevant scientific investigations, in a few words what we’d expect from Mulder and Scully, to a large extent we owe to him. Here’s a guy who lived in the ’20s and researched old copies of Scientific American, Nature and other such periodicals and magazines, looking for the damned, the unexplainable, the excluded. For what good is science, if it only chooses to include to its dogma what it can explain, sweeping under the carpet all that can be used to challenge its grand theories?

Giant, village-sized wheels submerged in the middle of the ocean; periodic rains of fish, frogs in various states of decay and of a gelatinous mass of unknown origin; falling stone discs, as in the quote above; meteors; lights in the sky moving in formation (reported in the 19th century); footprints of impossible creatures; giant hailstones; cannonballs entombed in solid rock, and that’s just a sample.

Reading about these mysterious exclusions was a delight. I love everything that challenges my way of seeing the world and allows me to contemplate alternative explanations for life, the universe and everything. To be fair, some of Fort’s favourite theories were down-right bizarre, such as his insistence on imagining a realm above our own from which all the falling creatures and materials originated – what our own surface world would be, conceptually, for the “deep-sea fish with the sore nose”, as in the last extract I quoted above. The existence of such a place sounds no less ridiculous now than it did in the 1920s, but I think Fort’s point was that his arbitrary explanations were just as good as the official ones offered by the scientific dogma of the time, which our present, widely-accepted, matter-of-fact world theories of today mirror. To be sure, a part – I don’t know how significant – of the excluded, would be possible to include today, but I’m sure that many of the phenomena Fort goes through in his Book of the Damned would be just as inexplicable today as they were in the centuries past.

There are two reasons this book isn’t getting five stars from me. The first one is that it’s twice as long as I think it should have been. I felt that Fort at certain points was simply repeating himself. It’s also possible he was just saying the same thing in a different, more difficult to understand way, and this is precisely the second reason this isn’t getting five stars. Fort’s language and style was very hit or miss. To give you an idea, the quotes I’ve included in this review are some of the easiest parts to understand from the whole book. Others love it. Myself, I can’t say I hate it, but I’m not sure it’s as successful a writing technique as Fort must have hoped for it to be.

The same hit-or-miss-ness is applicable to the book as a whole. I thought it was tremendously interesting and a significant publication that should be studied further and give inspiration to present-day Charles Forts, but I don’t believe the style is for everyone. Why don’t you find out for yourself if it’s right for you, though? It’s free!

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REVIEW: AN EXCURSION INTO THE PARANORMAL

An Excursion Into the Paranormal by George Karolyi

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the paranormal. The term itself is almost taboo among scientists and people who have devoted themselves, whether knowingly or not, to the High Church of Materialism, an idea and its implications beautifully explored by Rupert Sheldrake in The Science Delusion. It’s been connected with very specific things and phenomena, such as extrasensory perception, telekinesis, auras etc, which have all been discredited and/or completely rejected by what you’d call mainstream rationality; bad science, Tricks of the Mind/hallucination or outright fraud have been strongly suggested as the cause of the above phenomena and more. Nevertheless, according to the book’s definition of the word:

Paranormal phenomena do seem to occur, it’s just that the tools our current level of understanding of the world provide us with are insufficient to explain the why. Fraud, bad science etc. as explanations would constitute those phenomena normal, not paranormal, which by the way is the dominant narrative at this point in time. Perhaps things are not as clear-cut when the “definite proof” of these phenomena being normal is placed under scrutiny.

George Karolyi, in this book, did what in my opinion every scientist – or at the very least more of them – should be doing: he didn’t accept or dismiss observations based on what he assumed was true; rather, he put observations first and attempting to build a theory on the results second.

Apparently (and I’m using this word in particular because according to Google this man doesn’t exist), when Karolyi wrote the book, he was a researcher in the University of South Australia with a background in electrical engineering. This explains the absolutely rigorous methodology he seems to have followed. I’m serious: he begins the book with a Physics 101 on electricity, waves, EM fields and quantum mechanics, all of them fields of physics which were either completely unknown, very poorly understood or deemed magical/supernatural as little as 150 years ago. It even has a section on probability and statistics for readers to get a basic grasp of what significant, as opposed to chance, results mean when conducting experiments.

The book then goes through human auras, psychokinesis, Kirlian photography, ESP and survival-related phenomena (among others), describing what experiments have been done on each inquiry – some by the author himself -, often going into extreme, virtually unfollowable by the layman, technical details on the methodology thereof. What genuinely surprised me? The author, to his credit, included negative results. For example, his experiments on aura perception did not lead to anything more than chance results, yet there they were for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions on.

The majority of the rest of the phenomena, though, did in fact produce significant, sometimes even highly significant, statistical results, even when some of them generally either don’t lend themselves well to controlled laboratory experimentation due to the apparently unconscious nature of their induction, as is the case with telepathy, or proof of their existence would not be easily quantifiable, such as in the case of survival-related phenomena e.g. apparitions or reincarnation. Imagine where we could be going if we let this research guide our curiosity, instead of the misguided skeptics the world over.

On an interesting side note, I thought it was funny how at the end of the book Karolyi started making conjectures to explain the paranormal, such as the existence of parallel universes or dimensions (see 10 Dimensions Theory) which would “carry” the non-physical, conjectures which he then used as a platform for closing the book by going on a moral tangent – how people ought to live in order to make the best of their lives. It came into stark contrast with the extraordinarily detached point of view which preceded it, given the material at hand, but I thought it was more interesting than inappropriate.

The main point of all this is that it’s very unfortunate that we have limited ourselves in such a way so as to not be able to even imagine, for the most part, what we could be doing with this frankly liberating information. Maybe in 150 years people like Rupert Sheldrake, Charles Fort (whose Book of the Damned I’m in the process of reading) and even George Karolyi and other researchers whose work I’m trying to hunt down will have found their place in future History of Science books (or their equivalents) as forerunners of the coming paradigm shift, the next renaissance. We can only hope.

This review is of a copy of the book recently donated to the English section of Sofia City Library.

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Vsauce: Our Narrow Slice

What does the length of a human life really mean? How do we, often erroneously, perceive historical timeframes? Are we aware how uncharacteristic of our species’ normal pace current progress, and its breakneck speed, is?

One of Vsauce’s best episodes.

Review: xkcd: volume 0

xkcd: volume 0 by Randall Munroe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

xkcd is one of my favourite web comics. Not that I’m following a whole lot of others; it’s just on the top of a smallish stack. That said, the humour can be very hit or miss depending on the reader’s mastery of the niche subject in question each time. The über math geek jokes fly right over my head but every so often I might be able to understand some of the not-too-obvious computer/internet or somewhat less specific science jokes. This can be very gratifying, therefore I think I can envision the satisfaction one feels when they get the joke, when most others wouldn’t. In that sense there most definitely is something for everyone in xkcd, even for those who could only leniently ever be called geeks.

As far as the specifics of this collection of strips go, the selection isn’t bad, though it is a bit outdated by now. I should also note that I can’t for the life of me understand the meaning of the extra sidenotes printed in red throught the book. It would be not at all unfitting of mr. xkcd if he had put them there just to troll readers and make them feel stupid. No biggie though: see above.

Overall I’m giving this 4 stars because I think the web presentation suits the material better, not to mention there’s always access to the entirety of the content. But I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m complaining, no no: if there ever was an experience worth having, smartphones and laptops barred, reading xkcd on the loo would be it.

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Review: A Short History Of Nearly Everything

A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Short History of Nearly Everything is exactly the kind of book I enjoy. Witty, funny, made me think (each chapter about another facet of life), made me want to read it again sometime in the future –if only to be adequately prepared to duly take notes/highlight quotes from the first to the last page–, I learned things I would have hardly had the chance to find anywhere else and, as the best and most successful of books do, it left me with a different perspective on the world, an outlook on it that is very scientific in its premise and execution but far from anything dogmatic. It has been a humbling reminder and a glorious reassurance of how little we know about the world and at the same time how much we pretend to actually do so because, well… because we’re largely ignorant, scientists not terribly less so than ourselves.

Bill Bryson hops from one scientific field to the next as if he was Super Mario and science was Level 1-1. Within the pages of the same book we can find excellent write-ups on atoms, chemistry, lots of physics and biology, astronomy, geology… He talks about what’s under our feet (tens of kilometres of unexplored crust and a little less of ocean is all we can safely say about the contents of the ~6500km that separate us from the planet core), fossils and how little information they can give us because of their scarcity and the extremely specific conditions under which they form but how much information we try to extract from them…

How unprotected, really, we are in reality from a potential asteroid hit (no, you can’t send nukes or Bruce Willis to an object that you are only able to detect mere weeks before impact at best and which travels at a speed that allows it to cross the entirety of the terrestrial atmosphere within a matter of a single second), or how rumbling, overdue supervolcanos with calderas only slightly larger than the island of Crete could explode any moment now! Earth would survive. Life would probably survive, as it has many times before. Humans and our extremely narrow zone of comfort? Naaah. Bryson helps us understand our place in things, comprehend that our existence might be little more than an inexplicable natural accident, an unrepeatable oddity.

And of course there’s so much more packed in here. So much!

If you’re to read this book, prepare to also read things you would have never imagined about the unknown lives of great scientists, to see fundamental theories of the past go through high and low, be torn apart by dogmatic contemporary peers… The drama of science –what an unlikely, unfortunately, pair of words– and the success and sob stories behind the pioneers and discoveries are often unbelievable. These anecdotes are solid gold.

Together with What On Earth Happened/What On Earth Evolved, this book is a treasure of knowledge and insight. If you like learning stuff about the world for hours on end you seriously can’t miss it. Even if you don’t find learning about the world appealing, well… maybe these books will kick your characteristically human curiosity back into you.

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