Synchronicity and Near-death-experiences:
Two visible seams in the fabric of time & space Because God is a spiritual reality underlying all material reality, atheistic doctrine is untrue. In our times this can be shown by calling attention to two spiritual or non-material phenomena that occur with great frequency in human society: synchronicity experiences as defined by the psychologist Carl Jung and near-death-experiences reported in the thousands now. Both of these types of phenomena have defied scientific explanation. Some scientists have tried to debunk n.d.e.'s by saying that they come from a center of the brain that if removed removes n.d.e. experiences. No, all it removes is the memory storage area of the n.d.e. experiences. Scientists found that spinning people in gravity simulators produces the "tunnel" sensation reported in so many n.d.e.'s. Well, gosh, get blind drunk and watch the world spin around you before you pass out. Scientists claim ketamine, a common anesthetic drug, duplicates n.d.e's but the basic fact remains-how can a flat-line brain create any sort of hallucinations when chemically-induced hallucinations involve activation of several areas of the human brain?No scientific explanation either for synchronicity experiences many of us have had, the de ja-vu moments of feeling that you've done this before, seen this before, the prophetic dreams that come true in reality, the mysterious "coincidences" people sometimes have that present one with such striking similarities of name or content that it seems impossible for these similarities to have occurred "by chance". Atheistic responses I've encountered to this phenomena can be summed up in their common non-answer, "they're just coincidences, nothing more, nothing less." But, obviously there is something more in them. Something that defies scientific explanation and is therefore "miraculous" and point to a spiritual reality beyond the material one.
There are probably thousands of psychologists throughout the world using Jungian theories developed by Carl Jung's investigation into synchronicity phenomena. Jungian psychologists ask their patients to remember their dreams and to remember synchronicity events that happen to them so that they can access and understand the Universal Unconscious which plays out archetypal themes in each human beings life whether they are conscious of the fact or unconscious. This Jungian psychological theory is actually a religious or spiritual concept. They take synchronicity phenomena seriously and no one going through eight+ years of medical school is going to devote their professional lives to theories based on "mere coincidence" or imaginings.
And last but not least, there is the fact that so many human intellectual discoveries have been made not by carefully reasoned logically sequenced fact finding but by pure "inspiration" from dreams and moments of synchronistic relativity when memory and happenings in mundane events coincide. The history creative achievement of humankind proves atheism wrong when it claims nothing can come from a spiritual reality which does not exist. The phenomena of synchronicity proves these left brain dominated people wrong as it also proves that science knows extremely little about spiritual reality that cannot be measured directly but none the less impacts human beings in tremendous, civilization changing ways. Atheists are only people who have let their left-brain consciousness so dominate their right-brains, they can't see or understand spiritual right brain phenomena that spiritually conscious people experience so regularly in the human record that it often rules their whole national character and secular policies. For atheists to ignore right-brain processing and believe that only the left brain hemisphere determines what reality is is to be not only spiritually blind but intellectually half-witted as well.
Synchronicity events, "Sign Language" is the way God communicates with me, a believer now but formerly a near atheist who never had what I could call a spiritual experience in his life until Easter of 1979 when I went through three days of non-stop synchronicity experiences, each one connected in some way to the flow of spiritual information streaming into my mind from God knows where. It is experiences such as these that cannot be scientifically explained as Jung too discovered that point to an unknown spiritual dimension underlying the physical world we inhabit.
When science can explain synchronicity events, those weird "coincidences" that happen to so many of us at different times, then we can forget the spiritual world altogether but try it, try getting a scientist to explain why you or your friend had a dream with elements that came true the next day or two, or those strings of the same name or concept popping up within a short span of time in different contexts, in the book you're reading, or the sitcom you're watching, or the newspaper front page you glance at, seeing this same word or idea seemingly wanting you to pay attention to it for whatever reasons. Science can only grasp at straws with synchronicity events--"oh, they're just your brain recognizing stuff that it would normally ignore--e.g, seeing the same kind of car you just bought everywhere when you hadn't noticed them before", but this doesn't explain why, from my own experience, I would read for the New Testament for the very first time I could remember on the second day of my religious conversion experience, being struck emotionally for some reason by the sign of the dove coming to Jesus at his baptism then not more than two hours later going to my friend's house where she was "coincidentally" pet-minding two white doves that I'd never seen with her before, this person, synchronistically named Sophia which became to mean so much to my journey into Gnosis as she from then on brought other "signs" from God leading me to further spiritual discoveries. Synchronicity events point to the hidden "seams" in physical reality that show an underlying spiritual base. By the third day of three days of non-stop synchronicity happenings I had arrived at the place many religion's mention, seeing our world as a gigantic Play, as Maya, as illusion, because one becomes aware of the roles we humans are playing out with our lives. Here is this viewpoint expressed in the Old Testament, the Tanakh: Psalm 139: 16 "Your eyes saw my substance,being yet unformed.
And in Your book they all were written,
the days fashioned for me,
when as yet there were none of them."
Precognition-mental telepathy: more indication confirming there is more in heaven and earth than we know.. "NORWICH (Reuters) - Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them -- now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, whose research is funded by the respected Trinity College, Cambridge, said on Tuesday he had conducted experiments that proved that such precognition existed for telephone calls and even e-mails. Each person in the trials was asked to give researchers names and phone numbers of four relatives or friends. These were then called at random and told to ring the subject who had to identify the caller before answering the phone. "The hit rate was 45 percent, well above the 25 percent you would have expected," he told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. "The odds against this being a chance effect are 1,000 billion to one." He said he found the same result with people being asked to name one of four people sending them an e-mail before it had landed. However, his sample was small on both trials -- just 63 people for the controlled telephone experiment and 50 for the email -- and only four subjects were actually filmed in the phone study and five in the email, prompting some scepticism. Undeterred, Sheldrake -- who believes in the interconnectedness of all minds within a social grouping -- said that he was extending his experiments to see if the phenomenon also worked for mobile phone text messages."
The God Gene bites atheists again: The Evolution of the God Gene
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: November 14, 2009
"IN the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.
During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.
This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.
For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.
For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.
But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.
It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.
The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.
In natural selection, it is genes that enable their owners to leave more surviving progeny that become more common. The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, is highly controversial. Though Darwin proposed the idea, the traditional view among biologists is that selection on individuals would stamp out altruistic behavior (the altruists who spent time helping others would leave fewer children of their own) far faster than group-level selection could favor it.
But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.
A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view, that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000 years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. In the larger, hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of authority. Roman emperors made themselves chief priest or even a living god, though most had the taste to wait till after death for deification. "Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!" Vespasian joked on his deathbed.
Religion was also harnessed to vital practical tasks such as agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and harvested at the right time. Passover once marked the beginning of the barley festival; Easter, linked to the date of Passover, is a spring festival.
Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.
Nicholas Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times, is the author of "The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures."
From Internet Talkboard discussions "Logic and Rational thought, it means everything to me because it's a part of me."* *
"I will ask you here, do you agree with me that n.d.e's are anomolous events in regard to human behavior or do you think defying the self-preservation, family preservation, species preservation instinct is normal for human beings?"Back to top
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