One of western Christianity's best-kept secrets is its esoteric, mystical tradition. Starting with Jacob Boehme in the early 1600s, the theosophic branch is one of the most fascinating yet least well-known among the world's mystical traditions. Today on MindMatters we take inspiration from Arthur Versluis's two books, Theosophia and Wisdom's Children to make a first foray into the rich language and practice of the Christian theosophers.


Running Time: 01:01:47

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When it comes to how you are being poisoned in the name of health, one of my favourite topics is tobacco.

This will be a long one. Going from the increasing poisoning of tobacco-products by governments and big-tobacco, to the spiritual significance of the plant, some of its healing properties, and the subversion of its spirit.

You probably know that the regular cigarette or tobacco sold in stores has loads of added additives, and the smoking of these products is in no way the same as smoking tobacco by itself. Around 600 different types of additives are identified.

From what I've read, most tobacco products of your well-known brands like Marlboro, Pall Mall, Lucky Strike, Winston, etc., contain between 10 and 50 different additives.

Someone very kindly provided me with a copy of the slides from Sunday's presentation. They sent them to me because I have a Ph.D. and I work in research therefore I will respect the sender's request that they only be presented in an academic context and I will not post any of the actual slides on here, or supply copies. That being said much of the key bits of data can be found in the abstract that Z posted the following link to:

Link to AHA 2022 AWARE II abstract

Now to the presentation.

The background looks at the physiological factors around death and resuscitation, and has a slide on the pig study. It then looks at the different types of experience that are recalled, and also the psychological impact of these experiences. The historically low percentage of visual recollections is highlighted and he uses AWARE I as a source of evidence for this. He then moves on to the study itself.

Firstly he states 3 specific hypotheses related to Near Death Experiences:

• Consciousness and awareness - with explicit and implicit learning - and cognitive experiences occur during cardiac arrest

• Cognitive experiences may be related to the quality of brain resuscitation.

• Experiences during states of unconsciousness may impact longer term psychological outcomes in survivors

It is important to note that while the first hypothesis refers to consciousness during CA, none of these hypotheses explicitly relate to dualism or refer to the possibility of the consciousness surviving death, which is after all what we initially believed the AWARE studies were about, and what in fact Parnia himself has stated repeatedly in public outside of the context of a clinical scientific audience - an important point. The second and third hypotheses relate more to his medical discipline as an ER doctor.

In subsequent slides he details the design of the study, and there is a new twist to this. Due to the lack of survivors from CA, a sad but inevitable problem that has plagued all his studies, he has decided to include retrospective data from reports of consciousness during CA that did not occur within the prospective AWARE II study. This was to provide qualitative information on experiences. As a researcher myself, I find the inclusion of retrospective data in a prospective study a little troublesome. I get why he might do this, but it makes the research potentially messy. However, thankfully that does not happen when it comes to the presentation of the prospective results.

After this the other techniques are discussed - brain oxymetry, EEG, headphones and a tablet generating audio and visual "clues".

During the study memories that were reported were measured against a 32 point NDE scale, and any visual or auditory reports were collected and cross referenced with computer files listing the clues that were generated at the various timepoints.

Can you be religious without believing? A Christian without affirming the central dogmas?

It is a timely question, especially since there seem to be many people who, faced with a world gone bonkers, are reconsidering their ideas about faith, spiritual questions, and metaphysical stances. And it is a question that has been recently discussed in a very insightful conversation between Rupert Sheldrake, Philip Goff, and Paul Kingsnorth, which I recommend.

It seems to me we desperately need to make a distinction here: between propositional belief and faith in the unseen world.

Whether we should defer to 'experts' was a major theme of the pandemic.

Back in July, I wrote about a study that looked at 'expert' predictions and found them wanting. The authors asked both social scientists and laymen to predict the size and direction of social change in the U.S. over a 6-month period. Overall, the former group did no better than the latter - they were slightly more accurate in some domains, and slightly less accurate in others.

A new study (which hasn't yet been peer-reviewed) carried out a similar exercise, and reached roughly the same conclusion.

It is the classic dispute between conservatives and liberals: the question of the role of morality and the regulation of human behavior, whether by secular law, religious law, or social enforcement. A depressing issue it is, I would argue, because there seems to be no solution.

Simone Weil describes the two ends of the spectrum between laissez-faire liberalism and moral-cohesion-by-force as "Rome" and "Israel" respectively, where Rome stands for complete materialist decay — the proverbial morass of the decadent and godless late empire — while Israel stands for an authoritarian theocracy that micromanages people's every move.1

Both scenarios seem very unappetizing.

Alas, Emily Oster's proposal that we just forget and forgive the pandemic insanity of the past few years has pleased no one. This is partly because her op-ed is tone deaf and stupid, of course, but it's probably also down to Emily Oster herself, and a growing cultural exhaustion with the kind of person she represents. Oster is, in the terminology of Bruce Charlton, an almost archetypal Head Girl — the typical "all-rounder" who "performs extremely well in all school subjects" and "is excellent at sports," while being "pretty, popular, sociable and well-behaved":

The Head Girl will probably be a big success in life, in whatever terms being a big success happens to be framed .... But the Head Girl is not, cannot be, a creative genius.

Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes ... Modern colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military...

The way we see and describe hues varies widely for many reasons: from our individual eye structure, to how our brain processes images, to what language we speak, or even if we live near a body of water.

What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people see the world — both between individuals and between different cultural groups.

A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about color categories. There's plenty of room for differences, all along the way.

For example, most people have three types of cones — light receptors in the eye that are optimized to detect different wavelengths or colors of light. But sometimes, a genetic variation can cause one type of cone to be different, or absent altogether, leading to altered color vision. Some people are color-blind. Others may have color superpowers.

Our sex can also play a role in how we perceive color, as well as our age and even the color of our irises. Our perception can change depending on where we live, when we were born and what season it is.

To learn more about individual differences in color vision, Knowable Magazine spoke with visual neuroscientist Jenny Bosten of the University of Sussex in England, who wrote about the topic in the 2022 Annual Review of Vision Science. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

On the one hand, it is useful to distinguish between what we think and what we feel.

Thinking about the world is different from feeling pain after an injury; making plans is different from feeling joy at the sight of the first flowers blooming at the onset of spring.

From another perspective though — these are not mutually exclusive — it might be useful to look at thought and feeling as a unity.

Perhaps we can think of both as movements of the mind: in that picture, thinking and feeling are united by the primacy of mind.

Every change, every form of growth, has to do with our minds. As does every form of misery and suffering.

It is a rather sad state of affairs, then, that we modern people are seldom taught the crucial art of mind-ninjadom: the conscious and deliberate management of our thoughts. Indeed, we are not even taught that such a thing is possible.

Thoughts are so important that the only way to re-integrate hardened criminals into society, and essentially turn them into somewhat decent human beings, is a form of hardcore thought therapy over long time spans.1 In these interventions, the "therapist" ruthlessly corrects the criminal's thought world by making him aware again and again of the pathology of his reasoning. But even that only works in relatively few cases because, as with all therapy, the subject must show at least a minimal desire for change, which is typically not the case for example with more psychopathic individuals.