Esoteric, (Hidden,) Knowledge

to Writer...I personally encounter many that actually believe that nothing happens when you die and that there is no soul...they all happen to be very Science-minded which is where my angle tends to come from regarding my attitude.

There are belief systems, subtle they may be, within the Scientific community.

I know that's a broad brush-stroke and I suppose I categorize Science as one thing too much but apparently I'm not the only one who does it. McKenna and Sheldrake on this thread alone have done the same.

 

he made a lengthy post today in a thread by relax. He has bothered to register his like vote for things people have posted. His profile shows he has been every day for a while. I initially thought he was tuning out for the holidays or something.

 

That's what I was figuring...

 

I don't think Terence had a PHD, I believe his brother Dennis did, who was more of a conventional scientist.

 

Well im the first to report intwo thousand years that no one speaks from or for the deceased body. All perceptions of death has amounted to mystery. That is because the mystery is not discovered in death but in life. The mystery exists because we dont realize we have never died and have been here since the beginning.

 

if not phd then whatever degree he did have was enough.

 

So mckene has a bs in ecology, natural resources and shamanism from uc berkely whose motto is let there be light. Mascot golden bear

 

I have a ged I got 4years after droping out after the eighth grade. I have also had yoga teacher training. I got a reiki certificate. Some credits for contining education in the feild of massage from the assocation of liscensed massage practitioners. Mckenna talked about the emergence of affinity groups. My wife and I started a business called affinity east west,which was what we called a wellness center. We had a home that had an attached meeting space with its own complete public facilities. We provided counseling and training as well as hands on modalities including me cooking for meetings and the like. We also hosted a democratic caucus as supporters of john dean. There is that name again john dee. Oh yeah thereis the mycological study with joseph amarrati through the puget sound mycological society.amarrati was my freind tbone's graduate professor at the university of washington where some of the most cutting edge medical treatments are developed as well as having a strong hand in enviromental science. Some of the most pristine and poluted sites in the world are in the state of washington

 

IMO it's going to take a lot more than any thought to 'redeem' us.

As for the philosopher's stone, whatever it may be I don't think it's forgiveness. Forgiveness is a normal human attribute. It requires no belief in any higher power or process of alchemy.

 

I thought it was "The philosopher's stoned"




Silly me....

 

I am currently in the painful position of scurrying around trying to find someone to answer to for cash flow.

It doesn't matter if three people all make the same mistake, it's a mistake. Even speaking of "the scientific community" is incredibly dangerous . . . you might as well try and say something about "blacks" or "lasagna eaters". You need to be really specific with your words. What you mean is more akin to "Mainstream research scientists exploring mainstream projects with lots of funding". See those are the guys you read about in the news and who get more attention; but they do not comprise "the scientific community" any more than "italians" comprise "lasagna eaters".

Well I am another one who believes that when you die, nothing happens, and there is no personal soul. The idea of a personal soul was edited into christian doctrine by st thomas aquinas on a personal whim of his, because he couldn't understand the concept of an impersonal continuity, which was the spiritual understanding of every other religion on earth.

I believe when we die, we go back to the place we were before we were born. If you want to call this "the void", then fine. It has no value attached, in the sense of being the "buddhist void of nirvana" or "the existential emptiness of sartre"; a void is a void, and there are no value-tasters present in it to assign it any categories. Or you can call this "heaven", "Shambala", "the land of a thousand suns", etc, but down this road lies projection errors. If you think it's obvious that you have a little chinacat ghost who floats up from your corpse and goes to a nice happy place called "heaven" where all your family and friends departed await you for a kind of eternal cocktail party, then you haven't examined your assumptions and desires well.

Finally, opinions on afterlife and soul, astrology and magick, are not all there is to metaphysics. I can not believe in any of those things and still be able to expound much more on my metaphysical beliefs than those "traditionally spiritual". Chinacat if you don't know more about metaphysics to speak of, then you are not well informed. This is a recurring point in this thread that I hope you have taken at least a little to heart; without learning and education we are mostly grasping in the dark. We can learn from others scratch marks through the aeons. Some even found pretty good tunnels. Keep learning and reading, don't go for the low hanging fruit.

 

you are a funny guy triple b. I think if you express an opinion it is not out of humility. Im curious if it is such a common human practice if you can describe what it is imtalking about forgiveness?

 

Prior to this experience that we are calling on I had no great interest in the subject of astrology and to tell the truth it is still not the sjubject I am interested in. at this point the information simply fits in a theoretical model. So far I havent detected any obvious deviance from the greater chain of reasonable developement except the simple idea of rejection on the basis that it doesn.satisfy our previous conclusions about what things mean.

 

To give you an idea about chinacats fear of the scientific community, my conversation went like this, "so no on astrology", were the first words he said to, no hello, just no to astrology. Obivously not a critique of the overall information but that is where he stopped like the word itself got caught in his throat. Of all the things to pussy out over after his level of experience. It relly does blow my mind that a learned man would reject information based on his belief.

 

How can you tell whether or not "esoteric knowledge" is really that or just an illusion resulting from the destruction of brain cells. The trips can give one a sense of revealed wisdom, but I'd be suspicious of wisdom that can be bought from a drug pusher or a chemist: instant God. Ah yes, I can hear it now. If you haven't tried it, you'll never know. But really, if you have tried it, you still might not know. You'll just think you do. I have good friends who have taken one trip to many and now live in their own reality. But the real, unadulterated world isn't such a bad place once you get to know it.

 

I don't understand this post^ thedope

Metaphysics to me always meant the things that I listed. But I have different philosophy books by Lebiniz, Hume, and other Philosophers who considered their work Metaphysics. So I suppose that the term may have morphed over time from philosophizing about reality to being attributed with more..."supernatural" things.

No I don't personally believe in the whole heaven thing like you mentioned, Writer. I'm like you in the sense that I do feel that SOMETHING happens. Going back to where you were before you were born sounds much more reasonable than heaven OR no continuation at all. Obviously all we can do really is speculate.

That's also why I've always been attracted to the "enlightenment" teachings of Zen and elsewhere because it's all about "dying before you die" and coming into contact with "who you were before your parents were born".

Something I have always been curious about is that going off of the laws of Physics...the law of the conservation of energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed...isn't this pointing to an afterlife if you were to apply it to death?

 

there is no evidence that tripping kills brain cells. Rework your question omiting that assumption. That is the first thing to do.