A Footnote To The Previous Post

[poliphilo]

Tony Robinson was investigating the paranormal on TV last week. At one point a professional sceptic offered to show  how spiritualist seances were worked. A bunch of stooges sat round a table in total darkness, the "medium" called for a spirit to manifest itself  and the "medium"'s assistant came in- soundlessly-  and moved some objects around.

This was supposed to prove that the famous, physical medium, Helen Duncan- who sat in semi darkness and produced ectoplasmic manifestations of actual, dead people- was a fake. 

When Robinson pointed out there was a certain disparity between knocking things over in the dark and producing walking, talking spooks, he was told that Duncan's sitters were obviously imagining things. 

Ah, but of course. 

Comments

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

My sister Cindy, at eighteen, was looking at my grandmother's oil painting hanging in the dining room; she was thinking how Bessie had died exactly one year ago that day, and the painting suddenly, as she was thinking about Bessie's death, fell off the wall. Cindy was so scared she sat out on the front porch until my parents came home.

(My mother said she felt her father's presence all around the house as her mother was dying; soon after she died, Granddad's presence went away. Many years later, as Mother herself became ill, she said she sometimes felt her sister, her mother, and my father "near her bed" or in the room with her.

I believe there is another dimension we can't see or experience--at least, most of us can't, as cats can't taste sugar and we can't see ultraviolet.

BTW, Bishop Spong sends out emails, and while this is off-subject, it's an interesting discussion, so I will place it here:

Q: Do you believe in heaven and hell, the blissful heaven and the burning hell? And do you believe in Jesus Christ as your personal savior?

Q: Answering your two questions is impossible until some terms are defined and some explanations are given. When you define heaven as "the blissful heaven" and hell as "the burning hell," you reveal an evangelical mindset that asserts a particular understanding that you are requesting that I either affirm or deny. It is to bind the discussion to your frame of reference. That immediately suggests that you do not want real answers, you want affirmation. I cannot give you that nor would I be interested in doing so. With that background, however, let me proceed to respond. I think it would be fair to say that I do not believe in a blissful heaven or a burning hell as evangelicals define those terms. I do believe in life after death....

You define heaven and hell as places of reward and punishment where God evens out life here on Earth. I regard that as primitive, childlike thinking that transforms God into a parent figure who delights in rewarding goodness and punishing sinfulness. This portrays God as a supernatural, judging figure and it violates everything I believe about both God and human life.

If anyone pursues goodness in the hope of gaining rewards or avoiding punishment, that person has not escaped the basic self-centeredness of human life and it becomes obvious that such a person is motivated primarily by self-interest. The Christian life is ultimately revealed in the power to live for others, to give ourselves away. It is not motivated by bliss or torment. Both of those images are little more than human wish fulfillment.

The fiery pits of hell are not an essential part of the Christian story. If one would take Matthew's gospel and especially the book of Revelation out of the Bible, most of the references to hell as a fiery place of torment would disappear. That is a quite foreign theme to Paul, Mark, Luke and John. Evangelicals never study the Bible deeply enough to make this distinction. They basically talk about a book they do not understand.

When you ask about "believing in Jesus Christ as your personal savior" you are using stylized evangelical language. That language has no appeal at all for me. To assert the role of savior for Jesus implies a definition of human life as sinful, fallen and helpless. It assumes the ancient myth that proclaimed that we were created perfect only to fall into sin from which we need to be rescued. It was a popular definition before people understood about our evolutionary background. We have been evolving toward humanity for billions of years. Our problem is not that we have fallen from some pristine perfection into a sinful state from which we need to be saved, it is that we need to be empowered to become something that we have never been, namely fully human beings. So the idea that I need a savior to save me from a fall that never happened and to restore me to a status that I never possessed is in our time all but nonsensical. It is because we do not understand the nature of human life that we do not understand the Jesus role. I see in Jesus the power of love that empowers us to be more deeply and fully human and so I do not know how to translate your questions.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I very much like what Bishop Spong has to say.

I believe my father is still around- and intervening in small, kindly, but mischievous ways. In one such incident an invisible person- I'm almost sure it was him- tipped beer from an immaterial source over someone "he" believed was drinking too much

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Which brings up the question: what is "tipping over the beer"? Is it your father's personality or who he really was? A manifestation of his emotions as they were in life? Do personalities survive, I wonder? I get the sense (from much reading about it) that eventually who we are in this life is dumped (we go back somehow) to the cauldron of Creation, the raw material. Oh, who knows? That's neat conjecture, is all.

I wish I could say this better. When I start thinking about all these ideas I get confused and frustrated. I guess what I mean is that I, Jackie, maybe only get to live here, whereas the force of who I am lives always elsewhere and waits for my return--in some way, perhaps Jackie is a drawing on a sheet of paper, and the artist who draws is Me, and that Me is, as Eckhart says, being constantly created, as is God, as are all of Us.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I believe in reincarnation- and that the essential me- my spirit- has inhabited any number of different personalities. I think there's a period- between incarnations- when the spirit has the option to hang around- or revisit- the earth plane and act in the character of the person it used to be.

This is a simplification, of course. I expect the reality is a lot subtler.

I don't think personalities are dumped exactly. I think they're put away in the archives- but will always be there as a resource on which the spirit can draw.

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Could be a coincidence, but a little bit spooky, given that said person was very encouraging and had read the first story published in that newspaper:

http://ideealisme.livejournal.com/2008/04/01/

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well, yes...but I find life is full of such coincidences...

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Have you watched programs about Houdini?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I love Houdini!

[mummm.livejournal.com]

I think he spent his life trying to find an honest psychic and failed to do so.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true.

Which is inconvenient for someone like me who chooses to believe in psychism :)

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Well heavens... who knows? He may have been looking in all the wrong places!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I really don't know. The explanation may simply have been that his mother didn't want to "come through".

[mummm.livejournal.com]

After the experience I had one morning in the old cottage of a STRONG smell of bacon (My FIL's favorite thing) and then finding that there was none... I am unsure.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My Sat-Nav- which is sitting on the mantlepiece next to me- switched itself on a couple of times yesterday. It could have been a malfunction- or it could have been someone dropping by to let me know he's still around....

[mummm.livejournal.com]

Who knows? It's a nice way of thinking though.

[silverhawkdruid.livejournal.com]

I watched all three shows, and they barely skimmed the surface really. I had a couple of things scream at me. One was that the seances conducted by the lady in question were not done in pitch black, but in red light iirc, so the blackout and the assistant moving things wasn't even close to the reality. The other thing was the automatic writing which brought up a couple of interesting points at Glastonbury, re A Top Pig and Wallace, Emmanuelle (iirc) and Angel. Did you see that episode?

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, I watched them all. It left me thinking that TV really isn't the right medium for this sort of investigation. One wants thoroughness, detail, rigorous argument- none of which is very televisual- and none of which we got. I like Tony Robinson as a presenter (I'm a huge fan of Time Team)but I didn't think this series cut the mustard.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Apparently it was proven she was a regurgitator using mostly cheesecloth, even before she was convicted of fraud, more or less, under the Witchcraft Act:

"In fact, the Witchcraft Act was originally formulated to eradicate the belief in witches and its introduction meant that from 1735 onwards an individual could no longer be tried as a witch in England or Scotland. However, they could be fined or imprisoned for purporting to have the powers of a witch."

The Tony Robinson "debunking" does sound a bit pathetic, though!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How very extraordinary.

The Robinson programme managed to convey the impression that Harry Price had given Duncan a clean bill of health. Either the programme researchers failed to do their job or a decision was made to suppress evidence. Oh wow!

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Wow! That would be a MAJOR research fail, considering I stuck a couple of search terms into google and that article was on the first page. Quality of the BBC these days, I dunno...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed.

Thank you for the link, btw- that's a fascinating site.