Prayer – Some more dialog with TGO.

You can read entire blog … “Pope urges prayer, action to comfort AIDS patients” and the ensuing comments, at: http://thegreatone22.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/pope-urges-prayer-action-to-comfort-aids-patients/#comment-178

Some small excerpts from TGO’s Blog directed at me: 

“…In response to GhostRider’s commentary. No, the reason I do not believe in prayer is not a result of praying for something and not receiving it. I don’t believe in prayer because I do not believe that there is a God, much less a God who “listens” to our wishes. If there was a God it would be quite clear to the objective observer that he/she/it could care less about humans on this small rock we call Earth; not when one considers the suffering mankind has endured since the beginning of time. This is certainly something which an all-good, all-loving, all-powerful Being could no doubt have prevented…

…as to the “energy” or “force” that supposedly helped GhostRider recover from his near-fatal (not fatal since he’s obviously alive) accident…

 …During difficult times, as far as I’m concerned, I’ll take my chances with people; family, friends, doctors, etc., and leave God and invisible “forces” to others…”

 TGO, beloved yet naïve, friend of mine. You know very well that Webster and I had a fallout decades ago and we are rarely on the same page when it comes to definitions, but when writing, “fatal accident”, I was using my poetic license. I did experience “clinical death” – Check with Webster on what that is since you and Webster are like married or something – and that’s as fatal as I would have wanted it to be. Obviously, I am alive as you point out and if I chose the scientifically correct description of my experience, instead of the dramatic, “fatal accident”, I would have written that I had a near death experience – defined as a phenomenon in which a person clinically dies or comes very close to death only to be revived and then can recall in great detail stories of spiritual worlds and other supernatural events (since you are a stickler for using the definitions as chosen by the “flock”).

As you stated about, “…taking my chances with people; family, friends, etc. during difficult times…”, and as I recall, that’s exactly what I did – not a hard choice to make, or not a conscious choice at all being that I was in a coma – and as I also recall, it was those very people, the ones that you state you would, during difficult times take your chances with, the friends, family members, that were doing all the “praying”.  I myself was not doing any praying, unless you would construe the mantra that was repeating deep inside me, “I’ve got to get the hell out of this freakin place”, a prayer in and of itself – which it was – and as far as I’m concerned, being that I am not a religious person, I myself was not directing that “prayer” at God. BTW, I find it funny how you group God in with things like, microwaves, gamma radiation, the wind, and even love and hate, when you state, “I’ll leave God and invisible forces to others”. As for the prayers of family and friends and where they were being directed to, is insignificant and not of my concern. For all I care, they could have been praying to, “the man on the moon”, the results were that I did come back to life and recovered and I appreciate and love them dearly for having prayed and creating some sort of “energy” that was not only experienced as reality by me but kept sustaining my struggle during that entire time and I suspect, that even you TGO, being the friend that you are, and against your radicalized atheistic nature, in some sub-conscious way that went undetected by your “self”, prayed for me too.

TGO, I understand that to a radical atheist as yourself, just as to many others, anything with the word prayer in it, is of a religious context and I’d like to point out that my interest in “prayer” does not lie in the religious or spiritual realms but in our actual and concrete reality. If we want to examine what prayer might be, we have to turn to an unlikely ally. No, not to God, or The Bible, not to the spiritual, not to any religion nor to anything in the supernatural or metaphysical realms, but to one of our own sciences: quantum physics. TGO, since I have known you, you have always thrown the supernatural, the metaphysical, and anything that you cannot grasp or comprehend, into a group with “ghosts”, “goblins”, etc. or just labeled it “Mumbo-Jumbo”.  Let me take a quick moment for definitions here. BTW, these are not definitions according to me. There are as defined by the “flock”.

Metaphysics: A division of philosophy that is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being and that includes ontology, cosmology, and often epistemology… Metaphysics investigates principles of reality transcending those of any particular science… It is abstract philosophical studies: a study of what is outside objective experience… The philosophical study of being and knowing.

Supernatural: Of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially: of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil… Attributed to an invisible agent (as a ghost or spirit).

Quantum physics: The study of matter and energy at the deepest and most subtle levels possible… The branch of physics based on quantum theory which is a theoretical basis of modern physics – it’s been with us since the late 1800’s and in 1900, physicist Max Planck presented his quantum theory to the German Physical Society – that explains the nature and behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic level.

As you can see, Quantum physics is not related to, nor has anything to do with the metaphysical or the supernatural. It isn’t Mumbo Jumbo although for a man as my own father and many from his generation and educational background, it might as well be. Is it spooky? I guess you could say it is. It freaked the hell out of one of the most brilliant minds to have ever existed: Albert Einstein. As brilliant as he was, I suspect Einstein was a bit of a skeptic. (At least in the way my Doctor describes a skeptic. In the field of medicine she sees a skeptic being, “A doctor who looks at the data – what is – and doesn’t believe it.” ). But to his credit he continued “tinkering” with these sciences and till his death, kept trying to discover what was missing that would unify, not disregard, quantum and classical physics. I am sure when the existence of a round instead of flat world was discovered, it was spooky as hell thinking you’d fall off when you rotated and were facing “down”.

First of all, prayer has to be one of the oldest pursuits of mankind. We can only assume that it has been with us as long as humans have been around. Prayer, even before language existed, was probably right on the tip of the tongue of the first caveman who heard thunder or saw lightning strike a tree.

I am not going to get into neither the metaphysical nor the supernatural realms to examine what prayer might be, nor does my interest in prayer lie in any of man’s religions. We will turn to quantum physics, one of the most rigorous and challenging sciences in existence. In the last twenty years, this science has been shaken to its very foundation by a series of startling discoveries.

Quantum physicists keep finding that certain kinds of feelings affect their own experiments. It is of course, known and accepted by quantum physicists that the observer of the experiment affects the experiment. This is a basic law of Quantum Mechanics. Researchers in microbiology have found, for example, that human feeling either tightens or loosens the stranding of human DNA on a microscopic slide outside the body. In other words, researchers would be looking through a microscope at DNA, and the quality of the feeling in the room, the observers’ feelings, would wind that DNA tighter, or would unwind it to a looser state.

Quantum science is beginning to bear out, through study and experimentation, this relationship between human emotion and feelings and the outer world. For example, recent research says the magnetic nature of human emotion is directly linked to weather patterns and the barometric pressure.

TGO, the material world may, at some level, lie beyond comprehension, and, hey, there is nothing in my tiny, feeble, broken up and informal academic background preparing me for these kinds of relationships, on the other hand, they are showing up and are being recorded in our world today. Examples like the studies by Roger D. Nelson at Princeton Universe in his paper called, “Wishing for Good Weather: A Natural Experiment in Group Consciousness,” and also Lauri J. Robinson’s work at Franklin Pierce College, showing that human interaction with cloud formation/dissipation indicated results that were “significantly greater” than those predicted by chance.

Quantum physics seem very esoteric, as when a scientist explains how, on a subatomic level, it’s possible for a particle to be in two places at the same time, or to disappear into or appear from what could be an infinity of invisible dimensions. Or how, according to certain aspects of quantum physics, there’s really no reason why we shouldn’t be able to envision the future just as easily as we remember the past, since the past, present and future are all part of the same continuum.

According to Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna, physicists have merely scratched the surface of something much bigger. Zeilinger specializes in quantum experiments that demonstrate the apparent influence of observers in the shaping of reality. “Maybe the real breakthrough will come when we start to realize the connections between reality, knowledge and our actions,” he says. The concept is mind-bending, but it is well established in practice. Zeilinger and others have shown that particles that are widely separated can somehow have quantum states that are linked, so that observing one affects the outcome of the other. No one has yet fathomed how the universe seems to know when it is being watched.

Somewhat easier to grasp is the scientists’ consensus that the observable world is a kind of “matrix of energy,” in which our consciousness is a powerful force, and what we see internally is as “real” as what we view externally, and capable of altering that outer reality. So, maybe that is where the dynamics of prayer take place.

If Quantum physics shows us that we change the basic nature of matter just by thinking about it, maybe it’s the human mind that releases some sort of energy radiation that is capable of interacting directly with matter. And maybe, just maybe, “prayer” releases that energy that emanates from the human mind that has a direct effect on the environment.

Dr. Bryd, a cardiologist with San Francisco General Medical Center completed a research study involving 393 patients between August 1982 and May 1983. He divided the group into 192 patients who were prayed for, and 201 who were not prayed for. He reported that among other things, the people who were prayed for were five times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, pneumonia, or other post-surgical complications. They also died five times less often than the patients in the control group. http://www.godandscience.org/apologetics/smj1.html

Maybe that energy comes directly from our own “heart and soul” and is filtered through various parts of the mind. Or maybe that energy is what some call the, “divine creative force”.

TGO, if you want to be narrow minded, so be it. It really won’t make a difference or change reality. This whole area that we discuss periodically is not simply based on “beliefs” to me. I have lived it. Experienced it firsthand. It is as much reality as the reality of your experience reading this, or having spoken to me earlier today. I have been in that a kind of “matrix of energy”. Bathed in it. Soaked it in.

And ever since, I can’t shake a “feeling” that life here on Earth is a gift, not a test. It has purpose and meaning unique to each of us. We each have a “mission” to bring a sort of energy that is unique in each of us, to life. And we each chose to experience this human life in order to grow, evolve, and expand who we really are.

Happy Holidays to All

GhostRider / OneLove

I was reading a blog on my favorite blog site, http://thegreatone22.wordpress.com/ and I was semi-thrilled when, as I read along, I realized that I was being paraphrased. The blog reads:

… I’m not in favor of the Israelis and against the Palestinians or vice versa. Personally, I believe that both groups are completely and utterly (up to their eyeballs) full of crap. The Israelis with their “the chosen people” BS and the Palestinians with their Allah-crap; both groups are just religious fanatics who have been fighting and killing each other for thousands of years and will probably continue to do so until the end of time.

All of you religious people, especially the Jews, Muslims and Christians, need to stop, THINK, and lighten up. As a life-long friend of mine and very bright individual often says: “It doesn’t make a difference…” This statement is simple yet brilliant. “It doesn’t make a difference” folks, believe what you will… It just doesn’t make a difference. Once again, “it doesn’t make a difference.” TGO.

I have often thought that my philosophical point of view that, “nothing makes a difference”, is always being misconstrued by this bloger, my closest friend. I’d like to clarify that:

We are a species that are too cocooned by self-comforting habits and ways of being; habits of avoidance, denial, defensiveness, and so on, and one of those is this conscientious search for, “what difference do we make”. No other life forms get stuck on, get paralyzed on the questions, “Do we make a difference”, “Does anything make a difference”.

I remember as a kid, finding an ant hill, trampling all over it, returning a day or two later and finding rebuilt all over again. I’d trample it all over again only to find that they would rebuild all over again, and so forth and so forth. The ants never stop to wonder if it made a difference. If this happened enough to a human they would undoubtedly stop for fear that their efforts don’t make a difference. Even though we seem like we are searching for a difference, the difference doesn’t show up. We continue killing each other; we continue betraying our wives, our husbands. We live as if it doesn’t make a difference because when the difference we are searching for does not show up, we get stuck.

I say, lets just all agree to the fact that, nothing makes a difference and move on. If we would truly grasp… If we would understand, truly get, that nothing makes a difference, at that point we would also grasp that if, nothing makes a difference, then that fact itself, that nothing makes a difference, would not make a difference.

Can you dig it? That, nothing makes a difference doesn’t make a difference. And here is where the redeeming value lies and what my friend misconstrues. It does not make a difference that nothing makes a difference. We can choose to live life, as if, it makes a difference.

Live life, “as if”, it makes a difference. If, as individuals, as cultures, as people with different religious beliefs, as societies with different political systems, we lived life, “as if”, it makes a difference, then, and only then, would life make a difference and if life makes a difference, tell me reader, would it really make a difference that nothing makes a difference?

If, we lived life as if it makes a difference, does it make a difference that nothing makes a difference?

Ben Stein’s Last Column

For many years Ben Stein had written a biweekly column called ‘Monday Night At Morton’s.’ (Morton’s is a famous chain of Steakhouses known to be frequented by movie stars and famous people from around the globe.) Ben terminated the column to move on to other things in his life.

An Excerpt from:

“Ben Stein’s Last Column…”

How Can Someone Who Lives in Insane Luxury Be a Star in Today’s World?

…how can a man or woman who makes an eight-figure wage and lives in insane luxury really be a star in today’s world, if by a ‘star’ we mean someone bright and powerful and attractive as a role model? Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails.

…they can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer. A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.

…I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters and that it is my duty, in return for the lavish life God has devolved upon me, to help others He has placed in my path. This is my highest and best use as a human

Faith is, not believing that God can. It is, knowing that God will.

By Ben Stein

 

What a crock Bob Stein’s last column was. Good Riddance I say to his column. The way an essay starts and ends is always a giveaway to the point the writer is selling. He starts his “point” by writing:  “…a real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world…”

 OK…So he is selling WAR and the technique he is using is called, Propaganda.

 Propaganda is a concerted set of messages aimed at influencing the opinions or behaviors of large numbers of people. Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognition, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.

 But why is it propaganda? Because the truth is that soldier of the 4th Infantry Division and the others, will not face the “gratitude” of all of the decent people of the world. PULEASEEEE. Sadly, oh, so fucking sadly, they will face what all the soldiers that fought in Nam have endured since they got back home after going off to “liberate”, “free”, and “fight for democracy”, and, “gratitude”, is not what they faced. If it was hell that they faced and endured behind the lines, then it was a subtler kind of hell they endured once they were back home.

 A beautiful Egyptian girl I met in NY once said some words to me that will always remain within me. “FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR VIRGINITY”.

 Too bad Stein didn’t point out the obvious by writing that a real star, is not a President who orders these boys to go kill Evil in the name of Good like Bush did. A real star is a President who convinces the Evil to be Good. Not with bullets to the head that ends consciousness but with words to the heart that light the darkness.

What President Barack Obama was doing today in Cairo, Bush could have chosen to do 8 years ago after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 instead of creating the the U.S.- led war in Iraq. After all, since, according to the White House, Obama’s planned speech contained no new policy proposals on the Middle East, all Obama was doing was calling for a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims “, saying that “together, we could confront violent extremism across the globe and advance the timeless search for peace

For Stein’s last point, he ends by writing, “Faith is not, believing that God can. It is, knowing that God will.”

So, he is also trying to sell Religion and give the reader the feeling that God was supporting the war. What a crock that is. None of Christ’s teachings, which are really all packaged neatly in his “Sermon on The Mount”, hint that what Bush did is right. We just have not truly gotten, or have not understood, what the teachings of Christ were all about.

On my next blog, more about that sermon and possibly, whatever quirky philosophical statement I’m trying to make.

Love/Peace

GhostRider

By the way: Ben Stein served as speechwriter for U.S. presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and a piece of the Radical Religious Right. He has frequently written commentaries on economic, political, and social issues. Recently, he has become an outspoken critic of evolutionary theory, which he describes as “Darwinism,” and an advocate for intelligent design. He is the son of noted economist and writer Herbert Stein who worked at the White House. On May 3, 1976, Time magazine speculated on the possibility of Stein having actually been Deep Throat. In 2007, Stein chastised the police and the GOP leadership for their response to the Larry Craig scandal. Stein said that Craig’s sexuality should be a non-issue: “A party that believes in individual rights should be rallying to his defense, not making him walk the plank. I guess Ben must support the installation of GLORY HOLES in public toilet partitions.

GhostRider & Friends comes to life.

Good Friday. Of course, we all know what Good Friday is. Ironically on April 14th of 2006, Good Friday took on an additional meaning for me. I died – if only in the clinical sense and if only for 3 minutes even though it took me over a month to “get back” – I was in a coma for 35 days. You’ll read the whole story in the coming weeks but right now I want to answer, “Why a Blog”.

We’ve all heard about our lives “flashing” us by as we’re dying and the thoughts about regretting things we hadn’t done. It wasn’t like that at all for me. What was really “killing” me (excuse the pun), was all the things I hadn’t said. I had a need and a desire to speak and I couldn’t. I don’t mean the physical and vocal part necessarily, although the lack of that ability does carry a certain horror with it. Mainly it was not being able to “express” myself. Maybe, what it turns out that we really are is just an expression. Maybe each one of us are, or is it supposed to be, is, a unique and beautiful expression.  And in the medically induced coma I was in for a month, a controversial procedure that not all doctors are convinced of its effectiveness, I found that I was no longer the expression I came to know as “me”.

Perhaps no aspect of mind is more puzzling than consciousness and our conscious experience of self and the world. Despite the lack of any agreed upon theory of consciousness, there is a widespread consensus that an adequate account of mind requires a clear understanding of it and its place in nature. We need to understand both what consciousness is and how it relates to other, non-conscious, aspects of reality, but let me not get carried away in that direction just yet.

On this blog site, only those who care what I, as GhostRider, or friends, have to say need visit. Who are “The Friends”? I am hoping you all are. As I suggested, maybe all each of us is, is a unique and beautiful, human expression. As such, I invite the reader to be a friend and “express” themselves by either reading what get posted here, or by being a subscriber and commenting on what gets posted here, or as a contributor, by posting your own thoughts here (I know you’re dying to). It’s all good.

Are you interested in consciousness, quantum philosophy, near death experience research? I am, but most of all I’m fascinated that many of you out there, may still believe that things unseen are in the realm of the supernatural. I for one, not only have convictions regarding these issues but I have and would like to hear from those of you who have thoughts to share. What is important to me is not whether your beliefs are similar to mine, but rather that they are expressed, period. Intelligibly or dyslexically, I feel strongly both ways. Be patient with me as my humor can bit a bit esoteric at the beginning.

Love and Peace

Bernardo aka GhostRider