Balance, Awareness and Novelty

I call the believers of the supernatural the fish of humankind. I think there's a correlation between how much we believe and how much we see when it comes to paranormal events. Similarly, we only become aware of our own internal issues when we choose to acknowledge them. The fish of humankind believe in the bait or the idea of a different existence. Meanwhile, the non-believers stay back and watch or ignore the fish who want to believe that the bait is real. The fish bite, get reeled in and pulled out of their reality. This new experience wouldn't have been possible without reaching out and grabbing the bait. The fish get thrown back and return to spread the news about what they have experienced, only to be ridiculed. This isn't about being gullible and believing anything and everything. This is about keeping your mind open and acknowledging new experiences, whether those experiences are comforting or not and whether they make sense or not. Spend some time at supposed haunted locations with a video and audio recorder. Search for a Sasquatch or look for UFOs in the sky. There are plenty of people who won't bother to do any of these things.

Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend hours in prayer and meditation are different. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist said, "The more you focus on something, the more that becomes your reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of your brain." I think that people who tend to experience and believe in the paranormal are tuning into the right channel. A channel that has yet to be scientifically proven, but I believe is as real and invisible (to us) as gravity. Native Americans used to see beings of an alien origin, whether by using psychedelic drugs or not. It was common and viewed as a normal and positive experience.

Everyone has a comforting answer to life's mysteries. I think that belief and non-belief in the paranormal/supernatural are both based on fear of the unknown. Both are used by humans as security blankets. No matter how much we discover or believe about the world and universe we live in, we still have no way of knowing why there is something rather than nothing. For some people, believing in the supernatural is comforting. For other people, believing that nothing is real unless it is proven is comforting. I think that belief and faith in the unknown is natural for human beings and can be healthy in moderation. With new technology comes more distractions. More distractions cause less focus on the world and universe around us. I think that the more we collectively stay distracted by our technology, the more our collective unconscious will force us into novelty, just like I think it did with the U.F.O. phenomenon and the creation of major religions like Christianity. That doesn't necessarily mean they aren't real or true. I think that certain things that we have believed and continue to believe are more of a necessity for humanity. I think they have served the purpose of being a balancing tool for nature. I believe that the next novel event will be a more in your face discovery.

I think that the explosion of information that most of humanity has access to and is currently experiencing is pushing us towards a new existence or a newer way of thinking. I believe that this life is about gaining knowledge collectively. Physicists are moving closer to the idea that at the quantum level, all minds are part of each other, entangled in a giant web of interconnections streaming from a common source. I think that our limited perception, combined with our ability to understand that we don't fully understand our reality, points towards there being something beyond our reality.

"the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen. And these two qualities — habit and novelty — are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more complex. So I've taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and astrophysical processes. Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA-containing life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being. This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head ... you know, what modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here, and any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring. I say, no ... by looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic — that which advances novelty is good, that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully. Well this is the thing about technology ... it tends to polarize people. Not only does the universe have this preference for novelty, but each acceleration into novelty has preceded more quickly than the one which preceded it. So for instance the slow cooling out of the universe lead to the slightly more rapid appearance of organic chemistry which led to the quite rapid evolution of higher plants and animals which led to the hysterical pace of human history, and I see no reason to suppose that that process of acceleration will ever slow down." - Terence McKenna (from the 1997 Art Bell Show interview)

Excellent threat OP. I genuinely enjoyed reading that. Starred & flagged

The other day I was thinking about how non-spiritual people always say "Well I'VE never had a spiritual or paranormal experience, therefore I do not believe in anything other than our physical carbon-based life." Which is fine, I don't mind that. People can believe whatever makes sense to them. But I always figure that maybe the reason these people never have anomalous experiences is because they don't try. By not caring or believing it, maybe they are subconsciously blocking those frequencies. A catch 22 situation if you will. They don't believe it because they can't see it, but they can't see it because they don't believe it. Maybe this part of our mind must be exercised before we are able to tune-in to these 'frequencies'.

Quantum science certainly is making incredible leaps and bounds. Some people think that quantum science may be able to prove at some point that people do contain a soul or spirit. Who knows, maybe it will. If anybody here is interested in reading about this kind of thing go look up Dr. Melvin Morse or Dr. Jeffrey Long.

Terence McKenna was such a brilliant man. It's a shame that he had to depart so soon

Originally posted by Xaphan
Excellent threat OP. I genuinely enjoyed reading that. Starred & flagged

The other day I was thinking about how non-spiritual people always say "Well I'VE never had a spiritual or paranormal experience, therefore I do not believe in anything other than our physical carbon-based life." Which is fine, I don't mind that. People can believe whatever makes sense to them. But I always figure that maybe the reason these people never have anomalous experiences is because they don't try. By not caring or believing it, maybe they are subconsciously blocking those frequencies. A catch 22 situation if you will. They don't believe it because they can't see it, but they can't see it because they don't believe it. Maybe this part of our mind must be exercised before we are able to tune-in to these 'frequencies'.

Quantum science certainly is making incredible leaps and bounds. Some people think that quantum science may be able to prove at some point that people do contain a soul or spirit. Who knows, maybe it will. If anybody here is interested in reading about this kind of thing go look up Dr. Melvin Morse or Dr. Jeffrey Long.

Terence McKenna was such a brilliant man. It's a shame that he had to depart so soon

Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Any paranormal experiences I've had in the past I think could have possible been linked to my focus and belief in the subject. A buddy of mine and I both were in a cemetery, recording for disembodied voices one night. We left the audio recorder on a tombstone, drove off and came back to retrieve the audio recorder about an hour or two later. As we slowly walked towards it, we heard leaves crunching as if someone was walking near us. We didn't see anything or anyone anywhere. I focused on the sound. I completely believed that something we couldn't see was nearby. All of a sudden, we saw two glowing beings that were about 5ft tall swiftly float in front of us, materializing from the right of our vision and disappearing to the left. They had a cloudy appearance and you could almost make out legs and arms. They didn't appear to be touching the ground though. It lasted for about 3 seconds. My mind and body froze and I felt the adrenaline rush through my body. What we saw was real but why and how did we see it? Why haven't I seen anything like that before or since? I think that our belief and focus that night tuned our minds perfectly into whatever plane of existence those two beings appeared from.

I've also heard of a lot of people who claim to see ufos on a regular basis simply by asking them to show themselves. Assuming what these people are seeing is a real ufo, I think this could be a clue as to why and how some people have more paranormal experiences than other people.

I agree about Terence McKenna. His brilliance lives on and hopefully so does he.

"There is nothing the universe loves more, than courage."
~ Terence McKenna

I liked your thread, but from your descritption of what is novel, it seems like novelty might be limited to human perception. However, no matter who or what is looking at this place, I think we all could agree that it is near infinitely glorious.

We've got it wrong, seeing isn't believing.

Believing is seeing

Nice thread.
But i always ask myself? Why is it so important to see paranormal entities?
Do we have to see it to believe it?
Besides, being in touch with other realms doesn't necessarily make us better persons.

Novelty is an alchemical process of boundary dissolution, and transformation - so most people are too scared to be more fully present to it, and become creative and more fully self expressed by entering into it's domain of limitless freedom. We would rather remain imprisoned and constrained, most of us, within the ridiculous and absurd framework of all our own highly cherished preconceptions and biases which we use as a shield to protect us FROM novelty, creativity, authentic self-expression and unconstrained and unfettered freedom - yes it is ridiculous and absurd, and the reason McKenna might be right, that we need to actually perturb the brain-mind at it's chemical foundation, in an effort to catalyze the process, and bootstrap ourselves, kicking and screaming if need be, to the next level.