Making sense of spiritual experience

 Many times I have discussed a FEW aspects of the experience in spring of 1967 which forcibly drove me away from the extreme, logical, well-justified atheism

I believed in from age 8 (1955 or 1956), and the extreme experience in 1972 which drove me "all the way" to recognition of PSI, and the many steps in between.

I described them briefly in journal papers linked to at werbos.com/religions.htm.

(At werbos.com, I also explain how I resolved the many paradoxes which arise when one believes BOTH in real "psychic" or "spiritual" experience, but also in hard core physical realism as proposed by Einstein and Moshe Carmeli.) 

BUT THAT DOES NOT MAKE full sense of how to understand these things, without giving up the hard core Einsteinian realism which makes sense to me more and more.

Above all -- if we are like the cells of a vast solar system brain (like in the final slide of what I gave at the UN meeting a few weeks ago), how do WE live OUR lives and make sense

of our own ever more complex experience of life and soul? It seems we are all called to keep learning. The better we are as students in the school of life, the MORE and the FASTER will new subjects be presented to us.

And so, the recent scary chaos of our planet has led me to revisit certain details of my own experience, relating them to general principles.

In winter 1972, I have mentioned how a suitemate loaned me his copy of https://pdfcoffee.com/helping-yourself-with-esp-pdf-free.html which I read very intently.

I read it intently because it focused on EXERCISES, experiments I could do myself, and alter, and evaluate myself with scientific thinking. The final exercise was actually

a variant of kundalini yoga like what I later read about in a book by Gopi Krishna. By then... I knew how to raise a kind of energy (which I now think of as "qi") up to

chakras in the skull. That was interesting. BUT THEN: in a final stage, he asked us to refocus attention to a point about a foot above the skull, and then mentally speak to the inner higher self to 

... greet him/her and ask for feedback. (I am bcc'ing a person who talks a lot about "the Master within.").

In my case, I was really startled. I heard a loud booming voice, initially speaking in English. "Greetings. Glad you made it. But first -- I am NOT your inner self. Forget that part.

You may address me as 'Father.' Now I have important urgent things to show you..." And then it was like the kind of thing Greeley and MacCready described, in their great research report and book funded by NSF. Being pulled up out of my body, and initially taken across town to Harvard... and then more. By then I certainly knew about backpropagation, which I had discussed with many people; I view this as having been a support for that new direction in human understanding. When I ask, CRUDELY, "what does God want?", this reminds me of that.

I have often felt that Jesus Christ himself was one of the people visited by this same entity -- with the special discipline of really listening.

This reminds me of course that MANY humans, especially leaders, will tell you that THEY have heard from the voice of God, or will be very quiet while believing it strongly.

(Greeley's report does a great job of giving us real statistics on this kind of thing!) FOR MYSELF -- I often say that inspired works of art tend to be swirling mix of "three colors" -- real inspiration, confabulation, and marketing, demanding we work VERY hard on "discernment". (That has SOMETIMES been used as a defining element of Quaker universalism, but

politics and labels keep waxing and waning in all parts of humanity.) WHO was the entity we were listening to? Lack of discernment is in many ways the strongest threat of wars that could eliminate humanity in this century, if we do not raise our awareness further.

I tend to think this "Father" is more or less like the "spirit of the deep" described in Jung's Red Book. And like the pachatatta whose temple my wife and I saw years ago when living for a few days in Lake Titticacca in Peru. (An island of earth-mother, sky father, deserving of our fullest respect, even though Jesus was right when he said we will have more prerequisites to understand

in years after him.) 

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I am tempted to say more about another experience I have shared only with my wife. It is now... so important... I hope she will forgive me for describing just a small PART of it.

On the one hand, I do recall images and thoughts of her (improbable thus veridical) from well before 1988. But in 1988 (I think), I visited the town house of Andy Barto in Cambridge, UK.

(I forget the exact dates, but there are records of it.) As part of this, I visited Cambridge, UK, and meditated very hard on how I needed help of making sense of very difficult issues in fundamental physics. "Order from chaos... HOW? Is there any soui out there who could help me on THAT?"

That night, sleeping in Andy's House, I felt I was lifted to into a kind of "astral plane chat room." I was interviewed by a calm and wise but normal human old guy who asked me questions,

and then concluded with "OK. It is a reasonable and honorable request. It is worth trying."

SO WHO WAS HE?

Not "father." Not THAT level of higher intelligence. Just a fellow part of the same noosphere. THis morning I think: "Oh yes, that 'Communion of Saints.'"

And many confusing messages we get today come from well-intentioned people confused even there.

Is "Father" gone? No. Years ago, in a Quaker discussion, someone mentioned the book' God is my copilot."

I said, "No, he is my psychiatrist." Perhaps that kind of dialogue is the HIGHEST samadhi any of us humans ever attains.

We are all just pieces of our local solar system noosphere fully embedded in it.

But some of us are more like the eyes and ears, fully embedded in the body, but ALSO with a special ability and duty to get inputs from beyond it.

That's important when we have MANY dimensions of discernment to grapple with.

And -- most important to me