I had to look it up

I was sent this curious photo, and of course I had to look up the Bible verse.

And here’s Isaiah 14:

12How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!

13For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:

14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

15Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

No dinosaurs, no genetics. I was so disappointed. The believers always oversell their story.

I get email

There is a shifting pattern of spam email that I get. A while back, it was practically non-stop gay porn; I commented on this a while back, and laughed it off, which apparently annoyed the people who’d been sending it to me. I think they expected me to be stressed and conflicted and angry at getting photographs of muscular young men with large penises, but really…it doesn’t bother me at all. So lately the supply of hunky naked men posing in my in-box has all but dried up.

Instead, my previous criticisms have prompted a flood of commercial spam from middle eastern sites, and the malicious spammers have switched to signing me up for right-wing newsletters. It’s as if they think I don’t know how to use the delete key, or how to create spam filters. Usually they’re destroyed on sight, but one caught my eye — it was talking about a new theory of evolution.

You might be wondering what the old theories of evolution are. One is creationism, the biblical story; another is intelligent design creationism; and the third is the scientific theory of evolution, which he also calls the “particle-clang theory”, that it’s all about particles randomly banging together. According to this email, all three of those are wrong, and the true answer is something completely different. Are you ready for it?

The answer may be found in a fourth alternative, a transdimensional theory that says we weren’t exactly dropped off; but that we walked in from another dimension. We know from watching the Morph sensation that I have written about extensively on my site www.stuartwilde.com that this world is not always solid.

When the Morph appears strongly in a room, it seems as if there are fast-moving striations that move across your vision with many vortexes and swirls in it. You can put your hand up in it and your hand will dematerialize. It sounds extraordinary but we have seen that phenomena more than a thousand times. I’ve also seen humans completely dematerialize in front of my eyes and not reappear for ten minutes or more. I’ve done it myself with others watching. This phenomenon of dematerialization has now been seen by me and others over a thousand times, since I first discovered it in the spring of 2001. So we have become convinced.

One night, I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize, when a golden ring of light formed on the lawn. It appeared from nowhere. There was no obvious source to the light or any beam shining down from above. It was just there. So I told my mate to walk out and stand in the ring of gold, and he did that and ‘blip’ he was gone. He came back into view a while later, but when he was gone, he was totally out of sight. I could clearly see the distant trees through the area where he had been standing.

The other dimensions I write about, that Paul Dirac postulated (1930) exist as antiparticle worlds, and seem to our perception to be placed at arm’s length to us. They are close, not out in space a million miles away. So if a human can dematerialize and walk out of here, then it might also be possible, that at some point in ancient history, humans walked into this 3-D world from another more rarefied dimension close at hand, the walk-in theory might be possible. It’s certainly food for thought.

Are Humans Older than our Universe?

The problem with all the other theories of origins of man is that they look at the earth and humans as solid. Once you realize that the planet’s solidity is an illusion and that it also exists in a non-solid, hazy-wave, transdimensional form, then it is perfectly feasible that a human could walk out of a multi-dimensional, non-solid, close-by hyperspace into the 3-D earth plane and become solid flesh and blood once he or she got here.

Then particle-clang looks silly as the origins of our humanity and all of life on earth could well have begun in an eternal, twenty-six dimensional hyperspace that might have existed for trillions upon trillions of eons, before this universe came into being, just 13.8 billions years ago. It is probable that no modern scientist has ever seen the dematerialization of the human body so the Fourth Alternative would never have occurred to them.

Humans and the animals could be very old, much older than our universe. It is also very possible that our Universe is just one of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of universes, that various human species have evolved in, over timeframes that are so astronomical in length, they boggle the mind.

© Stuart Wilde 2009 – www.stuartwilde.com

Here below is a P.S. about the origins of man that I saw in the Mirror World as a vision.

The Origins of Man in the Mirror World-Aluna
Stuart Wilde

The mystical shamans of South America call the Mirror World, the Aluna. In the Aluna, there is a record of the origins of man on earth. In there, it is shown that man walked in naked from another dimension, but he was initially a bit of an automaton, unable to cope. It was as if his brain was not as yet activated to deal with a world of three dimensions and gravity, so he initially lay down on the ground and fell asleep.

While he slept, a being came to him from another world, and it placed six psilocybin mushrooms on his chest, three down one side and three down the other. When the man woke, he found the mushrooms and being hungry, he ate them. Awhile later, the mushrooms’ affect took hold of him, and his brain that had been previously dormant, clicked into action, and the man rose and stumbled off to find others, who had also walked into this three dimensional plane on exactly the same day. I would presume women got here in the same way, at the same time as the men.

What is fascinating is that the anthropologist and ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who wrote Food of the Gods, knew about the mushroom activation of human consciousness theory, but he did not consider the Fourth Alternative I have suggested, the walk-in theory discussed above.

He also believed humans evolved from a primitive state akin to automatons, but he did not say where those primitive beings came from, but he did suggest that they then took the mushrooms, and so they developed the self-aware consciousness that we know today.

I have no idea how we will ever prove the walk-in theory, because by its very nature it left no trace of what happened, but as creationism and evolutionism are mathematically ludicrous and open to question, it might be an idea to consider the possibility of walk-ins.

A sophisticated form of the intelligent design theory might be right in the end, as it doesn’t preclude walk-ins, and when dealing with other dimensions in hyper-space, one isn’t constrained by the tightness of a few billion years, that particle-clang theory asks us to believe in.

I reckon we walked in here just as the animals and the insects did, and that life is trillions-upon-trillions of eons older than our rather new universe.

Totally dingleberries with a big red clown nose on.

What always gets me about these loons isn’t their grand wacky theories of everything that explain absolutely nothing, but the casual asides: “I was out in a garden teaching a mate of mine from Montreal how to dematerialize”. Right. OK. I would love to meet this guy, see him standing in front of me in all his lumpy solidity, and ask him to dematerialize for me. I suspect he has a nice patter of prepared excuses for why he can’t just do it right then.

(Also on Sb)

You little rascals! You didn’t tell me!

I know there are a few gay contributors here. I want to know why you didn’t trust me enough to tell me about your grand plan! You were willing to spill the beans to the Vatican, but to me? Nooooo.

The Spanish Catholic Church is also concerned about homosexuality. During his Boxing Day sermon, the Bishop of Córdoba, Demetrio Fernández, said there was a conspiracy by the United Nations. "The Minister for Family of the Papal Government, Cardinal Antonelli, told me a few days ago in Zaragoza that UNESCO has a program for the next 20 years to make half the world population homosexual. To do this they have distinct programs, and will continue to implant the ideology that is already present in our schools."

I had no idea we even had a way to “make” people homosexual, but heck, if a Catholic priest says it, you know it’s got to be true. They take vows, you know, and believe in the ten commandments.

This is not my New Year’s resolution

I don’t make them. But I will lose more weight this year. Out of fear.

I was just at the grocery store, standing in the check-out line, which has become a gauntlet of terror. It’s the magazines.

Today, it was Paula Deen, round-cheeked and grinning, teeth bleached white, eyes like cold blue LEDs, photoshopped into perfectly plasticky plump grandmotherliness — a grandma with the complexion of an irradiated sixteen year old, glowing and sparkling — and she was holding a bowl of livid yellow macaroni and cheese that was bigger than her head. And I said to myself, this is the new face of death. And I said to myself, this is the American face of death, the death of viscid excess, the death that ends not in bones, but a quivering mass of adipocere. And I said to myself, don’t piss yourself, Myers, but that’s goddamn terrifying.

And I thought about buying that magazine and pasting that freakishly leering face on my refrigerator, but decided that placing a potent ward in my kitchen that would cause me to starve to death instead probably wasn’t a good idea.

But this is not a New Year’s resolution.

Tomorrow, it’ll probably be the Kardashians, and I’ll vow to Read More Books; or closeups of some starlet’s cellulite, and I’ll vow to be Less Superficially Judgmental; or creepy weepy exposes of a dying actor’s final hours, and I’ll vow to Crawl into a Cave When it’s my Time to Die. You can learn a lot from the supermarket checkout line, but mainly you learn that there’s a side of humanity that makes a fellow ashamed to be a humanist.

Hot for…student?

Jesse Bering is that weird evolutionary psychologist who writes for SciAm and who I’ve criticized before. It seems he doesn’t like me at all (boy, does he hate me—it’s extremely personal for him), and I’ll be charitable and assume his personal antipathy has clouded his judgment, because he’s really gone on a frothing tear on facebook and made a few strange accusations. Apparently, I have a choice: I can be sexually attracted to my students, or I’m sick and need to see a doctor. And then he and his friends proceed to carry out a remote dissection of my psychological problems. On facebook. By a bunch of people who’ve never even met me. How…unprofessional.

I was sent a copy of the thread; if you’d like to read bizarre internet drama completely disconnected from reality, you’ll find it below the fold.

[Read more…]

Dear Jesse, please don’t give up your day job

Jesse Bering, the evolutionary psychologist, has decided to play Agony Aunt and has penned a collection of suggestions to reader questions. The gorge rises; one struggles to avoid flinging the laptop across the room. Take his answer to a “Deep-thinking Hebephile” who thinks we ought to reconsider age of consent laws, to make it easier for him to have sex with the objects of his desire.

Whenever society screams about some demon or another, it’s probably just caught an especially alarming sight of itself in the mirror. Given the historical flux in age-of-consent laws, there are few among us who aren’t the direct descendents of those who’d be incarcerated as sex offenders today.

This is true. We probably all have rapists in our pedigrees, too, and thieves and murderers, and even priests. That does not imply that we should accept these behaviors because they just are; even if you are doing your best to be the dispassionate observer of an evolving group of animals, you should also wonder whether rapists/pedophiles, even the ones who manage to reproduce, are actually selectively better at reproducing than individuals who favor consenting, willing, cooperative partners. This is not part of Bering’s perspective, strangely enough.

And then he tells this bizarre, disturbing story.

Rind points out that it’s foolish and manipulative to demand that all teens frame their consensual trysts with all adults as inherently negative. He tells of a 14-year-old Jewish boy who lost his virginity to a prostitute in her 20s on the eve of the Holocaust only to soon perish at a concentration camp. On learning after the war from his son’s friend that the boy died a “man,” the boy’s father smiled and wept with pride. The irony, of course, is that today’s moral panic dictates that this teenager should be called a “survivor” of sex abuse had he actually escaped Auschwitz.

Holy crap. I’d think he was a survivor of sex abuse if he escaped that warped old deviant he called a father. I would find no consolation in the idea that a child of mine suffered stress and torment leading to death, but managed to put a penis in a vagina. I also wonder, if it were a daughter, would he have wept with pride at learning she’d managed to protect her virginity before death? The irony here is that this strange old man attached so much importance to virginity.

So Bering is deep into boring pedant mode and pretending to be the objective observer, but he really exposes his own biases. The other thing completely missing from his discussion is a recognition of the fact that sex involves at least two people — to Bering and his correspondents, the targets of their passions really are just objects, and consideration of their interests and desires is simply off the radar. It’s a bit like eavesdropping on psychopaths talking about their next victim, and it’s distressingly creepy.

I won’t even touch the letter from the obese anti-feminist looking to improve his social relationships (Bering’s advice: testosterone supplements), or the woman who finds teenage girls infuriatingly shallow (Bering notes that at 29, she’s “a young, reproductively viable female with diminishing mate value in the throes of intense intrasexual competition with potential rivals for a desirable mate.”) Allow me to suggest that if what you really want is a completely non-judgmental referee to provide biological rationalizations for any behavior you exhibit, Chris Clarke has the routine down cold.

Hauntological weirdness

Those of you with a peculiarly antiquarian or literary turn of mind might enjoy this odd essay from China Miéville on Lovecraft and various other strains of strangeness in fantastical fiction. I liked it because it’s got lots about tentacles, and also snipes at Eagleton.

This must be insisted upon for the heuristic edges of the Weird and the hauntological – and indeed of other fantastic categories – to stay sharp. Hence the importance of ‘Geek Critique’, which rebukes, say, Terry Eagleton when he blithely discusses the ‘rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead’;(25) because whatever the merits of the rest of his argument, only two of those figures are undead, and they are all different. Teratological specificity demands attention. And, granting the controversial position that ghosts are teratological subjects, such specificities are nowhere more different and important than between Weird and hauntological.

Others who dislike ornate verbosity may not care much for it at all, and that’s OK.