This blog has often showcased authors who have worked a scientific angle - read quantum physics - to convince us that the universe is made not of matter, nor of energy, but information. This information, they say, is malleable, as malleable as thought itself - which is information. Many of the writers are physicists themselves, and I presume know what they are talking about. I do not, and so cannot come across with the feeling of this mutability. Rather, because of my limited background, I remain more impressed by what I can - or believe I can - access. This has led to an interest in spirits, UFO's, telepathy and ultimately, mysticism, things that I may not understand in words, but do in feeling. In this, I think, lies the key to grasping other realities.
But "feeling" is nebulous, by definition. It does exist, but we cannot grow it in a test tube or tease it apart with an electron accelerator (although some quantum theorists believe we can - I leave that to them). If we think back to childhood, we understand that we understood many things wrongly - my idea of conception, for instance, was that it occurred when the newlyweds drank a glass of wine at the reception. Certainly there seemed to be a cause and effect! Yet it is not these misconceptions that bring back the essence of childhood - it is the sense of wonder and awe that surrounded it, as well as the terror of an unintelligible world run by unintelligible (adult) beings. Still - where is the essence of reality in feeling? Nothing in fact changes, just our ideas about it. This can be tremendous and can, and has, changed the world. Empiricism, as stated many times before, has disenchanted the human world and led to certain excesses and social forms that attempt to make up for this lack. Belief in Revelations through a psychopath like David Koresh led to a very different feeling-reality for the people in the compound at Waco. And so on. However, we have numerous accounts of actual, on-the-ground differences in reality for people of different historic ages or different cultures.
There are so many accounts of ESP and prescience among traditional peoples that they have become sideline oddities in anthropology. I was unwittingly drawn into this myself, after observing a mystical/religious increase ritual of the Hoti Indians in Venezuela (on which I read an account at at an Anthro meeting that was later published). Two days after, I had planned a hunt with some Hoti, and the night before had this dream where a voice told me, "you will hunt (kill) 7 animals." I told my fieldwork partner the next morning and shrugged it off before setting out into the forest. After several hours and several successes, we were nearly back to the village when I told one of the Hoti about my dream, ending, "but I only got 6. I guess the dream was wrong." "No," said the Hoti, "that squirrel you shot at, (so and so) found it after in the bush. You got 7 (where he held up his fingers). The Awato Feast (the ritual of a few days before) is very strong."
Still, such things can always be explained away as "coincidence." Other accounts, such as those of miracles in the Bible, are swept away as myth or primitive imagination (like a child having an imaginary friend). Magical healing, too, is usually explained away as psychosomatic healing, as if that answers anything, but it seems to assuage those who are committed to scientism. But there are some accounts that cannot be so easily pushed off. These include visions of spirits who tell people where to find things that they could not possibly know, or sightings or actual close encounters with UFO's or aliens by otherwise reliable people. For me, one of the oddest reliable accounts of a physically different reality came while doing fieldwork with a group (tribe) in lowland Venezuela.
These people by in large spoke Spanish and were familiar with mainstream Venezuelan culture, although they lived off the land and maintained some of their traditional beliefs. We were sitting around discussing old times with two older members when the topic of the "little people" came up. In the past, gnome-like people of the forest were invited to yarake (manioc beer) festivals and came with regularity. We asked the two what had become of them. One who spoke little Spanish immediately pantomimed the coming of one into a festival no more than three years earlier. He showed how he looked and how he had gone to the woods to invite him in. The other, who was fluent in Spanish, agreed. "Yes, he came! He was here just as you are here now!" He showed us how tall he was, gave a description of him and of the good time he had drinking with them (manioc beer would not account for such hallucinations. It is at best about half as strong as standard American domestic beer).
The two were firm in this - as all were on the existence of ghosts at the edge of the village at night, among a slew of other things seen by many or all that we would call fantastic.
Maybe the quantum theorists are right - we will look at them closer at another time. But it does seem that reality construction and feeling go deeper than the head and the heart - different realities might actually be REAL, in the sense that we hold today. It is, coincidentally, why this site includes such things as ghosts and psychic phenomena along side religious and mystical experiences. While the latter point towards an ultimate reality, the former show that this reality - one that has been so stripped of depth - is only one of many, and not nearly as impressive (if technically flat) as we are often told. FK
But "feeling" is nebulous, by definition. It does exist, but we cannot grow it in a test tube or tease it apart with an electron accelerator (although some quantum theorists believe we can - I leave that to them). If we think back to childhood, we understand that we understood many things wrongly - my idea of conception, for instance, was that it occurred when the newlyweds drank a glass of wine at the reception. Certainly there seemed to be a cause and effect! Yet it is not these misconceptions that bring back the essence of childhood - it is the sense of wonder and awe that surrounded it, as well as the terror of an unintelligible world run by unintelligible (adult) beings. Still - where is the essence of reality in feeling? Nothing in fact changes, just our ideas about it. This can be tremendous and can, and has, changed the world. Empiricism, as stated many times before, has disenchanted the human world and led to certain excesses and social forms that attempt to make up for this lack. Belief in Revelations through a psychopath like David Koresh led to a very different feeling-reality for the people in the compound at Waco. And so on. However, we have numerous accounts of actual, on-the-ground differences in reality for people of different historic ages or different cultures.
There are so many accounts of ESP and prescience among traditional peoples that they have become sideline oddities in anthropology. I was unwittingly drawn into this myself, after observing a mystical/religious increase ritual of the Hoti Indians in Venezuela (on which I read an account at at an Anthro meeting that was later published). Two days after, I had planned a hunt with some Hoti, and the night before had this dream where a voice told me, "you will hunt (kill) 7 animals." I told my fieldwork partner the next morning and shrugged it off before setting out into the forest. After several hours and several successes, we were nearly back to the village when I told one of the Hoti about my dream, ending, "but I only got 6. I guess the dream was wrong." "No," said the Hoti, "that squirrel you shot at, (so and so) found it after in the bush. You got 7 (where he held up his fingers). The Awato Feast (the ritual of a few days before) is very strong."
Still, such things can always be explained away as "coincidence." Other accounts, such as those of miracles in the Bible, are swept away as myth or primitive imagination (like a child having an imaginary friend). Magical healing, too, is usually explained away as psychosomatic healing, as if that answers anything, but it seems to assuage those who are committed to scientism. But there are some accounts that cannot be so easily pushed off. These include visions of spirits who tell people where to find things that they could not possibly know, or sightings or actual close encounters with UFO's or aliens by otherwise reliable people. For me, one of the oddest reliable accounts of a physically different reality came while doing fieldwork with a group (tribe) in lowland Venezuela.
These people by in large spoke Spanish and were familiar with mainstream Venezuelan culture, although they lived off the land and maintained some of their traditional beliefs. We were sitting around discussing old times with two older members when the topic of the "little people" came up. In the past, gnome-like people of the forest were invited to yarake (manioc beer) festivals and came with regularity. We asked the two what had become of them. One who spoke little Spanish immediately pantomimed the coming of one into a festival no more than three years earlier. He showed how he looked and how he had gone to the woods to invite him in. The other, who was fluent in Spanish, agreed. "Yes, he came! He was here just as you are here now!" He showed us how tall he was, gave a description of him and of the good time he had drinking with them (manioc beer would not account for such hallucinations. It is at best about half as strong as standard American domestic beer).
The two were firm in this - as all were on the existence of ghosts at the edge of the village at night, among a slew of other things seen by many or all that we would call fantastic.
Maybe the quantum theorists are right - we will look at them closer at another time. But it does seem that reality construction and feeling go deeper than the head and the heart - different realities might actually be REAL, in the sense that we hold today. It is, coincidentally, why this site includes such things as ghosts and psychic phenomena along side religious and mystical experiences. While the latter point towards an ultimate reality, the former show that this reality - one that has been so stripped of depth - is only one of many, and not nearly as impressive (if technically flat) as we are often told. FK
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