During the years following Vietnam, the army became convinced that the Chinese had thousands of children who were clairvoyant. Somewhat mystified, the CIA, NSA and DIA did their own research into mind-control, remote viewing, and other New Age concepts. Among the largest and most well funded of these was the First Earth Battalion which originated on the ideas and writings of one Jim Channon.
His philosophical impetus is as follows:
Chinese monks were often attacked by robbers. They developed a new fighting system based on using the force of the attacker against him. Likewise the soldiers of the First Earth will learn martial arts with the same ethical basis. No Earth soldier shall be denied the kingdom of heaven because he or she is used as an instrument of indiscriminate war. The conscience will be developed together with the ability to neutralize the opponent.
Skill sets he hoped to ingender in the armed forces included the following categories of warrior monks:
PEOPLE
All warrior monks, but an interdependence of New Age skills as well.
[The graphic shows the following skills, all emanating from a central Spirit Wizard]
* Spirit wizard
* Meditation leader
* Martial arts wizard
* Nutritionist herbalist
* Vexillographer (flags and banners)
* Cinematographer
* Old tapes
* Holographer
* Printer
* Minstrels
* Video technoid
* Satellite technoid
* Laser technoid
* General systems theorist
* Physicist
* Futurist
* Builder
* Conservationist
* Indian tracker [sic]
I would hope to be a spirit wizard (which sounds neat) mixed with a futurist/indian tracker (to help me find dinner at lunch time). I would settle for Vexillographer, but to be honest, I wouldn’t want to be Printer. That sounds boring.
It seems well and good, but the research Channon conducted went on to be used in part for “enhanced interrogation techniques” and methods used at the standoff at Waco, Texas. In short, his hippy powers were used for evil.
To learn more about the interesting goings-on and the writing of Channon, go here.
While heading in to shore off the coast of southern Australia, we were approached by two men in a small rowboat who claimed to have an animal unlike any we had ever seen. Holding up a large glass jar, we were confronted with a mass of foliage not unlike that of a carrot, or a clump of seaweed. Remarkably, the plant began to move about, seemingly in possession of not only the gift of locomotion, but of sentience.
Asking for a closer look, we were told that the creature could only be viewed for a price. Growing irate, a young member of our crew leapt from the deck of our vessel into the sea and hoisted himself into the rowboat. In the ensuing scuffle, he won control of the jar, only to see it smashed in his hands by an oar swung the more dexterous of his adversaries. Diving into the water after the beast, the young man found himself in a sea full of weeds, and for the life of him he could not discern the direction in which the true specimen had fled.
“Lost!” he moaned as he climbed back aboard, “lost forever.”
Once ashore, we met a town doctor, who was familiar with the species. After telling him of our misadventures, he remarked that the young man’s actions had likely saved the specimen’s life, as he could not fathom such a creature surviving in a glass jar for more than a few hours. We passed this information on to the young man, who, upon seeing the rendering our artist produced of the beast, insisted upon the jar being drawn as well. Without it, he said, the depiction was “wholly unbelievable.”
Suppose you walk past a barber’s shop one day, and see a sign that says
“Do you shave yourself? If not, come in and I’ll shave you! I shave anyone who does not shave himself, and noone else.”
This seems fair enough, and fairly simple, until, a little later, the following question occurs to you - does the barber shave himself? If he does, then he mustn’t, because he doesn’t shave men who shave themselves, but then he doesn’t, so he must, because he shaves every man who doesn’t shave himself… and so on. Both possibilities lead to a contradiction.
Apparently this problem gave mathematicians like Bertrand Russel a big headache at the beginning of the 20th century, and almost made some people give up on life entirely.
I don’t think it is that big a deal, because the barber could just be a woman.
Paradoxes are kind of fun though, especially ones about God being all powerful and all. One nice one goes “Could God create a burrito so big that even God could not eat it?” I like this one because it helps me imagine what an infinite burrito would be like, and it also helps me imagine God eating that burrito in an instant. What this would do to the divine digestive tract is anyone’s guess.
Wandering through the Nagano prefecture of what was once the Shinano district, we came upon a grassy field. In the distance there was a lone tree in full bloom, though it was not the season for flowers. How was this possible?
Our host told a story which to us seemed tangentially related:
“There was once a pauper living in this district who was called Issa. He was an orphan, which in that place and time meant that he had little chance of material success or happiness. Beaten as a child, he traveled from place to place, living off the kindness of others and writing short poems to himself. In time achieved enough stability to get married and have a son. Soon though, even this short period of calm was disturbed as his wife and his son both passed away. Despite his great suffering, his haiku are radiant in their humility, their compassion, and their friendliness towards life.”
How was the story of this pauper related to the tree in full bloom, we asked our host.
“Issa believed that all things issued from a central source which was, if nothing else, beautiful. This was how he was able to maintain his compassionate nature despite the trials life threw at him.”
Yes, yes, but the flowers…we urged him.
“Near the end of his life,” our host said with a sigh, “Issa lived alone in a small wooden hut in this district. The old man had three possessions: A lamp, a pen, and a bedroll. During a stormy January night, he was preparing to sleep when with a bump from his elbow he toppled the lamp and set the straw floor of his hut ablaze. He escaped, but it was only a matter of minutes before his hut was fully engulfed in flames. He walked away from the blaze in the quickly deepening snow. As he walked he grew weary, and, knowing he could go no further, lay his bedroll onto the snowy ground.
He was found in the morning; he had passed away in the night. Under his pillow was found the last of his 20,000 haiku.”
We listened, in silence now.
“There are thanks in order:
the snowflakes on this bedroll,
they too, are from god.
This is the last haiku of Kobayashi Issa.”
Wind blew, and we were no closer to understanding the mystery of the tree in full bloom. I asked that the scene by committed to our records, along with the verse as our host had translated it. Strangely, the tree’s resplendent bloom eluded our artist, who was forced to settle for bare branches in his recreation.
While in the state of Yap we were shown the remarkable form of currency used by the local population since antiquity. Giant stone disks, crafted on Yap or on neighboring islands are valued not only based on their mass, but on their age and history. Strangely, the money often changes hands without being moved, as it would take over twenty men to lift a single coin. In past ages, we were told, the giant monies were moved by canoe, though today they are largely stationary.
Producing a coin from our treasury to show our host, we were met with laughter. “That is your great wealth?” he gasped. “That?”
Inquiring about the history of our coin, he was concerned to find that we could not tell him who the previous owners were, nor where the thing was made or during the reign of which ruler.
Dr. Jim Tucker, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia who has carried on research in the field pioneered by the late Ian Stevenson, another psychiatry professor at the college and a Montreal native, said he and colleagues stop short of arguing that reincarnation is a fact.
“My conclusion is that the strongest cases provide evidence that there are times when memories and emotions seem to have survived death,” he said.
“Whether that exactly means what people think of as reincarnation—as sort of a soul moving from one life to another—that’s hard to say ... [But] there is a lot of reason to think that consciousness is sort of an independent force in the universe, and as such it may well exist separate from the physical brain, at least at times. This would be an example of that.”
The cases that prompt Dr. Tucker to remark like this are those in which patients display vivid memories of existences other than their own without any other signs of mental instability. Dr. Tucker says that while the idea of a consciousness that exists apart from the brain runs contrary to the materialist leanings of the scientific community, his own inclination is that at some point, the strictly materialist view will see a strong challenge.
I am not shocked. Materialism results out of the inability to test that which is not material, not out of a philosophical impossibility of super-material realities. Hell, for all scientists know, we could be the imagination of some sort of computer program that has managed to simulate a material world perfectly well. Their job is not to figure out if that is true, but rather to learn all they can about the simulation.
I do think, however, that we sometimes display a remarkable lack of creativity when it comes to understanding our own minds. The understanding of consciousness, it seems to me, is an area well-primed for a paradigm shift. In the physical world we have come to understand that the lines we once thought were solid are indeed blurred. This was true when we discovered that all things were made of atoms, and it was true when we learned about quantum theory.
I think that at some point we will learn that the lines we draw between our consciousnesses are similarly blurred, but it will take a long time to figure this out because we are looking at them from the inside. It is impossible to look at one without also looking through one, and this is a huge problem.
I think though, that just like believing that physical boundaries are discrete is an example of rudimentary thinking, so does believing that your consciousness is surrounded by some sort of brick wall represent a marked lack of creativity.
In Eastern thought, each soul is atman, which is a fractal representation of Brahman, which is the totality of existence, or the Oversoul. One way of understanding this is to imagine Brahman as a big bonfire with a never-ending source of fuel. When someone is born, it is like putting a small stick into that fire and letting it catch. The small flame is atman, it is made of Brahman, but it is also separate and its own entity.
In this way consciousness can be passed, manipulated, extinguished, and absorbed, it is not simply an abstraction created by the firing of neurons, it is an energy, albeit one that we do not yet understand. I think that we may have an inclination to it, however, and I sure hope that some giant brain figures it out soon because I feel like it is on the tip of my tongue.
The Sirige is the most impressive of all Dogon masks, standing an impressive 15 feet tall. When it emerged at the beginning of the procession it rivaled even the trees.
A villager seated with us said that the height symbolized a link between this world and another world, and we marveled at the motion that the dancer achieved: now dipping, now rising.
When we inquired as to the mechanics of the dance, the same villager motioned to his own toothless mouth, the mouth of a dancer, as the bulk of the sirige is secured by a wooden bar gripped in the dancer’s teeth; the entire weight of the stunning mask supported by only his jaw.
Hana’s friend Krista lives on a house boat on the Nile river in Cairo. A few mornings ago, she woke up to find things a bit different in her home. There were some items displaced onto the couch and a pair of men’s shoes in a side room. Odd. Then, she walked into her kitchen for morning tea, and found a man sleeping on the kitchen counter. She went to get the property manager, who immediately ran across the street to get a friend. Together, they put the sleeping stranger on the ground and tied him with a rope, all without him waking up.
Upon further examination, Krista found that the man was wearing her necklace.
When the stranger finally woke up, the two property managers asked him how he had entered the apartment. He said “min el ba7r…yalla hop” (from the river, let’s go….hop!).
So this clever villain floated up on a houseboat in the night, and hopped in. He took off his shoes, then looked around, rearranging nick-nacks here and there until he found a particularly nice necklace. Putting it on, he somehow fell asleep on the kitchen counter, and awoke to find himself bound on the floor.
