What about this crop circle?

[Toke]

Only one kind of woo - psi. Other kinds of woo are actually psi effects in disguise, for instance if I am consistent in that attitude then homeopathy is not really about the chemical or the water, it's about the unconscious mind-over-matter psi of the homeopath and patient.

The unified theory of woo?

You are stretching the term psi to cover everything thereby making it more or less meaningless.
Guess it is not a problem as long as you do not try to test it.

 

[23_Tauri]

Hmm. Is that common? If a crop circle recovers like that, does it mean that none of the plants were broken or damaged by the stomperboard or feet? I mean would damaged plants recover like that?

Sometimes you get the plants brushed over at half height. It's more common in spring barley, which is thinner and more bendy than wheat. The person who entered the formation reported no obvious signs of mechanical damage but I can't verify and accept this is anecedotal (although I have no reason to disbelieve him).

Pretty much all the crop recovers, even that which is well flattened by a stomper board. It's the visitors that do the damage and trash the crop, not the original circle-making.

You might want to ask Stray Cat his opinion on circles where the plants aren't laid all the way down to the ground he probably knows more than me (but I can't vouch for what he's willing to divulge)

 

[Limbo]

I think it would take a bit more than one crop circle, and you might want to observe others interacting with your crop circle too.

Yeah.

The trickster archetype exists in people and is alive and well in Wiltshire. It is this that challenges and transforms our way of thinking. Why would you want it to be overcome?

Well, maybe overcome is the wrong word. The trickster can be a catalyst for change, and so maybe adapt would have been a better word.

 

[Limbo]

The unified theory of woo?

Unified woo, religion, mythology, mysticism.

You are stretching the term psi to cover everything thereby making it more or less meaningless.

I can see how it might look that way. But psi is a universal, it's an archetype of the collective unconscious, a common denominator. It is quite naturally stretched to cover every religion and mythology and mystical tradition anyway, it is a part of them all. From primordial shamanism to Christianity. And therefore it covers or touches on every category of religious ("woo") phenomena. Including crop circles and UFOs.

And if you think to dispute categorizing crop circles and UFOs as a 'religious phenomena', I would recommend thinking again.

 

[Toke]

And if you think to dispute categorizing crop circles and UFOs as a 'religious phenomena', I would recommend thinking again.

Would not dream of disputing that.
A crop circle is just as good as a catholic statue crying blood.

 

[Limbo]

Would not dream of disputing that.
A crop circle is just as good as a catholic statue crying blood.

Well then, since psi is found in every religion, and crop circles/UFOs are religious in nature, then a connection of some sort between psi and crop circles/UFOs becomes apparent. All one has to do is indulge in the study of comparative mythology/mysticism/religion and parapsychology to confirm it. The resulting panoramic cross-cultural meta-perspective is necessary in order to see the unified pattern in both the past and the present, I think.

 

[W.D.Clinger]

Well then, since psi is found in every religion, and crop circles/UFOs are religious in nature, then a connection between psi and crop circles/UFOs becomes apparent. All one has to do is indulge in the study of comparative mythology/mysticism/religion to confirm it. The resulting panoramic cross-cultural perspective is necessary in order to see the unified pattern, I think.

Almost, but you should have said:

Wooful explanations for crop circles/UFOs are religious in nature.

The study of wooful explanations for crop circles/UFOs therefore belongs within the discipline of comparative mythology/mysticism/religion.

 

[Toke]

Almost, but you should have said:

Wooful explanations for crop circles/UFOs are religious in nature.

The study of wooful explanations for crop circles/UFOs therefore belongs within the discipline of comparative mythology/mysticism/religion.

It appears that the only point in dispute is whether this psi/woo/religion exist outside human imagination.

I say no.

 

[Limbo]

It appears that the only point in dispute is whether this psi/woo/religion exist outside human imagination.

I say no.

And as always, sooner or later that point will boil down to the hard problem and the nature of reality. I am a transcendental or mental or perhaps a neutral monist. Hard to say. My tentative metaphysical position is that the nature of reality is mind, not matter. That's how psi is possible and why the sheep-goat effect is inevitable. The trickster is sort of like a personification of the sheep-goat effect, IMO.

The Enduring Enigma of UFOs

[...]

Such experiences are reported not as fantasy but as reality—often more intensely real than everyday life. Observers interpret them according to their expectations and culture. Religious pilgrims at Fatima saw a disk in the sky as a religious miracle; pilot Kenneth Arnold saw flying craft. Others may perceive ghosts of the dead, apparitions of the living, techno-elves, blobs of light, or extraterrestrials. Westerners tend to see technologically sophisticated spacecraft piloted by humanoids, straight out of the special effects and cast of a Star Wars movie. We expect to get radar hits on apparently solid flying machines, and sometimes we do.

One of the first to explore the notion of mythology manifesting as physical reality was psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who in 1957 published the book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky. More recently, authors Jacques Vallee (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact) and Keith Thompson (Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination) and folklorists Peter Rojcewicz and Thomas Bullard have written about the parallels among UFOs, folklore, and mythology.

“Space-Age myth” does not imply that UFO sightings or encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, sprites, elves, or demons are fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, blurring conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities. Some may object that this proposal doesn’t account for the physical traces associated with some UFO reports, but this misinterprets what Jung and others have proposed. They suggest that the manifest world emerges from mind, that is, that mind shapes matter. Where have we heard this before?

In his book Global Mind Change, former IONS President Willis Harman discussed three basic ways of looking at the world. He called the current Western scientific worldview “materialistic monism,” or “M1.” Within M1, everything—both matter and energy— is made of a single substance. From matter emerges everything, including the brain-generated illusion called mind. In M1, angels and aliens walking through walls are fine plot points for an episode of The Twilight Zone, but they are impossible in the real world. In M1, UFOs are conceivable, but only in terms of hard, physical spacecraft with humanoid pilots. Most of the modern technological world was created based on M1 assumptions, so it carries enormous persuasive power. But the whole panoply of noetic experiences defy materialistic explanations, suggesting that M1 is an incomplete worldview.

Detailed taxonomies of these anomalies are described by all cultures; they include, among others, the Hindu siddhis, the Catholic charisms, Sufi attainments, and, in indigenous societies, shamanic magic. Harman’s second worldview, M2, represents dualism, which assumes two fundamentally different kinds of substances in the universe, matter and mind. Many scientists today reject dualism because it begs the problem of how two deeply different substances could interact at all. In addition, it seems lavish to require the universe to maintain (at least) two distinct essences, when it would be far simpler to have only one.

The third worldview, M3, is transcendental or mental monism, which Harman argued is the source of both the perennial wisdom and the emerging worldview of the twenty-first century. In M3, consciousness is primary, and matter and energy are emergent properties of consciousness. M3 accommodates everything that M1 and M2 allow for, as well as rogue phenomena like telepathic ETs, observation-shy UFOs, and collective mind–manifested UFOs. Evidence in favor of M3 has been slowly amassing for over a century. Such recentbooks as Irreducible Mind, Entangled Minds, and Measuring the Immeasurable (see review 0n page 41) discuss the empirical evidence in detail, ranging from psychic phenomena to creative genius to mind-body interactions to evidence suggestive of reincarnation.

[...]

 

[Toke]

As you might have guessed I am quite happy with the M1.

(Sure the others could be fun as fantasy, like as basis for a world for tabletop role playing.)

 

[Limbo]

As you might have guessed I am quite happy with the M1.

Pity it has to go the way of the dinosaur.

I hope you adapt and evolve well.

 

[fls]

Wow. That dude totally misunderstands the perspective of science. I wonder why.

Linda

 

[23_Tauri]

Such experiences are reported not as fantasy but as reality—often more intensely real than everyday life. Observers interpret them according to their expectations and culture. Religious pilgrims at Fatima saw a disk in the sky as a religious miracle; pilot Kenneth Arnold saw flying craft. Others may perceive ghosts of the dead, apparitions of the living, techno-elves, blobs of light, or extraterrestrials. Westerners tend to see technologically sophisticated spacecraft piloted by humanoids, straight out of the special effects and cast of a Star Wars movie. We expect to get radar hits on apparently solid flying machines, and sometimes we do.

Jolly japes aside, it seems almost trite of me to state that crop circles, like ufology, have been appropriated by the New Age movement as another pillar on which to mould its belief system. Crop circles are modern myth, but they are also a radical form of interactive art where the observer becomes part of the creation. I don’t think we’re in dispute here limbo, but we are talking about interpretation of events, and that includes people’s interpretation of the physical evidence, which itself creates the mythology.

 

[Limbo]

Jolly japes aside, it seems almost trite of me to state that crop circles, like ufology, have been appropriated by the New Age movement as another pillar on which to mould its belief system. Crop circles are modern myth, but they are also a radical form of interactive art where the observer becomes part of the creation. I don’t think we’re in dispute here limbo, but we are talking about interpretation of events, and that includes people’s interpretation of the physical evidence, which itself creates the mythology.

When it comes to the on-going evolution of world mythology/religion, I don't know if the word appropriated is appropriate. To think of a mythos as sort of like reaching out and 'appropriating' this or that is not the right way to think of it, IMO.

How much do you know of primitive shamanism, of the shamanic awakening? How much do you know of altered states of consciousness? That's where mythology started long ago, and that's where it evolves and 'moulds' itself even to this very day. Each mythos, each religion is ultimately based on these same shamanic/mystical/ASC experiences. Such experiences are like catalysts for religious evolution.

Then there is an interaction, a cultural give-and-take, between the mystics who achieve or are afflicted by altered states of consciousness experiences and the community. From that give-and-take mythology is born, evolves. The experiences of the mystics become mythologized - the archetypes are given a cultural form. But the first impulse in this process is involuntary and mystical and profound and "originates" from a "part" of the psyche that is outside of the ego-self.

All mythologies have people who have UFO type experiences, because such experiences are found in shamanism and so are found in all religions in one archetypal form or another, since all religions evolved from shamanism. So of course the New-Age movement, a modern mythology, has as much claim to it as any other mythological system because New-Agers have UFO experiences too.

 

[I Ratant]

Puppy shaking a shoe.
It never tires of the fun.

 

[Elizabeth I]

Anything I can give you can be interpreted in more ways than one, and you and I obviously have different ideas about what constitutes an 'indication otherwise'.

I'm puzzled as to why you would select the more complex, less supported interpretation than the simpler, more grounded one.

What if I go out and make my own crop circle which, through a paranormal anomaly, leads me to ask myself profound, life changing questions about the nature of reality?

Then you probably need to get out more.

 

[Limbo]

I'm puzzled as to why you would select the more complex, less supported interpretation than the simpler, more grounded one.

Isn't it clear? My own paranormal experiences limit my options. I wouldn't be here taking on JREF without an unshakable psychological foundation based on multiple direct personal experiences with the paranormal.

 

[Elizabeth I]

Isn't it clear? My own paranormal experiences limit my options. I wouldn't be here taking on JREF without an unshakable psychological foundation based on multiple direct personal experiences with the paranormal.

But you admit it's a matter of interpretation. Therefore you choose to interpret phenomena in a way that adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the interpretation.

 

[Limbo]

But you admit it's a matter of interpretation. Therefore you choose to interpret phenomena in a way that adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the interpretation.

True, but my choices are quite limited. I can't interpret them away with any degree of intellectual honesty, as would be required if I wanted to go with the simpler, more grounded world-view of a JREFer. Tempting, but no.

 

[23_Tauri]

But you admit it's a matter of interpretation. Therefore you choose to interpret phenomena in a way that adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the interpretation.

Sometimes though, with crop circles, there is no obvious, simple explanation of "it's all done with boards". Take a close look at the simple circle in flax I posted to earlier. There are many questions surrounding the construction and appearance of that circle that I cannot answer within my current knowledge of circle making and to which I have not yet found the answers. For me, it's enigmatic and that's why for me it was the most impressive formation of last summer.