2014-0607

Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.

1 Comment[Author: Category: Non-fiction, Paranormal, Reviews ]
Proof of Heaven

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By Dr Eben Alexander, M.D. published by Simon and Schuster 2012. Buy this Book!

While this book is an account of Dr Eben Alexander surviving a serious life-threatening illness, it is also a revelation of human consciousness. In the book, we find an account of a neurosurgeon’s experience of the kind of disease he himself has treated during his career. This places him in a most advantageous position to explore why he survived such a fatal illness.

Chapter by chapter the book swings between the family’s account of their experience, and what the doctor was experiencing (as far as he can remember). His account of seeing things and knowing things while out of his body is extraordinary. Whether the things he saw and heard have meaning for us is another matter. Experiencing God or heaven, is a very personal matter. Therefore, Dr Alexander’s experience may fall into the category of phenomena for us. This need not detract from the valuable information contained in this book.

What interests me most is the way this scientist was able to understand consciousness. We would expect a specialist brain doctor to understand the brain. Dr Alexander’s experience showed him that he had little understanding of the brain in relation to consciousness prior to his illness.

He says, “The brain itself doesn’t produce consciousness.” Dr Alexander explains that the brain actually filters our perceptions so that we can manage them. Then he says something that in my experience is a fact, “True thought is pre-physical.” In my own book, which examines human consciousness, (published in 2007) I say, “Our consciousness is expressed using our physical body, primarily our brain. Hippocrates observed that the brain was the messenger of consciousness, not the consciousness itself. So our brain is a tool through which we express our consciousness. The livelier our consciousness is the better its vehicle.” Kristina Kaine, “I Connecting: The Soul’s Quest” These ideas about consciousness come some way towards helping us to experience ourselves as beings of body, soul and spirit.

Dr Alexander’s experience of the will is also extremely interesting. “We are free beings hemmed all around by an environment conspiring to make us feel that we’re not free.” In my understanding, we are at a point in the evolution of humanity where we must work on our will with conscious awareness. Understanding freewill and individuation has reached a critical point in the world today. We hear cries for freedom everywhere. In fact, sometimes it seems that people who are already free are crying for even more freedom. To my way of thinking they are crying for something more and it could be the freedom that Dr Alexander experienced when we was in a coma and near death.

So Dr Alexander’s experience recorded in his book is timely. His conclusions in Chapter Fifteen are inspiring. For a neurosurgeon to write the words, “The brain itself doesn’t produce consciousness.” is quite breathtaking. Dr Alexander explains that the brain actually filters our perceptions so that we can manage them. If we think about this it really makes sense. In this multi-tasking world, we are continually filtering the information that comes towards us so that can manage our daily life. The same could easily be true of information about the spiritual worlds.

This book left me with one hope. Why can’t we be open to ideas that challenge our knowledge instead of dismissing them? Being open to possibilities is the only way to come to the truth. The truth always hides from limited minds. As Dr Alexander says of people who think that they know, “They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts.”

It is clear to me that Dr Alexander experienced the human spirit as something different from the human physical body. This is an awareness that I continually strive for. He observes that, “Much of what people have had to say about God and a higher spiritual world has involved bringing them down to our level, rather than elevating our perceptions up theirs.” I applaud Dr Alexander for producing this book; it has given me hope that as a human race we will increasingly experience the truth that we are spiritual beings inhabiting a physical body. – Review by Kristina Kaine.

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2013-0807

Parzival Reconsidered: How the Grail Sites Were Found – Wolfram Von Eschenbach as a Historian

1 Comment[Author: Category: Academic, History, Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews ]
How the Grail Sites Were Found

How the Grail Sites Were Found

Werner Greub (Author),
Robert J. Kelder – Willehalm Institute Press – Amsterdam (Translator) Buy This Book!

The 13th century German poet-knight Wolfram von Eschenbach assures us that his famous Grail romance Parzival contains descriptions of historical events that took place eleven generations before his time, i.e. in the 9th century, exactly in the way he narrates them. The source for his material he describes as a certain “well-known master Kyot the Provençal”, thus not, as still generally is assumed, Perceval by the French poet Chrétien de Troyes that appeared some 20 years earlier. But because this enigmatic figure Kyot could, until now, not historically be identified, his existence has long been cast in doubt, and so it is widely assumed that Wolfram based Parzival on poetic justice. With respect to his Willehalm, an unfinished epic poem on the heroic exploits of the Franconian William of Orange, it is still generally believed that Wolfram’s source was the semi-historical folklore of the Aliscans, one of the many so-called Chansons de geste of the roving  troubadours of the south of France. At that time the troubadours were extolling the rather fantastic and pious deeds of this paladin of Emperor Charlemagne. One of the last protectors of Celtic or Grail Christianity, the paladin was declared in 1066 a patron saint of the knights by Pope Alexander II.

In one of his lectures on Christ and the Spiritual World: The Search for the Holy Grail , the Austrian-born founder of the science of the Grail, also known as Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), stated on January 1, 1914, that Kyot is no mere figment of a poet’s vivid imagination, but definitely a historical figure, who lived not in the 12th, as is still generally believed, but in the 9th century. In private conversations, moreover, he described the Arlesheim Hermitage – an old Celtic sacred landscape near the site of the Goetheanum in Dornach, Switzerland – as the actual Grail area where Parzival had his eventful meetings with Trevrizent and Sigune, both of whom lived in seclusion as hermits not far from Wolfram’s Grail Castle Munsalvaesche, often mistakenly thought to be Montségur on the French side of the Pyrenees.

The above indications by Wolfram von Eschenbach and Rudolf Steiner motivated the Swiss-born anthroposophist and Grail researcher Werner Greub (1909-1997) to take Wolfram von Eschenbach’s words seriously, thereby succeeding, as it were, in bringing the Grail down to earth. Carefully following all of Wolfram’s manifold indications from the original Middle High German texts to the letter, and reading the landscape as a largely unspoiled script, he not only found Kyot to be none other than the medieval William of Orange, but also discovered, or rather decoded, most of the historic scenes of actions where – in the first half of the ninth century – most of the actual events in Parzival as well as Willehalm must have taken place in an area of what now is now called Alsace, Switzerland, Germany and France. This led Werner Greub to formulate his novel and controversial theory that Wolfram von Eschenbach is not only to be regarded as a great poet, but also as an exact chronicler of Parzival’s revolutionary inauguration as Grail king at Whitsun Saturday, May 12, 848 in the Grail castle Munsalvaesche located halfway up a hill on an ancient Roman quarry in the Arlesheim Hermitage. Wolfram’s references to various planetary constellations also turned out to be so exact that by means of extensive astronomical calculations the whole chronology of Parzival and, indirectly, that of Willehalm could be established.

As the title of this voluminous research report suggests, the emphasis lies not so much on the where but on the how. Werner Greub managed to depict his discovery of the Grail sites on various maps and in the geographical reality itself in such a manner that every scene of action can be represented and experienced step by step within the mind of the attentive reader. The reader is invited to make the next step of visiting the Parzival and Wilhelm geography in person in order to make an experiential assessment on the merits of this unique book that purports to be the hitherto considered legendary Grail tradition in a completely new light.

How The Grail Sites Were Found was first published under the title Wolfram von Eschenbach und die Wirklichkeit des Grals in 1974 by the Goetheanum, School for Spiritual Science founded by Rudolf Steiner in 1923 as the research and development center of the General Anthroposophical Society. It elicited such controversy that the second and third volumes of this projected Grail trilogy were never officially published. Due to these and other extenuating circumstances, it took 27 years for this book to be translated and first published as a ring-bound manuscript in English in 2001 and another 12 years before this first book edition could finally see the light of day. (A French edition was published as La Quête du Gral in 2002 and a Dutch translation Willem van Oranje, Parzival en de Graal by the Willehalm Institute Press in 2009.) More »

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2013-0707

A Secret History of Consciousness

2 Comments[Author: Category: History, Non-fiction, Reviews ]
A Secret History of Consciousness

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By Gary Lachman (Author), Colin Wilson (Foreword)

Published by Lindisfarne Books (May 1, 2003) Buy this Book!

This book is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand human consciousness. It is astounding to think that we explore the depths of the ocean and the outer reaches of space without putting a similar effort into exploring the true nature of the human mind. Perhaps I am expecting too much of those who have the resources for such exploration.

Machines may assist in identifying left and right brain, the activity of neurons and so forth, but they will never enlighten our understanding of perception, cognition and other facets of consciousness. Gary Lachman clearly explains how consciousness itself can unravel its mystery. He traces the ideas of many great minds and pulls them together in a way that makes it clear that human consciousness evolves and in particular, self-consciousness. Here lies the key; have we developed our own self-consciousness or do we still rely on group consciousness. Perhaps this idea holds a clue for our scientists.

Who better than Gary Lachman, the Science Writer, to scope human consciousness in the way he has in this book? The evolution of self-consciousness is in our face every day. How many young people die as they challenge themselves in extreme sports? How many people create unnecessary difficulties for themselves and what about the bizarre practice of self-harm.

Lachman makes this point when he writes: “[Colin] Wilson recognised that the attraction of inconvenience and living dangerously is not in the actual problems or challenges they present, but in the focus and concentration we bring to bear on meeting them. Heidegger and Gurdjieff hit the nail on the head when they said that the thought of one’s death can lead to an experience of “being” – the thought, not the actual confrontation.”

I will be referring back to this book often as I seek to understand the development of my own consciousness as well as the challenges that we face as a human race living in today’s world. – Review by Kristina Kaine

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2013-0307

Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives

Comments Off on Life Before Life: Children’s Memories of Previous Lives[Author: Category: Non-fiction, Paranormal, Psychology, Reviews ]
Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children's Memories of Previous Lives

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By Jim B. Tucker, M.D., Foreword by Ian Stevenson, M.D.
Published by St. Martin’s Griffin Press, New York, N.Y., 2005. Buy this Book!

In the Foreword of Life Before Life, Ian Stevenson (1918 – 2007), whose work became well-known after the 1966 publication of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation, informs the readers that Jim Tucker writes so well that “he may beguile a casual reader into thinking he or she has no work to do. Read on, and learn that evidence may answer – sooner than you expected – the most important question we can ask ourselves: What happens after death?” Author Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, has taken on the task of continuing the monumental work that Ian Stevenson began in the 1960s. He writes in the Introduction: “More than 2,500 cases are registered in the files of the Division of Personality Studies at the University of Virginia… Previously, we have only written for a scientific audience, but now that we have forty years’ worth of data, the general public deserves the opportunity to evaluate the evidence as well. I will try to present it in as fair a way as possible so that you can judge for yourself.” For example, in the third chapter, titled “Explanations to Consider,” numerous other possibilities by way of understanding the cases described in Life Before Life are carefully considered, such as fraud, fantasy, genetic memory and possession, but these are generally ruled out through deductive reasoning, with the reader led back to serious consideration of reincarnation. Through the end of this chapter and in the four that follow, Dr. Tucker continues the substantiation of reincarnation by presenting remarkably similar data for more than 40 cases that involve children’s memories of previous lives. In Chapter 8, “Divine Intermission,” he achieves a tentative transition from emphasis on the mysteries of the soul to considerations for the existence of higher causative factors: spirit. In the ninth chapter he presents “Opposing Points of View,” and in the tenth and final chapter he at last allows for some “Conclusions and Speculations,” including “The Question of Karma.”

Near the end of the 1960s, financial support in the amount of one million dollars for Ian Stevenson’s work came from the will of Chester F. Carlson (1906 – 1968), who invented the photocopying process for the Xerox Corporation. Although the unusual nature of the research made some people uneasy, “Universities are not in the habit of turning down million-dollar gifts…The university eventually did decide to accept the money since it had been given to support scholarly work, and the work continued.”

In the cases presented the children first begin talking about the previous life around the age of two, and the median age when the talking stops is 72 months or 6 years. The children generally describe events near the end of the previous life and rarely remember more than one life. However, in the case of Bobby Hodges from North Carolina, which opens Chapter 8, memories from lives other than the most recent are described: in one life Bobby describes a death that resulted from a gunshot wound, and in another from a motor vehicle accident. What stands out in the cases presented in Dr. Tucker’s book is the fact that the amount of time in-between lives is surprisingly short, ranging from six months to fifty years, with most rebirths occurring from eighteen months to five years after the previous deaths. Most of the cases occurred in Asia or India — Sri Lanka, Thailand, Myanmar and Turkey — with the rebirths almost always occurring within the same region or nation, and sometimes within the same family. However, a significant number of cases are given that originated in England, Europe and the United States. A two-year-old boy in Britain recalled the life of a German WWII pilot, stating “I crashed a plane through a window.”  Later, he drew swastikas and eagles and demonstrated the Nazi salute and the goose-step march of German soldiers. (This has similarities to the case of James Leininger, in the book Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot, which is reviewed on this bLog.)  Some two dozen international cases involved a change from Japanese to Burmese lives, with the children recalling lives of Japanese soldiers who had been killed in Burma in WWII. These statistics do appear to be pointing to certain causative factors in quick returns: violent and sudden deaths in WWII, as well as in many other circumstances, such as in crimes or fatal accidents. In such circumstances the potential for spiritual development within the individual may be far better served in earthly life rather than in the spiritual world between death and rebirth.

An extraordinary case is described on page 114, at the beginning of Chapter 6, which is titled “Unusual Behaviors.” This relates the disturbing memories of a four-year-old girl who resided in Florida. The child, Kendra Carter, developed a loving attachment to her swimming instructor, named Ginger. The child talked about Ginger all the time and then began saying that she had been a baby in Ginger’s tummy, but that Ginger “had allowed a bad man to pull her out and that she had tried to hang on but could not. She described being scared in a dark and cold place afterwards. Kendra’s mother eventually found out from Ginger that she had in fact had an abortion nine years before Kendra was born when she was unmarried, sick, and dealing with anorexia nervosa… This case presents us with a number of perplexing questions. Why would a four-year-old girl think that she had been involved in an abortion? What caused her to develop the idea of reincarnation when she was being raised by a mother who could not even consider the possibility?” The mother attended a conservative Christian church and “did not accept the idea that reincarnation is a process that normally occurs.”

How does Jim Tucker achieve the transition from soul to spirit in the final chapters of the book? Concisely and admirably: challenging the assumption that the areas of physics and paranormal phenomena are incompatible; discussing how consciousness can be regarded as separate from the physical brain; mind-matter interactions; pointing out how mainstream science, while necessarily conservative, favors the status quo far longer than is productive; addressing the arguments of the population explosion; and pointing out that religious beliefs are not part of scientific objectivity, although deserving of consideration. The author quotes Matthew 11:10-14 and 17:10-13, from the New Testament: “Jesus says that John the Baptist is the prophet Elijah who had lived centuries before, and he does not appear to be speaking metaphorically.” In the chapter titled “Conclusions and Speculations” he addresses such difficult questions as: Does Everybody Reincarnate?, In Cases of Reincarnation, What Reincarnates?, The When and Where of Reincarnation, The Question of Karma, Enduring Emotions, Advice for Parents, Spiritual Speculations, Future Research, and Final Thoughts (Out of the mouth of babes …)

But it seems that this book and the extensive studies and research from which it draws, as totally admirable and necessary as it is, can only partly answer the question pointed out by Ian Stevenson in the Foreword: What happens after death? For the memories recounted can almost entirely be attributed to the causative factor of the “quick return.” This may be more than enough for many readers. Yet others may ask: what occurs in-between death and rebirth when the individual has led a long and fulfilling life, resplendent with good deeds and the continuous quest to develop higher or spiritual consciousness, and who then experiences a natural death, such as someone like Mother Teresa? What occurs within the soul and spirit when there are hundreds of years in-between lives? And what is required to be brought from earthly life in order to make such long, fruitful interludes possible? – Review by Martha Keltz

Recommended:

Life Between Death and Rebirth, Sixteen Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, 1912 – 1913; Karmic Relationships, Volumes I through VIII, Lectures by Rudolf Steiner, 1924; At the Gates of Spiritual Science, Lectures I through XIV, by Rudolf Steiner, 1906; Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment (one of the “basic books” of Spiritual Science), by Rudolf Steiner, 1904.

 

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2013-0207

Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work

Comments Off on Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work[Author: Category: Biography, Non-fiction, Reviews ]
Rudolf Steiner: An Introduction to His Life and Work, by Gary Lachman

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By Gary Lachman
Tarcher Book Publishers, February, 2007. Click to Buy this Book!

When speaking of the life and work of Rudolf Steiner, the greatest challenge is to express it in general terms. Gary Lachman has done just that. The other challenge for those who know Rudolph Steiner’s work is to speak of it in an unbiased way. Gary Lachman invites you to know Rudolf Steiner in his humanity; a man who had one foot on this earth and the other in the spiritual world that weaves through every physical Higgs boson particle.

At the core of Rudolf Steiner’s teaching lies the principle of metamorphosis. He invites us to observe and think deeply about the form-changing process we can observe in nature and apply that to human evolution. Gary Lachman uses this same principle to reveal the life of Rudolf Steiner through the pages of his book. Steiner himself wrote in his autobiography that its purpose was to “trace the course of his thought and to show how it evolved over time.” Yet many of his followers today embalm the Steiner they think he was in the ideas of a century ago when he lived.

One of the key principles to change is the encounter with a force of resistance. Through the journey that Gary sketches we come to understand that at every turn in his life Rudolf Steiner met with resistance in one form or another, both from without and from within his organization. He still does today. Why wouldn’t such a significant thinker be as well-known as Einstein? Einstein! the one whose theories do not metamorphose into modern scientific thought as well as he may have hoped. On the back cover of Gary’s book we read, “Rudolf Steiner — educator, architect, philosopher and agriculturist — ranks amongst the most creative and prolific figures of the early twentieth century. Yet he remains a mystery to most people.”

What Gary Lachman has written in this biography goes a long way to unraveling this mystery. Steiner wanted to find ways of expressing with utmost clarity what he called “the living activity of the human spirit.” Gary explains that from an early age Steiner was aware of things “seen” and things “not seen.” The things “not seen,” meaning not grasped by the senses, weren’t fantasies, or what we’d call “mere imagination.” They were inner events taking place on a kind of interior stage, the soul.” Gary says that “Rudolf Steiner talks about the visual world as a tapestry behind which is a great work.” More »

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