Hard to Believe These Dinosaurs Still Exist...

Gobsmacked!

A few months back, my daughter mentioned to me that one of her friends would never even entertain the possibility that God or anything "spiritual" might be real because "it's not scientific".  

"What?" I replied, taken aback.  "Sounds like her mind is stuck in the '70s... and she wasn't born until the '90s!  You should tell her that her 'science' is a bit out of date."  

Truly, I'm always a little stunned when I run into someone who believes atheism is scientific.  Of course, I'm just as gobsmacked when an otherwise intelligent person informs me - as one did recently - that he considers alternative medicine to be nonsense and "witchcraft" and that he is happy to follow the advice of his allopathic MD exclusively.  "Well, that's your funeral," I thought.   


All these encounters remind me a little of my dear old dad who - and no, this is one hundred percent true - could never keep straight the difference between yoga and yogurt!!  To be fair, though, dad grew up in a much different time and was always open-minded enough to admit defeat if you could present him with irrefutable evidence.  After all, he was a lawyer!  


So what do you say to someone who's essentially stuck in the mechanistic worldview of the Newtonian Physics and can't break out of that paradigm?  What do you say when they accuse you of being unscientific, gullible, "new age" or plain stupid?

Here are some simple suggestions for you.  Just remember, what resonates with each person is unique, so be prepared to adjust your words accordingly ;-)

Helping to Open Their Minds

First, know why you want to engage them in conversation at all.  For me, it stems from the fact that the study of human resilience, which is the study of maximizing human potential, demands an absolutely unbiased, evidence-based and therefore scientific approach to understanding the nature of reality itself.  It's quite clear that if we allow ourselves to be slaves to preconceived notions and comfortable ideologies, we are not doing that.  


Second, remember there are four stages to any scientific discovery - 1. It's dismissed as rubbish, 2. It's persecuted as heresy, 3. "There may be something to this" and 4. "It's absolutely true and we thought of it first".


Knowing that's the case, consider the following short video, where Dr. William Tiller, professor emeritus of Stanford University, explains why some people, including scientists, just can't handle new information that challenges their assumptions:














Third, if they're talking about anything spiritual, you can inform them that the original versions of most of the great spiritual traditions espoused a scientific method based on using the human mind-body organism as the instrument of observation.  So, if they're really as scientific as they claim, they should logically be prepared to do one of two things: a) engage in the spiritual experiments these traditions have outlined in order to prove or disprove their claims, or b) admit their ignorance on the subject.  

To help you with this, you should read the short article on "True Skepticism" on Dr. Gary Schwartz' website here.  


(Also, feel free to share your copy of my book, The 5 Pillars of Life, with them should they want a more detailed explanation, or send them to the Global Resilience Solutions website to get their own). 



Fourth, be prepared to share with them some of the latest scientific evidence on human potential, including experiments in such things as distance healing, research into the human energy system, scientific validation for methods used in energy psychology, such as EFT, and more.


To get started, you can have a look at the works of:

• Dr. Rupert Sheldrake (UK biologist who has pioneered the theory of morphic / morphogenetic fields)
• Dr. William Tiller (Renowned US physicist studying subtle energy fields)
• Cyndi Dale (US author who has done extensive research into energy medicine across cultures)
• Dr. Gary Schwartz (Doctor of psychology, medicine and surgery at the University of Arizona and a researcher into the spiritual side of psychology)

There are lots of others, of course, so I'm not pretending that's a complete list by any means.  Hopefully, though, all this will help you more than hold your own the next time your run into someone who "didn't get the memo"! 

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger 

Is Astrology for Real? Is it USEFUL?

Just last night I was teaching at the university, and our comparative religion course had advanced from dimmest antiquity to the 21st century.  In the context of talking about New Age thought, one of the topics I cover is very, very old - astrology.

To do this I used a very special book, Richard Tarnas' Cosmos and Psyche:

 

Tarnas is a philosopher and cultural historian who originally followed the standard academic mindset of dismissing astrology out of hand as an old wives tale.  Fortunately, Tarnas has intellectual integrity and eventually realized he couldn't just dismiss astrology without proving it wrong.  Yet, to his shock and surprise, his decades of research on the matter have totally convinced him that our "modern" idea (of the last few hundred years only) that there's no relation between the heavens - the great "out there" - and the mind - the great "in here" - is totally wrong.

As he points out, modern man has been the victim of a historical process to deny the sacred aspect of the cosmos and reduce it to balls of dirt or fire floating in space.  Copernicus' discovery that the earth orbits the sun and not the reverse had this curious side effect, possibly because Catholic and Protestant leaders alike opposed his views.  

Before that you had St. Anselm's pseudo-theology in which the created world has zero importance (so much for ancient Christianity!), and later Descartes' declaration "I think, therefore I am", Newton's mechanical view of the cosmos, Darwin's reduction of life to biological accident and other developments that have conspired to affect how we see the universe and ourselves.

Perhaps, in the end, this will all be seen as just a long historical hiccup of sorts.  For his part, Tarnas goes over in detail countless examples of how astrological configurations have coincided with historical events and the lives of individuals.  

How Astrology Works:

One of the easiest ways to find out the basics on the Western astrological system is to watch this short video:





From the video you'll pick up at least two interesting tidbits:  the first is that there's a whole lot more to this system than the video could explain, and the second is that, given the complexity of the cosmos and the nearly infinite combinations of individual birth times with planetary orbits, ascendants, midheaven points and the rest, astrology considers you to be totally unique.  And if you're that unique, those horoscope columns in your local paper that pretend you and everyone in your sun sign will have a similar day are total garbage.  According to the rules of astrology itself, they're nothing more than meaningless entertainment for the masses.  

 

My Experience of Astrology:

In my late teens and early twenties I had much the same reaction as Tarnas toward astrology - the only way to find out if it was for real or nonsense was to learn how it works.  So I learned it to the point where I could cast a horoscope accurately and interpret it reasonably well.  My conclusions?

I found that as a predictor or analysis of character traits, a properly done horoscope was astoundingly accurate.  As a predictor of future events, though, it was less useful.  How come?  Probably because we always have 20/20 hindsight - we can look at an event, look at the astrological data and say, "no wonder!"  But if we try to guess how a particular piece of astrological data will manifest itself concretely in our own lives or the life of the nation, for example, we don't necessarily have much to go on.  

Of course, there are really two sets of objectors to astrology.  One set are those who consider it bunk simply because their culture has taught them to say that and they repeat the party line mindlessly.  The other objectors are chiefly Christians of various types, who may be more than a little thin on the history of astrology in Christianity and on ancient Christian cosmology too.

Several years ago I had an unusual conversation about astrology with an Orthodox Christian monk from Mt. Athos.  His reaction was something like, "That the cosmos has inherent order and that it affects us shouldn't come as any surprise.  Yet to say it affects our thoughts and actions is not the same as saying it determines our thoughts and actions.  That we would reject."

And the idea that astrology teaches that the cosmos controls your destiny is surprisingly widespread among people who know nothing about astrology.  In point of fact, it doesn't teach that at all.  It purports merely to show tendencies.  

Astrology and Personal Resilience:  Is It USEFUL?

That's a harder question to answer.  Can we understand ourselves better by having our horoscope done?  Probably.  Can we understand the people around us better by knowing the proclivities of their sun sign?  Yes, no doubt true in many cases.  

Can we use astrology to anticipate and avoid bumps in the road of life?  Maybe, but the jury's out on this one.  And the real question is how much effort would the average person have to put into understanding astrology and for how much of a "return on investment".  

So it may come down to this: how practical is astrology as a resilience tool?  Can it be made more practical?  

If you have thoughts or comments on this, feel free to jump right in!

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

 

Energy Psychology and the Shape of Things to Come

Just blew in the door from presenting at the 12th Annual Energy Psychology Conference (EPC) in Toronto.  And it was a phenomenal experience!  (For me it started out as dinner with friend and EFT expert Carol Look, so it definitely got off on the right foot ;-)

Although I certainly enjoyed giving a 2-hour workshop on Hara to about 40 enthusiastic people, the real "ice cream" for me was being able to spend three days with a group of highly intelligent, friendly and open-minded people whose primary focus is healing others.  Their collective dedication to truth, to scientific rigor and their insistence on respecting the scientific method were very inspiring.

As you know all too well, respect for the scientific method is the first casualty of the "ideological orthodoxy" running most any academic field.  You see this in fields as diverse as medicine, history, theology, archeology, and psychology.  In fact, there's probably no field where this hasn't happened.  

I'd like to share with you some of the cutting edge information on energy healing presented by Dr. Larry Dossey, a best-selling author who left his very prestigious medical career to write "heretical books" on the effects of spirituality on the healing process and whose keynote address kicked off the conference.  The information he and others shared has enormous implications not only for the future of health care, but for each one of us as we pursue our goal of personal Resilience.

 

So just turn up your speakers and I'll tell you some of Dr. Dossey's key points:

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger