Ishtar wrote:
It is not my intention or wish, though, to try persuade anyone about my experiences. I don't feel the need to do so and I'm sure others also don't need me to do so. So perhaps it was a mistake to mention any prophecy that I have done.
Perhaps not exactly a mistake, but it does make it rather difficult for someone such as myself to take your comments as being based on anything other than an entirely subjective experience. Furthermore, I would argue that it might unintentionally devalue any comment you choose to make upon the "limitations" of science.
Ishtar wrote:But what started all this up today was woodrabbit’s post about how Frances Crick had discovered the structure of DNA while in an altered state. This is itself would indicate that the altered state is not just purely imaginary, make believe and recreational and thus of no use to man nor beast ....in the same way that we know south American shamans have discovered the medicinal properties of plants by entering the trance state.
Hmmm. Okay.
Ishtar wrote:
Some may think that the shamanic technique it’s not a rational approach to discovering the truth. But how far has rationalism brought us? The trouble with the rationalist is that he minimises everything he doesn’t understand. He has to, because he starts off from the idea that everything is explainable, and that mystery is in some sense, the enemy.
I would argue that rationalism has brought us a very long way indeed and I don't think anyone would really like to guess how much further it is likely to take us. In essence rationalism is no more than a tendency to favour that which makes coherent sense so I fail to see why it should be regarded as such a bad thing. Surely one might just as well take umbrage with those who believe that pain hurts.
The idea that there are things for which there is no explanation (presumably the belief of the non-rationalist) seems to me more like a series of words strung together than part of an argument, unless of course we're getting into quantum theory which really does seem to be full of weird shit. This 'mystery as enemy' idea appears to be imposing a framework upon to your model of rationalism which, so far as I am able to tell, bears little relation to whoever it is we're talking about here (who? scientists? me, Dig and FM?). There are things which are understood. There are great areas which are either poorly understood, not understood at all, or even unknown. An attempt to understand is not, I think, an engagement with an enemy, and to suggest it is seems to introduce a defensive theme to the argument.
Ishtar wrote:Because the molecular biologist can’t see what 97 per cent of what our DNA does, he calls it “junk DNA”. Because the scientist can only account for 5 per cent of the universe, he calls the rest of it “dark matter”. Or because scientists only know what 6-8 per cent of the brain does, they say that we only use that percentage. Anything rather than admit that there’s a huge mystery out there ...and that we’re a long way off from seeing the full picture.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I believe 'junk DNA' is simply DNA which we retain yet which remains switched off for the reason that we no longer have much use for fins, scales or suchlike. I was not aware that this constituted a mystery. Furthermore, dark matter is simply a mathematically elegant theory used to explain observed (and otherwise presently unexplained) workings of the universe. I don't think there are any scientists who refuse to admit that dark matter (or more properly the issue it attempts to address) represents a huge mystery or that we may be a long way off from seeing the full picture.
It may surprise some of you to learn that I am not necessarily unsympathetic to the subject of matters shamanic (at least in terms of ritual behaviour), but I find this need to prove the validity of something that is surely a subject more closely related to philosophy than to science by emphasising a dichotomy (that the word?) of the saddo stubborn science nerds who want to classify our dreams vs. the liberal free-thinking mushroom scoffer.... kind of unhelpful. It seems to me that to regard science (which after all is simply a method of achieving objective understanding) as the Grinch who stole Christmas etc is an incredibly reductionist view and a particularly innacurate one.
