Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00181)

Dear Dallas,
I don't know if there is anything of interest in this piece, but it is my response to the first chapter of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World.
Cass

Dear Anne, In spiritu et veritate

 

I was delighted when I read that “All our science measured against reality is primitive and childlike and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”

 

Carl raised the following points, in a patronizing tone, against William F.Buckley

Did he know about molecular biology?

Did he know about paleontology?

Did he know about oceanography?

Did he know about genealogy?

No, only that DNA were frequently linked capital letters

 

And that

“What was allowed to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion”.

 

By the 1900’s evolution was thoroughly embedded in the science curricula and treated as fact, although it was limited to secondary schools. See Hunter’s Croce Biology. The BSCS released a new series of textbooks in early 1960 that dogmatically affirmed the teaching of evolution. In 1968 Bibleand prayer reading was removed from schools.

 

So my question is, if a trickle was only getting through, where lies the source of this statement and if accurate then science itself is to blame for the trickle as it was being taught in schools for 50 years when Carl made this claim?

 

Carl then labeled Buckley naďve in his thinking stating that “all claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted”. Quoting that science has never found any geological or oceanographic supportfor the existence of Atlantis and or Lemuria. Therefore they never existed. I am fine with his analysis, but then he provides an example in the newly discovered ancient civilization of Ebla that advertised the virtues of Ebla beer.

 

Carl cites another ancient civilization, Ebla. It is historically recordedthat Ebla had a very modern civilization prior to 1000bc, that they were polytheistic, worshipping Astarte. They were Canaanites yet scripts found were Sumerian cuneiform – no explanation has been found for this anomaly as yet. And the crushing point, that Ebla’s final destruction occurred inthe giant upheavals that engulfed the Middle East about 1650-1000 bc! Apparently their culture and tradition lived on in Syrian culture.  

 

In one statement Carl laughs at the idea of submerging continents then quotes a civilization that was destroyed by giant upheavals???  

 

Carl proceeds to quote Plato as getting “old and grumpy” and demon haunted that their ignorance of science and mathematics contributed to the decline of ancient Athens, when Bart and Schwegger showed that the ancients were well acquainted with the mutual attractions of iron and the lodestone as well as with the positive and negative properties of electricity. The reciprocal magnetic relations of the planetary orbs, which are all magnets and aerolites, were called by them magnetic stones. In 1872 Pr. A. M. Meyer also stated that The Earth was a great magnet, adding “on any sudden agitation of the sun’s surface the magnetism of the earth receives a profound disturbance in its equilibrium, causing fitful tremors in the magnets of ourobservations and producing those grand outbursts of the polar lights, whose lambent flames dance in rhythm to the quivery needle. Science is now coming around to this way of thinking, suggesting sun spots may be the cause of our current and past extreme
weather conditions.

 

Carl uses the Library of Alexandria as a recurring theme yet discounts the information as myth and demon haunted.

 

Carl attacks the naďve notion of UFO sightings, yet spends years looking for ET life through the SETI program.

 

Carl discounts the raising of the Himalayas yet cannot explain how the Andes got to be where they are now.

 

“Seen from space, the curved hook of the Andes Mountains looks a bit likea walking cane ready to head westward on a jaunt across the Pacific Ocean.If you could peer outward from the center of Earth, however, a different pattern would emerge: The same arcing shape would turn into a continent-sizequestion mark.

The question that needs answering is why the Andes exist at all, contend geo-physicists Raymond M. Russo and Paul G. Silver, who claim that the classical theory of plate tectonics offers no explanation.

World-class mountain ranges are formed, in theory, only when two continentsrun into each other, as India and Asia are doing today. That continental shoving match has over the last 40 million years compressed the landscape asthough it were an accordion, raising up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. Similarly, the Andes show massive compression in places and possess a high plateau like Tibet's. But whereas India is plowing into Asia, South America has no continental opponent to push against. So what forces have erected the Andes, the highest peaks in the Western Hemisphere, ask Russo and Silver, former colleagues at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. (Russo has since moved to the University of Montpellier II in France.)” COPYRIGHT 1995 Science Service, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

 

 

 

Carl suggests that “the recent findings of the real science of seismologythat the inner core of the Earth may be composed of a single huge nearly perfect crystal of iron”, then attacks the idea that the Atlanteans used crystals to read minds, transmit thoughts, and the means of building the pyramids. My understanding is that crystals are formed throughout the universe, from the crystalline minute specks in our eyes when we awaken, to the specks of crystal life that form planets and stars (dust clouds). Like Pythagoras states, god geometrizes. All life has been shown as crystalline formations, from the cube through to the tetrahedron. (Disagree about the Crystal of Iron at the centre of the earth)

 

And going back to the earlier statement of an electric universe (which Science is coming around too- see Pr.Kozyrev) which surrounds us and which bindthe cosmos together in ceaseless motion, a universe of magnetic electricalwaves, which are able to penetrate the smallest atom to the densest matter, why is the idea improbable that the brain processes ‘thought’ as electric in nature. The organ of thinking, the brain, has been shown by science to be an electrical transmitter, why then is the idea improbable that thebrain processes ‘thought’ as a naturally occurring electric phenomenon, and if this is the case we should be able to connect with other electric waves in our environment. This certainly proves the case for mesmerism and hypnotism when it is known that a mesmerizer can overpower his subject by word suggestion, which is merely thought projection. This also would explain the phenomenon of ESP, Remote Viewing, etc. The mesmerizer is able to penetrate into other persons
thought processes, at a conscious and subconscious level.

 

after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, when Dean Radin and his team at the Institute of Noetic Sciences were able to measure a tremendous change in the behavior of computerized random-number generators surrounding the time immediately before and after the attack:

 



Figure 1.4 – Data from Radin / INS measuring a change in mass consciousness on Sept. 11, 2001

 

The graph shows that somehow, a change in the mass consciousness of humanity affected the behavior of electromagnetic energy in computer circuits around the world, especially those computers nearest to North America. Later weshall see that this is just the beginning of a whole new world of “consciousness science.” We will suggest that torsion waves and consciousness are essentially identical manifestations of intelligent energy.

 

 

 

Carl likes to laugh at the Ancients cosmology knowing that even before Ptolemy (who got it from the Babylonians) the ancients taught the sphericity and rotation of the earth and the motions of the planets. These ideas was taken up in the 15th century by Nikolaus Krebs (Cardinal de Cusa), (“De Docta ignorantia”) Pico Count de Mirandolas in the 16th century, Copernicus,Galileo, and in 1623-1662, Blaise Pascal wrote, “Let him (man) contemplate Universal Nature in its high and full magistry. Let the earth seem to him to be a mere point by comparison with the vast circle that this star describes. Let him stand amazed in reflecting that this vast circle itself isbut a point, very small with regard to that which the stars that sweep around the firmament embrace….Nature is an infinite sphere, of which the center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.

 

I think it was in the mid 1800’s that the term Science and initial scientific thinking was metaphysically driven, e.g. Aether, gravitation etc. They just used different words and probably when the real truth is known, morespecific to what it naturally is. 

 

 

Luckily, Columbus went against public and church opinion, holding on to theancients understanding that the earth was not flat, and sailed for America.

 

 

Carl writes 

ONE NOW FASHIONABLE SUGGESTION I FIRST PROPOSED IN 1960 IS

THAT THE HIGH TEMPERATURES ON THE SURFACE OF VENUS ARE DUE TO A

RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT. (All emphasis added and deserved)

 

"First, Carl claims that Dr. Velikovsky does not deserve

Credit for predicting high temperatures on Venus because

everybody knew it, although historical fact shows that only Dr.

Wildt had made the same prediction before Velikovsky. Then

Carl either tells a double lie or else suffers an alarming

memory lapse that may require neurological consultation claiming

that neither Dr. Wildt nor Dr. Velikovsky had made this

prediction (which they had, and he had noted earlier) -- and

then he brazenly claims he had originated it himself.  

 

 

I believe Carl to be a true visionary, but his demon was the visionary –v-the rationalist. . It explains the dichotomy of his personality and hiscontradictions on certain points.

 

 

He didn’t believe in the afterlife, but wished to live again.

 

He had a recurring nightmare that there would be a nuclear holocaust and built Ithaca mostly underground.

 

He experienced sleep paralysis, “if only I could get there (parent’s bedroom) before falling into the clutches of the presence”.

 

 

Carl has been hailed to almost godlike status with the Marijuana groups attempting to legalize the drug.  

 

"I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high.... in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theater." Pot enhanced his pleasure in music and food. ("A potato will have a texture, body, and taste like that of other potatoes, but much more so.")



In sex, too: marijuana "gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of images passing before my eyes."

"I find that most of the insights I achieve when high are into social issues," he added. "I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racismin terms of Gaussian distribution curves. 

It was a point obvious in a way, but rarely talked about. I drew the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down. One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written 11 short essays on a wide range of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics...I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.... 

 

Carl came at the right time and for the right purpose, but as some old grumpy man once said “an accepted scientific truth today – in five or ten years from now will be discredited and considered to be – as exactly it is– just one more step forward on the path of discovery, although while itwas considered a truth, it had mathematical demonstration, it had a modicum of philosophical thinking and research were collected and brought together in proof and support of it.”

 

We are now in the 21st century; I have the opinion that science, in some quarters, is still holding on to 20th century scientific concepts and needs to move forward. Many scientists have taken the attitude that truth has been established hence there is nothing left to discover, other than those things which collaborate and support our original theory. They have lost their understanding of what science is. If science stays fixed in the past it will have no future.

 

Perhaps you can explain the phenomena that was Carl Sagan and to a greater understanding of the man. Perhaps I am attracted to the visionary in him while you are attracted to the rational thinker, which I am at odds with.

 

I imagine this will sound the death knell for me on the Carl Sagan group. In spiritu et veritate

 

Cass

 





 

 

 

 

 

 

 


		
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