・DISCOVERING WHO AND WHAT WE ARE・
barry Shortlink to this post: http://wp.me/pvdM6-SS
____________________________________________________________________
A hospital doctor has undertaken the “largest ever scientific study” of near-death experiences and concludes that it provides evidence for life after death.
____________________________________________________________________
Indian TV viewers have been treated to a nightly dose of reality TV featuring past life regression.
A reincarnational case study featuring a Brontë, a movie, and a Beatles wife.
In the 1967 comedy-drama movie The Graduate, a bright young graduate named Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is seduced by the older, wiser and saucier Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft). Benjamin finds himself way out of his depth, and his troubles only increase when he falls in love with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter.
The movie was based on a book of the same name. There has been some speculation that the inspiration for the fictional Mrs. Robinson was a certain real-life Mrs. Lydia Robinson in nineteenth-century England, who caused a scandal by her affair with young Branwell Brontë, the wayward brother of the famous English novelists, the Brontë sisters. (Note the initials B.B.: Branwell Brontë, Benjamin Braddock).
Not surprisingly, people who enjoy gazing in the mirror rather too much like to think that they are very good looking. But could they be right? Some new research now suggests that others would probably agree with them — narcissists really do seem more attractive than average.
I used to be a great fan of Ken Wilber‘s. His synthesis of multiple perspectives on psychology, spirituality and consciousness was right up my street.
A number of things, however, have given me reason to adopt a slightly more critical stance to his work. I could and maybe should write a whole article explaining what I mean, but for now let me just point out a few things.
First, the fact that someone once referred to him as “the Einstein of consciousness theory” — this was going way too far and possibly it went to Wilber’s head. I think it would be more appropriate to call him the David Bowie of consciousness theory — someone who (as Bowie himself puts it) cleverly puts together other people’s ideas.
I just came across this wonderful article, “Isis Speaks”, by Isis Coble (above).
Isis, also known as Meerkat or TarotMama, is an inuitive/psychic counsellor who does online tarot readings via her tarotmama.com website.
The article was published in Sojourn magazine (Vol 2, Issue 2), in 1998. Sojourn was a magazine for spiritually-minded women writers and artists based in Northern California. In the article—described as an “interview” although there are no questions—Isis tells her life story. The bit I want to relay is about Isis’s first encounter with an Enlightenment Intensive in the ealy 1970s.
The 2008 U.S. Presidential election prompted a number of spiritual channels to get the soul and personality profiles of Barack Obama. This provides an interesting opportunity to see how different people can receive or intuit similar (though not always identical) information about the same soul.
A notable case of reincarnation or a tragic case of narcissism — or possibly even both?
Nefertiti (c. 1370 BC – c. 1330 BC) was the chief wife of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten and one of the most famous women in history. Thanks to the beautiful bust of her discovered in 1912, Nefertiti has also become something of an icon of female beauty. The bust is regarded by some as the Mona Lisa of the ancient world.
21 August 2009
My wife and I both got into the Abraham teachings at the same time, via separate routes. For me, Ask And It Is Given was one of those books that seemed to want me to buy it when I was browsing in a bookshop one day. In my wife’s case, she had been reading a different book entirely but noticed that it had been inspired by “the Hickses of Texas”. We tracked down the reference and found that it was Esther and Jerry Hicks, authors of Ask And It Is Given. Esther is the medium who channels the group-being known as Abraham.
I have written previously in my spiritual journal on our first experiments with manifestation and the law of attraction.
It recently occurred to me that there aren’t that many movies that are explicitly about, or which explicitly portray, enlightenment, awakening, or other breakthrough spiritual experiences.
There are plenty of films about religion, religious people and their religious ways. But these rarely include scenes that reveal any genuine sense of spirituality. As if to illustrate the point, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is little more than torture flick.