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When my mother was pregnant with me, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Both the GP and the oncologist agreed that she must have an immediate hysterectomy, with the inevitable abortion of myself. But my mother was a stubborn and courageous woman, and still is at 81. After my birth, she was checked again for cancer. All gone. Nothing there. And to this day, nearly 60 years later, she has never had cancer. So mine was a miraculous birth. My mother only told me this when I was 57 and she was 79. I suppose she was afraid I would get a swollen ego or feel that I was somehow special or different.
In 3rd and 4th grade, I was a prodigy. I made better than A's, better than A+'s, I made 100's on my report card. I was reading high school books. Naturally, I was the teacher's pet. But I didn't have any friends. So for the next few years, I became the teacher's bane, the class clown, the class cutup. But by the time I hit 8th grade, I was back to being a prodigy, taking classes on my own that weren't offered in our tiny high school. Teachers began bringing me books from the local University library.
At 15, I read Plato's Republic, and became a utopian dreamer. I had always been a day-dreamer, but now my day-dreams took on more focus. I also read the Mentor classics on science and philosophy, the history of H.G. Wells, and the popularizations of 20th Century science by George Gamow. I scored off the scale on the only IQ test I ever had (it only went to 140). I was a National Merit Scholar and an NDEA Title IV Fellow, scoring in the 98.6th percentile (of those taking the test) on the GREs.
At 19, I got the idea of making a science of utopia. And I pursued this dream, despite uniform rejection and discouragement from all my professors, all my colleagues, and all my family. As Edison said, genius is 2 percent inspiration, and 98 percent persistence. Or at least, that is what he meant. It took me 30 years of working on the problem, off and on, before I finally solved it. My solution is found by clicking on "Utopias Result."
But let us backtrack to the beginning. I sound like an egghead. I was, but I was also a mystic. That had completely different roots.
I grew up on a primitive farm, without electricity, central heat, or indoor plumbing. We drank water with a pail that we all used, drinking water out of a bucket, which I carried from the well down by the barn. We didn't heat the whole house, only the living room, with a wood burning stove. I carried the wood into the house each night. I went to school in a little town (pop. 300), and neither the school nor any of the houses had indoor plumbing.
Thus, knocking over outhouses was one of our pranks on Halloween night, along with letting a cow into the school house, shooting out the few streetlights with BB guns, and throwing eggs into or on the cars of anyone we had a grudge against. We also built barricades down mainstreet, with hay bales or huge empty oil drums. This kind of hooliganism was traditional and tolerated.
I am not complaining. I am exulting. It was a wonderful life, vanished now from the American scene. There was nothing more cozy than to sit on one side of my mother, my older brother on the other, while the stove reached a red heat, and the kerosene lanterns put out a soft golden glow, and the wind howled around the cornices, while my mother read us books. This is my fondest memory of childhood.
Do you remember the laconic Plainsman of the movies, played by Gary Cooper? This is authentic. Country people are comfortable with silence. It is considered rude to break another's reverie. So I was always free to go inward, to my luminous day-dreams, or outward, to immerse myself in the south wind that blew over my bed, with its memories of South Seas, and the moonlight beaming down. Indescribable feelings filled me with longing and nostalgia, for what I did not know. I was living a certain mystical path, that of "carrying wood and water," and did not know it. I assumed everyone had these wonderfully luminous experiences, but that it was like sex, something no one talked about. I loved solitude in nature so much that I always volunteered for the really boring jobs, like plowing or herding cows.
I could enter the luminous world of the nature mystic, or the collective unconscious. Even that wasn't enough for me. I would get on my bicycle and ride round and round the yard (not the lawn, but a barren area between barns and corral). This must have seemed eccentric, but not by word or gesture was it discouraged. When the hands are busy, the mind is free, and can go where it will. Often it will roam the realm of Genius, Oceanic Consciousness, also known as the collective unconscious. Other times one will merge with the wind, the sky, the trees, mountains or surf.
This is the essence of meditation, at least of the "carrying wood and water" school of mysticism. One must spend many thousands of hours in Oceanic consciousness (advanced day-dreaming) and many thousands of hours immersed in the mood-feelings of nature before one is ready for the Illumination of Fire, which I experienced at age 31. This is also known as Cosmic Consciousness. In that sense, there is a path, which one may follow accidentally, as I did, or deliberately, in which case we call it "carrying wood and water." The hero must first survive the trip through the "dark wood," which for me was alcoholism and toxic psychosis. Later one finds a Mentor. Mine was a mild mannered soft spoken linguist named Bill Coates. He introduced me to the classics of psychical research and mysticism (two quite different topics). Only then was I ready for my transcendental encounter with the ONE, where I saw, as one recognizes a face, all of space and time, fit into a single pattern. This is the divine purpose, that runs through all things. It is the meaning of life. In the New Tarot, it is represented by the Mother. There is no single word for it in English.
Speaking of the New Tarot, I spent most of my thirties studying it and doing mandalas and deciphering the alphabet of symbolic elements.
This is not a conventional autobiography. I am only including the things that were most important in my development as a mystic and philosopher and scientist. And most of these were interior and private experiences.
When I was a Freshman in college, I saw the three norns, deciders of fate in Nordic mythology. Divinity always comes in threes. There are three judges in the Chinese underworld that decide your next lifetime, and under hypnotic regression, people can remember having to go before the three judges, during the in-between life. But back to the three norns. They looked like three respectable middle-aged ladies, sitting there at my desk or standing around it, looking at me as if to say "So this is the One?" I blinked my eyes and they were gone. This was an apparitional experience, so I can say from my own experience that apparitions are just as real as ordinary reality. It is a different sort of reality.
When I was ten, in the summer of 1950, I saw a UFO, in full daylight, at close range (about 200 feet) and had it under continuous observation for what seemed like a long time, but may have been a minute or two. Nobody in my family believes this story. I don't blame them. They weren't there. Everyone but me was either in the house or the barn. My chores took me outside to feed the hogs and calves and gather eggs and carry up a pail of water, and bring in an armload or two of firewood (in winter). I was standing there, looking at nothing in particular, facing West, where the sun had just set. But it was still full light, as summer evenings usually are.
Coming up over the tallest trees on the creek that lay downhill about a hundred yards to the West was a pitted sphere, covered with a flame-like greenish aura. It came silently about 25 mph, due East, at a constant height. Overhead it made an instantaneous right-angled turn without banking or slowing down and went off due South at the same leisurely pace. After that I always knew the textbooks were wrong, but I kept that to myself. I kept a lot of things to myself.
In high school, at Monica's birthday party in Perry, I saw an honest to gosh case of table-tipping. It was late autumn, the house was overheated, there wasn't room to dance, and we were too young to drink. What I'm trying to say is that the party was getting boring, we were getting sleepy, and thinking about leaving. Besides, both the principal and the superintendent were present. That might seem strange, but it was a small school, and informal, and they were often involved in our social activities. Indeed, it was the principal who "called" our square dances. And he was the one who suggested that we do table-tipping. Junior Riddle is what we called him. He was also the girls basketball coach. Thank you Junior Riddle, wherever you are. And you were right about me. I didn't know everything, and not everything can be learned from books. Sometimes I think he arranged this exercise just to deflate my intellectual arrogance, the sin of pride. He succeeded.
It was a perfectly ordinary card table, with folding legs. I helped set it up. It certainly had no invisible wires. We were too poor in the fifties to buy the gadgets of illusionists, even had we known about them.
Junior Riddle sat six people at three sides of the table, leaving one side free. Fingers lightly resting, thumbs to thumbs and little fingers to little fingers, making a kind of three sided circuit. One by one those at the table said in a solemn voice, "Rise, Table, Rise." Time slowed to a stop. We had been there forever, waiting for the table to rise. In clock time, it may have been 30 to 45 minutes. Or it may have been much less. We were in our own bubble of time.
After an eternity had passed, the table did rise, or at least the free end rose, tilting back on the other two legs. It rose a good foot off the floor, and stayed there. Junior Riddle did not seem at all surprised. I'm sure our mouths were hanging open. He suggested we ask it questions, and give it a code, such as one tap for yes, two for no. In the excitement of the moment, we couldn't think of any really significant questions to ask. Like is there life after death? Is there a God? Is there meaning to life? No, we asked how many dollar bills were in Ted's wallet. Three said the table. Ted checked, and there were three dollar bills. We asked it if we were going to win an upcoming basketball game against Red Rock (see the movie "Hoosiers" and you will know what basketball means to countless small towns across the midwest). One tap for yes, two for no. It very slowly tapped once, then stopped, in the up position. By how many points? Three, it said. In fact, we lost by about 20 points. We asked it how many days until Christmas. It very rapidly tapped 25 times. We asked one another, "Is that right?" No one knew. In fact, it was wrong, as I found out when I got home and checked a calendar. But it didn't matter whether it was right or wrong. What mattered was that it was a clear case of psycho-kinesis. I know. I was the skeptic, looking under the table to see if someone were lifting it with a foot, passing my hand over the table checking for invisible threads, checking fingers to see if everyone was resting their hands lightly on the table. They were. It is possible to pull a card table, but this requires pressing down hard, inverting the last digit, and turning the joint white.
About half the high-school (total number of students: 50) were at the party. We all believed it. The other half were totally skeptical. So I don't expect you to believe it either. But I knew. Once again, I learned that the textbooks were wrong, or at least incomplete.
The course of my life was set by the books I read at 15. History, science and philosophy. I knew I didn't want to do history, but I was always torn between science and philosophy. In the end, I did both. And my online books have some contributions to science (mostly theoretical) and some contributions to philosophy. My invention of the science of Utopian Analysis made good use of my love of history, for it was in the political experiments of history that I found all the data I needed.
I took a bachelor's degree in Physics, and a Ph.D. in philosophy. But that didn't mean I had lost any interest in physics. I stayed with it via Scientific American, which I have read ever since my Senior year in high school. Also, when I was about 30, I had a chance to take undergraduate quantum mechanics again, just for fun. Once again, I had found a Mentor, an old professor who told us many tales out of school, many personal things about the great figures of the 1920s. And I really learned quantum mechanics, although I never learned the math beyond the undergraduate level.
When I was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, a friend of mine was a physicist, who happened to be from India. We two bachelors often went out to dinner at the one India Restaurant in LA. Once when we were talking about quantum mechanics, he said rather vehemently that he wished he didn't have to constantly crank out equations. The paradoxes of quantum mechanics obviously bothered him. What he wanted was about twenty years just to contemplate the meaning of the equations. He never had that luxury. But I did. And I eventually realized that de Broglie's 1923 approach frees quantum mechanics from paradox. I also have an idea about quantum gravity, and another about the consequences of anti-particles having anti-gravity. That is the sum total of my contribution to existing sciences.
My philosophical contributions consist in the founding of sciences, for that is the point and function of Western philosophy, as well as its crowning glory and only accomplishment. It took me 30 years to learn how to distinguish the essence from the accidental in existing science, and learn how to apply the essence of scientific method (which makes no assumptions) to other problems and other realms of experience. That sounds very dry and abstract, but there is nothing dry and abstract about my books. Do you want to know about free will? Beautiful cities? Capital punishment? The meaning of life? Read my books. It is all in there. All I am is there. Split the wood, lift the stone, I am there. For ALL is ONE. Or at least, that's one hypothesis.
There was a time when I thought I was supposed to start a new religion. There was a time when I thought I was supposed to be a guru. Fortunately, I came to my senses and realized that I could hardly pursue a path which I have explicitly rejected, for good and sufficient reasons, as I have both of those. No, if you are impressed with my writings, don't try to become my disciple, and don't start a religion in my name. Start or continue one of the three sciences I have either created, altered or renewed. The one I created, taking up where Hobbes and Locke left off 300 years ago, is Utopian Analysis, the science of civilization. This science will never come into full existence unless their are followers, people who become Utopian Analysts and publish their work. A science is a communal affair, continuous from generation to generation. So if you wish to be my follower, follow me in this.
There already exists a science of Psychical Research, journals, Ph.D.s, and the various SPRs (Societies for Psychical Research). But this science had bogged down, come to a complete stop, under the attacks of the "Skeptical Inquirer," and its psi-cops, but for internal reasons as well. So I have re-founded the science on the work of Shafica Karagulla, someone unknown to the SPRs. I am in no way rejecting the excellent and rigorous work of Prof. Ian Stevenson, or G.N.M. Tyrrell, or any of the other pioneers of the original SPR. Indeed, I bow down to them, as the great pioneers of the subject. I hold Hobbes and Locke in the same respect. What I have done is kicked out "Parapsychology" with its roots in psychology, two pseudo-sciences if I ever saw one, and re-focused on the investigation of spontaneous phenomena, as advocated by Prof. Ian Stevenson.
Dr. Shafica Karagulla's work shows that the mind and the body are completely different things, made of different substances. It is also evident from the HSP observations that the mind has no EM interactions. This is confirmed by the NDE data, and the reincarnation data. So we simply re-define Psychical Research as "the rigorous study, using scientific method, of rare and spontaneous events or talents, which shed light on the mind, a real entity quite different from the body, and in no way created by the body." Of course, one must understand scientific method, and people coming into this field from psychology obviously do not understand scientific method.
The other thing which has brought Psychical Research to a dead stop is the absence of a theory of the mind as a natural object. For this, one must understand 20th Century physics, as well as 20th Century Psychical Research. This may be a bold thing to say, but I believe I am the first person to understand 20th Century physics (see the chapter "The Rotten Foundations of 20th Century Physics"). Theory is extremely important, as any student of the history of science knows. So if you wish to be a follower, follow me in this: do the scientific tests of my theory of the mind as a natural object. Revive the newly re-defined Psychical Research and spread it to every university. Fight off the psi-cops with the tools I have given you (see the chapter "Galileo Has the Last Laugh").
Finally, we come to the scientific study of mystical and symbolic experiences of mankind, which I define as the science of metaphysics. People have tried to create such a science before, but they were people who did not understand scientific method. And among mystics and students of symbolic revelations, probably none but me think that scientific method has any place at this bounteous table. But I say, unless the real discoveries of metaphysics are grounded in scientific method, they are like dust in the wind. They will make no permanent contribution to the knowledge of mankind. These experiences are reproducible, which is the first requirement of science. And one can be a scientist and a mystic, using the universal language of Jungian symbolism rather than calculus. I am that person. So if you wish to follow me, follow me in this: help to make metaphysics a science. And do so with full involvement in symbolism and the mystical path, not standing back and viewing mystics like lab rats. Be your own experiment. And when you come to understand some part of the puzzle, be not afraid to publish, even if it contradicts all the hot air exuded by hippies and former college professors high on hallucinogens.
Copyright © Thales97 2000
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