Scientists

[Guest guest]

> I do think there's a certain amount of skepticism

> within the scientific community, but that goes along

> with the types of personalities that enter those fields.

>

It is the same within the spiritual community , there is an " us " and " them " ,

that really bothers me. I recently posted some of the articles that I posted

here to my own list concerning the temporal lobes in the brain, and I'm not

sure very many people liked it very much, I was not saying by posting those

articles that " look, see, all the spiritual stuff is just a short circuit in

the brain " , I wasn't saying that at all, but I feel like alot of people took

it that way. My own opinion on those articles and what happens, which is my

own theory, and is not proven, is that the kundalini or the life force

energy rises up through the body flows through the brain, activates certain

things and causes alot of the spiritual experiences. When it activates the

temporal lobes, I think it causes a connection that enables a 4th dimensional

type sense, that is without time or space, which makes the emotional sense (

like intuition and empathy) enhanced and connected with the other senses

(sight, hearing, etc..). I think I have even read something similar to this

in yoga material somewhere.

I guess some people just like to know how things work? Like most people buy

a phone, plug it in, and use it. I look at a phone, think " wow, thats really

cool, i wonder how that thing works? " , and then i may tear it apart to see

if i can figure it out:) (It usually doesn't work again after I do this:)

I can see how NLP is that way too, it is kind of like tearing something apart

to see how it works. " I say this I get result A, I say this I get result B "

.. Even noticing a connection with a horse or a dog is somewhat of a

scientific process, it involves noticing something happening and testing,

then validation, right?

 

 

 

Sorry i am just rambling on and thinking entirely too out loud probably:)

 

tracy

 

 

http://chamberpoems.tripod.com

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

I have to put in my 2 cents about scientists. I see

comments made about 'them' so often and I have

a different perspective. My husband is a

neuroscientist, he is one of these people everyone

refers to because he studies the brain. And most

of our friends and his all of his family are MDs,

scientists, etc. Our life centers around that community.

My opinion about them is that they are not trying to

disprove all sorts of things and are not always just in

it for greed, though there is a lot of that in the medical

profession..

 

Very often, it's not at all the scientific studies that

are the problem, nor the conclusions drawn. It's the

media, reporters, people on mailists - many people

who are not trained in science and who draw wild

conclusions and don't read the studies themselves.

Next time you hear something about a study, go

read it yourself and then watch what everyone else

says about it. It's amazing sometimes!

 

I do think there's a certain amount of skepticism

within the scientific community, but that goes along

with the types of personalities that enter those fields.

I used to think that when they said, " there is no evidence

for that " - it meant, " it is not true " . But that's not what

they mean at all. They mean, they are not going to say

either way unless it can be shown to happen more often

than random chance. Once people understand the

concept of chance, it becomes much easier to evaluate

whether something being postulated is true or not. The

type of people who go into science tend to be

exacting - they are not happy with 'close enough'. And

they help propel our understanding because of thinking

that way, as limited as it seems.

 

Then again, ask me again on a day when I have

one of my frequent rails against the medical

profession. I sing an entirely different tune then.

 

Linda

" DrNature "

 

http://www.DrNature.net

http://www.LifeCoachingRadio.com

[Guest guest]

Tracy,

 

I am like you - I want to know how things work. NLP

appeals to me for this reason as well. I just am not a person

to get caught up in certain details. I see people arguing about

whether chakras spin counter-clockwise in Australia. I don't

mean to make fun of this sort of discussion. I just don't think

it has a whole lot of use. We don't know if they spin, and IMO

it is just a symbolic way of trying to explain something in how

we as human or spiritiual beings work. I may really bother some

people with these statements, but I also feel that a lot of what

people discuss about different energies is just conjecture that

many take as gospel truth.

The bottom line is, we're all basically looking for answers to

who we are, how we should live, and mostly --

how to make ourselves feel better. So we go from theory

to theory looking for answers. I look to people who are

successful in the ways I want to be, and listen and learn

from them. I care about results more than whether the brain's

temporal lobes are that way by accident or design. The search

for God sometimes takes us away from just living our lives well

on a daily basis.

Again, these are all just my opinions.

 

Linda

" DrNature "

http://www.DrNature.net

 

 

loneshewolf1028 wrote:

 

> It is the same within the spiritual community , there is an " us " and " them " ,

> that really bothers me. I recently posted some of the articles that I posted

> here to my own list concerning the temporal lobes in the brain, and I'm not

> sure very many people liked it very much, I was not saying by posting those

> articles that " look, see, all the spiritual stuff is just a short circuit in

> the brain " , I wasn't saying that at all, but I feel like alot of people took

> it that way. My own opinion on those articles and what happens, which is my

> own theory, and is not proven, is that the kundalini or the life force

> energy rises up through the body flows through the brain, activates certain

> things and causes alot of the spiritual experiences. When it activates the

> temporal lobes, I think it causes a connection that enables a 4th dimensional

> type sense, that is without time or space, which makes the emotional sense (

> like intuition and empathy) enhanced and connected with the other senses

> (sight, hearing, etc..). I think I have even read something similar to this

> in yoga material somewhere.

> I guess some people just like to know how things work? Like most people buy

> a phone, plug it in, and use it. I look at a phone, think " wow, thats really

> cool, i wonder how that thing works? " , and then i may tear it apart to see

> if i can figure it out:) (It usually doesn't work again after I do this:)

> I can see how NLP is that way too, it is kind of like tearing something apart

> to see how it works. " I say this I get result A, I say this I get result B "

> . Even noticing a connection with a horse or a dog is somewhat of a

> scientific process, it involves noticing something happening and testing,

> then validation, right?

>

> Sorry i am just rambling on and thinking entirely too out loud probably:)

>

> tracy

>

> http://chamberpoems.tripod.com

>

>

[Guest guest]

Tracy and Linda:

 

I think both of you have missed my point, and that is why I

waited so long to make it, after allowing everyone to say their

piece first ;-)

 

There is nothing wrong with wanting to know, or studying the

processes of the human body. There is a difference between

curiosity and skepticism. What is wrong is in believing that just

because you think you know how something works that it naturally

follows you know how everything works, or that the representation

you studied is universally true without exception. This is a

problem " on both sides of the fence " as you put it.

 

To doubt something exists at all until someone proves it to you

objectively can be a problem; but believing anything anyone tells

you without questioning can be naive and dangerous, too.

 

There does not need to be a dichotomy. I have been in the medical

field for a long time as a nurse, nearly twenty years, and both

my mother and grandmother are nurses, so I'm used to examining

all the bodily excreta and skin eruptions of everyone in the

family at the breakfast table. Holism is the approach I prefer,

acknowledging and honoring all of a person without seeing them as

a diagnosis or a part to be worked on. In order to honor a person

holistically, I can't deny that they are spiritual and emotional,

largely subjective beings.

 

Now, that said, you might be saying at this point, " But aren't

the scientists acknowledging with this study that we are

spiritual? " Yes, and no. They are acknowledging that we are

hardwired for spirituality, yes. But they are not yet willing to

widen their minds to the possibility that there is anything " out

there " because they can't see it or measure it with machines.

They prefer to see it as a complex mix of electricity, chemicals

and emotions. Come to think of it, that is how they define love,

too.

 

I believe we are much more than the sum of our parts. There is no

way to measure a soul, but I believe we each have one.

 

There are good and bad things about being analytical (yes, Linda,

here is the Libra coming out). The good thing is, it keeps us

grounded from going off into a complete snake oil frenzy, or back

into the dark ages of ignorance and superstition. But the bad

thing about it is, that a lot of ancient and useful techniques

and treatments are discounted because they can't be objectively

quantified to the satisfaction of the people who seem to be

making decisions as to whether things are considered " real " or

not. And our human experience is rendered to clinical mediocrity.

 

The brouhaha over Therapeutic Touch is one such example of this.

Years of study and research by the healing community on the

technique has been roundly discounted by the mainstream, even

very clean, double blind studies like the Wirth study on wound

healing, and the science project of a young girl in Colorado

" boogie busting " TT made into JAMA. The shame of it is, that it

wasn't even TT that was being studied; it was whether or not the

subjects could guess which hand she was holding her hand next to

without seeing it. Now, considering what we have discussed about

the field, and its ability to contract or expand, and the ability

of a person to control the outcome of a study by their intention

(especially a project studying subtle energy or particles) I

don't think that the girl, the daughter of an avowed skeptic,

should have done the experiment herself; instead she should have

at the very least gotten an objective person with no preconceived

ideas to serve as the " hand subject " for the TT practitioners to

be tested on. The fallout? In the past thirty years, many

graduate level students used TT as their subject for their

masters thesis or doctoral dissertation. Now that it's been

trounced by JAMA and the media, it's much harder to get approval

from their review boards for the research or studies.

 

But none of that was considered... for weeks, all you saw was how

a school girl had debunked TT. That was not just the media. That

was perpetuated by a professional journal, the Journal of the

American Medical Association.

 

There have been some begrudging admissions of efficacy in the

last few years (the Tiffany Field work on touch, for instance, or

the studies on acupuncture) and I hope to see more of it. But I'm

really uncomfortable with the idea that my subjective experiences

can be so easily minimized or dismissed by 'authorities', who are

of course the ones that the media looks to for disseminating

information.

 

There has been a recent study on Vitamin C in which cells were

placed in a petrie dish with Ascorbic Acid and observed. It was

found that the cells mutated. Oh, what a surprise, cells bathed

in acid mutate. Should we draw the conclusion, as the headline

blared, that Vitamin C can cause cancer? I think not. What was

not studied (and the key point here) is how Vitamin C acts in a

living system. It is a water soluble vitamin that doesn't build

up in the system. The body uses what it needs every day and

excretes the rest through the bladder. Voila. The erroneously

drawn conclusion is syllogism, or bad logic. In this case, I

agree it was probably the media that distorted the results, since

I never saw where the scientists had done anything but note what

they did and what happened.

 

Basically, I think we should keep an open mind, whether we are on

one side of the fence or the other. Maybe we should be fence

riding more. Sometimes things will be debunked as snake oil, and

that's okay. But just about everything we use now, from

vaccinations to caesarian sections, were considered radical and

fringe at one time, had to be 'proven' before the mainstream

accepted them. It is just annoying to be painted as lacking

intelligence, or worse, as being a con artist or quack, by a

narrow minded faction of skeptics that appears to have a loud

voice in how decisions are being made for things like, oh,

research funding, graduate school projects and pilot studies.

It's a circular conflict.

 

Well, this has run long, but I hope I'm no longer being

misunderstood. If I personally believed that something did not

exist if I could not see or quantify it, I'd shut the list

down... most of the principles of energy healing, chakra work,

body mind mapping, hypnosis and meridian therapies are still on

the fringe and 'unproven'. I do them because they " work " , and I'm

willing to let science catch up with us, but not to discount or

denigrate us in the interim.

 

Science has gotten to a point with its didacticism that many

therapies are in common use for decades or longer before they are

even willing to research them. And it might sound " turfy " but

when they eventually admit something works, they tend to want to

own and control it, prescribe it or change it.

 

Blessings,

Crow

[Guest guest]

Crow...

 

A wonderful post.... Thank you.

 

I do think the fact that the girl's " study " was accepted so

readily by mainstream medical practitioners and media

indicates a fairly strong cultural bias against energy

medicine. The group that I have been working with was

called " The Lunatic Fringe " by one of the key alopathic

physicians at a Michigan hospital where the idea of adding

an holistic aspect to the hospital's offerings had been

suggested by a community review board.

 

This doesn't mean that science is bad or that

scientists--including physicians--are wrong to seek

explanations and evidence. It does suggest, however, that

belief may be the single most important factor in what

explanations and evidence are accepted.

--

---------------------------

Joel P. Bowman, Ph.D.

Email: joel.bowman

Department of Business Information Systems

Western Michigan University

http://spider.hcob.wmich.edu/~bowman

---------------------------

[Guest guest]

Caroline Abreu wrote:

 

> Tracy and Linda:

>

> I think both of you have missed my point, and that is why I

> waited so long to make it, after allowing everyone to say their

> piece first ;-)

 

Crow, that may be true, or we may just be talking about

different aspects of this subject at this time.

 

> There is nothing wrong with wanting to know, or studying the

> processes of the human body. There is a difference between

> curiosity and skepticism. What is wrong is in believing that just

> because you think you know how something works that it naturally

> follows you know how everything works, or that the representation

> you studied is universally true without exception. This is a

> problem " on both sides of the fence " as you put it.

 

True, anyone who would make generalizations in that way

would be wrong.

 

> To doubt something exists at all until someone proves it to you

> objectively can be a problem; but believing anything anyone tells

> you without questioning can be naive and dangerous, too.

 

That was my point - I am saying that the scientists are *not* saying

it doesn't exist, but people think that they are.

 

> Now, that said, you might be saying at this point, " But aren't

> the scientists acknowledging with this study that we are

> spiritual? " Yes, and no. They are acknowledging that we are

> hardwired for spirituality, yes. But they are not yet willing to

> widen their minds to the possibility that there is anything " out

> there " because they can't see it or measure it with machines.

> They prefer to see it as a complex mix of electricity, chemicals

> and emotions. Come to think of it, that is how they define love,

> too.

 

That's not true of the people I know. They are saying that they

can't say that spirituality/god *is* true, not that it isn't true. IOW,

they can't prove that it is, but they can keep studying what they do

know - the hardwiring of our brains. That's all they are about, they

are not theologians. This is the same problem I find with the medical

profession versus naturopaths. Many people get so upset that they a

re not given information about how to stay healthy from their doctors.

Doctors are technicians; they fix what is wrong. My husband's sister

had *one* 3 hour class in nutrition in her medical training. That is not

what medical school is all about. In my naturopathic training, I had tons

of it and studied herbs for healing. Not one class on surgery. We do

different things. So do scientists and theologians. I don't see

scientists setting out to disprove god, I see them interested in finding

out how we work from a biological standpoint. That is their job.

 

> I believe we are much more than the sum of our parts. There is no

> way to measure a soul, but I believe we each have one.

>

> But the bad

> thing about it is, that a lot of ancient and useful techniques

> and treatments are discounted because they can't be objectively

> quantified to the satisfaction of the people who seem to be

> making decisions as to whether things are considered " real " or

> not. And our human experience is rendered to clinical mediocrity.

 

Part of the problem with this, IMO, is that people see the medical

profession as authority. This is changing a lot and that's why

people are questioning more and making their own decisions about

their own treatments. If a group (AMA) says something is hogwash,

and we've seen it to be true in our own lives, who cares what they say.

The shift has been made in many ways and now insurance is paying

for a lot of these 'alternative' therapies. But I also am well aware

of the power grab the AMA is making, what they've done in Florida,

and how they want to keep the money in their court. They are a

powerful lobby. I just think the rest of us need to speak with our

dollars. We have just as much power but don't realize it and don't

utilize it to its full potential. Though that is changing too.

 

> The fallout? In the past thirty years, many

> graduate level students used TT as their subject for their

> masters thesis or doctoral dissertation. Now that it's been

> trounced by JAMA and the media, it's much harder to get approval

> from their review boards for the research or studies.

 

This is a good point.

 

> But just about everything we use now, from

> vaccinations to caesarian sections, were considered radical and

> fringe at one time, had to be 'proven' before the mainstream

> accepted them. It is just annoying to be painted as lacking

> intelligence, or worse, as being a con artist or quack, by a

> narrow minded faction of skeptics that appears to have a loud

> voice in how decisions are being made for things like, oh,

> research funding, graduate school projects and pilot studies.

> It's a circular conflict.

 

I do agree with this, strongly. Part of my mission is to get people

to understand that their opinions are just as valid and they can

let them be known by how they spend their dollars. If people

really knew this, they would be amazed at the power they yield.

And one of the ways to realize that their opinions are valid, is

to look at the types of people who go into these scientific and

medical professions and see them just as people, nothing more.

Educated in one way but not in others. It's amazing to me how

often people in math or science are called 'geniuses'. That's

just one form of education. I think it stems from the fact that

math seems hard to a lot of people, so anyone who can do it

well is termed a genius. I see it in the paper all the time, and I

see people asking questions of my husband as if he knows

everything. It just doesn't work that way!

 

> Science has gotten to a point with its didacticism that many

> therapies are in common use for decades or longer before they are

> even willing to research them. And it might sound " turfy " but

> when they eventually admit something works, they tend to want to

> own and control it, prescribe it or change it.

 

I agree with that too. It seems to me, and I may be wrong

about this, but the people who are in alternative/holistic/complementary

health are more passive, peace loving. It's a wonderful thing but it's

partly why these things are the way they are. We need a bit more

aggressiveness, education about how business works (it follows the

dollars) and make our voice be known.

 

Linda

" DrNature "

 

>

> Blessings,

> Crow

[Guest guest]

Have you seen the movie; " Oh God " ? The main character has a visit

from God, but no one else can see God with him. He is skeptical and

fears he is gone crazy but, in the end finds something very profound.

He realizes that whether or not you Believe is a personal discovery-

and-decision and everyone has to make that decision for themself

based on thier own experience. You can't measure it and you can't

judge it's worth. Arguing things like this are like arguing who loves

who more, who's headache hurts worse, who's life is better.

Audrey

 

 

, Crow wrote:

> ...you might be saying at this point, " But aren't

> the scientists acknowledging with this study that we are

> spiritual? " Yes, and no. They are acknowledging that we are

> hardwired for spirituality, yes. But they are not yet willing to

> widen their minds to the possibility that there is anything " out

> there " because they can't see it or measure it with machines.

> They prefer to see it as a complex mix of electricity, chemicals

> and emotions. Come to think of it, that is how they define love,

> too.