This book recounts how psychiatrist Montague Ullman and psychologist Stanley Krippner conducted experiments to determine whether persons acting as senders can transfer their thoughts to the minds of sleeping receivers, thereby altering their dreams. Their results were astonishing: the researchers were able to verify several instances of telepathic communication between participants. Participants often gave uncannily accurate descriptions of images that the senders attempted to project to them – apparently confirming the reality of extrasensory perception during the dream state.
This study makes a thorough examination of the phenomenology of mystical luminosity experience, and how it may relate to religious and mystical concepts of divine or transcendent light. A phenomenologically grounded model is introduced, and early mixed methods investigations summarized.
This book is a philosophical experiment in thinking, feeling, and willing beyond the transcendental threshold of Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy. The key to this reconnection is found in imagination, which if consciously cultivated can grant the process philosopher direct experience of the cosmic creativity expressing itself in both the depths of the soul and throughout the physical world.
Demi Moore tackles the role of a lifetime in “The Substance” (Mubi), directed by French provocateur Coralie Fargeat.
While it would be easy to call Demi’s performance fearless or brave or any other euphemism for “often nude,” I’d simply say it’s just really cool that Demi Moore, an A-list star since the 1980s —who’s made movies like “Ghost,” “G.I. Jane,” and “A Few Good Men,” but hasn’t had a high-profile starring role in some time — would look at this totally demented script and say, “Yes, I will play a woman driven so mad by society’s unforgiving beauty standards that she starts acting like the Evil Queen from ‘Snow White’!”
Moore faces this body horror satire head-on, giving everything she’s got to portray what it feels like to age in a world that rejects anyone over 30. “The Substance” leans into that madness for two hours and twenty minutes, giving both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley ample time to build on each other’s riotous rage at a nightmarishly misogynistic society.
The day Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) turns 50, her horrid boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid, giving a manically outsized performance) has kicked her off her long-running aerobics fitness TV show. She spirals, ending up in a car accident and a chance encounter with a strange young doctor.
Margaret Qualley in ‘The Substance’ (photo: Mubi)
The doctor slips her a USB drive with ‘THE SUBSTANCE’ printed on it. He promises it will change her life. After securing a package from a run-down building, Elisabeth feels she has no choice and injects herself with the Substance, birthing a gorgeous younger clone of herself (Margaret Qualley) out of her spine. It seems painful, but the benefits are immediate and extraordinary.
The clone names herself Sue, and she is everything Elisabeth wants to be. She quickly reclaims her TV show and has all of Hollywood knocking at her door. There’s just one problem: The Substance only works for seven days, then Sue must go to sleep as Elisabeth reawakens. No real issue, Elisabeth and Sue can manage their schedule. It shouldn’t be that hard! And besides, what’s the worst that could happen if Sue were to stay out just a little longer?
It’s interesting that the film won Best Screenplay at Cannes, as one of its biggest strengths is the limited dialogue. Long stretches of the film focus just on Moore and Qualley’s facial expressions, gyrating bodies, and horrifying Cronenbergian transformations. From Moore furiously wiping her makeup off to Qualley cringing at plunging a needle into her original body’s spine, we get everything we need without anyone saying anything. The film feels stripped down, with only three big name actors and a couple different locations. Fargeat’s focus is not overwhelming theatricality, but precise, especially when it comes to physical transformation.
Without giving too much away, it’s clear that Elisabeth Sparkle’s miracle drug has a few side effects. Birthing your own clone — who then has to stitch you back together and give you an IV drip of unidentified nutrients while you lay there unconscious for a week — has many opportunities to go wrong. We know there must be a cost, but Elisabeth and Sue are too blinded by fame to see it.
Even when the calm but firm voice over the phone explains things, they don’t accept it. In the grand tradition of Brundlefly or Frankenstein’s monster, we’re here to see things fall apart. On that front, “The Substance” delivers, but the gore is not visceral, with a New French Extremity level, disgusting without feeling like you’re watching “Saw.” In fact, the grossest moment might be Dennis Quaid sucking up dozens of shrimp while cruelly talking down to Elisabeth.
Overall, “The Substance” is a total blast and proof that Demi Moore’s star will never go out. The narrative shortcut in casting Moore is used perfectly, giving us more time to get grossed out by nasty fingernails, rotting teeth, open wounds, blood and pus. Those with weak stomachs may not be able to handle everything spewed in the film, but the brave will appreciate how much work Moore does to sell this ridiculous nightmare.
“What’s happening at Stanford?” writes one medical school dean on social media, regarding the Pandemic Policy symposium at Stanford University today, featuring a number of Fauci-hating anti-maskers who took constroversial stances on public health policies during the pandemic.
The Friday conference is called Pandemic Policy: Planning the Future, Assessing the Past, and beginning with the very first panel discussion — moderated by conservative Christian podcast host Wilk Wilkinson — the event seems to have peculiarly right-wing bias. The first panel this morning was about “evidence-based decision making” and the restrictive policies that many cities put in place in 2020, and sought to answer the question “How well did these policies work to protect the public from COVID-19 and what were their unintended consequences?”
Hindsight is 20/20, certainly, when it comes to a novel pathogen, and watching the horror show that unfolded in New York City in March and April of 2020, other cities took some very strict measures to try to limit the spread of the first variant of COVID-19. UCSF’s Dr. Monica Ghandi was on the panel, and she was likely a voice of reason, but with Wilkinson moderating and Johns Hopkins surgeon Dr. Marty Makary, a noted skeptic of pandemic restrictions also participating, who knows?
Another panel today on “Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom” featured Trump’s COVID advisor Scott Atlas, who early in the pandemic cast doubt on the usefulness of masks, and who is now part of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford. Also on that panel is writer Alex Berenson, who used his Substack to shriek about the pandemic being over in the summer of 2020, and who regularly rails against mRNA vaccines and the Biden administration generally on his Xitter account.
Bay Area News Group reports that the wider medical and public health community has not been too thrilled with the obvious angle of this symposium, which seems aimed at promoting a Republican agenda of as few restrictions as possible if we’re hit with another pandemic.
“My goodness, what’s happening at Stanford?” writes Dr. Peter Jay Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine, on X. “This is awful, a full on anti-science agenda.”
The Nation noted this week that this is the second of these symposiums with a strangely similar cast of cranks — the first was held at Johns Hopkins University in September. And the purpose of the events seems to be both to “rewrite the history of the pandemic” and to audition for a second possible Trump administration, where some of these conservative medical professionals would like a job.
“These Covid contrarians — who have found little support for their views among their peers — have decided that the science has been turned into “a dogmatic tool of oppression” for rejecting them,” writes Gregg Gonsalves in The Nation. “In their minds they are Galileos against the church, and now they are tilting their fury against the institutions themselves.”
Gonsalves argues that the two symposia are focused on “establishing a beachhead” in liberal academia for these figures, who are largely disrespected among their academic peers.
“If you cannot convince your colleagues of the worth of your arguments, then you can cry out that you’re being discriminated against for simply having ‘differing views,’” Gonsalves writes. “But things don’t work like that in science: we don’t teach intelligent design alongside evolution, or alternative theories of the cause of AIDS.”
Stanford professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is one of these discredited figures. Bhattacharya wrote something called the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020 which argued for sheltering the sick and vulnerable but letting young people run free to get infected and gain immunity to COVID-19. The Pandemic Accountability Index rails against this alternative theory of public health today, gaming out how many more Americans would have likely died, and how many children could have been left without caregivers or teachers, if Trump had someone like Bhattacharya running the show four years ago.
“It’s an election year,” says Martha Louise Lincoln of San Francisco State University, speaking to Bay Area News Group. Lincoln argues that these conservative-leaning “experts” looking for a hire from Trump “likely advocate weaker, cheaper public health protections that tolerate disease, ask little of government, and leave it to individuals to protect their own health.”
Luckily Trump and Atlas were only charge for ten months of the pandemic.
New Thinking • Oct 4, 2024 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1999. It will remain public for only one week. The shaman is more interested in treating the spiritual causes of an illness than the symptoms. Alberto Villoldo, PhD, director of The Four Winds Foundation, is co-author with Stanley Krippner of Realms of Healing and Healing States. Here he describes the path of shamanism as one of facing one’s fears, particularly the fear of death. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.
wow • Oct 4, 2013 Speech given by Vice President Henry Wallace at a dinner of the Free World Association in New York City. Also sometimes referred to as “The Price of Free World Victory” (May 8th, 1942). http://amichigander.blogspot.com
The Lord of Debauch is one of those warning cards that we must always take seriously when we come under his influence. Without fail, when he appears we must expect to be subjected to some kind of temptation or test. We must be on our guard for making the exact mistake that he tells us is possible.Temptations come in many shapes and forms, don’t they? Some of these are minor, and others much more serious. The Seven of Cups deals primarily with sensual pleasures… sex, food, money, status.Sometimes, the card indicates that we are surrounded by a multitude of different pleasures, and cannot quite make our minds up which ones to choose, out of the many available to us. In so doing, we miss the boat altogether and end up with nothing. Or, alternatively, we greedily snatch at everything we see, possibly missing the real treasure that is waiting for us to notice it.Greed, triviality, surrender of moral ethics are the big problems when this card appears. We must guard firmly against any of these things, holding hard to our sense of love and goodness.On a day ruled by this card, you need to keep a sharp eye open for all of the above. Also try to monitor your reactions and responses to others – another way we can give in to the Lord of Debauch is to treat another human being in a way we wouldn’t wish to be treated ourselves.If your irritability quotient goes up, spend some time with yourself working out why, and then deal with it. That way you won’t snap the heads off the people you love. If you feel impatient and frustrated, again, work out why… then go and satisfy yourself.On the high spiritual level, this is a day where forgetting what you believe in will accrue some debt unnecessarily. Be alert for tests of your belief, strong in your love, and bright in your life. That way you should pass the test!!Affirmation: “I am strong in love and bright in life. I shine with the radiance of a star.”
“Your spiritual development is a divine path that leads to truth, goodness and beauty. It is a spiritual path reflecting the unlimited, absolute nature of the universe and the grand design of creation.”
Morihei Ueshiba (1883-1969) Japanese Martial Artist
AN OPPORTUNITY FOR DAILY REFLECTION BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE SCHOOL OF PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY
“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated”
Thomas Paine (February 9, 1737 – June 8, 1809) was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, inventor, and political philosopher. Wikipedia
Translation is a 5-step process of “straight thinking in the abstract” comparing and contrasting what you think is the truth with what you can syllogistically, axiomatically and mathematically (using word equations) prove is the truth.
The claims in a Translation may seem outrageous, but they are always (or should always be) based on self-evident syllogistic reasoning. Here is one Translation from this week.
1) Truth is that which is so. That which is not truth is not so. Therefore Truth is all that is. Truth being all is therefore total, therefore whole, therefore complete, therefore otherless, therefore one, Since I am and since Truth is all that is, therefore I, being, am Truth, Since I, being, am Truth, therefore I, being, have all the attributes of Truth. Therefore I, being, am total, whole, complete otherless, one. Since I am Truth and since I am mind/consciousness, therefore Truth is Mind/Consciousness. (Two things being equal to a third thing are equal to each other.)
2) Sometimes I don’t feel ownership of my own body, let alone the body politic.
Word-tracking: ownership: owe, ought, to have, possess, or be master of, to have control of, boss, in charge, dominate, responsible for body: physical form, nature, natural body politic: the people of a nation, state or society considered collectively
3) Truth being all that is, there is nothing other than Truth to be in control, therefore Truth is always the one in charge. Since Truth is all that is, therefore Truth is always the one in charge of Itself. Since Truth is all, therefore limitless, therefore infinite, therefore the body of Truth is infinite. Since the body is Truth is infinite, and since Truth is one and therefore not divisible, therefore the body of Truth is one infinite, indivisible Body. Since form or appearance requires some sort of definition or finiteness and since Truth is infinite, therefore form and appearance are a misapprehension of the infinitude of Truth. Since Truth is Consciousness, the only truth about form or appearance is as ideas in Consciousness. Since Truth is one body, the idea of body politic or people collectively, is a misapprehension about the infinite, formless body politic of Truth.
4) Truth is always the one in charge. Truth is always the one in charge of Itself. The body of Truth is infinite. The body of Truth is one infinite, indivisible Body. Form and appearance are a misapprehension of the infinitude of Truth. The only truth about form or appearance is as ideas in Consciousness. The idea of body politic or people collectively, is a misapprehension about the infinite, formless body politic of Truth. 5) Truth is always the one in charge of My one, infinite body, (aka Itself) not to mention the one, infinite Body politic.
