Not terribly long ago during a training, my teacher realized I was really having a challenge with a particular exercise. She invited me to relax and explore the challenge rather than the exercise.
Doing so, I realized my challenge was that the exercise violated some laws of physics. I’ve studied physics and some of my patents make use of physics concepts so it’s safe to say I have a background in physics.
But now that background in physics that was getting in the way. My knowledge of physics, based in my (logical) conscious mind, was putting up a real block to performing this exercise because the exercise, to my linear-logical mind, violated some physical laws.
My teacher (ever wise, patient and beautiful) smiled and nodded at me. She asked, “Are there laws of physics you don’t know about yet, things that haven’t been discovered but exist never-the-less?”
I nodded vigorously and enthusiastically. “Of course”. The laws of physics get rewritten all the time. Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, I explained, were examples.
She continued nodding and smiling and said, “Then use those laws you don’t know about yet to make it work.”
BOOM! I’ve been able to do that exercise every time ever since.
All I need do is put myself in a place where as yet unknown laws are already known and exist. Of course, that makes me drop back to the here and now because the laws of physics are the laws of physics, it doesn’t matter if the world doesn’t know them yet. Shades of Einstein’s “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” It’s doubtful that ancient smithies understood the mechanical dynamics of how a hammer works. Their lack of understanding didn’t stop them from using a hammer or getting things done.
What we’re describing in the above is the difference between natural, preternatural and supernatural phenomena and being aware of those differences.
Most people’s daily lives are filled with natural phenomena that don’t require any specialized training to recognize, understand or accept. But think about this for a second. Would cellphones and remote controls be considered natural phenomena one-hundred years ago? Probably not. Definitely not two-hundred years ago. One-hundred years ago there was a beginning knowledge of electromagnetic fields and radiation. Even if scientists could understand the principle (theory) it’s doubtful they’d understand the application (technology) and definitely they wouldn’t be able to duplicate the technology in any form for another seventy-five years. Some readers may equate this to Clarke’s Third Law, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” and in truth, we’re really dealing with Clarke’s Second Law, “The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”
To those scientists of yore, cellphones and remote controls would be considered preternatural, as in “extraordinary but still natural phenomena”, just a little way past what’s possible into the impossible. We may not understand how something works but that doesn’t stop it from working fine. Pulsars – stars that emit radio signals with such amazing regularity that they seem to “pulse” – were originally called “LGMs” as in “Little Green Men” because astrophysics, astronomy, cosmology, et cetera, had no explanation for the incredibly regular signals. Such signals had to be made by intelligent beings broadcasting “Hey! We’re here!” to the rest of the universe.
But eventually our knowledge and understanding grew and we (actually Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell) figured it out.
In the early 1990s there was a bit of a stir in the neuroscience, neurophysics and sensory awareness communities because there was increasing evidence of a sex organ that wasn’t a sex organ. After a while, it was conceded that perhaps animals had such an organ but that it couldn’t exist in humans. Now it’s general knowledge (in these fields and some others) that animals and humans share a vomeronasal sense and that this sense’s primary function is to help us pick a mate.
A little later it was discovered that some people are able to sense disease in others even when those others seem quite healthy. How was that possible? Behold, humans possessed a psychoneuroimmunological sense or PNI, something aboriginal cultures and animals still make use of but that western society forgot. It is conjectured that some people’s PNI is sensitive enough to detect biochemical changes in others (through olfaction, touch, et cetera) and respond. This explains medical intuitives and other abilities often considered supernatural, as in “being incapable of scientific explanation or by the laws of nature”.
Most recently, studies are underway to determine if humans have a magnetoreception sense, basically the ability to know direction by sensing the earth’s magnetic field. This sense has been recognized in animals for the last 10-15 years or so and Susan always gets a kick out of such research. For as long as we’ve been together, I’ve never been lost. I have an uncanny ability to “know” which direction I have to head in to get where I want to go. Drive or walk a little bit in the wrong direction and my nose starts twitching and itching. She now even asks, “What does your nose tell you?” when I think we’ve taken a wrong road or street or path.
Where does magnetoreception lie in the human body? Evidently somewhere between the eyes, ears, nose and before the brain.
What’s one way magnetoreception is used in humans? In aboriginal and some modern societies it’s used in practices such as Feng shui and to sense energy flow in the earth. So once again, what was supernatural becomes preternatural becomes natural.
And this brings us to the purpose of this post. Everything we study and practice here at the NextStage Expanded Awareness Society is doable in science. It may be outside the laws of probability but being outside the laws of probability means something is possible, just not something that happens all the time (see The Solitaire Meditation for more on this). And just because something is beyond our current understanding doesn’t mean it’s not understood by somebody somewhere. It’s just a matter of finding the people who know enough to explain it in ways you can incorporate, understand and accept. I share my university learnings with my teachers and several of them say something along the lines of “So it only took you white guys how many thousands of years to figure that out?”
As is written at the top of our Principles page;
There is no supernatural, there are simply things that are easily understood and/or controlled by almost everyone, and those things that are understood and/or controlled only by specialists.
Those things need to be dealt with using different techniques, just as building a bridge needs to use different techniques and specialists than roasting a pig. People in these societies usually accept and believe in what we call magic, which refers to the technology they use to manipulate what we call the supernatural. – Cara Richards
Susan, trained in science and a contributor to patents and peer-reviewed papers, says of science “It’s not real until we can measure it and put a label on it.”
What we do is science, just not measured and labeled yet.
Somebody once said, “You must unlearn, what you have learned.” Society as a whole seems to only believe in what they can see. Why? Why have we forgotten our ways? Part of me feels like it’s part of the big picture. Part of a process to make us focus on developing technology for a while. But I don’t know. The Universe has a plan, but why have we forgotten – even turned against – the old ways. Call it Shamanism, Mysticism, or whatever, for so long the human race relied on that to survive and to heal and to progress. Why did we turn our backs on it? Why has “Western Society” been so against the Old Ways?
Why does society as a whole seem to only believe what they can see?).
>>>How much history would you like as part of the answer? Modern western society became an objective-based society pretty much in the late 1600s as that’s when the British legal system started requiring evidentiary trails for its decision making. This was fueled by the Renaissance’s push towards scientific objectivity (again requiring proof by repeated, independent validations).
This becomes amusing because with the Renaissance came instrumentation such as the microscope, the telescope, the bathysphere, … basically devices that could extend our senses beyond basic biology (and regarding same, recent studies have shown that the human eye can detect single photons. Single photons! Rather amazing! All those people who were seeing little flashes of lights and shadowy images and such and were told they were imagining it? Probably not!). Science recognized that there was information available that was beyond the “accepted” bounds of sensory awareness, but the demand for objective confirmation required that everybody (with the correct equipment) could have the same experience.
This is also fascinating in light of the fact that the great thinkers of the time – Newton, Galileo and others – were subjective rationalists. They firmly believed that subjective experience was perfectly acceptable for explaining phenomena. (Note that I cover this is
Why have we forgotten our ways?
>>>I don’t think we have. If we had forgotten our ways, such stories wouldn’t exist in myth, folklore and fantasy.
Part of me feels like it’s part of the big picture. Part of a process to make us focus on developing technology for a while. But I don’t know. The Universe has a plan, but why have we forgotten – even turned against – the old ways. Call it Shamanism, Mysticism, or whatever, for so long the human race relied on that to survive and to heal and to progress. Why did we turn our backs on it? Why has “Western Society” been so against the Old Ways?
>>> Now we get into the influence of religious dogma. The early Christian church had just about everyone doing these things. Healing, glossolalia, seeing visions, … It’s all there.
However, as the church moved from a spiritual to a political organization, it also moved from a pentecostal to a fundamentalist doctrine. It couldn’t have ordinary people walking around demonstrating Biblical abilities because such people were authorities onto themselves, hence uncontrollable. Even christian mystics became despised to the point where the healings, for example, were considered evil unless the church recognized and sanctioned them.
The end result was that anyone with above “normal” talents was feared, hated, hunted down and destroyed. That resulted in disciplines like the Practice essentially going underground (so to speak). They’ve always been with us, it’s simply that not everyone has had access to them.
This is an admittedly quick response to a very involved (and excellent) set of questions on your part. Perhaps we can make it part of a webinar training at some point.