Medicine Wheel

Medicine Whee via Wikipedia

The Medicine Wheel comes in several variations. Essentially it’s a wheel-shaped pile of stones built by several Native American groups on sites of sacred power and used for ritual and meditation.

Some believe that aliens had a hand in the medicine wheel.

Today, adaptations of the medicine wheel are used in New Age and holistic therapies, where illness is believed to be caused by discord or imbalance among inner and outer energies. Treatment consists of guiding the ill person through the disturbance that created the illness, along a healing path apparently outlined by the wheel.

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Illness

Theater Square of Susan Sontag by Anosmia via Flickr

In her book Illness as Metaphor (1978), Susan Sontag argued, not unlike Michel Foucault, that contemporary ways of approaching and understanding illness are intricately linked to societal norms. Huston Smith, in Beyond the Postmodern Mind (1982), also contends that current views about illness are culture-bound.

Other cultures, particularly those located in different historical periods, would probably regard as abnormal some contemporary beliefs, ideas and practices which many today see as normal.

This kind of argument is often used in relation to mental illness (and an inverse argument is often used with regard to homosexuality and polygamy¹), but Sontag (and Foucault) point out that it also applies to physical illness.

As with mental illness, bias with physical illness is evident in the way the issue is construed—i.e. the apparent causes, the best course of treatment, and what an illness supposedly signifies about a sick person’s moral character.

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¹ That is, other cultures, particularly those located in different historical periods, would probably regard as normal some contemporary beliefs, ideas and practices which many today see as abnormal. For instance, many in the ancient world believed that illness was caused by spiritual attack. Today, this belief would probably be uncritically dismissed by medical science.

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Venial Sin

Meditation

Elizabeth Nourse, Meditation via Wikipedia

Meditation is a term with a wide variety of meanings, each relating to a particular approach influenced by a given psychological, religious, philosophical or spiritual belief system.

So when someone says, “I meditate,” it can mean almost anything. The late rapper Guru (1961 – 2010) for instance, once said in “Living in this World”:

I’m growin’ tired of the trickery
And the misery, it’s makin’ me kinda sick you see
But now I meditate, so I can get it straight
My thoughts penetrate, so I control my fate.¹

For René Descartes, meditation involved thinking, as evident in the title of his Meditations on First Philosophy, a philosophical method of doubt containing six meditations, and the famous line “cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am,” originally “Je pense, donc je suis”). Descartes’ meditations, however, did not preclude the idea of faith because it was his belief in God’s goodness that bailed him out of some of the sticky philosophical problems that he got himself into.

Meditation also refers to some kind of practice leading to experiential peace or an enhanced perspective on life, for here and perhaps the hereafter. This kind of meditation may involve bodily movement (e.g. Tai chi), postures (e.g. hatha yoga) or stillness; and it may or may not require a religious component.

Clinical psychology studies found that meditators report similar feelings of stillness, peace and oneness when repeating a mantra with or without religious connotations. Apparently any monosyllabic word (e.g. “tin, tap”) produces the same empirical results as a religious word (e.g. AUM).

But before we get too excited about these results we’d do well to remember that research scientists observe from the outside and have no reliable way of ascertaining the quality and character of subjects’ internal experience. Subjects may report experiences with similar sounding words but those words may point to radically different forms of consciousness and perhaps numinosity.

While some researchers have tried to pin down specific brainwave activity to precise meditational states, the same theoretical limitations arise.

Alpha wave activity is associated with relaxation and is thought to be a beneficial state. In fact alpha activity has been observed in a number of different forms of meditation. The remarkable thing, however, is that as the meditators signalled that they had entered into the state of mental silence, or “thoughtless awareness”, another form of brain wave activity emerged which involved “theta waves” focused specifically in the front and top of the brain in the midline (Knowledge of Reality Magazine, Issue 21, 1996-2006).

Clinical studies point out that religious belief has little effect on empirical results–that is, scientists see more or less the same brain activity regardless of one’s spiritual beliefs. But that’s about all they can say. Any scientist who then suggests that this finding proves all religious experience is qualitatively the same is stepping out of science and into the realm of speculation.

In Christian mysticism, meditation is generally regarded as a less elevated prerequisite for contemplation. As Evelyn Underhill puts it in Practical Mysticism: A little book for normal people (1914):

Now meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating: and as a discipline, it derives its chief value from this transitional character (p. 46).

The strength of this definition is that it doesn’t advocate a ‘this or that’ scenario, as so many fundamentalists and conservatives tend to depict the world and religious practice. Instead, it represents a developmental approach where a seeker proceeds through meditation to eventually encounter contemplation. And one likely moves back and forth between the two in varying degrees during a lifetime.

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¹ Guru, “Living in this World,” Jazzmatazz Volume II.

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The New Age

Search For Infinity: Christian Halderman

Some contend that the idea of the ‘New Age’ originated as a marketing category in the 1980s, with New Age style  ideas going back, of course, to the 70s and 60s.

Others note, more comprehensively, that the media also uses the term, as do many individuals and organizations. Whatever its origins, the ‘New Age’ refers to almost anything relating to contemporary spiritual discourse and practice.

New Age books, music, lectures, workshops, videos and websites deal with humanity’s development, usually with the goal of self-actualization and sometimes global transformation.

At the outset of the 20th-century, the American psychologist and philosopher William James outlined his The Varieties of Religious Experience several innovative spiritual trends remarkably similar to today’s concept of the New Age:

…for the sake of having a brief designation, I will give [it] the title of the ‘Mind-Cure movement.’ There are various sects of this ‘New Thought,’ to use another of the names by which it calls itself.¹

From the 1980s to around the new millennium religious fundamentalists, especially of the North American Christian variety, targeted the New Age as the workings of Satan. Important figures like C. G. Jung, Rudolf Steiner and Fritjof Capra were caricatured as Satanic hostiles to apparently ‘true’ fundamentalist versions of the Christian faith.

However, the emphasis of fundamentalist reactionary attacks has arguably shifted from perceived psychological and spiritual threats to scientific ones. Believers in evolution sans God are the new devils in the flesh to be countered and corrected by those single-minded Fundamentalists who believe they have a privileged interpretation of Christian scripture.

This shift is probably due to recent advances in mapping and sequencing genomes. The possibilities of this technology are staggering, and the new is always scary to those deeply entrenched and invested in longstanding cultural biases.

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¹ William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Penguin, 1985 [1902], p. 94.

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At Earthpages.org

• “The New Age and Remote Viewing“

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Adamski, George

Adamski, George (1891–1965) Polish-born American well-known among UFO researchers and enthusiasts, alike, for his writings about alleged encounters with extraterrestrials.

In his book written with Desmond Leslie, Flying Saucers Have Landed (1953), Adamski claims that beautiful, benevolent beings invited him aboard their spaceship.

Adamski says the ship’s pilot was telepathically connected to the propulsion system. By controlling thought waves interfaced with advanced technology, the aliens allegedly tapped into elemental harmonic rhythms of the universe.

This, according to Adamski, enabled their penetration and actual travel through space-time. Adamski’s diagram of the circular transportation system is likened to the Hopi medicine wheel.

Adamski also says, however, that the minds of human beings are currently far too chaotic and undisciplined to meaningfully (and safely) harness such a technology, a sentiment which recalls Arthur Koestler‘s notion that, by virtue of its apparently random evolution from primitive to complex, the human brain is intrinsically conflicted.

Critics of Adamski are many. Most feel that his accounts fall into the category of hoax, as the following aptly illustrates.

One aspect of the UFO story does seem to be deeply involved in hoax. This is the so-called contactee cult. Many people now located over much of the world claim to have had direct contact with the flying-saucer people. (Adamski and Leslie, 1958; UFO International).
Perhaps the contactee is informed by mental telepathy that he should report promptly to a certain lonely spot in the desert. Upon obeying, he is met by a flying saucer whose occupants are, as a rule, beautifully humanoid and who frequently take him into their confidence by allowing him to photograph themselves and their craft, inviting him in for a look at the control panels, and perhaps taking him for a quick spin, sometimes to Mars or Venus but best of all to the mysterious planet on the other side of the sun, unobservable from mother earth.
Everything about these stories seems to cry hoax. The proof is typically a series of photographs (which could easily be fraudulent) and copious quantities of pseudoscience. Someone who had really contacted visitors from another world should surely be able to do better than that. Why should visitors from another world bother with such obscure representatives of the human race, anyway? Their message is always that man must cease his wars or be destroyed, but why should such an important message be given to someone who is bound to be considered a liar when he delivers it?

Frank B. Salisbury, “The Scientist and the UFO” in BioScience, Vol. 17, No. 1, (Jan., 1967: 15-24, p. 19).

» Alien Possession Theory (APT)

Image Source:

• “UFO Incident” by Flidais Earie at http://www.flickr.com/photos/flidais/431988892 Creative Commons License

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