John Wren-Lewis' Endarkenment

Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of everywhere into here. (Children's nursery rhyme)

As a professor and humanist psychologist, John Wren-Lewis was in the forefront of a 1960s Death of God movement before his experience. He saw mysticism as "an escape into fantasy" and a shirking of "creative struggle." He was a "skeptic about all things mystical," and "saw mysticism as a ' failure of nerve'." Then something happened.

American Amnesiac Michael Boatwright Wakes Up Speaking Swedish

What if some morning you wake up in a motel room and don't know who you are?  You don't know how to access your bank accounts to survive. You don't know if you have a job. You don't know if you have a wife. If so, what is her name? The names of your children? What is your country?  You look in the mirror and don't recognize yourself. You talk in a language  not your native tongue.

Gettysburg 4th of July 1913 Reunion Between Yankees & Rebels

100 years ago today. We are creatures of time and time is a kind of amnesia. Most of what falls into the past is lost to us while that which is recalled becomes filtered through the present. Baz Luhrmann's 2013 movie The Great Gatsby is an example. With its modern-music sound track the film seeks to please modern sensibilities rather than lead viewers into how the world was seen then. For some, TV commercials and movie stars are the way the world is, without question, without doubt. Yet we are descended from ancestors whose stories and lives are unknown to us--from 1861 to 1865 mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, lost over 700,000 loved ones in the American Civil War.  Their world was fragile, not to be trusted.  It is a war that defined the United States of America and today its citizens go about their daily business without knowing whence they came.

Meditation, Neuroplasticity, & Happy-Wiring the Brain

All at once the roshi, the room, every single thing disappeared in a dazzling stream of illumination and I felt myself bathed in a delicious, unspeakable delight. . . . For a fleeting eternity I was alone--I alone was.

Man's Best Friend Revisited

They are uniquely loyal to their masters. Unlike cats, they are oriented to what we want, and they understand that we are trying to communicate. They have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to them with oxytocin, the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between them and humans come to be? And how can they, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently? And of course you know what am I talking about, don't you?

Sparrows, Nature & Nurture

I walk among the shadows of my memories and in the distance I see a boy playing in the hay mow of an Iowa barn built over a century ago by his ancestor.

Spooky Action at a Distance & Reinhold Bertlmann's Socks

John Bell said there was no mystery in Albert Einstein's Hidden Variables. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, the four scientists posited that spooky action at a distance --nonlocal interaction of objects spatially separated-- could be explained by Hidden Variables. That is, two entangled particles could affect one another though light years apart, and this mutual influence was due to something hidden from observation. In 1981 John Bell said it could be explained by the socks on his friend's feet.

Richard Halliburton Lost at Sea

On October 5, 1939, the Chancery Court in Memphis, Tennessee declared Richard
Halliburton officially dead. “Lost at Sea,” newspaper headlines declared of him, his crew, and his Chinese junk, Sea Dragon. This was big news. Another famous adventurer had disappeared. The year before, Amelia Earhart, with her navigator Fred Noonan, had ditched a Lockheed Electra somewhere in the Pacific.

Morality, Wall Street, & Capuchin Monkeys

In Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 epic, Charleston Heston descends from Mount Sinai to deliver morality from God to His people. The Ten Commandments  indicates that it comes from the top down, from the deity to us. We are told what to do and that is that. But does moral behavior depend on rules from on high?

Facts You Always Wanted To Know But Were Afraid To Ask About

Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. Hence, "to take a crap". I can think of many ways for my name to be remembered, but that isn't one of them.

Poet Hart Crane's father invented Life Savers candy. Crane committed suicide by jumping off a cruise ship into the Gulf of Mexico. Defying all logic, there is really no connection between the two facts. Dare I say he did not have a life saver?

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