I just can't believe I got born again !!!
After Identical Twins we now have the HighStrangeness of Time Twins !
Time Twins.
"King Umberto I of Italy was introduced to a restaurant proprietor and remarked upon the similarity of their appearance. Upon inquiring it was learned that the king and the restaurateur had been born on the same day, at the same time, had married wives with the same name, and both had a son called Vittorio. The restaurateur had gone into business on the day the king ascended the throne.
The king then learned that the restaurateur was to take part in a shooting match the next day in which he was delegated to present the prizes; and the king expressed the wish to meet his double again.
But when the time came the king learned that his time twin had been killed accidentally while cleaning his gun. And before he could be taken to the scene of the accident, the king himself was shot and killed by an anarchist assassin."
Such pairs are called Time Twins in the book *The Case For Astrology* by J.A. West and J.G. Toonder.
Old book (1970) but good book. You can download a copy from Anna's Archive.
In Piqua, Ohio, in 1939, twin brothers were born to an unmarried mother They were adopted by different families and raised without knowing of each other's existence. Adoptive parents Jess and Lucille Lewis in Lima, Ohio were told that the twin brother of their new son had died. The same story was told to the Springer family 80 miles away in Dayton in another part of the state. Six years later, when Mrs Lewis completed the long adoption procedure, she told court officials she had called her son James. 'You can't do that, they warned. 'His twin brother is actually alive - and he is called James.'
It was nearly 40 years before James Lewis tracked down his missing twin brother James Springer and arranged a meeting. Both men were astonished that their lives had developed along inexplicably similar patterns. They had both grown up with adoptive brothers called Larry. Both had identical interests and weaknesses in the same school subjects, and they both owned dogs called 'Troy'. They had both married women called Linda, had both divorced them and both had subsequently remarried women called Betty.
Their first sons had each been named James Alan. They had taken their families each year to the same small Florida holiday resort, staying at hotels or the same beach. James Lewis and James Springer both worked as pump attendants in petrol stations, and they had worked as assistants for the same chain of hamburger restaurants.
Independently of each other, they had both volunteered to serve their communities in different parts of Ohio as part-time deputy sheriffs and unknown to each other, they both immersed themselves in the hobbies of carpentry and technical drawing.
Medically and physically they had shared the same history. Each was 6ft tall and weighed 180 pounds. They had suffered tension headaches and migraine at the same times in their lives and had recovered from the symptoms at the same age. They had experienced identical heart problems and other ailment at the same periods in their lives.
From *The World's Greatest Mysteries* by Gerry Brown.
​
I bargained with Life for a penny,
and Life would pay no more,
However I begged at evening
When I counted my scanty store;
Life is a just employer.
He gives you what you ask,
But once you have set the wages,
Why, you must bear the task.
I worked for a menial's hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have willingly paid.
Jessie B. Rittenhouse
There was a young fellow named Clyde,
Who didn't care whether he lived or he died.
But after he was dead,
He lay on his bed
And he cried, and he cried, and he cried !
This post is a follow up of the earlier post which was Part 1. It continues further from the end of the passage quoted in Part 1.
I am further quoting from Dr Dean Radin's book *Real Magic* which shows how editorial bias prevents the publication of data about the paranormal.
"Six months later, we submitted another article for publication. It reported a survey of psi experiences reported by meditators, which I briefly mentioned in Chapter 5. Our paper discreetly proposed that because psi experiences were so commonly reported by meditators, surely these reports were worthy of further investigation.
The article was rejected even before it was sent out for review. The rejection used wording similar to the notice of retraction for our mediumship paper, providing a clue as to why the earlier article had been retracted. The rejection read: “The content of this manuscript does not meet the standards of rigor required by the journal to be considered for publication.” Fortunately, this time the editor provided an explanation of what he meant by “standards of rigor.”
In a nutshell, the editor was unhappy because we were too open to the mere possibility that the meditators’ experiences might be due to genuine psi. He wanted us to state that the meditators’ experiences were “psychological illusions or delusions,” and not to imply that such experiences might be real. He agreed that it was important in science to be tolerant of phenomena thought to be improbable, but it wasn’t proper to be sympathetic to impossible ideas, like—in his terms—that “pigs can fly” or “water can be turned into wine.”
Encountering this sort of prejudice is common in psi research, but we weren’t prepared for his next statement. The editor was so confident in his belief that psi effects are literally impossible that he added: “I will do everything in my power to avoid any public research grant money being spent in that direction.” Then, to add insult to injury, he added that he might reconsider publishing a revised paper, but only if we explicitly denied the possibility that psi exists.
This editor’s position was quite clear, but it was also flagrantly wrong. It was based on the false equivalency that the study of commonly reported human experiences is like trying to prove that pigs can fly.
It ignored 150 years of empirical literature and numerous meta-analyses demonstrating that some psi phenomena are real. And it blithely dismissed the history of science, which has repeatedly shown that today’s most cherished scientific concepts will eventually be replaced by unimaginable new discoveries.
When a scientist or journal editor declares that something is impossible and must be stopped, even in the face of supporting experimental evidence, then we’re no longer dealing with science. This is a sign of scientism, the dogmatic belief that a narrow interpretation of today’s scientific worldview is infallibly correct. Enforcing dogma was the purpose of the Inquisition, whose motto was, essentially, “Eliminate heretical ideas. Resistance is futile.” If drawing an analogy with the Inquisition seems too harsh, then consider the editor’s closing offer. It was exactly the same as the Inquisition’s most effective strategy for extracting confessions: recant your heretical beliefs, and maybe—just maybe—we’ll spare you.
As a practice, science aspires to be rigorous, open, and humble in the face of the great unknown. But scientists are also human, so the same tendencies that spawned the Inquisition are still very much present today, and virtually every scientific and scholarly discipline struggles against the tendency to collapse into dogmatic thinking. As a 2017 editorial in New Scientist said, “To advance science we need to think about the impossible. Science sets out what we think is true—but when it gets stuck, it’s time to explore what we think isn’t.” When dealing with consciousness and its far capacities, exploring the unthinkable is absolutely necessary."
Do not believe the scientist who tells you that there is no proof of existence of the paranormal.
He may himself be a gullible innocent, who is unaware that the scientific establishment actively works to prevent the publication of positive data which supports the existence of the paranormal.
I am quoting below a passage from Dr Dean Radin's book *Real Magic* which shows how this suppression is done.
"Some mediums claim that they can just glance at a photograph of a person and immediately tell if the person is alive or deceased. To test this claim, we invited twelve professional mediums to our lab to look at photos. All of the photos used in the experiment were first transformed into a uniform grayscale and then the photos were counterbalanced across eight categories: gender, age, gaze direction, glasses, head position, smile, hair color, and image resolution. For each image of, say, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was gazing at the camera, wore glasses, and was smiling with his head tilted to one side, one photo fitting that same description would be of a living person and another would be of a deceased person. This counterbalancing method was used to avoid giving the medium any clues about whether the person was alive or dead.
The mediums examined 404 of these photos displayed in a random order on a computer monitor, one photo at a time. Each was shown for a maximum of eight seconds. Half of the people in the photos were deceased, and half were alive at the time the experiment was conducted. The mediums were asked to press one button if they thought the person in a photo was living, a second button if they thought the person was deceased, and a third button if they didn’t know.
The mediums’ overall average accuracy on this task was 53.8 percent, where 50 percent was expected by chance. That’s associated with modest odds against chance of 250 to 1. Five of the twelve mediums independently obtained statistically significant results, and nine of the twelve mediums obtained results in a positive direction................
We published the results of this experiment, and then something unexpected happened.
Our study was peer-reviewed and appeared in one of the highest-impact academic psychology journals. Within four months of it being published it had been viewed thousands of times and was rated among the top 5 percent of the millions of papers tracked by a company that measures the scientific impact of journal articles. The journal’s public relations office even featured it on their Facebook account as an item of special interest.
Then, one day we were informed that the article was going to be retracted. This means it would be ceremoniously stricken from the journal’s website and marked forever after with the word “retracted,” in large red letters. This practice ensures that the article is eternally shamed, just like the scarlet A shames its wearer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel *The Scarlet Letter*. Retraction of a journal article is rare and serious, because it implies that the reported results were found to be fraudulent, seriously mistaken, plagiarized, or unethical.
My colleagues and I were of course alarmed to learn about the retraction. So we immediately asked the editor who informed us about the retraction to tell us what was going on. In cases involving retractions, authors are supposed to be given a chance to correct any misconceptions or mistakes. The editor replied that the article would be retracted whether or not we agreed to it, nor would we be given the opportunity to respond. That was an egregious breach of editorial ethics, so we asked if any concerns about fraud had been raised or if someone had found a methodological problem that we overlooked. The editor replied that it wasn’t about fraud or mistakes. So again we asked why the article was being retracted.
We received no response and the article was retracted. The woo-woo taboo dies hard."
Do not believe the scientist who tells you that there is no proof of existence of the paranormal.
He may himself be a gullible innocent, who is unaware that the scientific establishment actively works to prevent the publication of positive data which supports the existence of the paranormal.
I am quoting below a passage from Dr Dean Radin's book *Real Magic* which shows how this suppression is done.
"Some mediums claim that they can just glance at a photograph of a person and immediately tell if the person is alive or deceased. To test this claim, we invited twelve professional mediums to our lab to look at photos. All of the photos used in the experiment were first transformed into a uniform grayscale and then the photos were counterbalanced across eight categories: gender, age, gaze direction, glasses, head position, smile, hair color, and image resolution. For each image of, say, a middle-aged, dark-haired man who was gazing at the camera, wore glasses, and was smiling with his head tilted to one side, one photo fitting that same description would be of a living person and another would be of a deceased person. This counterbalancing method was used to avoid giving the medium any clues about whether the person was alive or dead.
The mediums examined 404 of these photos displayed in a random order on a computer monitor, one photo at a time. Each was shown for a maximum of eight seconds. Half of the people in the photos were deceased, and half were alive at the time the experiment was conducted. The mediums were asked to press one button if they thought the person in a photo was living, a second button if they thought the person was deceased, and a third button if they didn’t know.
The mediums’ overall average accuracy on this task was 53.8 percent, where 50 percent was expected by chance. That’s associated with modest odds against chance of 250 to 1. Five of the twelve mediums independently obtained statistically significant results, and nine of the twelve mediums obtained results in a positive direction................
We published the results of this experiment, and then something unexpected happened.
Our study was peer-reviewed and appeared in one of the highest-impact academic psychology journals. Within four months of it being published it had been viewed thousands of times and was rated among the top 5 percent of the millions of papers tracked by a company that measures the scientific impact of journal articles. The journal’s public relations office even featured it on their Facebook account as an item of special interest.
Then, one day we were informed that the article was going to be retracted. This means it would be ceremoniously stricken from the journal’s website and marked forever after with the word “retracted,” in large red letters. This practice ensures that the article is eternally shamed, just like the scarlet A shames its wearer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel *The Scarlet Letter*. Retraction of a journal article is rare and serious, because it implies that the reported results were found to be fraudulent, seriously mistaken, plagiarized, or unethical.
My colleagues and I were of course alarmed to learn about the retraction. So we immediately asked the editor who informed us about the retraction to tell us what was going on. In cases involving retractions, authors are supposed to be given a chance to correct any misconceptions or mistakes. The editor replied that the article would be retracted whether or not we agreed to it, nor would we be given the opportunity to respond. That was an egregious breach of editorial ethics, so we asked if any concerns about fraud had been raised or if someone had found a methodological problem that we overlooked. The editor replied that it wasn’t about fraud or mistakes. So again we asked why the article was being retracted.
We received no response and the article was retracted. The woo-woo taboo dies hard."
Once a disciple approached a saint and requested spiritual instruction. The saint said, “What am I to tell you? Everything is the Self. Just as water solidifies and becomes ice, the Self takes form and becomes this universe. There is nothing but that Self. You are that Self. Recognize this and you will know everything.”
The seeker was not satisfied. “Is that all you have to say?” he asked. “I can read that in a book.” He was puzzled because the Guru had not asked him to do hatha yoga or pranayama, to shave his head or grow a beard, or to meditate on a specific object. “Can’t you say something else?” he asked. “That is all I have to teach,” the saint said. “If you want more instruction, you will have to go elsewhere.”
So the seeker approached a second Guru and asked him for instruction. This Guru was very clever, and he knew what kind of person the seeker was. “I will instruct you,” he said, “but first you will have to serve me for twelve years.”
In India, since ancient times, service to the Guru has been considered a great spiritual practice. It is a very mysterious sadhana, in which knowledge of the Truth arises spontaneously in a seeker as he works for the Guru.
So the seeker willingly accepted this condition and asked the Guru what kind of service he should perform. The Guru called the manager of his ashram and asked, “What kind of job do you have for this seeker?” “There is only one job open, and that is picking up buffalo dung,” answered the manager.
“Will you do that?” the Guru asked.
“Yes,” said the seeker.
The seeker was very sincere and true, so he did not question the nature of the work. He was willing to spend twelve years picking up buffalo dung, because he considered the experience of the Self to be worth any kind of effort. Day in and day out for twelve years he picked up buffalo dung.
Then one day he looked at the calendar and discovered that he had worked for twelve years and two days, so he went to the Guru and said, “I have finished my twelve years of service. Please give me instruction.”
The Guru said, “This is my teaching: Everything is Consciousness. The Self alone appears as all things in the universe. You, too, are the very same Self.”
Because of his years of sadhana, the seeker had become very ripe, and as soon as he heard the Guru’s words he went into a deep samadhi, during which he experienced the Truth. But when he came out he said, “O Guruji, one thing puzzles me. I already received this teaching. It is the same teaching the other Guru gave me.”
“Yes,” said the Guru. “The Truth doesn’t change in twelve years.” “Then why did I have to pick up buffalo dung for such a long time in order to understand it?” “Because you were stupid,” the Guru replied.
This is the truth. If you had a keen intellect and the power of understanding and discrimination, what spiritual practices would you need to perform in order to recognize your own Self? How much time would it take you to experience that Consciousness which is manifest everywhere? It is just a matter of recognition, and it is so simple that it takes only a fraction of a second.
It is only because you do not have this power of understanding that you have to meditate. For so many years, you have been living in the awareness “I am an individual,” and for this reason it is very difficult for you to immediately accept the awareness “I am God.”
You have been filling your mind with negative thoughts and feelings about other people and about yourself, thinking that you are small, that you are weak, that you are sinful. You have spent your life trapped in limited identification. If your body is beautiful, you think that you are beautiful, whereas if your body is ugly, you think that you are ugly. If you study, you consider yourself learned, whereas if you do not study, you consider yourself illiterate. When anger, greed, and attachment arise in you, you identify yourself with them. This is ego, the sense of limited individuality, which has trapped you for innumerable lifetimes.
From Where Are You Going ? by Swami Muktananda.