Belief in other realities is widespread across the world in all countries and cultures. Most common are innumerable religious and quasi-spiritual traditions and doctrines that teach the existence of alternative realities such as heaven, hell, paradise, an afterlife, a spiritual realm or 'plane', and so on.
Eastern and Oriental traditions contain a vast amount of teaching on such matters. No physical proof of any sort is offered other than occasionally reported 'miracles' and anomalous events of various sorts. Most teach mental and emotional disciplines as the only means of experiencing these non-physical realities whilst incarnate, but those disciplines do not allow the objective, third-party observation required by the empirical methodology of Modern Western Science.
However, it is amusing to note that the very foundation of modern, rationalist thought is attributed to Rene Descartes, whose key inspirational ideas came to him in a series of dreams. As noted by Stanislav Grof in "The Holotropic Mind":
"The paradox is that Rene Descartes' "Discourse on Method", the book that reformed the entire structure of Western knowledge and that provided the foundations for modern science, came to its author in three visionary dreams, and a dream within a dream which provided the key for interpreting the larger dream. What an irony it is that the entire edifice of rational, reductionist, positivist science, which today rejects 'subjective knowledge', was originally inspired by a revelation in a non-ordinary state of consciousness!"
The results of this were stated quite clearly by Dr David Gross at the 2005 Solvay Conference: "We don't know what we are talking about". He said that the field is in "a period of utter confusion" comparable to that of 1911: "They were missing something absolutely fundamental. We are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then." He was quickly forced into a retraction by colleagues, but his words ring true.
The obvious question is how to determine which of these - the physical monism of materialism or some sort of extra-physical pluralism - best describes our reality. I am interested in communicating with Japanese English-speakers interested in these topics.
Eastern and Oriental traditions contain a vast amount of teaching on such matters. No physical proof of any sort is offered other than occasionally reported 'miracles' and anomalous events of various sorts. Most teach mental and emotional disciplines as the only means of experiencing these non-physical realities whilst incarnate, but those disciplines do not allow the objective, third-party observation required by the empirical methodology of Modern Western Science.
However, it is amusing to note that the very foundation of modern, rationalist thought is attributed to Rene Descartes, whose key inspirational ideas came to him in a series of dreams. As noted by Stanislav Grof in "The Holotropic Mind":
"The paradox is that Rene Descartes' "Discourse on Method", the book that reformed the entire structure of Western knowledge and that provided the foundations for modern science, came to its author in three visionary dreams, and a dream within a dream which provided the key for interpreting the larger dream. What an irony it is that the entire edifice of rational, reductionist, positivist science, which today rejects 'subjective knowledge', was originally inspired by a revelation in a non-ordinary state of consciousness!"
The results of this were stated quite clearly by Dr David Gross at the 2005 Solvay Conference: "We don't know what we are talking about". He said that the field is in "a period of utter confusion" comparable to that of 1911: "They were missing something absolutely fundamental. We are missing perhaps something as profound as they were back then." He was quickly forced into a retraction by colleagues, but his words ring true.
The obvious question is how to determine which of these - the physical monism of materialism or some sort of extra-physical pluralism - best describes our reality. I am interested in communicating with Japanese English-speakers interested in these topics.
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