James Ray – The Prison Want Ads

James Arthur Ray, motivational speaker and star of The Secret, was found guilty of negligent homicide and sentenced to two years jail, after he cooked three people to death in a bogus sweatlodge in 2009. He is due for release on July 12 this year.

I have been wondering what James Ray will do upon his release. I’ve been expecting a slippery, slithery return to business, aimed at new customers and avoiding mention of what he’s been up to lately. Also, there are those who have clung onto him so far, hoping to grab a bargain business deal from a fallen dictator. They will be flooding the atmosphere with good vibes about Ray, and promoting exploitive “business opportunities” to the most vulnerable end of the market they can find.

That’s all still to come. But first up, the parole board requires Ray to remain in Arizona for 110 days after his release. That might pose some logistic difficulties for him I guess, but James Arthur Ray, author of Harmonic Wealth: The Secret of Attracting the Life You Want is an expert in using quantum physics and the Law of Attraction to get everything — yes everything — he wants… and you can too.

Or not.

Actually things don’t seem to be going so Harmonically well for Death Ray. He doesn’t know where he’s going to stay in Arizona for that time and has been reduced to getting his brother, Jon C Ray, to beg to other people for money, support and a couch to sleep on. An email which Jon Ray sent out privately has fallen into the hands of the activist blogger and kick ass fake robot the Salty Droid, who kindly featured it on his website:

Dear Bruce Lipton Fans & Commenters….

I just received an email from someone who thought that I should treat Bruce Lipton‘s teachings on the Biology of Belief as a provisional hypothesis awaiting further confirmation or disproof. Okay, let’s consider the arguments for and against.

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There are two common arguments against this position. One is that Lipton’s teachings are in fact supported by mainstream science, and the other argues that Lipton’s work is a threat to mainstream science and that the studies supporting it have been suppressed. Let’s examine these opposing factions.

One who argues strongly that the Biology of Belief is accepted by mainstream science is Dr Bruce Lipton Ph.D.

In this lecture, he argues that the popular press has misinterpreted the recent advancements in genetics and misinformed the public. He is supported in this position by a group of commenters here on this blog, who point to numerous articles which they believe, for reasons that escape me, somehow support Lipton’s teachings.

On the opposing side, arguing that the Biology of Belief directly contradicts the dominant mechanistic paradigm of modern science and has therefore been suppressed, is Dr Bruce Lipton Ph.D.

In this interview he argues that the studies which support the ideas behind the “Biology of Belief” healing system have been suppressed. “Hundreds of studies”, he claims (without naming any) have been suppressed because they contradict mainstream science. He is supported in this by a group of commenters here on this blog, who argue that mainstream science is narrow-minded and so blinded by its materialism that it is incapable of recognizing the truth of Lipton’s teachings and suppresses them.

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I could just let these two groups of commenters slug it out between them but they haven’t noticed each other’s existence yet. And anyway, experience tells me that if they did ever meet to discuss things, they would all be swapping sides back and forth without even noticing. It’s a bit like biblical interpretation. Lipton’s teachings are so garbled that his fans are forced to make up their own version. In fact, this leaves them free to make up several of their own versions, between which they can alternate according to which ever point they want to make at a given moment. Of course, they still ascribe it all to Bruce Lipton Ph.D.

Luckily, the solution is simple.

Both camps are wrong. Lipton’s teachings are not supported by mainstream science, nor are they supported by research that has been suppressed. At least Lipton has never named any of the “hundreds of studies” that were refused publication. That argument might have been slightly more plausible in the 1980s, but these days with the internet, anyone who wants to put their cancer cure online can do so. And obviously, we have cases like Andrew Wakefield‘s elaborate fraud which got published in the Lancet despite being highly controversial at the time, and the sincere but premature publication of the neutrino affair which would have overturned a “central dogma” of physics. This even got saturation coverage in the mainstream press before the scientists themselves discovered their error and retracted it at great professional cost.

More importantly Lipton does not present his ideas as a provisional hypothesis, but rather as fact. So certain is he that his teachings work that he is prepared to stake…… well…… other people’s lives on it.

If you wish to claim Lipton’s teachings are a provisional hypothesis, you have just acknowledged that Lipton is a cancer quack.

Incidentally, there is also a third group who suspect that Lipton is a babbling loon, but can’t quite bring themselves to let go of the idea that magic is real because someone with a Ph.D says it is. So they say “I’m not defending Lipton, but can you prove he is wrong?” All I can say to these people is pick one of the above groups and get in line.

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An analogy is NOT evidence and it does NOT constitute a hypothesis, not even a provisional one.

Lipton does not describe or propose any chemical reactions or physiological processes which might be involved in his cancer cure, despite having a Ph.D in cell biology. Instead he uses nothing more than an analogy — an extremely poor and wildly over-stretched analogy — to support his claims.

Scientists sometimes use analogies to explain unfamiliar things by comparing them to familiar ones. For example, a protein fits into a protein receptor in a manner that is analogous to a key in a lock. This does not mean that proteins dangle on something like a key chain or that the protein receptor will rust if it gets wet. That’s pushing the analogy too far.

Lipton uses a general analogy to describe cell function. He likens cells to an individual human being. He lists some functional components of a person (brain, heart, sex organs, etc) and then points to parts of the cell which he feels are analogous to these. Then he goes way overboard and ascribes ALL the characteristics of such components in a whole person, to the supposedly analogous components of a cell. Not surprisingly, everything that follows this ridiculous abuse of analogy, is utterly wrong and highly dangerous. 

Clearly, if this were to be a hypothesis, he would postulate chemical reactions which might be occurring. He doesn’t  do this. Instead, he starts with technical explanations using technical biological terms, and then advances it using analogy alone, and winds up presenting a model of healing which is based entirely on this one spurious analogy. This is what he sells as a cancer cure.

Let’s go through this step by step.

Lipton draws an analogy between the way the cell membrane can identify a protein using its protein receptors, and the way we use our sense organs or perceive our environment. From there he makes an unjustified leap and starts using the word perception to describe what the cell membrane does!!!

From there, he explains that our belief systems influence our perceptions, and then leaps on further to insisting that by changing our belief system we can change our perceptions. (His presentation of this is wildly exaggerated and very muddled, but I’ll let it pass because he’s traveling towards a different goal.)

The next leap is to assert that not only do cells perceive things, but that they too — like us — have belief systems!!! The next leap is that these belief systems determine the way the cell perceives, and the next leap is that by changing its belief system the cell can alter its perceptions of what is around it.

And the next leap is the idea that the cell can change its belief system if ordered to do so by the brain. This is followed by another long and squarking-like-a-turkey leap, where Lipton insists that our brain can cure cancer by ordering cells to stop perceiving their environment as cancer inducing. Lipton of course offers no explanation for how this might work, and of course proposes no evidence for this. For him, the mystical powers of analogy is enough.

Those who claim that these teachings are part of mainstream science apparently think that if they can find an article which seems to support some part of this (like for example that cells can bee affected by stress) then this must mean the rest of what Lipton says is true too. I won’t bother pointing out how stupid that is.

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To those who think I don’t have the right to speak about this because I am not a scientist, I offer you the conclusion of a recent commenter @Mona, who is a biologist (and her claim to be certainly matches up with her IP & other data):

I was given a book by Bruce Lipton and found it completely bananas.

That’s it. There’s no need to take it any further than that.

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Posted by Yakaru

Atheism is not a “controversial position” for a scientist

I’ve been intending to write something about this for ages, but I was never quite sure how to approach it.  Happily the theologian John Haught has solved that problem for me, by saying something which succinctly reveals a very common misunderstanding both about science, and about the recent popular outbreak of atheism.

John Haught, like many people, thinks that scientists who publicly proclaim their atheism must be pushing their own radical and hubristic science-flavored ideology. They are not. People like Richard Dawkins and (as we shall see) the biologist and author Jerry Coyne* (see footnote), are presenting a position that is entirely consistent with well established science. The only “radical” — or better put, unusual – thing they are doing is speaking about it publicly, without obscuring  the obvious conclusions of established scientific knowledge from the public.

Haught had the following to say:

Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, whose faith in evolutionary naturalism has no limits, will continue to remind us that the high degree of accident and blind necessity in biological evolution renders the emergence of mind nothing but a fluke of nature. (Why he puts so much trust in his own mind, therefore, remains a mystery.) [Emphasis added]

I will pass over his disgracefully (for an academic) ignorant implication that natural selection is random, and focus on the parenthesized statement. As if Professor Coyne himself dreamed up the whole idea that evolutionary theory functions perfectly well without the need of resorting to a creator to drive it.

Coyne is not overstating or overestimating the strength of the science behind his position in this matter. Evolutionary science is extremely well equipped for tracing and conceptualizing the origins and development of the world’s 10 million or so different species, and is just as good for the billions of other species that have gone extinct. It has been confirmed, strengthened and refined since 1859 by advances in genetics, plate tectonics, biochemistry…… and every other relevant field of science. Certainly there’s an immense amount we don’t know and probably never will, but there are no glaring holes in the theoretical foundation which are so blank that one could credibly postulate divine activity taking place there. And it’s not for lack of looking.**

If Professor Haught wants to argue that Coyne has overstepped scientific prudence he will have to do more than merely assert it. Not only is there no evidence for God’s involvement in evolution, but to the contrary, there is in fact vast evidence precluding such activity. Haught would need to identify a fundamental flaw (or even potential flaw) in evolutionary theory. He hasn’t done that, and doesn’t even seem to be aware that this is what would be required of him.

And the fact that Haught thinks Coyne’s views rest on “faith” in biology and “faith” in his own hubristic mind, demonstrates how little Haught has troubled his own mind with the science he is so, um, haughtily criticizing. Instead, he appears to think that he is criticizing Coyne in isolation, when in fact he is unwittingly taking on an extremely well established field of science.

An example from Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True illustrates this point vividly. Scientists hypothesized that, starting about 80 million years ago, marsupials migrated from North America, down to the southern tip of South America. Around 30 to 40 million years ago they suddenly start appearing in the fossil record in Australia. At that time, it is now known, Australia and South America were connected by Antarctica. They have, of course, drifted apart since then by tectonic movement.

Southern Hemisphere geography about 70 million years ago: [Source]

So it was hypothesized that marsupials must have migrated over Antarctica to Australia. Paleontologists then went to Antarctica, examined 30-40 million year old rock, and indeed found the fossils that confirmed their hypothesis.

…..So if your theory predicts you’ll find 30 million year old kangaroo fossils in Antarctica, for heaven’s sake, and you go there and find them, well, okay you call that faith if you want I guess….. Fully earned, fully deserved faith in the findings and methods of science. This is not a case of Jerry Coyne having faith in his own mind “for some reason”.

Can Haught or any other theologian offer science anything comparable?

Nope.

On the other hand, science and even atheism has plenty to offer theology. Above all they offer a clear boundary. They indicate exactly when and where theologians should immediately shut up if they don’t want to waste their own time and everyone else’s.

That’s also a general point for whatever it is that the term “spirituality” refers to. There’s only one thing that makes a scientist talk rubbish, and that’s if he or she has done bad science. Feel free to call them on it, but first, at least try to grasp the basics of whatever it is you are criticizing.

Message to John Haught and anyone else who criticizes science without understanding it: if you think that scientists are too goddam certain, read them again and this time, notice that they have a sliding scale for degrees of certainty, and that they clearly distinguish between well founded knowledge and speculation…. No, I’m not surprised that you overlooked all that on that first reading…. Yes that kind of language does seem rather alien for some reason, doesn’t it….

______________

* John Haught and Jerry Coyne engaged in a public debate a while ago, with the result being that Haught wrote to the institute organizing the debate and requested(/demanded) that the debate not be released publicly on the internet as was the custom. Clearly he was shocked at the way that Coyne calmly and at times hilariously demolished not just Haught’s arguments but the entire profession of theology within 25 minutes. Eventually the debate was released and can be viewed below. Highly recommended!

(The Q & A is here.)

Professor Coyne has spent several years plowing through hundreds of the most highly respected theological texts, in response to the oft-repeated criticism of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion that Dawkins’ criticisms don’t apply to “sophisticated theology”. Sophisticated theology is beginning to pay the price for this hubris.

** Intelligent Design Creationism, for example has, I believe, located the most likely loophole in evolutionary theory: the possibility of irreducible complexity. If they could find a credible example, they could postulate a hitherto unknown process. So far every postulated example has been both utterly trivial, and completely blown out of the water, once investigated. 

In fairness to Professor Haught, it should be noted that he testified against the teaching of ID Creationism in US schools in the Dover Trial.

Posted by Yakaru

Note to Neale Donald Walsch & His Fans — “I” am not God

The thing that I call “I” is nothing at all. It doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion — a necessary illusion for social functioning and probably for normal mental functioning too. It gives continuity. But if you go looking for it, you won’t find it.

Some kind of consciousness obviously does exist, and there’s a door somewhere around here that leads inwards to a mind-blowing (at first) but utterly peaceful experience of simply being alive and aware…. but without knowing “who” is aware.

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I suspect that those who are reading this and saying “Huh?” (which may be everyone) have in fact experienced exactly what I’m talking about, and that I have described it so badly that it’s unrecognizable. And I expect that any decent Sufi or Zen practitioner would have already fallen of their seat laughing at me by now, which is why I avoid writing about anything like this.

But I had to start off like that in order to tell Neale Donald Walsch that he’s full of it and wouldn’t know a mystical experience if it galloped around him whinnying in an ancient Aramaic dialect.

Some people, usually the most shallow and egotistical, have some tepid, ego-soaked mystical experience and immediately start thinking they’ve “got it”. Then they go running around telling everyone else that they’re “enlightened” and anyone who has a working definition of that word, and feels themselves socially inferior to this person, will immediately start licking their boots. Others start showing up to “check out if this person has got something“, and a number of them, who also feel socially inferior or sexually attracted, will stay. Soon a “community of seekers” develops and they all hang around reassuring each other that they have “changed so much” and that “life is better now that they have met ________.”

But Neale Donald Walsch is not one of these gurus.

I doubt that he has had any kind of insight at all into the simple semi-mystical fact of consciousness. I guess he must have opened the door long enough to say “Ah, it’s God in there” before quickly clamping it shut again — because looking a little further might have been painfully humbling enough to immunize him against the kind of chest-thumping I am God stuff that he carries on with. 

Mr Walsch, your “I” doesn’t exist, even though it has one of those important sounding triple barreled names, tops the bestseller lists and is known to thousands as the human face of the Judeo-Christian God.

And I’m not even going to bother suggesting that God doesn’t exist. Instead, for the purposes of this post, let us allow the standard pseudo-mystical definition of “God”, where the word refers to the whole universe, including that little bit that my eyes can’t see, (i.e. myself) which I usually forget to include in my idea of “the whole”.

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Now, if you start telling people that there is something mysterious inside their consciousness and that this thing is God, some people will have an experience which is analogous. (Or, more likely, they will imagine themselves to have an experience which is analogous.) Something matches up. But this shouldn’t surprise anyone. Surely we all know that our normal everyday waking consciousness is only a tiny fraction of the inner experiences our brains can provide.

Every time you lift a little of that thin veil of normalcy, it doesn’t mean that you have immediately experienced god. That’s an ideological construct that insensitively closes the door on a whole inner world. Even more sadly, it makes such experiences seem foreign. And it belittles your own mysterious being — “That wasn’t me, that was God.” 

And, of course, that same sentence bloats your ego and makes you feel justified in lording it over others — “ That wasn’t me, that was God.”

Cutting up your consciousness like that — dividing yourself up into “little me” and “Big Me — God” (Walsch’s terms), will alienate you from vast areas of your own subjective world. It’s also psychologically unhealthy for everyday functioning.

In other words, it will ruin your connection to the mysterious and subjectively miraculous workings of your own consciousness; and it will also ruin your everyday life by scrambling your normal decision-making process — making you constantly ask yourself “was that me doing that or God”.

Some advice: 

As soon as you say “that was God” you can be sure it wasn’t. And as soon as you even pose the question, you can be sure that you are already missing yet another chance to be aware of the mysterious inner ocean of consciousness that is lapping at your feet every single moment.

Ancient pond
Frog jumps in
Plop — the sound of water!

(Matsuo Bashō)

Here endeth the lesson.

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Posted by Yakaru

Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations With God” — Some Historical Background

All this “You are God” stuff has a long history and includes a fairly profound mystical tradition as well as a rather non-profound political history. The reasons for this strikingly checkered past should swiftly become obvious to anyone who stops and thinks about it. 

The “God” refers to the ultimate in alpha males, and the “you” is the ultimate in biblical humbleness and worminess. The conjunction of the two might be the ultimate in democratic humility, or the ultimate in despotic hubris….. or a mix of the two with a lucrative business plan attached!

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The idea was first written down in the Upanishads, a quite impressive old document which included the often quoted idea that one should “Be still and know that I am God”. But instead of “God”, of course, it’s “Brahma”. Sadly, this should remind us that it’s only speaking to members of the Brahman caste, and not to any Untouchable.

Striking isn’t it, how easily the most vicious and inhuman hierarchy ever devised, the Hindu caste system, nestles so easily in next to the apparently democratic idea that God is in everyone. Note too, please, the built-in Orwellian disclaimer — All people are God, but some people are more God than others.

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The idea resurfaces in the Bible. Saul of Tarsus (who was influenced by the Greeks, who were themselves influenced by Hindu philosophy), tells the Galatians that he now has a “Jesus” where his “self” used to be. Again, while this all sounds very humble, it also forms the basis of divine papal authority, and onward to centuries of hideous torture and a shocking array of crimes and abuses.

Again, note the ease with which a humble idea of personal submission rests so easily with ideas of hierarchy and unquestionable authority.

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A more curious and possibly more honorable appearance of the idea occurred in Baghdad in the 10th Century. The Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj waded into the philosophically dangerous waters of deciding that if God is in everything, then he can also be found by anyone who knows how to look, regardless of religion or social status.

This is a genuinely brave and (I find) appealing idea, which is an invitation to unhindered exploration of the natural world and inner contemplation. For a sincere seeker and a genuinely devout believer, this is a perfectly reasonable conclusion, or even an unavoidable imperative. The fact that religious fundamentalists have always opposed this idea suggests they are themselves not in fact believers, and are purely interested in political power — the very thing which this idea threatens.

Likewise, the fundies didn’t like Mansur’s insistence on sharing his mysticism with the masses, and they had him executed. According to accounts, Mansur went bravely to his death, repeating that his “self” had already been destroyed, long before the ax was to fall. If the accounts are true, it seems he genuinely believed that, as he put it, “There is nothing wrapped in this turban except God.”

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This is the tradition that Neale Donald Walsch claims to be a part of. He claims both the divine authority of Yahweh as instilled in Saul, as well as the humbleness and courage in the face of oppression, of Mansur. Subsequent posts will consider how Walsch navigates this philosophical minefield, how he measures up to the standards he claims to represent, and how he deals with the built-in temptations of hierarchy, hubris and profit. 

(I know, I’ve been blabbing about doing this for ages, but there is a surprising amount of preliminary stuff to clear out of the way before one can get a clear approach to this character!)

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Posted by Yakaru

10 things New Agers Don’t Understand About Science: Part 1 — Science says life is “just” chemical reactions

Welcome to this series of ten posts on the most common misunderstandings about science, which form a surprisingly large part of the foundation for New Age teachings.

Just for the record, many of the views dealt with in this series are ones which I myself have previously advocated, (though never online, and never on any public platform).

This first post is about the extraordinarily popular idea that Science says we are “just” chemicals and molecules, and that love is “just” a chemical reaction.

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I remember about 25 years ago asking a woman I knew who was studying psychology if she felt her love for her children was just a bunch of chemical reactions. She spluttered a bit, but said yes. I countered that the love must come from somewhere, and that it wasn’t on earth before she felt it, was it? I concluded and believed that love is being poured into us from the “outside”, from the spirit world. Subjectively it felt like that to me at the time.

Something within us (or at least within many of us) rebels at the idea that we are “just” matter.

I invite those who think and feel this way to do this: take up a marking pen and draw a neat line through the word “just”.

Science says that life is chemical reactions.

That is in fact exactly what science says. Some idiot scientists may have put the “just” in there, as the behaviorist B.F. Skinner did, but the correct representation of science’s findings so far is that chemical reactions are the basis of life. You don’t even need to give up any beliefs in the soul, or divine love at this point. Science is good at distinguishing between what can be termed knowledge (i.e. things that seem to be reliably true enough that retesting them for each experiment or equation would be a waste of time) and speculation.

That we have a soul is, from a scientific viewpoint, a speculation. Even if it seemed to a scientist to be subjectively undeniable that we have a soul, it would be more prudent to acknowledge that scientifically we have neither evidence, nor any purpose for such a speculation. We can go a long way using only that which we can justify with a foundation of scientific knowledge, without needing to fill in too many gaps with speculations. And we certainly don’t need to create gaps in established knowledge to force a place for the soul to be crammed into!

Neale Donald Walsch — Conversations With Verbosity

Frank Zappa sang:

Do you know who you are?
You are what you is
You is what you am
A cow don’t make ham

You ain’t what you’re not
So see what you got
You are what you is
And that all it is

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Neale Donald Walsch said:

You are an Individuation of Deity, a singularization of The Singularity, an aspect of Divinity. You are the Localized Expression of the Universal Presence… You are God… You are in the Realm of the Physical — what has also been called the Realm of the Relative…which is where Experiencing occurs.

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I don’t think I have to say too much more about this…..(*There are some more posts on the way – this is just a brief start.)

But for those who don’t think they’re getting their money’s worth from this post, I’ll add a bit more….

Zappa had something to say in the above quote and used straight forward language to say it. Mostly, you’ll notice, with good earthy Anglo-Saxon or Old English-derived words. And Walsch says next to nothing, despite using more words, longer words, and much more complicated language — largely derived you’ll notice, from Latin, the language of theology. Zappa is a little confronting, but good humored. Walsch is just bossy and uses the ubiquitous New Age tactic of “assertion-presented-as-fact”….. And also, Zappa is speaking in English; Walsch is not. He’s speaking some weird parallel language that uses English words, but with consistently distorted meanings.

Walsch has gathered terms from widely disparate fields, including, (in order of appearance), Jungian psychology, theology, self invented terminology, artificial intelligence theory, Catholicism, quantum physics, Buddhism/Hinduism, New Age Christianity, needlessly grandiose verbosity (Realm of the Physical), fake authority (“what has also been called” has only ever been so called by him!), more needlessly grandiose verbosity + self invented terminology + physics (Realm of the Relative), and another self invented term (Experiencing).

And what’s with all the capitals, you ask? I have no idea, but for some reason during the 1990s ALL the gurus were doing it. And then the fashionable ones stopped. (I remember one friend proudly insisting in about 2004 that her guru didn’t do that anymore.)

And what does it mean? Well, that you are “individuating” (not in the Jungian sense, but in the capital I sense); that you are God; that you are on planet Earth; and that you are “experiencing” (not in the English language sense, but in the capital E sense). It means absolutely nothing at all, does it. It’s pure white noise. Those are not really words but empty spaces. The consumer fills in the blanks with their own meanings, which they then ascribe to Neale Donald Walsch.

But surely there’s more to it than that?

Yes there is. I just wanted to get this out of the way first. People always say that Walsch has a “nice message”, without realizing that he doesn’t really have any message at all. It’s they who have the nice (if rather pointless) message! What Walsch does have though, is a full blown, highly exploitive scam, modeled on basically the same slick, slippery business model that, by some extraordinary coincidence, all the other New Age teachers seem to be running these days as well. And it’s not nice.

More to come soon on this topic……

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Posted by Yakaru