"Dopamine"
Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
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"Dopamine"
I'm at home sick - so had a chance to watch this after Jacobi made a comment.
I cried and cried and cried during the part where he gets a chance to experience more....and afterwards I thought once again about Conscious Death.....dying with full consciousness. There is Grace in doing that....I've seen it with my own eyes and heart while watching the man I loved die from cancer. I don't mean to say he acted graciously while dying....nooo....he was in a great deal of pain and fear during those last few months. But it was there at the very ending... I could see it glowing out from him...and I knew without doubt they were bringing him home. Of course he wanted more time....I've heard from many many others who have been with the dying that they always do....and he was surprised that there at the ending of his life he wanted more time with us. On the other hand he talked to me about how he could feel his spirit family...oh wow....visions coming up now...and more crying from being shown...
....
whew...these are coming with more frequency now....
Anyway... He had admitted to me early on the short time we had together that in looking back over his life he could tell he really never "lived" it....that he constantly felt like he didn't belong here and was lost. Since I was an INFJ I understood him immediately and he was floored by my ability to fully grasp what he was saying....because he's an INTP....well...he was an INTP. What struck me from the conversation was the fact he was beginning to regret not fully living "A" life....the fullness and richness of a lifetime. Sure he had a couple of wives and a couple of sons...but they were completely dysfunctional and he had no clue how to deal with any of it. So he retreated from the world and lived alone for 12 years driving himself into cancer due to lack of understanding.....either from or by himself....and especially....other human beings. As the end approached his Essence began to surge up and out of his field in connection with his higher Self. He was bridging the two frequencies between the 3rd and the 5th. That's why he could feel their touching him giving him the "knowing" there was love and forgiveness waiting for him and strength to go "to the end".
He endured sooo much pain ....I am in awe....you see.... because he was actively conscious of it the whole time.
When he came to visit me in my room after he died the day before He was a radiant being of Light manifesting in the physical form that loved me. He glowed with the energy of Grace.
The drunken man died suddenly with no conscious awareness of his "life" in that moment... at all. I wonder if that's why when we transition from this body and are doing our life review we go "awww shit...i didn't really live it now did I?...Best go back down and give it another whirl...." ...and then we reincarnate again.
The Buddha taught how to die consciously through active living in mindfulness. I'm glad I have been given the gift of this teaching. The movie brings this point home very well.
I agree…I really liked the art in this, you can see traces of Anime and other things, but I really like the storytelling, very well done overall.
Perhaps it is that need for more that causes reincarnation…there does seem to be a higher number of people who died in a violent manner…jumped from a burning building or was killed in war…maybe they felt they were shortchanged in some way because their lives were so suddenly cut short?
Personally, I would prefer not to reincarnate if I can help it…hehe.
I have a feeling that I will not, that this life is profoundly what it is, no matter how menial, boring, painful, frustrating, disgusting, and generally terrible that life can be…it is also the opposites of all those things that I just listed.
In a whole other category unto itself is love.
I am sorry that his death was painful at times, in all ways that it could possibly BE painful…I know that at some point it was.
My Father went very quickly from denial/fear/anger/fighting to depression…but then he found some resignation, he seemed to come to terms with it right before he really declined fast…I feel really blessed that he never lost his sense of humor and was trying to joke with us even when he wasn’t making sense anymore.
One of my last memories of him was pulling up to my parent’s house and he was sitting on the front entryway to the house in a wheelchair, and he was looking at the blossoms on the cherry tree planted just 5 years prior. He says, “Isn’t it just so beautiful?” and I stop and we both just look at this tree for quite some time.
We will all find our way to that moment…some sooner than others…some will be quick, some will not…but we will all transcend these bodies that have served us so well and join the unknown beyond.
It has been said many Lightworkers incarnated this time with all of the unfinished contracts to give everyone - including Gaia - the opportunity to complete theirs. By completing those contracts one assists Gaia and then we go on to our missions. I know...sounds hokey doesn't it?LOL Yet there you are making a very valid point which dovetails in with what I've heard.
And hell no we aint' coming back...not to this ridiculous game! Hahahaha....
...which suggests you are now getting the opportunity to complete your karmic contract.
I can relate to being grateful for the sense of humor. I still have a message on my phone of him laughing as he says "i'm back on my feet ...sortof"....and everyone around him appreciated his ability to laugh at the situation.
:love: mmmm....the scene of you and your dad taking a moment in time to enjoy nature's gift of beauty felt so nice in my heart.
Reincarnation Research and Myths of Scientific Practice
By Sommer_HPS
Between you and me, I’m so not into the idea that karma will eventually get me and drag my poor soul back into a new body after I die.
At the risk of appearing a gloomy Gus, to me one life seems just about enough.
Pythagoras of Samos (c.570-c.495)
From the days of Socrates and Pythagoras, the idea of repeated lives has survived in writings of Renaissance thinkers like Giordano Bruno and finally became absorbed in New Age ideologies from the nineteenth century, where they have lingered up to the present day.
Today, professional philosophers seriously consider the question of reincarnation only occasionally.
In a discussion of the problem of personal identity, Derek Parfit suggested the type of empirical evidence that might convince him:
Derek Parfit (Photo by Steve Pyke/Getty Images)
“One such piece of evidence might be this. A Japanese woman might claim to remember living a life as a Celtic hunter and warrior in the Bronze Age. On the basis of her apparent memories she might make many predictions which could be checked by archaeologists. Thus she might claim to remember having a bronze bracelet, shaped like two fighting dragons. And she might claim that she remembers burying this bracelet beside some particular megalith, just before the battle in which she was killed. Archaeologists might now find just such a bracelet buried in this spot, and at least 2,000 years old. This Japanese woman might make many other such predictions, all of which are verified” (Parfit, 1984, p. 277).
Ian Stevenson (1918-2007)
Stevenson set himself apart from most previous authors writing on phenomena suggestive of reincarnation through his scientific credentials and his rigorous methodology.
A seasoned and widely respected professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, Stevenson rejected hypnotic regression as a method to uncover supposed memories of past lives, and instead investigated hundreds of spontaneous claims of reincarnation memories through interviews and cross-examinations of claimants and witnesses.
Typically, a case investigated by Stevenson would look like this: A child alarms their parents by claiming to be a different person, someone who had died.
To the parents’ added horror, the child would also often demand to be reunited with their ‘real’ family.
Despite disencouragement (and sometimes threats and caning) from their parents, the child continues to exhibit highly unusual and specific memories and behaviours, which are eventually used to identify an actual person who had lived and died in an often considerable distance, and whom the child and their family in all likelihood has had no conventional knowledge of.
Perhaps most incredibly, the strongest cases also involve birthmarks which strikingly correspond to (usually) fatal wounds in the ‘remembered’ person, who had nearly always died of an unnatural cause such as accident, murder and suicide.
Attempting to match the details in question, in dozens of rigorously documented cases Stevenson was able to locate ‘previous personalities’ by following the claims made by these children.
Most though by no means all of Stevenson’s investigations took place in India and other countries where the belief in reincarnation is widespread and claimants not as difficult to come by and to openly investigate as in the enlightened West.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996)
In his popular science classic, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan observed that this new field of study into children who “sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation”, deserved “serious study” (Sagan, 1995, p. 285).
This, however, was the last we heard of Sagan on the matter.
But other investigators — such as the Icelandic psychologist Erlendur Haraldsson, the Canadian anthropologist Antonia Mills, and the German-born psychologist Jürgen Keilat the University of Tasmania — began to independently research similar cases.
Stevenson died in 2007 but has been succeeded at the University of Virginia by fellow psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker, who specialises in the investigation of Western cases.
Another leading and scientifically hard-nosed expert of reincarnation research is the anthropologist James G. Matlock, currently a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation, whose bibliography of online resources is a useful collection for serious literature on this mind-boggling phenomenon.
Together with Stevenson’s records, well-documented cases published by these and other authors display features that dramatically exceed those suggested by Parfit as acceptable evidence for reincarnation.
Phenomenologically, they comprise the following variable but quite robust features:
- talk about alleged past-life memories begins at the age of 2-5 and ceases at the age of 5-8;
- alleged memories are narrated repeatedly and with strong emphasis;
- social roles and professional occupations of the alleged previous personality (PP) are acted out in play;
- mention of the cause of (usually violent) death
- emotional conflicts due to ambiguity of family or sex membership;
- display of unlearned skills (including basic foreign language skills) as well as propositional knowledge (of names, places, persons, etc.) not plausibly acquired in the present life
- unusual behaviour and traits corresponding to the PP, such as phobias, aversions, obsessions, penchants;
- occasionally, alcohol or drug addictions that were manifest in the PP;
- sexual precocity and gender dysphoria (where the PP belonged to a different sex);
- birthmarks, differing in etiological features such as size, shape and colour from conventional birthmarks and other relevant birth anomalies, significantly corresponding to wounds involved in the death of the PP;
A more recent finding is that children relating a violent death in the PP occasionally display symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, which do not seem to correlate with any biographical events, but to circumstances of the allegedly remembered mode of death (cf. Haraldsson, 2003).
Neither Stevenson himself nor any of his colleagues have claimed that their material actually provides compelling proof of reincarnation.
While Parfit appeared curiously unaware of this literature (as far as I’m aware, he never betrayed the slightest knowledge of it), other respected philosophers like Curt Ducasse, Robert Almeder and Stephen Braude have taken it seriously as an empirical basis for discussions of the age-old question of reincarnation.
But what about the ‘scientific community’?
Isn’t the fact that you probably never heard about this kind of research sufficient evidence that there must be something fundamentally wrong with it?
After all, according to a rather widespread assumption about standards of scientific practice, anomalies irresistibly attract scientists like light attracts the proverbial moth.
For in order to be a ‘real’ scientist you are expected to constantly challenge your pet theories about how the world works, always look for refuting instances that may indicate you’re wrong, and follow the evidence wherever it leads and whether you personally like it or not.
The more outlandish an anomaly reported by more than one qualified and critical observer, so the myth goes, the quicker it attracts other scientists, ultimately producing a true landslide of opinion in the ‘scientific community’, which is then faithfully reflected on the pages of mainstream science journals and in textbooks.
If you did hear about the work of Stevenson and colleagues, chances are that your informants weren’t trained scientists who personally scrutinized the data with an open mind, and published their critiques in peer-reviewed science journals or discussed them at academic conferences.
Instead, the public discourse — including entries on all sorts of unorthodox matters on Wikipedia — is dominated by self-appointed guardians of ‘Science and Reason’ organised worldwide in so-called Skeptics associations, represented by professional enlightenment crusaders such as James Randi and Michael Shermer in the US and Richard Dawkins and Richard Wiseman in the UK.
As previously observed by my colleague Rebekah Higgitt, some of the most active and visible representatives of the Skeptics movement profess to impartially stick to evidence, but ultimately give science a bad name by relying on aggressive polemics and derision of opponents.
Stevenson himself sometimes complained that what frustrated him much more than misrepresentations of his research particularly in the popular media was the almost complete silence by the ‘scientific community’.
Rather than offering informed criticisms of Stevenson’s research, most fellow scientists have in fact simply ignored it.
That’s why there’s a good chance that we will never know what is behind the strange facts collected and published by Stevenson and colleagues.
Stevenson is dead, other senior researchers are retired, and there is no next generation of serious, qualified researchers in sight, let alone career opportunities for young scientists who might want to give this potentially revolutionary kind of research a shot.
But why am I telling you all this?
Certainly not because I want to convince you that reincarnation is a fact.
Impressive as the best cases and the scientific credentials of their investigators are, personally I’m not convinced that they unambiguously prove reincarnation. But to me it seems that we are dealing with a quite robust body of anomalous data in serious need of explanation.
And given my historical research on the links between science and the ‘occult’, I cannot but note a striking consistency in the academic reception of elite unorthodox science over time.
Presently, I’m working on an article reconstructing the work of William James, the ‘father’ of modern American psychology, with the spiritualist medium Leonora Piper.
In one of his articles on psychical research, James problematized certain “social prejudices which scientific men themselves obey”, and briefly described his futile attempts to motivate scientific colleagues to independently test Mrs. Piper as an example:
William James (1842-1910)
They also have to be excused from any such entanglement. I advise another psychological friend to look into this medium’s case, but he replies that it is useless, for if he should get such results as I report, he would (being suggestible) simply believe himself hallucinated. When I propose as a remedy that he should remain in the background and take notes, whilst his wife has the sitting, he explains that he can never consent to his wife’s presence at such performances. This friend of mine writes ex cathedra on the subject of psychical research, declaring (I need hardly add) that there is nothing in it; the chair of the psychologist with the Commission was founded by a spiritist, partly with a view to investigate mediums; and one of the five colleagues who declined my invitation is widely quoted as an effective critic of our evidence” (James, 1901, p. 15).
Now to me it seems obvious that radically empirical research into mediumship and children claiming past lives can provoke profound fears and irrational knee-jerk responses, touching as they do on deep and potentially scary existential issues — the question of life after death, the privacy of the self, the very nature and limits of knowledge, etc.
As a historian, that’s why I find the study of the complex links between science and the ‘occult’ so rewarding: it cuts right through a massive thicket of basic assumptions about the supposed intrinsic rationality of scientific practice.
Not least, a critical comparison of actual events and debates with their representations in retroactively whitewashed popular histories of science highlights the important function of history as a powerful means to determine and maintain the very scope and limits of permissible scientific questions.
At the same time it would be wrong to claim that unorthodox sciences investigating reported phenomena traditionally associated with metaphysical problems stand isolated in their academic neglect.
You really don’t have to be a historian or sociologist of science, or familiar with the writings of Thomas Kuhn or Harry Collins, to realise that scientists as a rule have never been particularly fond of anomalies or serious challenges of scientific and medical paradigms even in less fundamental and comparatively trivial matters.
Especially not, perhaps, since the sciences were transformed into professional careers during the nineteenth century.
If you’re a scientist or academic yourself, or have friends who are, you’re probably already well aware that intellectual freedom only goes as far as resources, time, career opportunities, peer and institutional support, and not least cultural biases regulated to an alarming degree by self-appointed reality sheriffs and their journalistic henchmen permit it to go.
Bibliography
Haraldsson, E. (2000). Birthmarks and claims of previous-life memories: I. The case of Purnima Ekanayake. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 64, 16-25 [PDF link].
Haraldsson, E. (2000). Birthmarks and claims of previous-life memories: II. The case of Chatura Karunaratne. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 64, 82-92 [PDF link]
Haraldsson, E. (2003). Children who speak of past-life experiences: Is there a psychological explanation? Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 76, 55-67 [PDF link].
Haraldsson, E., & Abu-Izzeddin, M. (2004). Three randomly selected Lebanese cases of children who claim memories of a previous life. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 68, 65-85 [PDF link].
James, W. (1901). Frederic Myers’s service to psychology. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 17, 13-23.
Keil, J., & Stevenson, I. (1999). Do cases of the reincarnation type show similar features over many years? A study of Turkish cases a generation apart. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 13, 189-198 [PDF link].
Keil, J., & Tucker, J. B. (2005). Children who claim to remember previous lives: cases with written records made before the previous personality was identified. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 19, 91-101 [PDF link].
Kelly, E. W. (Ed., 2013). Science, the Self, and Survival after Death. Selected Writings of Ian Stevenson. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Matlock, J. G. (1990). Past life memory case studies. In S. Krippner (Ed.),Advances in Parapsychological Research, Vol. 6 (pp. 187-267). Jefferson, NC: McFarland [PDF link].
Matlock, J. (1997). Review of Reincarnation: A Critical Examination by P. Edwards. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 11, 570-573 [PDF link].
Mills, A., & Tucker, J. B. (2014), Past life experiences. In E. Cardeña, S. J. Lynn, & S. Krippner (Eds.) Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence (second edition, pp. 303-332). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Mills, A., Haraldsson, E., & Keil, J. (1994). Replication studies of cases suggestive of reincarnation by three different investigators. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, 88, 207-219 [PDF link].
Sagan, C. (1995). The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House.
Stevenson, I. (1974). Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Preface by Curt Ducasse). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Stevenson, I. (1997). Reincarnation and Biology. A Contribution to the Etiology of Birthmarks and Birth Defects (2 vols.) Westport: Praeger.
Stevenson, I. (2003). European Cases of the Reincarnation Type. Jefferson: McFarland & Company.
Tucker, J. B. (2009). Life Before Life: A Scientific Investigation of Children’s Memories of Previous Lives. London: Piatkus.
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
That was pretty interesting. It's nice to see an article on reincarnation that takes a middle ground. Most either provide dubious evidence to their claims and insist it exists or just dismiss it entirely. The subject's a fascinating one, but I haven't come across many writers who seek to elucidate without inserting opinion as fact.
There is one thing though. While Carl Sagan did say that further study should go into Stevenson's claims, he didn't really take reincarnation any more seriously than other spiritual topics. He was very skeptical towards the idea, but not closed to the possibility it might exist. That's quite a bit away from being an advocate.
There is one thing though. While Carl Sagan did say that further study should go into Stevenson's claims, he didn't really take reincarnation any more seriously than other spiritual topics. He was very skeptical towards the idea, but not closed to the possibility it might exist. That's quite a bit away from being an advocate.
Hi Skarekrow,
I apologize if you've already posted something similar to this. If you don't read either article, I feel like the video at the end really helped me to visualize what actually happens in the body and it's helped me (in my opinion) to get well sooner than I probably would have otherwise.
Your Mind can Keep You Well
http://www.psitek.net/pages/PsiTek-creative-visualization12.html#gsc.tab=0
Did you know that it is only recently that medical doctors have accepted how important the power of the mind is in influencing the immune system of the human body? Many decades passed before these men of science decided to test the proposition that the brain is involved in the optimum functioning of the different body systems. Recent research shows the undeniable connection --the link-- between mind and body, which challenged the long-held medical assumption. A new science called psychoneuroimmunology or PNI, the study of how the mind affects health and bodily functions, has come out of such research.
A psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Lean Achterberg, suggests that emotion may form the link between mind and immunity. “Many of the autonomic functions connected with health and disease,” she explains,” are emotionally triggered.”
Exercises which encourage relaxation and mental activities such as creative visualization, positive thinking, and guided imagery produce subtle changes in the emotions which can trigger either a positive or a negative effect on the immune system. This explains why positive imaging techniques have resulted in dramatic healings in people with very serious illnesses, including cancer.
OMNI magazine claims (February, 1989), in a cover article entitled “Mind Exercises That Boost Your Immune System”:
“As far back as the Thirties, Edmund Jacobson found that if you imagine or visualize yourself doing a particular action - say, lifting an object with your right arm - the muscles in that arm show increased electrical activity. Other scientists have found that imagining an object moving across the sky produces more eye movements than visualizing a stationary object.”
One of the most dramatic applications of imagery in coping with illness is the work of Dr. Carl Simonton, a radiation cancer specialist in Dallas, Texas. “By combining relaxation with personalized images,” reports OMNI magazine, “he has helped terminal cancer patients reduce the size of their tumors and sometimes experience complete remission of the disease.”
Many of his patients have benefited from this technique. It simply shows how positive visualization can help alleviate - if not totally cure - various diseases including systemic lupus erythomatosus, migraine, chronic back pain, hyperthyroidism, high blood pressure, hyper-acidity, etc.
However, individual differences have to be taken into consideration when discussing each patient’s progress. It’s understandable that individuals have varying abilities to visualize or create mental images clearly; some people will benefit more from positive-imagery techniques than others
Nevertheless, if visualization can help people overcome diseases, it could possibly help healthy individuals keep their immune system in top shape. Says OMNI magazine: “Practicing daily positive-imaging techniques may, like a balanced diet and physical exercise routine, tip the scales of health toward wellness.”
The Simonton process of visualization for cancer
Dr. Carl Simonton, a radiation cancer specialist, and his wife, Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, a psychotherapist and counselor specializing in cancer patients, have developed a special visualization or imaging technique for the treatment of cancer which is now popularly known as the Simonton process. Ridiculed at first by the medical profession, the Simonton process is now being used in at least five hospitals across the United States to fight cancer.
The technique itself is the height of simplicity and utilizes the tremendous powers of the mind, specifically its faculty for visualization and imagination, to control cancer. First, the patient is shown what a normal healthy cell looks like. Next, he is asked to imagine a battle going on between the cancer cell and the normal cell. He is asked to visualize a concrete image that will represent the cancer cell and another image of the normal cell. Then he is asked to see the normal cell winning the battle against the cancer cell.
One youngster represented the normal cell as the video game character Pacman and the cancer cell as the “ghosts” (enemies of Pacman), and then he saw Pacman eating up the ghosts until they were all gone.
A housewife saw her cancer cell as dirt and the normal cell as a vacuum cleaner. She visualized the vacuum cleaner swallowing up all the dirt until everything was smooth and clean.
Patients are asked to do this type of visualization three times a day for 15 minutes each time. And the results of the initial experiments in visualization to cure cancer were nothing short of miraculous. Of course, being medical practitioners, Dr. Simonton and his psychologist wife were aware of the placebo effect and spontaneous remission of illness. As long as they were getting good results with the technique, it didn’t seem to matter whether it was placebo or spontaneous remission.
Can you Imagine Cancer Away?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/03/ep.seidler.cancer.mind.body/
By now, you likely know David Seidler, who won an Oscar on Sunday for best original screenplay for "The King's Speech," was a stutterer just like King George VI, whose battle with the speech disorder is portrayed in the film.
What you might not know is that Seidler, 73, suffered from cancer, just like the king did. But unlike his majesty, Seidler survived the cancer, and he says he did so because he used the same vivid imagination he employed to write his award-winning script.
Seidler says he visualized his cancer away.
"I know it sounds awfully Southern California and woo-woo," he admits when he describes the visualization techniques he used when his bladder cancer was diagnosed nearly six years ago. "But that's what happened."
Seidler says when he found out his cancer had returned, he visualized a "lovely, clean healthy bladder" for two weeks, and the cancer disappeared. He's been cancer-free for more than five years.
Whether you can imagine away cancer, or any other disease, has been hotly debated for years.
One camp of doctors will tell you that they've seen patients do it, and that a whole host of studies supports the mind-body connection. Other doctors, just as well-respected, will tell you the notion is preposterous, and there's not a single study to prove it really works.
Seidler isn't concerned about studies. He says all he knows is that for him, visualization worked.
"Mucus and salty tears"
"When I was first diagnosed in 2005, I was rather upset, of course," Seidler says in a telephone interview from his home in Malibu, California. "After three to four days of producing a lot of mucus and salty tears, I knew prolonged grief was bad for the autoimmune system, and the autoimmune system was the only buddy I had in fighting cancer."
Seidler said that's when he decided to sit down and write the screenplay for "The King's Speech," which had been simmering in his brain for many years. "I thought, if I throw myself into the creative process, I can't be sitting around feeling sorry for myself," he says.
After consulting with California urologist Dr. Dino DeConcini, Seidler decided not to have chemotherapy or have all or part of his bladder removed, common treatments for bladder cancer. Instead, he opted for surgery to remove just the cancer itself, and he took supplements meant to enhance his immune system.
"For years, whenever I walked down the stairs I rattled like a pair of maracas, I had so many pills in me," he says.
Despite his best efforts, the cancer came back within months. Seidler was forced to rethink his decision not to have chemotherapy or bladder surgery.
Envisioning "a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder"
As his doctor booked an appointment for surgery two weeks later, Seidler commiserated with his soon-to-be-ex-wife, and it was a comment from her that gave him the idea to try to visualize his cancer disappearing. "She said, 'Well, what happens if in two weeks they go in and there's no cancer?' " he remembers. "I thought to myself that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This woman's in total denial."
But later, reflecting upon her comments, Seidler thought perhaps she might be on to something -- perhaps it would be possible for his cancer to just disappear while he waited for surgery. Figuring he had nothing to lose, for the next two weeks he imagined a clean bladder.
"I spent hours visualizing a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder lining, and then I went in for the operation, and a week later the doctor called me and his voice was very strange," Seidler remembers. "He said, 'I don't know how to explain it, but there's no cancer there.' He says the doctor was so confounded he sent the tissue from the presurgical biopsy to four different labs, and all confirmed they were cancerous.
Seidler says the doctor couldn't explain how it had happened. But Seidler could.
He says he believes the supplements and visualizations were behind what his doctor called a "spontaneous remission" -- plus a change in his way of thinking. He stopped feeling sorry for himself because of his cancer and his impending divorce.
"I was very grief-stricken," he remembers. "It was a 30-year marriage, and in my grief, I could tell I was getting sicker. I decided to just change my head around."
"The mind has the power to heal"
While Seidler says he knows his unorthodox recovery techniques sound "woo-woo" to some ears, they sound "like science" to Dr. Christiane Northrup, a best-selling author who's written extensively on the mind-body connection.
"This doesn't sound woo-woo to me," she says. "The mind has the power to heal."
She says by moving himself "from fear and abject terror into action," Seidler changed his body's chemistry. "Fear increases cortisol and epinephrine in the body, which over time lower immunity," she says.
High levels of the two stress hormones lead to cellular inflammation, which is the way cancer begins, Northrup says. Taking action, as Seidler eventually did, decreases the hormones.
"Hope is actually a biochemical reaction in the body," she says.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine & Miracles," says it's the same way an athlete uses visualization to improve performance.
"When an athlete visualizes success, their body really is experiencing success. When you imagine something, your body really feels like it's happening," says Siegel, a retired clinical assistant professor of surgery at Yale Medical School.
But Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, calls the mind-body connection a "new religion" that encourages false hope.
"There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease," says Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. "There's a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful."
She says stories like Seidler's are just that -- only stories and not proof that the mind-body connection is real. Some other part of the patient's treatment plan likely explains success against the disease, or in other cases, the success is temporary and part of the natural course of the disease.
For example, she says bladder cancer often returns. "You beat it down, and it comes back, and you beat it down, and it comes back," she says. "If [Seidler] had bladder cancer, this may very well not be the end of the story."
More heart attacks on Mondays
While Angell points out there are no large-scale studies showing visualization can treat disease, there are studies that seem to indicate what happens in your mind has an effect on your body.
For example, several studies have shown heart attacks occur more often on Mondays, presumably because people are under increased stress returning to work after the weekend.
Another set of studies shows how you perceive yourself affects your health.
In research done by the Yale School of Public Health and the National Institute of Aging, young people who had positive perceptions about aging were less likely to have a heart attack or stroke when they grew older. In another study by researchers at Yale and Miami University, middle aged and elderly people lived seven years longer if they had a positive perception about aging.
In 2008, Harvard researchers published a study where they told a group of hotel chambermaids their daily cleaning activities counted as exercise and were equivalent to working out at a gym. A month later, these chambermaids had lost weight and lowered their blood pressure without changing anything, yet chambermaids who weren't told about the benefits of their daily work had no such changes.
"It's so damned obvious that your attitude effects survival," says Siegel, the retired Yale surgeon.
A visualization guide
Whether you're convinced of the effects of visualization or not, Northrup says there's no harm in trying them, as long as you realize that like any other treatment, visualization might not work.
There's no definitive guide to visualization, but Siegel, who's instructed his patients in imaging for many years, has a few suggestions.
First, he says to draw a picture of four things: yourself, your health problem, your treatment and your body eliminating your problem. These pictures might tell you what sort of imagery would work best for you.
For example, when one of Siegel's patients drew her disease as 10 cancer cells next to one white blood cell, he suggested she visualize her body making more white blood cells.
Second, he says to know yourself. One religious patient of his had been visualizing dogs attacking and eating up her cancer, which didn't work, so instead she pictured her tumor as a block of ice and God's light melting it away, which he says was more effective.
Third, he suggests not visualizing anything violent, since most of us aren't violent by nature.
"Children don't mind being violent, and they'll visualize blasting away cancer, and that's fine, but most adults don't like to kill, so that's not an image they're comfortable with," he says.
He remembers one patient who was a Quaker and a pacifist, and quickly rejected any notion of "killing" or "beating" cancer. Instead, he pictured white blood cells carrying cancer cells away, and he beat his cancer.
[video=youtube;0TvTyj5FAaQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TvTyj5FAaQ[/video]
I apologize if you've already posted something similar to this. If you don't read either article, I feel like the video at the end really helped me to visualize what actually happens in the body and it's helped me (in my opinion) to get well sooner than I probably would have otherwise.
Your Mind can Keep You Well
http://www.psitek.net/pages/PsiTek-creative-visualization12.html#gsc.tab=0
Did you know that it is only recently that medical doctors have accepted how important the power of the mind is in influencing the immune system of the human body? Many decades passed before these men of science decided to test the proposition that the brain is involved in the optimum functioning of the different body systems. Recent research shows the undeniable connection --the link-- between mind and body, which challenged the long-held medical assumption. A new science called psychoneuroimmunology or PNI, the study of how the mind affects health and bodily functions, has come out of such research.
A psychologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center, Lean Achterberg, suggests that emotion may form the link between mind and immunity. “Many of the autonomic functions connected with health and disease,” she explains,” are emotionally triggered.”
Exercises which encourage relaxation and mental activities such as creative visualization, positive thinking, and guided imagery produce subtle changes in the emotions which can trigger either a positive or a negative effect on the immune system. This explains why positive imaging techniques have resulted in dramatic healings in people with very serious illnesses, including cancer.
OMNI magazine claims (February, 1989), in a cover article entitled “Mind Exercises That Boost Your Immune System”:
“As far back as the Thirties, Edmund Jacobson found that if you imagine or visualize yourself doing a particular action - say, lifting an object with your right arm - the muscles in that arm show increased electrical activity. Other scientists have found that imagining an object moving across the sky produces more eye movements than visualizing a stationary object.”
One of the most dramatic applications of imagery in coping with illness is the work of Dr. Carl Simonton, a radiation cancer specialist in Dallas, Texas. “By combining relaxation with personalized images,” reports OMNI magazine, “he has helped terminal cancer patients reduce the size of their tumors and sometimes experience complete remission of the disease.”
Many of his patients have benefited from this technique. It simply shows how positive visualization can help alleviate - if not totally cure - various diseases including systemic lupus erythomatosus, migraine, chronic back pain, hyperthyroidism, high blood pressure, hyper-acidity, etc.
However, individual differences have to be taken into consideration when discussing each patient’s progress. It’s understandable that individuals have varying abilities to visualize or create mental images clearly; some people will benefit more from positive-imagery techniques than others
Nevertheless, if visualization can help people overcome diseases, it could possibly help healthy individuals keep their immune system in top shape. Says OMNI magazine: “Practicing daily positive-imaging techniques may, like a balanced diet and physical exercise routine, tip the scales of health toward wellness.”
The Simonton process of visualization for cancer
Dr. Carl Simonton, a radiation cancer specialist, and his wife, Stephanie Matthews-Simonton, a psychotherapist and counselor specializing in cancer patients, have developed a special visualization or imaging technique for the treatment of cancer which is now popularly known as the Simonton process. Ridiculed at first by the medical profession, the Simonton process is now being used in at least five hospitals across the United States to fight cancer.
The technique itself is the height of simplicity and utilizes the tremendous powers of the mind, specifically its faculty for visualization and imagination, to control cancer. First, the patient is shown what a normal healthy cell looks like. Next, he is asked to imagine a battle going on between the cancer cell and the normal cell. He is asked to visualize a concrete image that will represent the cancer cell and another image of the normal cell. Then he is asked to see the normal cell winning the battle against the cancer cell.
One youngster represented the normal cell as the video game character Pacman and the cancer cell as the “ghosts” (enemies of Pacman), and then he saw Pacman eating up the ghosts until they were all gone.
A housewife saw her cancer cell as dirt and the normal cell as a vacuum cleaner. She visualized the vacuum cleaner swallowing up all the dirt until everything was smooth and clean.
Patients are asked to do this type of visualization three times a day for 15 minutes each time. And the results of the initial experiments in visualization to cure cancer were nothing short of miraculous. Of course, being medical practitioners, Dr. Simonton and his psychologist wife were aware of the placebo effect and spontaneous remission of illness. As long as they were getting good results with the technique, it didn’t seem to matter whether it was placebo or spontaneous remission.
Can you Imagine Cancer Away?
http://www.cnn.com/2011/HEALTH/03/03/ep.seidler.cancer.mind.body/
By now, you likely know David Seidler, who won an Oscar on Sunday for best original screenplay for "The King's Speech," was a stutterer just like King George VI, whose battle with the speech disorder is portrayed in the film.
What you might not know is that Seidler, 73, suffered from cancer, just like the king did. But unlike his majesty, Seidler survived the cancer, and he says he did so because he used the same vivid imagination he employed to write his award-winning script.
Seidler says he visualized his cancer away.
"I know it sounds awfully Southern California and woo-woo," he admits when he describes the visualization techniques he used when his bladder cancer was diagnosed nearly six years ago. "But that's what happened."
Seidler says when he found out his cancer had returned, he visualized a "lovely, clean healthy bladder" for two weeks, and the cancer disappeared. He's been cancer-free for more than five years.
Whether you can imagine away cancer, or any other disease, has been hotly debated for years.
One camp of doctors will tell you that they've seen patients do it, and that a whole host of studies supports the mind-body connection. Other doctors, just as well-respected, will tell you the notion is preposterous, and there's not a single study to prove it really works.
Seidler isn't concerned about studies. He says all he knows is that for him, visualization worked.
"Mucus and salty tears"
"When I was first diagnosed in 2005, I was rather upset, of course," Seidler says in a telephone interview from his home in Malibu, California. "After three to four days of producing a lot of mucus and salty tears, I knew prolonged grief was bad for the autoimmune system, and the autoimmune system was the only buddy I had in fighting cancer."
Seidler said that's when he decided to sit down and write the screenplay for "The King's Speech," which had been simmering in his brain for many years. "I thought, if I throw myself into the creative process, I can't be sitting around feeling sorry for myself," he says.
After consulting with California urologist Dr. Dino DeConcini, Seidler decided not to have chemotherapy or have all or part of his bladder removed, common treatments for bladder cancer. Instead, he opted for surgery to remove just the cancer itself, and he took supplements meant to enhance his immune system.
"For years, whenever I walked down the stairs I rattled like a pair of maracas, I had so many pills in me," he says.
Despite his best efforts, the cancer came back within months. Seidler was forced to rethink his decision not to have chemotherapy or bladder surgery.
Envisioning "a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder"
As his doctor booked an appointment for surgery two weeks later, Seidler commiserated with his soon-to-be-ex-wife, and it was a comment from her that gave him the idea to try to visualize his cancer disappearing. "She said, 'Well, what happens if in two weeks they go in and there's no cancer?' " he remembers. "I thought to myself that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This woman's in total denial."
But later, reflecting upon her comments, Seidler thought perhaps she might be on to something -- perhaps it would be possible for his cancer to just disappear while he waited for surgery. Figuring he had nothing to lose, for the next two weeks he imagined a clean bladder.
"I spent hours visualizing a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder lining, and then I went in for the operation, and a week later the doctor called me and his voice was very strange," Seidler remembers. "He said, 'I don't know how to explain it, but there's no cancer there.' He says the doctor was so confounded he sent the tissue from the presurgical biopsy to four different labs, and all confirmed they were cancerous.
Seidler says the doctor couldn't explain how it had happened. But Seidler could.
He says he believes the supplements and visualizations were behind what his doctor called a "spontaneous remission" -- plus a change in his way of thinking. He stopped feeling sorry for himself because of his cancer and his impending divorce.
"I was very grief-stricken," he remembers. "It was a 30-year marriage, and in my grief, I could tell I was getting sicker. I decided to just change my head around."
"The mind has the power to heal"
While Seidler says he knows his unorthodox recovery techniques sound "woo-woo" to some ears, they sound "like science" to Dr. Christiane Northrup, a best-selling author who's written extensively on the mind-body connection.
"This doesn't sound woo-woo to me," she says. "The mind has the power to heal."
She says by moving himself "from fear and abject terror into action," Seidler changed his body's chemistry. "Fear increases cortisol and epinephrine in the body, which over time lower immunity," she says.
High levels of the two stress hormones lead to cellular inflammation, which is the way cancer begins, Northrup says. Taking action, as Seidler eventually did, decreases the hormones.
"Hope is actually a biochemical reaction in the body," she says.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine & Miracles," says it's the same way an athlete uses visualization to improve performance.
"When an athlete visualizes success, their body really is experiencing success. When you imagine something, your body really feels like it's happening," says Siegel, a retired clinical assistant professor of surgery at Yale Medical School.
But Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, calls the mind-body connection a "new religion" that encourages false hope.
"There is something so biologically implausible that your attitude is going to cure a disease," says Angell, a senior lecturer in social medicine at Harvard Medical School. "There's a tremendous arrogance to imagine that your mind is all that powerful."
She says stories like Seidler's are just that -- only stories and not proof that the mind-body connection is real. Some other part of the patient's treatment plan likely explains success against the disease, or in other cases, the success is temporary and part of the natural course of the disease.
For example, she says bladder cancer often returns. "You beat it down, and it comes back, and you beat it down, and it comes back," she says. "If [Seidler] had bladder cancer, this may very well not be the end of the story."
More heart attacks on Mondays
While Angell points out there are no large-scale studies showing visualization can treat disease, there are studies that seem to indicate what happens in your mind has an effect on your body.
For example, several studies have shown heart attacks occur more often on Mondays, presumably because people are under increased stress returning to work after the weekend.
Another set of studies shows how you perceive yourself affects your health.
In research done by the Yale School of Public Health and the National Institute of Aging, young people who had positive perceptions about aging were less likely to have a heart attack or stroke when they grew older. In another study by researchers at Yale and Miami University, middle aged and elderly people lived seven years longer if they had a positive perception about aging.
In 2008, Harvard researchers published a study where they told a group of hotel chambermaids their daily cleaning activities counted as exercise and were equivalent to working out at a gym. A month later, these chambermaids had lost weight and lowered their blood pressure without changing anything, yet chambermaids who weren't told about the benefits of their daily work had no such changes.
"It's so damned obvious that your attitude effects survival," says Siegel, the retired Yale surgeon.
A visualization guide
Whether you're convinced of the effects of visualization or not, Northrup says there's no harm in trying them, as long as you realize that like any other treatment, visualization might not work.
There's no definitive guide to visualization, but Siegel, who's instructed his patients in imaging for many years, has a few suggestions.
First, he says to draw a picture of four things: yourself, your health problem, your treatment and your body eliminating your problem. These pictures might tell you what sort of imagery would work best for you.
For example, when one of Siegel's patients drew her disease as 10 cancer cells next to one white blood cell, he suggested she visualize her body making more white blood cells.
Second, he says to know yourself. One religious patient of his had been visualizing dogs attacking and eating up her cancer, which didn't work, so instead she pictured her tumor as a block of ice and God's light melting it away, which he says was more effective.
Third, he suggests not visualizing anything violent, since most of us aren't violent by nature.
"Children don't mind being violent, and they'll visualize blasting away cancer, and that's fine, but most adults don't like to kill, so that's not an image they're comfortable with," he says.
He remembers one patient who was a Quaker and a pacifist, and quickly rejected any notion of "killing" or "beating" cancer. Instead, he pictured white blood cells carrying cancer cells away, and he beat his cancer.
[video=youtube;0TvTyj5FAaQ]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TvTyj5FAaQ[/video]
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
D O P A M I N E
D O P A M I N E
D O P A M I N E
D O P A M I N E
@Jacobi
Oh...oh god.
I need a towel.
You knowwwww..... a person can change their mind and then not be quoted later....
....just sayin'...
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
That's true of course. But that suggests an change of attitude which is out of pattern. Ghandi could have called for a take up of arms, but never have been quoted. Martin Luther King might have suggested that black people are inferior, but it was never recorded. These are of course extreme examples. I'm just making a point.
Carl Sagan was an intelligent, well read man and his beliefs came from extensive research and thought. While he could have changed his mind on reincarnation, it's simply far more likely that he did not.
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION]
Sound advice, wouldn't work with Godzilla though. He'd get off to that.
Sound advice, wouldn't work with Godzilla though. He'd get off to that.
Oh so many things become possible with implants and wormholes, or at least spaceships with quantum entangled particles going near light-speed, or launched at different times or different speeds... my parents had to keep me from ruining Santa Claus from other kids too.
My trickery goes about as far as being tricked into thinking I tricked and caught a leprechaun. :fish:
Tin Man
"a respectable amount of screaming"
Oh so many things become possible with implants and wormholes, or at least spaceships with quantum entangled particles going near light-speed, or launched at different times or different speeds... my parents had to keep me from ruining Santa Claus from other kids too.
I'm confused. Are you mocking me, mocking pseudo-scientific ideas or just being random. Maybe a bit of everything?