Introduce yourself

[Michael Larkin]

I don't have a great deal to say about myself - I'm British and have listened to all Alex's podcasts. I have a degree in zoology and a masters in education and am very interested in science at the edge, so to speak.

Thanks for having me,

Michael Larkin

[paqart]

I'm an American living in Europe, teaching computer graphics at a small university. Until I was about 15, I was headed towards becoming a scientist, then abruptly switched to art. I became a professional commercial artist a few years later, and worked in print, television, comic books, films, and video games, always as an artist.

My interest in psi derives from my own psi experiences, of which I have had many. When I was young (up to about 20 years old) I ignored them, no matter how surprising they were, and maintained my atheism at a fairly militant James Randi-esque level. However, my wife got me to start recording some of the incidents that happened, and after a while I had so many examples of oobe's, precognition, premonitions, pk, and remote viewing that I could not honestly explain them away as anything but what they appeared to be: psi.

Having had these experiences myself means that I do not have to take someone else's word for the existence of psi, I know it is real because I've experienced it myself. On the other hand, because most people do not have these kinds of experiences (or they aren't telling if they have), I become the guy who is the first hand account for someone else, or the person whose credibility is questioned. James Randi himself has weighed in on the subject because we have a mutual friend, a physicist who has been a part of a couple of these psi experiences in my life. Randi's unreasoning, irrelevant, and bizarre suggestions typify for me the skeptical community. It was in an attempt to find some kind of level-headed alternative that led me to discover skeptiko.com and this forum.

AP

[Arouet]

Hi folks,

I'm an atheist and a skeptic though I don't have a science background. I'm a relatively new listener who has been going through the archives. I'll admit that sometimes I want to scream at my Ipod at some of the things I hear Alex say but I find the show extremely interesting and do like to keep an open mind.

I am firmly of the belief that psi claims should be tested scientifically and am very glad to see Alex pushing for more of this kind of research.

I look forward to participating in this forum!

[Annemieke]

Hi all

My name is Annemieke and I live in the Netherlands. I found this forum some time ago, after hearing a podcast.

I read some interesting posts here, so I signed up. But then I could not find the forum again because I forgot to bookmark it and could not remember the name.

But today I found an email message from this forum with a link, so here I am.

My main interest is about the interaction between mind and matter. I have a blog Mindstructures where I try to write about that and about my other interest, human development.

My latest posts are about David Bohm because at the moment I am extremely fascinated by this man.

[OC68]

Welcome Annemieke. Your blog is very interesting.

[DanBoothCohen]

I was born into the post-War prosperity of the Baby Boom generation and grew up on the West Side of Manhattan during the 1960s. I hold a B.A. from Connecticut College is in History of Science, focused on the roots of nuclear science from alchemy to the atom bomb, an MBA from Boston University, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Psychology from Saybrook University.

The key philosophic insight I gained from these studies remains the seminal impetus for my work. As a post-Hiroshima, post-Nazi Holocaust Jewish-American, I was charged to pursue as part of my life’s work the challenges to our generation articulated by Oppenheimer and Einstein. Oppenheimer (1948) explained that in unleashing the energy of the atomic bomb, nuclear science made future warfare unendurable for the victors as well as the vanquished. The existential dimensions of the atomic bomb “extended and deepened our understanding of the common sources of power for evil and power for good…. This is seed we take with us, traveling to a land we cannot see, to plant in new soil." Echoing this sentiment is Einstein’s (1946) famous quotation, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything, save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Thus, it became imperative for me, as I emerged into adulthood, to travel (both metaphorically and literally) to the land that my parents and grandparents could not see to change my mode of thinking. The compass rose that pointed towards this land of changed thinking was that humanity possessed the knowledge to unleash explosions to incinerate entire cities, but not the wisdom to survive this knowledge.

Alchemy’s central metaphor had always been a two pronged quest: to transform the inner nature of humanity and the external nature of matter. Transforming lead-into-gold encompassed these dual meanings. Nuclear science solved one side of the riddle. Without the other, we risk gaining this knowledge only to drive humanity extinct. What I sought was to look for the other part of the alchemical quest: to transformation the human heart, guided by Thompson (1981), “The avatars of the New Age… will not be the solitary male, but the male and female together” (p. 254).
In the first decade after receiving my Bachelors and Master in Business Administration degrees, I pursued two complementary careers: one as a small business owner and the second as a peace activist.

I was a co-founder of an engineering and consulting company. Fortuitously, one of our early contracts was to provide strategic planning services to the Director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the fourth lineal successor to J. Robert Oppenheimer. I made several trips to the Laboratory and wrote two strategic planning documents: one was the first draft of a Congressional budgetary rationale for the Strategic Defense Initiative (Stars Wars) and the other, a long-term global assessment which envisioned that by the end of the 20th century the United States military would capture control of Persian Gulf oil fields. In working directly with Dr. Donald M. Kerr and members of his senior management team, I felt firsthand the terrifying trajectory of an organizational system charged with manufacturing evermore destructive weapons of mass annihilation within an institutional culture that strictly prohibited consideration of Oppenheimer and Einstein’s cautionary warnings.

In my parallel career, I was a peace organizer and activist. During the 1980s, I was a founding member of the City of Cambridge Peace Commission, and Co-Director of the Boston chapter of Children of War. During these years, I lived for brief periods as a peacemaker in the two places that epitomized the power of evil in the minds of many Jewish Americans: Germany and Palestine. In Germany, I joined a massive civil disobedience action at a U.S. Army base opposing deployment of nuclear Pershing II and Cruise missiles. At this event I was literally carried away by German police in the middle of the night. In Palestine, I walked the length of the Occupied West Bank, joining the former chaplain for the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the Atom Bomb on Hiroshima) Father George Zabelka, who had walked 5,000 miles from Seattle to reach Bethlehem on Christmas morning 1983. Later, I led and organized German-American teenage peace exchanges, which included visits to Dachau and US Army bases in Germany, and 100-mile Peace Walks across Massachusetts.

I married in 1987. After our first daughter, Anna was born in 1990, my wife and I withdrew from our external activities in the peace movement to concentrate on being with our children.

By 1996, my engineering company had grown to three offices and 50 employees. We were the leading providers of commercial and industrial energy and water conservation services in the United States, under contract to various agencies of the federal government, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and numerous utilities and corporations. Equitable Resources, Inc. (EQT.N), an integrated natural gas company headquartered in Pittsburgh acquired the company. The proceeds from my stock sale enabled me to support my family for the past 10 years.

My three decades working with peace building processes and activities have done as much to reveal the shortcomings in the peacemakers’ toolkits as to accomplish their stated objectives. In my experience, peace-oriented programs rely largely on education, dialogue, emotional literacy, and cognitive awareness. These are powerful and effective tools, but I have often encountered their limits. Without knowing what Family Constellations were or that they even existed, I encountered them in 2000 because I was looking for them, searching for what was missing from the peacemaker’s toolkit. Like Oppenheimer’s explorer, I was traveling towards a land I could not see, but knew must exist or be created.

During the years when I traveled to Germany and Palestine as a peacemaker, I experienced a series of serendipities and synchronicities that shook and finally shattered my belief that everything can be adequately explained in mechanistic, materialist, positivist terms. After a particularly improbable encounter on a rain-swept street in Jerusalem, I ceased to invoke half-feigned disbelief in the face of mystery.

Whereas my mother’s father, Abraham Fuhrman, was convinced in the sanctity of his encounter with the Angel of the Lord, his wife and daughter considered these messages mindlessly indiscriminate and occult, if not outright psychotic, the product of his trauma on the killing fields of Europe. This family history inoculated me. On the first morning of a trip to Europe, I awoke from a frighteningly intense and vivid apocalyptic dream. As I lay semi-awake in a strange bed on a different continent from where I had woken the day before, an externalized voice spoke firmly and succinctly. It said: “If you want to be holy, you must give up sex and language. But your job in this lifetime is not to be holy. Learn to be human.”

My mystical experiences did not lead me to embrace a mystical creed. Rather, my stance towards countless such experiences with serendipities, synchronicities, telepathy or clairvoyance has always been as an enchanted agnostic, one who is open to mystery and skeptical of explanations.

My interest is to integrate objective and subjective aspects of human knowledge. It is not satisfactory for me to isolate elements of consciousness in the mode of experimental psychology, nor to abandon evidence, reason and tangible reality.

The missing tool in the peacemaker’s toolkit, whether the conflict is between ethnic groups, lovers, or aspects of the Self, uncovers and resolves unconscious feelings and impulses that persist below the surface of cognitive awareness. This tool has eluded peace psychologists partly because constructs such as forgiveness, reconciliation, and open-heartedness are abstractions that are difficult to define and measure. The emphasis on evidence based and empirically supported psychology tends to push research and practice away from subjectively oriented processes. Conversely, faith based and spiritually oriented approaches risk being little more than naïve fantasies.

While I cannot claim to be objective or unbiased, I can attest that I have remained true to my philosophic stance as an enchanted agnostic; I am open to mystery and skeptical of explanations. Further, every day for the past 27 years, I have dedicated myself to fulfilling the command given me as I woke up in London: Learn to be human.

[OC68]

Wow, that is quite the introduction Dan but I like it. It gives some real insight into who you are. Welcome!

[DanBoothCohen]

Thanks! I am really enjoying the Skeptiko podcasts and forum. Here is a link to my website: Hidden Solution - Systemic Family Constellations..

[alextsakiris]

Originally Posted by DanBoothCohen

Thanks! I am really enjoying the Skeptiko podcasts and forum. Here is a link to my website: Hidden Solution - Systemic Family Constellations..

Welcome Dan... looking forward to reading your posts.

[imiyakawa]

I'm currently studying economics and finance. I do not share any interests of any people my age. I guess I am an aberration. Perhaps the only interests I hold are watching family guy, reading psi research, learning economic theory and spending hours on wikipedia reading about the different fields. The extent of human knowledge is just baffling. Side interests include logic, philosophy, (and physics to a smaller extent).

Current occupations of my time, and thought areas, are, at the moment;
- The limits of Bayesian statistics and the incredible psychic claims in my family. Mainly I'm trying to figure out what I can draw from these claims without blaspheming reason.
- If an n-body planetary system, of which one body has water on it, can be configured in such a way as to never decay. If this is possible, then this would violate the first law of thermodynamics. On the other hand, I struggle to see how a certain set of variables when n can = 1 -> a gigantic number couldn't combine to form this system.
- Whether time is a flow or a stock if wavefunction reduction is determined.