It's all in the vibe

There is usually something in New Scientist that catches my eye. One of the articles in this week's edition  (1 Oct. 2011) was an article by Michael Brooks entitled 'The weirdness inside us'. In it Brooks explores research that postulates that quantum uncertainly operates within biological systems as well as in quantum mechanics. Jennifer Brookes at Harvard University studies smell. The established wisdom is that a chemical's scent is determined by its molecular shape. The problem with this is that we have around 400 differently shaped smell receptors but can recognise around 100,000 different smells. Some chemicals have the same shape but smell different, while others smell the same but have different shapes. Morphology cannot therefore be the answer, or the whole answer, to our sense of smell. Around 70 years ago a British chemist, Michael Dyson, proposed that 'just as the brain constructs colours from different vibrational frequencies of light radiation, it interprets the characteristic frequencies at which certain molecules vibrate as a catalogue of smells' (34). Now to me, as a non-scientitst, this sounds remarkably like the theory of homeopathy. One of the key criticisms of homeopathy seems to be not that it doesn't work, as in some circumstances it evidently does, but that the mechanism by which it might work is not within the remit of conventional science. Never mind that the mechanisms by which many of our conventional pharmacopeia works are not well understood. In 1996 Luca Turin, a biophysicist at UCL, came up with the notion of electron tunnelling as a mechanism that could make vibrational sensing work. The fuzziness of quantum mechanics determines that an electron has a spread of possible energies and that there is a probability that it will burrow through the energy barrier that would normally hold it within the atom. Turin proposed that when 'an odorous molecule lodges in the pocket of a receptor, an electron can burrow right through that molecule from one side to the other, unleashing a cascade of signals on the other side that the brain interprets as a smell. That can only happen if there is an exact match between the electron's quantised energy level and the odorant's natural vibrational frequency' (36). The article goes on to describe more recent experiments that would seem to support the notion of vibrational sensing. We seem to be moving away from an understanding of matter as made up of objects (atoms) to a view of matter as made up of energy and vibration. This holds true from the nano to cosmic level. It is the bits in between that have proved hardest to understand, but we seem to be getting there.

Death and God

Having watched Richard Dawkins on television last night one could not but help be struck by his insistence that religion was false and science true. By science he meant a reductive materialism and not an examination of the evidence for the existence of life beyond the physical world, or the continuation of consciousness. There was of course nothing scientific in his apparent lack of knowledge of the evidence in these areas. Today I came across the following quote from Albert Camus's Notebooks  which seems to speak to 'the Dawkins' dilemma' - the insistence by some, but certainly not all, scientists (sceptics) on the absolute rightness of their position without the need to produce evidence to support it:

There is but one freedom, to put oneself right with death. After that everything is possible. I cannot force you to believe in God. Believing in God amounts to coming to terms with death. When you have accepted death, the problem of God will be solved - and not the reverse. 


I do not worry about whether people believe in 'God' as the term means so many things to so many people, but I am concerned by the fear of death in our society, in our world, as it distorts the way we live. Fear of death and the freedom to embrace life cannot coincide as fear casts a shadow over life. In understanding the psychology of avoidance or denial I like the following passage from 'Scott' (T.E. Lawrence) channelled through the mediumship of Jane Sherwood (The Country Beyond, 1969: 48-9):

Perhaps psychology can help us to understand this tendency. it is surely a kind of masochism, a stoic resolve to punish the wishful thinking one suspects is behind the belief in immorality. It feels very stern, strong and noble to deny the thing one secretly longs for, and so to prove that one is quite able to do without it. It is easy to find arguments to support this denial and see how superior it makes one feel to say "I, at least, do not need to believe in such things".


'Scott' found, as it seems we all do in our time, that whatever made him who he was had 'escaped' from his body at the moment of death. What he would have denied a short time before became self-evident, that there is change, but no snuffing out of existence. The scientific law of the conservation of energy applies to life itself and not just to inert matter.


More on Jane Sherwood, 'Scott' and the relationship between vital and non-living matter to come in my Exploring the Afterlife blog.

To Cause a Death

Frances Zammit kindly sent me a copy of Kelly Connor's book, To Cause a Death: The Aftermath of an Accidental Killing (Clairview, Forest Row, 2004). It was a gripping read - as a  17 year old Kelly Connor accidentally knocked down and killed an elderly pedestrian. Finding no comfort or understanding from her family, religion, the medical and psychiatric profession, she coped alone, or at times failed to cope, with the question 'Do I deserve to go on living, having taken another life?' For a while after the accident she was subject to nightly visions in which angels and demons argued over her soul. She understood that they were interested in her everyday intentions, how much she loved. Having no religious context in which she could discuss these visions she kept them to herself. The next couple of decades included endless travel around Australia (where her family had emigrated from Manchester, UK), time in psychiatric hospitals, failed suicide attempts (she felt the need to talk to the woman she had killed and see if she was forgiven), a change of name and a brief marriage and birth of her daughter Meegan.
There was a glimmer of understanding when staff at the women's refuge she was living in at the time recommended a therapist to Kelly (originally known as Brenda). While previous attempts to come to terms with her 'crime' had been met with an attitude of denial and failure to engage, this therapist launched into a story in which a young man on a horse knocked over and killed his younger sister. He was banished by his grieving mother, who had witnessed the accident but had been unable to prevent it. She was the mother, the therapist explained, and her mother the young man who had been forced to experience the pain of banishment. She had to forgive her mother for her inability to comfort her in the present life. Kelly was not able to connect with this story at the time, but when through sending her daughter to a Waldorf school she came to read and study the works of Rudolf Steiner, the notion of karma and the need to make amends in this life for injuries caused in past lives fell into place. Everything about the accident seemed contrived to ensure that Brenda Connor and Margaret Healy met when they did so fatefully on a zebra crossing in 1971. Neither were on their usual path and had taken diversions to be at that spot at that time. Kelly came to believe that the 'accident' that had so shaped her life and that of those around her was pre-planned, and that there was a working out of grace and purpose through it all.

The final chapter digresses from the autobiographical to an explanation of Steiner's teachings on kamaloca, the astral plane on which the dead work out their karma and review their lives. According to Steiner's anthroposophical teachings the dead spend roughly three days in a kind of half sleep before awakening in kamaloca. The time spent there is roughly one third of their earth life, with the review process taking place at the ratio of one year in kamaloca for every three spent on earth, working backwards from death to birth, so that someone who died aged 90 would spend thirty years in kamaloca. During this time of review the deceased relive not only their own part in events but the effects of their actions on others. Those who participated in these events are often consciously or subconsciously aware of what is happening and may think or dream about the deceased person at that time. If the dead are not to carry the unresolved karma into another life they can be forgiven or helped to shed any burdens by the actions of the living.
Anthroposophy is broadly in line with other sources in terms of recognising a period of rest for most following death, and one or more past-life reviews, as well as the possibility of continued interaction between the living and the dead. He is unusual in being prescriptive about the timing of these events. Other sources tend to stress the variability in the time a soul spends in kamaloca or on some similar plane, depending on the speed of their spiritual advancement. Bruce Moen in Voyage to Curiosity's Father (Hampton Roads, Charlottesville, 2001), for instance, describes an out of body visit to the mother of a friend he had been asked to check up on after her death. Sylvia had died in a confused state and he had helped her move on. She had not by all accounts been a particularly holy or spiritual person during her last lifetime, so Bruce was surprised to learn a short while later that she had already 'graduated' and become a 'Being of Light' (in Steiner's terms, had completed her time of review in kamaloca). Moen was shown that once Sylvia knew she was dead her religious upbringing told her that Jesus would come and take her. When Sylvia was asked by a guide if she wanted the love of Jesus to fill her heart she replied that she did, and the negative energies she carried from her former life was successively washed away until she reached a stage at which there was simply nothing to hold her there any longer, as she had become filled with pure unconditional love - no punishment, no divine retribution, just a rebalancing of her energies. I guess this is what Christian teaching means by grace and the undeserved nature of our reception of it.
Whether or not one wishes to engage with the spiritual journey and anthroposophical conclusion, To Cause a Death makes an excellent read.             

Negative attachments

In my current reading I repeatedly come across sources that talk about the ways in which immoral behaviours and 'low' vibrations open us to negative influences. Valerie Mason John, for instance, in her semi-autobiographical book Borrowed Body, republished by BAAF as The Banana Kid spoke of people with depression and a destructive life style, including herself, as having a creature like a furry cat sitting on their shoulders. The cat could urge someone to yet more destructive behaviours such as suicide. Galen Stoller was motivated to write his posthumous memoir, My Life After Life, partly to warn others about the realm of 'misanthropes', creatures parasitic on humans who allow them to feed off their energies. Bruce Moen in his Exploring the Afterlife series speaks of ghosts of those who were attracted to a certain life style, who had failed to move away from the earth vibrations, being drawn to a house where people were taking drugs. When one lot were exorcised, another lot moved in - echoing the Gospel narrative of sweeping a room of spirits, only to leave room for more to arrive (Matt. 12, 43-5). Moen also visits the "hells" for people who are attracted to such places by their vibrational frequency when they die. There is a thiefs' hell, an emotional sadists' hell, a liars' hell, and so on. An individual isn't condemned to such places after death but is attracted there, and can leave as soon as they learn or desire to change their dominant vibration. These were the thoughts running through my mind in response to the scenes of violence on the streets of some of England's cities in the last week. The opposite of all these vibrations, or their cure, is pure unconditional love. Those of us fortunate enough to have experienced unconditional love have a responsibility to extend it to those we meet. Who knows how many 'hells' it can help dispel.