Is There Room For Anything But Materialism?

“Our great war is a spiritual war.” – Fight Club

Does a llama think the end of the world is called the Alpacalypse?

Generally, around holidays, I let my remaining seven strands of hair down and allow a post or two to deviate a bit from the normal categories.  Why?  Because we live in a world where often unusual ideas will eventually be found to be true, and I like to ask, from time to time, “What if?”

Enjoy!

Just as the pendulum of society has oscillated to the GloboLeft position (and, is oscillating back to the TradRight as we speak) there has been an oscillation of the way people think about the world.

Now, I would suggest, Western Civilization is at another peak:  peak materialism.  By materialism, I mean not that people are into material goods (even though they are) but that the entire focus is that there is a material explanation for everything, including why Kamala Harris exists.

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has one tooth in the middle of his face?  Now you’ll never be able to unsee it.

This isn’t a revelation to anyone in the West, since this is what we’ve been dealing with for the majority of our lives.  We have a mechanistic determinism that says that everything has an explanation, and that those explanations are all based in some sort of material, physical, phenomenon.

I used to play rugby, back in the day (prop) and our coach would, during practice, say “bad luck!” when someone goofed up.  My immediate thought was, no, that wasn’t bad luck, the player goofed up.  But was I right?

Well, if the world had taken a slightly different turn, the ball a different bounce, the opponent a different line, maybe the decision the player made would have been the right one.  Perhaps, then, there is a place for luck.

What’s the difference between a teabag and the American Rugby World Cup team?  The teabag stays in the cup longer.

And I do believe in luck.  Part of is because my life has been an extraordinarily lucky one.  And, no, not the “Luck is when preparation meets opportunity” definition, but “How is that stupid SOB so lucky?”

Okay, that’s a sample size of one, and the average scientist would say that’s just one data point, and not a series.  But, it’s not:  a series of improbable events in a single lifetime isn’t just one datapoint, it’s a series of them.

But what about actual studies that show phenomena that are far outside of the real of anything science can explain?

This one (LINK) shows that 90 experiments across 33 labs in 14 countries have shown that precognition exists.  What’s precognition?  That’s knowing the outcome of a future event, before the event occurs.

What kind of event?  Well, one study that I read used sensors on someone viewing a computer screen.  The screen would show random images, most of which were rather dull.  Occasionally, though, the screen would an emotionally charged picture – think nudity or an accident victim, meant to be a “shocking” picture.  The sensors recorded (in general) things like increased heartrate and increase blood pressure before the emotionally charged images showed up onscreen.

I went to a swimwear store and asked them if I could “Try on the bathing suit in the front window.”  They told me I’d have to use a changing room.

The subjects “knew” subconsciously that something was up and their bodies reacted.

Now, I can certainly come up with several ideas from quantum physics that might allow for this time-reversed phenomenon, you know, when effect happens before cause.  But people before, say 1900, would have just said that precognition was part of life – from the ancient Greeks to the prophecies of the Bible, precognition was just accepted as a part of reality – one that couldn’t be explained.

I’ve even had weird, precognitive dreams about odd events.  One time when I was in seventh grade, I awoke, laughing.  Why?  Because someone had stolen the lock off of my school locker, but left the valuable stuff inside.  I found it really humorous that someone would just steal the lock.

The next day?  After fourth period (the period immediately after I’d told my math teacher the humorous story) the lock was . . . gone.  My stuff?  There.

I can’t understand kids these days and their overwhelming Axe®-scents.

Certainly, it could be a coincidence.  But the odd perfection of the dream and the reality was jarring.  I’ve had other dreams that came true as well.  Most have been relatively boring things, and, certainly I’m not above calling them coincidences.

However, .gov, (in conjunction with the Stanford Research Institute) created a project for remote viewing – clairvoyance, where they created a program that produced (according to some sources) actionable information and according to at least one independent statistician were clearly 5-15% above random chance.

Those are just two examples of potential phenomena that exist outside of our ability to explain using purely material descriptions.  And, no, I’m not wedded to the idea that those phenomena exist, but that would certainly be the simplest explanation for several events in my life.  But, I am a committed Christian, so obviously I have the belief in things that have and always will be beyond the understanding of men.

And, again, before 1900 or so, the vast majority of people in all civilizations all over the world would have agreed that while there is the material plane of existence, but there is also the spiritual plane of existence, with as much (if not much more) relevance to our daily lives than the physical.

I like Chihuahuas, but not enough to eat a whole one.

One thing I’ve learned during my life, is to understand that there’s a lot that I’ll never understand, but that I do think that there is far, far more to our lives than just materialism.  Heck, if I had a dime for every time I thought about materialism, I could probably afford some Gucci™ socks.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

30 thoughts on “Is There Room For Anything But Materialism?”

  2. Well said. It doesn’t take a prophet to tell where we are headed when your choices are burning or jumping you have arrived at dependence on your faith.

  3. I was a dedicated teen reader of the old FATE magazine (which is still being published, see https://www.fatemag.com/ ) and vividly remember the Time magazine cover story on The Psychics from high school (which I just now looked up, see https://time.com/archive/6877897/boom-times-on-the-psychic-frontier/ ) so I would say that widespread interest in the paranormal has lasted long past 1900 and strongly extends even into today. After all, The X Files was a hit for reasons other than just Scully being smokin’ hot.

    But these are weird times. We have literally had key government officials testify under oath in Congressional hearings that there is a secret UFO program… and nothing seemingly comes of it! I find this dumbfounding. Of all the areas of the “paranormal”, nobody cares enough to make public the truth about extraterrestrials, which would be the greatest scientific discovery in human history?

    Yeah, yeah, yeah, precog is an interesting topic. But…show me the Greys!

    https://www.voanews.com/a/former-military-officials-testify-before-us-congress-about-extraterrestrials-alien-craft/7199375.html

    3. One can be agnostic about aliens, psychic powers et al. and still quite curious as to why Fedgov agencies are beavering away at them.

    4. I’ll probably do another one on that topic soon enough – more keeps coming out, and the conclusions are crazy.

  4. A friend of mine died. His daughter gave me a tool he owned, missing an attachment.
    My friend appeared in a dream, and brought the missing device, and said where it had been stored.
    OK.
    His daughter called me up a couple days later and she said she had the missing attachment, found exactly where my dream friend stated it was was.

    1. was reading about Michael Bentine – he was involved with SOE during WW2 and afterwards with the SAS as an expert pistol and revolver shot – and looked up his entry on wikipedia. I looked up some of the books he wrote and one in particular, The Door Marked Summer deals with spiritualism and life after death. He describes “visits” from dead people as well as precognition among some people, not all. It coalesced a lot of the ideas and my thoughts on life after death and although I was far from dismissive of “stuff like that”, it was too well detailed and coherent to dismiss as mumbo jumbo. It is here if you fancy reading it:

      https://oceanofpdf.com/authors/michael-bentine/pdf-the-door-marked-summer-download/

      Phil B

    2. That. And other stories that I’ve had happen to me. Too much to them to simply shrug them off.

  5. If there have been legitimate studies done that demonstrate precognition, telepathy, or other paranormal things, well, okay. That’s not a make-or-break thing in terms of my own worldview. In my own experience, it has occasionally seemed to me that I had experienced minor stuff like knowing that a phone call was coming, just before it happened. But I think there’s a sort of bias operating there that can mislead. Any time I think my phone’s about to go off, and then it does, that’s very memorable. How many times did I have that feeling, and then nothing happened? I can’t even say, because those non-events are un-memorable. My conclusion is that, while there may be paranormal “frequencies,” I’m pretty deaf on those frequencies.

    1. I knew a guy directly involved in the government study of remote viewing back in the 1970’s. The program worked. They got actionable intelligence out of it. But it wasn’t sufficiently reliable to be worth continuing, especially after the press got hold of it and mercilessly mocked the government. Shoot, Hollyweird just made a movie with Clooney a couple years ago mocking the project.

    2. Yeah, there’s a lot of high strangeness going on, and not something that we can (now) explain.

  6. I’ve wondered if there is someone out there with total control of the precognition, and wisely never reveals that ability, nor attempts to change future happenings. You would never know, if you had a conversation with them about their reaction to meeting you, but hopefully it wouldn’t be shock, or extreme pity.

    1. It would be a sad power to have, since all stories end. If there’s a good reason not to have it, it’s that.

    2. Heinlein’s “Life-Line” explores the consequences of not keeping your yap shut.

  8. There are plenty of things that simply are unexplainable. That doesn’t necessarily require one to subscribe to one of the organized religions in the world of course. Some things just simply are beyond explanation.

    1. I know YMMV, and I’m not trying to convert anyone, but I’ve had sufficient personal experiences to convince me that the most important parts of our lives is likely in that realm.

  9. John, at least three times in the current year, I have had one of the moments that suddenly make me think of a dream I had which perfectly pre-called the situation. It was one of the deja-vu moments, when the mind suddenly says “This happened before, and this is when it happened.” None of them were the sort of useful things that would actually be helpful – more “in a place” sorts of things – but the interesting thing is that I had not even known of the place when I had those dreams.

    There are indeed more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy….

    1. Yup. It’s been a while since I had one. That’s the downside – it’s not a repeatable phenomenon.

  10. I went to a chiropractor years ago who used “electroacupuncture” to trace out meridian lines where “chi” is supposed to flow. He basically used a modified ohm meter in which I held one probe in my hand (where lots of meridian lines come together) while he used the other end to find the acupuncture points (which correspond to low resistivity points). I was skeptical at first, but it was amazing to see that acupuncture points line up directly and quantifiably with points of electrical continuity in this body (i.e. chi is just electricity). The meridians are essentially electrically conductive wires in the body and it still blows my mind that these were discovered hundreds of years before Radio Shack was selling ohm meters.

    There is a point to all of this rambling…..if you’ve got all of these conductive “wires” in your body, then you also have a bunch of antennae that can receive or transmit wavelengths that are roughly 4X the length of the “wire”. This suggests the body meridians should receive signals in the 40 to 100 MHz range and mid/high GHz range for smaller neuronal connections in the brain (which is one of the reasons I don’t use a 5G phone).

    So it seems the method for transmitting/receiving signals that could equate to ESP or some other 6th sense is already there although it isn’t clear how the signal would need to be modulated in order for the brain to interpret it. My guess is there is some DARPA researcher reading this right now and laughing because they have known about this and using it for mind control for 50+ years already (and he is sending my brain the signal to go buy more stuff on Amazon at the same time he is laughing at me).

    1. Or, quantum entanglement? Yeah, I admit the DARPA researcher laughing is a good one. Wonder if he knows what I’m going to have for dinner tomorrow?

  12. Okay, here goes. I understand many people won’t believe me, but it’s been my life, and I cannot deny my own experiences. I don’t believe in the supernatural, in the way I don’t believe in trees. They’re there, they exist, they don’t require belief.

    ***

    My deja-vu experiences always come in pairs. The first time, I get the profound knowledge that this situation will happen again. (Vuja-de?) And then again, months or years later, when the situation recurs exactly as foretold.

    ***

    I have been to places that didn’t exist the next day. The most memorable was when we were spending the night at some campground. It was in the middle of a forest, and there was a lake running east-west a couple miles north of us. I got bored after supper (as a teenager does), so I decided to follow the trail behind our campsite to the nearby pool. The trail led to the far end of a parking lot, and the pool was closed. Since the sun was going down, I decided to take one of the numerous shortcuts I had seen crossing the shallow ravine between the parking lot and the trail. I found one leading directly from one corner of the pool, and thought it was a bit strange that it had tire tracks. But since I only had to to go about 50 yards to find the main trail, and less than a quarter mile to the campsites, what the heck. So off I went. And I walked, and walked, and turned left onto a different trail (in the direction of the campsites), and walked. As it quickly grew darker, I began to panic. The campsites weren’t that far away, I should have been back within 5 minutes, and it had been about 10 minutes since I left the pool. So I panicked, and started running.

    I hit another dead end, and turned left again. Immediately, a stern voice ordered me to Stop! So I did, and found myself standing at the edge of a cliff above the lake. I turned around, and soon found a trail sign. I was more than two miles away from where I started, on the wrong side of a lake that spread more than a mile across my path.

    It took me more than two hours to get back, where it had taken less than 15 minutes to cross the space to get there.

    I went back to the pool the next morning, to see how I had managed to get so lost. I could see the main trail from the edge of the pool. There were no paths near the pool, and none of the shortcut paths were wide enough to admit a motor vehicle.

    ***

    I had a poltergeist. We call it Murphy. It occasionally takes things, hides them *elsewhere*, and brings them back months or years later, placing them in odd but obvious locations. I was probably about 12 when I noticed this happening. At first, I blamed the dog and cat, or perhaps my parents. So when I was 15, I decided to conduct an experiment. My parents were out for the day, leaving me home to mow the yard. (We had two acres.) So I kicked the dog and cat out of the house, and placed my favorite cap in the middle of the kitchen table. Then I put on my ratty old cap to go out and do chores. When I was done with the riding mower, I stopped inside to get a drink. The cap wasn’t on the table. It was nowhere to be found. The dog and cat were still outside, and the house had been locked.

    That ball cap showed up two years later. I found it under my pillow in the morning when I was making my bed. It hadn’t been there when I woke up, and I was the only one awake that early on a Saturday.

    My wife heard these stories, and politely scoffed a them, until she saw it happen. We had a digital thermometer – a really cool, new gadget at the time. It went missing, so we got a replacement. When we were leaving that apartment (in newly reunified Berlin), we cleared absolutely everything out and boxed it all up. In my final sweep through the place, I found the original thermometer all alone on the shelf in the bathroom, at about chest level. Easily visible. I called her in to see, because she had already done her own sweep through the place a few minutes before. The thermometer hadn’t been there when she looked. So we found the bathroom box, opened it up, and put it in with the other thermometer.

    Murphy apparently changed allegiance to my daughter when she was a teen. Now in her mid twenties, she thinks it’s an occasional annoyance. I’m just glad my things have stopped disappearing or moving around, but it’s a bit disappointing, too.

    ***

    As a joke, I took a “Magic 8 Ball” to Iraq when I deployed there for a year. I consulted it before every mission outside the wire – which was at least 5 times a week. That means I consulted the cursed thing hundreds of times. It was correct every single time. The only times it gave equivocal answers, the mission was changed or cancelled afterwards. It got so that I was terrified of looking at the thing, but also afraid to not look. It’s the most disturbing thing that has ever happened to me. (Mass graves didn’t bother me, other than the smell.)

    After we got home, I was afraid of throwing it away. I put in on top of the bookshelves, so the kids couldn’t touch it. After a couple years, my wife was cleaning the shelves, and found it had leaked out all the blue stuff and died. So I could finally pitch the creepy thing in the trash. The blue stain is still on top of that bookshelf as a rarely visible reminder.

    1. I’ve had similar things happen to me (missing places, missing things that impossibly turn up), though not with a Magic 8-Ball.

      The world is far, far stranger than most people accept.

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