Other Forms of Life (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 18, 2008, 02:33 (5616 days ago) @ dhw

However, I have had experiences which prevent me from completely sharing your scepticism in one area. As a doctor you are convinced that healing powers are a "misconception", so I will tell you of an experience that is not in the Brief Guide. My father suffered from 'frozen shoulder', and the doctors could not help him. Totally against his will, and in desperation,he allowed himself to be persuaded by my mother to see a faith healer who had been recommended> - Let me explain your father's experience first. The proper medical treatment is to anesthetize the patient and forcibly stretch the shoulder, breaking up scar tissue around the muscles of the shoulder joint. The 'healer' used psychology or suggestion or mild hypnosis to get your father to gradually stretch his shoulder against pain. The healing powers were within your father. Whatever was done by the healer reduced his pain so that he could stretch. - About hypnosis: Warts are caused by a virus. I know the doctor who proved this. What is amazing is despite the fact that direct medical treatment is difficult, hypnosis works, and in fact the hypnotist can ask the patient to cure the warts on his left side but not the right side and it happens! Or on the right side and not the left. The healing powers are within the patient. That is why placebos work. I once stopped giving a hospitalized patient her pain shots because it was obvious she was getting hooked. We substituted saline, which worked. Three days later I confronted her with what I did. She fired me as her MD. I didn't want her as a patient anyway, but I'd made my point. - > Finally, I'm intrigued by what you say about OBEs and NDEs, together with your statement that "the immaterial world is "material"'. If perception, identity and thought can survive independently of the brain (which is clinically dead), what is their material basis? - The "immaterial world" is the quantum layer, which underlies our reality, and it is real but not material in our ability to sense things. It is virtual energy. I'm sorry that quantum theory is so counterintuitive, like Lewis Carroll in Thru the Looking Glass; it is there but not there. This is what George was suggesting as the source of our universe: a vacuum quantum fluctuation, resulting in our universe popping into existence from the virtual vacuum of our spacetime. This is the source of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Quantum mechanics makes real and accurate results with its formulas, as averages of what all the particles are doing, but has no idea where each individual particle is or whether it is a particle or wave until measured. It really is both particle and wave at the same time, all the time. We can only measure one aspect or the other. - The reason for the NDE /OOB study you have described is because of the development of hospice care for the dying. Doctors are being exposed to hearing from patients who come back from NDE's and describe friends or acquaintances that have just died and the patient could not have known this in their sedated dying condition. And those people have just died! This corroborates the episode. I've heard a doctor in Houston describe one such story he was part of. With whom did the patient communicate during the NDE? - I believe consciousness is at the quantum level, and possibly stays as an energy constellation after death. After all TV and radio programs are electromagnetic energy (Quanta) and your set can interpret what it receives from a mass of organized quanta.