Zionism

See my post American-Israeli settler says Palestinians need to leave or we'll kill them.

 

How the Star of David came to be added to Meher Baba's emblem

The Temple Menorah has long been the symbol of Judaism. Use of the symbol dates back 3000 years. 

Early representation of the menorah on a Judea coin, 40–37 BC

The symbol associated with Judaism today is the Star of David. The Star of David gained prominence as a Jewish symbol in 14th-century Prague following the rise of Cabalistic Judaism and only became a widespread religious symbol in the 19th century, coinciding with the rise of Jewish Zionism. Today it is the symbol of the state of Israel.

So, how did the symbol of Israel wind up on Meher Baba's emblem? This is that story.

Meher Baba's emblem was not a project that Meher Baba initiated. It was from its inception the product of his followers, beginning with Dr. William Donkin. Dr. Donkin was both a doctor and a very good artist.

Dr. William Donkin & one of his paintings

Donkin traveled with Baba on his mast tours in the 1940s and wrote The Wayfarers chronicling these tours in 1948. He drew the emblem as a frontispiece for his book. A frontispiece is a decorative illustration found near the beginning of a book. 

Below is his original frontispiece from The Wayfarers (1948).

The symbol became a common motif in Baba things. Below it appears on one of Baba's chair cushions used by him.

The Sufis, who edited and published God Speaks, must have liked the symbol as they included it on the cover and as its interior frontispiece when it came out in 1955.

The symbol remained the same in all four printings of the fist edition, 1955, 1967, 1968, & 1970.

But when the 2nd Revised Edition of God Speaks came out in 1973, the frontispiece and cover were different. The Jewish symbol had been added. What accounts for this?

First, some startling facts. Meher Baba designed his tomb when it was constructed in 1938. He had religious symbols carved for the top, one for each corner. They represented Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. They did not include any Jewish symbol. 

Next, Meher Baba never used the word "Judaism." There are a few possible reasons for this. Ancient Judaism largely ended with the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, afterward first merging into Christianity, and later the remainder merging into Islam in 600 AD. But more importantly, Judaism is not an Avataric religion. It respects no Avatar. While all six Avatars of this age that Baba spoke of are represented by the symbols atop his tomb: Zoroaster, Ram, Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, and Mohammad (millions of Hindus today accept Gautama Buddha as the ninth avatar of Lord Vishnu). Baba also said that the Jews crucified Christ. "But these Parsis! I feel that when I was Jesus, the Parsis were Jews. The Jews were the cause of my crucifixion." (Lord Meher, 1986 print edition, p. 4675) For these reasons, adding the modern symbol of the Jewish Zionist state to his emblem seems a bit far fetched. Well then, who put it there?

In 1962, a Russian Jewish émigré to America, Vivian Agostini (whose birth name was Ida Losh), and who was living in New York, came and met Meher Baba. Impressed with him, she got the idea to cast a bronze medallion to give away at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. To her medallion she added the Jewish star.

Later, in 1973, the Sufis — apparently liking the inclusion by Agostini — changed the symbol in God Speaks to be in line with it. And still later the new symbol replaced Donkin's original image in The Wayfarers. Donkin had passed away in 1969 so had no say in this.

Therefore, today the symbol usually appears like this: 

Meher Baba never referred to Judaism as a religion, but only to "Jews." We can only guess why. As for being inclusive of other faiths on the emblem, why Judaism? There are more Shintos and Sikhs than Jews in the world. Why exclude them? Why exclude Confucianism? Hundreds of millions of people in China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam practice Confucian ethics.

In what way is adding the Jewish symbol to Baba's emblem being inclusive, but not these?

__________________

To download a cleaned up original emblem go here.

Pseudo-scientific quasi-religious bilge

Michio Kaku and Neil deGrasse Tyson are popular science promoters on TV and the internet. I don't think people believe me when I say the images and concepts they promote are pseudo-scientific quasi-religious bilge. People don't know to question it because they were raised on it and conditioned to think it is advanced thinking they can't understand — and they think these men are brilliant experts.

 

Mastery in Servitude emblem from 1940s

Original design by Dr. William Donkin 1940s for his authored book "The Wayfarers," incorporating Meher Baba's given motto "Mastery in Servitude" (Manzil-e-Meem, 1923).

History of an Idea

1. First began to think this thought in a Physical Anthropology class in the second semester of my sophomore year at USC in January 1978.

2. Continued discussing my idea at Korty Films with Brad Jones in 1982 after being inspired by an article on evolution in the April 1982 issue of Life Magazine. 

3. Was drawing images illustrating my concept of an inside-out evolution in 1991 in San Francisco. 

4. Got inspired to write a book when I came to Fayetteville for good on March 13, 1997 when Megan was one year old.

5. Attended school in Little Rock in June 1997 to complete my bachelor’s degree. Worked on my idea at the library after class each day. 

6. Spoke to my father about my studying philosophy and planning a book shortly before he died. He died April 25, 1998.

7. Took my first undergraduate summer school philosophy class in June 1998, less than two months after my father’s death.

8. Everything got clear by the start of my second semester of graduate school. January 1999.

9. 1999 was the year I became intoxicated with philosophy. 

10. Graduated in May 2001 with my M.A.

11. Completed writing The Evolution of Perception in May 2004. Published in June.

12. Published my second book, Evolution of Perception Re-Explained, in February 2021.

April 1982 Life Magazine, Was Darwin Wrong About Evolution?

The idea of an "inside-out" evolution is quite simple. It is what I now call "psychic emergence," where the force driving evolutionary change is an internal psychic one, a drive to gain consciousness, rather than external pressures from the environment that cull or promote random mutations. The reason the idea hit me in a Physical Anthropology college class when I was 18 is that I saw through the course that evolution was not actually occurring all the time in nature, but had once occurred and had ceased to occur after homo sapiens evolved, and that once a species evolved homeostasis set in. This was in perfect agreement with Baba's explanation of evolution in God Speaks. 

The Life Magazine article I read in 1982 that got me excited titled "Was Darwin Wrong About Evolution?" said that what scientists had discovered in the 120 years since Charles Darwin originally published his book On the Origen of Species was that specimens in the fossil record did not show the variety that Darwin had predicted would be found. See my December 2021 blog post Evolution is no longer taking place on Earth.

It has taken me almost 50 years to communicate my idea. I'm as convinced of it now as I was then.

Gabriel Pascal

Difficult to find high resolution screenshot of Hungarian film producer and Baba lover Gabriel Pascal (1894-1854). He was slated to direct Meher Baba's movie in the 1930s before the project was abandoned. In his lifetime he most famously produced Pygmalion (1938), Major Barbara (1941), and Caesar and Cleopatra (1945).

On the film set of Major Barbara. Vogue Magazine, 1939. Gabriel Pascal was a household name in his day.

What Jesus said about hell

Destiny Finn talks a bit too fast here, but she has a lot to say. What she says about the history of the concept of hell is true and she covers the subject well. For more on the subject spoken much slower I recommend listening to Bart Ehrman, professor at UNC Chapel Hill who focuses on the textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He has a good video on this same subject here.

Street artist thrills with “Caruso” live in Latvia

This is one of my favorite versions of one of my favorite songs. 

Other favorite versions include:

As sung by the song's writer Lucio Dalla (1943-2012) in the room where he wrote it in 1986, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqtSuL3H2xs 

As sung by late Luciano Pavarotti in 1998, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDEdZfnULIg

As sung by the superb tenor Jonathan Antoine, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlF-wFrukEU

As sung by my favorite soprano Amira Willighagen in 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiH1MPfV5nA

Hydroflying in China

A Flyboard is a brand of hydroflighting device which supplies propulsion to drive the Flyboard into the air to perform a sport known as hydroflying.

All Billionaires Are Evil - 5 Ugly Reasons Why

Outro for Chapter 6 of Red Dead Redemption II

Video reactor ThatNerdViolet posted this yesterday. She has been playing the game for 5 months and still has two chapters to go.

CINNA @StateFarm Gamerhood season 5!

Stephen Kinzer: How America Brought War to Ukraine

Meher Baba Playing Marbles

Ashley Graham's village vlog

Meher Baba's teaching in a minute and 23 seconds

This is worded very well, and very succinctly.

Quantum Delusions: A World That Doesn’t Exist

Recently I wrote a paper with the long title, The Rise of Pseudoscience, pseudo-anthropology, pseudo-history, pseudo-archeology, pseudo-religion, quackery and superstition. You can read it here. That paper set off a series of reflexions in my mind that led to an important point I want to try to express in this paper. If I can succeed in getting my point across, this might end up being the single most important paper I’ve ever written, second only to The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance itself — my first attempt to explain my cosmology.

To begin with let me explain something about the evolution of perception concept, a concept I’ve been writing and talking about for over 25 years.

In the evolution of perception there is a pre-existent intelligence. It is wrong to say an intelligence that permeates the Universe, because it preceded and created the Universe, initially in the form of a psychic experience that expanded and gradually came to ‘feel solid’ to the creatures that emerged out of this process and found themselves in this world.

This evolution went through several stages or eras. These are named and described in my book The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance. The first of these was a mathematical era. Initially mathematical laws and then a world of gases and minerals that supervened upon those laws emerged and evolved, though solely in a mathematical form. On one level the inorganic world continues to be in this state today. It is only our evolved senses (that evolved out of that inorganic state and supervened upon it) that schematize these mathematical states as qualitative states like sound and color.

Let me say this again. As these gases and minerals in their mathematical state evolved, organic forms gradually supervened upon those states, what we know as living organisms. These organic forms (which were themselves really fundamentally mathematical) evolved nervous systems and sense organs, and through these gradually gained the ability to perceive mathematical states as sensible states.

I show this in a crude diagram:



The point of this diagram is to show the idea that through the evolved nervous system and sense organs of evolved organic creatures, mathematical states are perceived as sensible states like color, sound, touch, smell, etc. All the while they remain mathematical states. This is described in detail in my books.

So, now we come to the subject of this paper. Not seeing things in this way, philosophers and scientists had to explain things a different way, not in terms of such a psychic emergence but as actual things. This led to various problems. In recent years a world wound up being invented by scientists, philosophers, science fiction writers, and New Age influencers that does not in fact exist. It is what, in contemporary polite conversation, is referred to as the quantum reality — a world imagined to be how things really are where we can’t see them or on the level in which things are too small to see.

The result of this extremely modern trend is that people now trust these scientists and science fiction writers and use words they don’t stop to realize they don’t understand. But they evoke vivid images in them that they like and believe are in some way profound. I am speaking of dimensions and multiverses and warped space and time particles. This world isn’t real.

I want to talk about how this occurred. How did men of science and reason, who began their journey using observation and careful reasoning dive into pure unrestricted imagination and think they were making great discoveries?

To answer that we have to go back and tell the story.

Making things up is not new. Human beings have a long tradition of inventing things that were vividly imagined to explain things we couldn’t understand. Sometimes these imaginary things might have been intended symbolically by those who concocted them, but even if that were the case other people innocently believed in them literally.

I have often referred to this ancient way of explaining things as inventing things we can’t perceive to explain the things we do. This method of explaining things had the disadvantage of adding to the sum of things needing to be explained. For we wind up in the end with not just the thing we wanted to explain but also the thing we invented to explain it to explain.

Take the example of the World Turtle. The belief that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle appears in several different cultures and spiritual traditions.

Deities are another example. How do we explain people we perceive? By inventing people we don’t who we suppose created them.

But about 2600 years ago in ancient Greece people began to look for natural explanations for the things they saw. Aristotle called such men “natural philosophers.” The same happened in the European enlightenment beginning in the 17th century. Philosophers like Galileo began to question the old orthodox ways of explaining things. And gradually belief in God began to weaken and give way to such natural explanations.

The ideas these men had were radical for their day, but they remained rational and based on observation. In 1620 Francis Bacon formalized what became known as the scientific method in his treatise Novum Organum. And in 1623 Galileo began to break with past doctrines of causation in lieu of answers in line with scientific principles in his book The Assayer. Even when such philosophers proposed ideas that were purely conjectural, they continued to conform with our natural intuitions. For instance Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600 for teaching concepts like an infinite universe filled with other planets, moons, and suns.

But around the start of the 19th century, a change occurred. People started to propose ideas that were not based on observation or real reasoning or the scientific method. Pseudosciences like Phrenology and Galvanism began to emerge and gain popularity. Spiritualism became fashionable. By the 20th century even once-serious scientists began to abandon the scientific method and swear off logic and observation, bragging about their reliance on imagination. What happened?

There were many reasons for this. I’m going to go over some of those influences before explaining what truly was behind this trend.

INFLUENCES

• Historical: The end of the 1700s saw the end of the European Enlightenment, a unique period in philosophy and the arts that emphasized reason and worked to emancipate people from superstition. Ending in the 1790s with the French Revolution, it was followed by the Romanic Period. The Romantic Period saw a passionate rejection of cold rationalism, industrial order, and the strict rules of the Enlightenment and Classicism. Instead, Romantics embraced an outlook centered on strong emotion, individualism, and the mysterious.
• Religious: In the United States there was a major Protestant revival that became known as the Second Great Awakening. Millennialism and Spiritualism became popular. Seances were everywhere, even reaching the Lincoln Whitehouse. In 1875 the Theosophical Society formed in Greenwich Village with its own alternative theory of evolution — one where we descended from a series of root races.
• Technological: Innovations in the printing press brought down the cost of printing books, making publishing more accessible and obviating the need for institutional support such as by a University or Church. The second industrial revolution caused people to increasingly place faith in science over God, ushering in scientism and faith in the salvific power of science.
• Philosophical: Materialism, behaviorism, functionalism, and atheism became norms in academia.
• Scientific: Darwinism (where things evolved out of chaos) became canon in schools. Galvanism was popularized in the mid-19th century by lecturers who taught that electricity was the connecting link between spirit and matter. Post-Newtonian “quantum mechanics” became a catchword for counterintuitive ideas about space and time.
• Literary: The mid-19th century saw a drastic increase in science fiction. Frankenstein (1818) popularized galvanism, equating the soul with electricity. By the mid-1800s a new genre was introduced called nonsense literature, a broad categorization that balances elements that make sense with some that do not, with the effect of subverting language conventions or logical reasoning. Jabberwocky from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is an example. In 1895 The Time Machine introduced the “fourth dimension” as a literary McGuffin — a device in a story that serves as a trigger for the plot.
• The New Science: In 1905 a young Albert Einstein introduced time dilation. In 1915 he introduced the concept of bent spacetime in The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity. In 1957 Hugh Everett introduced his concept of parallel realities (multiverses) through his "Many-Worlds Interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In 1969-1970 Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, and Leonard Susskind introduced vibrating, one-dimensional quantum strings (String Theory).

These influences led to science beginning to emulate science fiction. What would cause this new level of speculation to be introduced into science based on what the scientist is able to imagine to account for purely mathematical observations? All these ideas — time dilation, bent spacetime, multiverses, and extra dimensions — were honest attempts to explain these anomalies in the mathematics extrapolated from observations. These were no longer testable hypotheses. But rather than being the source of concern people bragged about what felt like liberation.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. (Einstein)

The mistake was to promote imagined imagery to the level of reality they confusedly thought was another realm we could not see, a quantum realm. Such a second realm they assumed existed behind the curtain of reality – using a metaphor. Were they to understand what EOP tries over and over to articulate, that our sensible (sensory) experience is an interpretation of an existing mathematical world in an underlying primary intelligence, they would never have tried to project things analogous to the things they found in their experience (like strings or substances) into the realm they imagined existed. For they would have recognized that this realm does not exist at all.

But only through the lens of the concept of psychogenic emergence could they have realized what they were doing. There is no ‘other side,’ a notion popularized by the 60s rock band ‘The Doors’ that sounds profound specifically because it perpetuates this catchy illusion. See my paper The Other Side of the Veil where I describe how LSD was sold to a young public as a way to see ‘the other side of the veil.’

Now let me explain what’s really behind this move away from our natural innate intuitions and reason and toward unfettered imagination and projection.

The idea that our internal intuitions are somehow connected to God’s mind, and thus to the Universe God Created is a very ancient idea. The idea was that we human beings have certain innate intuitions we can’t fully explain ourselves that connect us in some way to the Universe, because the human mind is in some mysterious way connected to the Creator’s mind, and thus to the rational laws of nature. This view is sometimes called Newtonian, for it was the view that allowed Isaac Newton to guess there is a regular mathematical principle behind gravity that he could discern through reason. Without this view Newton would never have sought for the law of gravity, let alone discovered it by careful observation and intellect.

This view that God’s Universe is ordered rationally — and thus is discernible to us — we also find in the Old Testament.

...but you have arranged all things by measure and number and weight. (Wisdom of Solomon 11:20)

This verse highlights God's divine wisdom and order, stating that everything in creation was structured and designed with precise measure, number, and weight rather than chaos.

But this idea even goes back before the idea of a Universe created by a monotheistic deity, for we have it in the works of Aristotle in Greek times. The way Aristotle understood it was that the Universe is rational, and it was because of this that it could be understood by us. It was not the result of chaos. This is the idea of the governing factor of the logos, often interpreted as reason. And John taught that Jesus was the very embodiment of this logos.

But we have lost this notion. We lost this sense of connection to the logos. We began losing it in the Enlightenment as theists became deists, more so in the 19th century with the emergence of the “new science” and the popularity of irrationality. And finally completely with what came to be called the “quantum universe.”

So now we come back to my friends around a picnic table thinking they are talking about the teachings of Meher Baba, peppering their concepts with tropes from Star Trek the Next Generation, wormholes, holodecks, antigravity, spacetime, and portals to exotic dimensions. This is not Baba’s teaching in any way, shape, or form. The public is today ripe for superstition after the 2nd half of the 19th century, due to a steady diet of spiritualism, crank science, pseudoscience and pseudo-history. Einstein and Feynman finished them off in the 20th century. Add to this science fiction in television, and what passes as philosophy is literally stupidity.

In his posthumously discovered and edited Intelligence Notebooks, Meher Baba greatly developed and explained in enormous detail the relationship between our own mind and innate natural intuitions about space and time and the logos. We are not just connected to it, but are expressions of its very emergence.

American-Israeli settler says Palestinians need to leave or we'll kill them

In fairness to this ignorant girl, the Bible does tell the Jews to kill the people of Palestine and steal their land.

In Deuteronomy 7:1–5 Moses relays God's command to the Israelites before they enter the land: when God delivers the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites into their hands, they must "destroy them totally", make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.

In Deuteronomy 20:16–18 God specifically instructs regarding the cities of these nations inside the land: "Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you."

What kind of God would order a people to do such a thing? A god who never existed. Contemporary secular and textual scholars generally date the core of the Book of Deuteronomy around 622 BCE, 800 years after Moses is traditionally believed to have lived.

Amira Willighagen & Ndlovu Youth Choir - Amen (Official Music Video)

Dreams, Orbs, Spaceships, Spirits channeled by Darryl Anka

This is a madman. His nonsense has probably ruined many lives by now.

See my paper The Other Side of the Veil here.