Many identities, one head.

We were discussing dissociative identities last night and there surfaced the observation that pathological psychologies were merely extreme examples of much more common human tendencies, which is to say that nearly everyone harbors characteristic dissociative personal identity states to some degree or another. One symptom of switching identity states is saying one thing in one identity state and then saying the exact opposite after the switch, and being totally unaware of the blatant contradiction. This is not to be confused with bare-faced lying, in which the person knows the falsity of the statement.


Helen Schucman, co-scribe of A Course In Miracles, was diagnosed by her boss and co-scribe, Bill Thetford, as being quite dissociative. In Absence From Felicity, Ken Wapnick  discusses the diagnosis of Helen's dissociative identities in a chapter titled Beyond Heaven and Helen: The Priestess, "My primary focus in this book has been the two sides of Helen's personality." Others have used the phrases, "Helen and Hell" or "St. Helen and the Bitch."


I suppose that coming to the office each day with Helen must have been a continuing game of The Lady or the Tiger. Which is it today?


Here is more than you ever wanted to know about the history of the dissociative disorder, adapted from Wikipedia.


In Roman mythology, the god Janus was described as having "two-faces", but primarily, before the 19th century, people exhibiting symptoms similar to those were believed to be possessed by demons.


An intense interest in spiritualism, parapsychology, and hypnosis continued throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hypnotists reported what they thought were second personalities emerging during hypnosis and wondered how two minds could coexist. The 19th century saw a number of reported cases of multiple personalities which Rieber estimated would be close to 100. Epilepsy was seen as a factor in some cases,and discussion of this connection continues into the present era. The public, however, was exposed to psychological ideas which took their interest. Mary Shelley's 1818 Frankenstein, or; The Modern Prometheus, had a formidable impact.


By the late 19th century there was a general acceptance that emotionally traumatic experiences could cause long-term disorders which might display a variety of symptoms. These conversion disorders were found to occur in even the most resilient individuals, but with profound effect in someone with emotional instability like Louis Vivé (1863-?) who suffered a traumatic experience as a 13 year-old when he encountered a viper. Vivé was the subject of countless medical papers and became the most studied case of dissociation in the 19th century.


Between 1880 and 1920, many great international medical conferences devoted a lot of time to sessions on dissociation. It was in this climate that Jean-Martin Charcot introduced his ideas of the impact of nervous shocks as a cause for a variety of neurological conditions. One of Charcot's students, Pierre Janet, took these ideas and went on to develop his own theories of dissociation. One of the first individuals diagnosed with multiple personalities to be scientifically studied was Clara Norton Fowler. American neurologist Morton Prince studied Fowler between 1898 and 1904, describing her case study in his 1906 monograph, Dissociation of a Personality.


Published in 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is well known known for its portrayal of a split personality.


In the early 20th century interest in dissociation and multiple personalities waned for a number of reasons. After Charcot's death in 1893, many of his so-called hysterical patients were exposed as frauds, and Janet's association with Charcot tarnished his theories of dissociation. Sigmund Freud recanted his earlier emphasis on dissociation and childhood trauma.


A review of the Index Medicus from 1903 through 1978 showed a dramatic decline in the number of reports of multiple personality after the diagnosis of schizophrenia became popular, especially in the United States. A number of factors helped create a large climate of skepticism and disbelief; paralleling the increased suspicion of DID was the decline of interest in dissociation as a laboratory and clinical phenomenon.


Starting in about 1927, there was a large increase in the number of reported cases of schizophrenia, which was matched by an equally large decrease in the number of multiple personality reports.Bleuler also included multiple personality in his category of schizophrenia. It was concluded in the 1980s that DID patients are often misdiagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia.


In 1957, with the publication of the book The Three Faces of Eve and the popular movie which followed it, the American public's interest in multiple personality was revived. During the 1970s an initially small number of clinicians campaigned to have it considered a legitimate diagnosis.


Between 1968 and 1980 the term that was used for dissociative identity disorder was "Hysterical neurosis, dissociative type". The APA wrote: "In the dissociative type, alterations may occur in the patient's state of consciousness or in his identity, to produce such symptoms as amnesia, somnambulism, fugue, and multiple personality."


The highly influential book Sybil was published in 1974, which popularized the diagnosis through a detailed discussion of the problems and treatment of the pseudonymous Sybil. Six years later, the diagnosis of multiple personality disorder appeared in the DSM III. Controversy over the iconic case has since arisen, with some calling Sybil's diagnosis the result of the therapist's methods, while others have defended the treatment and reputation of Sybil's therapist, Cornelia B. Wilbur. As media coverage spiked, diagnoses climbed. There were 200 reported cases of DID (dissociative identity disorder) as of 1980, and 20,000 from 1980 to 1990. Joan Acocella reports that 40,000 cases were diagnosed from 1985 to 1995. The majority of diagnoses are made in North America, particularly the United States, and in English-speaking countries more generally with reports recently emerging from other countries.

Oldest Christian texts discovered?

Margaret Barker is an authority on New Testament history and she has been called upon to help investigate the origins of a collection of relics which could be the earliest example of Christian text. Barker, of Borrowash England, is examining photographs of the "metal books" found in a cave in Jordan. It is thought the artefacts might be almost 2,000 years old, and they could be unique evidence of Christian activity as early as 33AD

There are about 70 of the books, each made of between five and 15 "leaves" about the size of a credit card and bound by lead rings. They were apparently found by a Jordanian Bedouin between 2005 and 2007, when a flash flood exposed two niches inside a cave, and have since been taken to Israel.

Archaeologist David Elkington is heading a British team trying to unravel the mysteries of the books and to get them safely into a Jordanian museum. He contacted Mrs Barker on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mr Elkington admits the books have attracted intense interest.

During the course of his research, he said he and his wife had been shot at and received death threats.

Soul Group Journal - November 30, 2010

Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!

Dr. Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell University, conducted a series of experiments that will soon be published in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bem tested the idea that our brain has the ability to not only reflect on past experiences, but also anticipate future experiences. This ability for the brain to "see into the future" is often referred to as psi phenomena.

"The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results." – from Bem's pre-publication abstract, Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect

Bem did find that certain people demonstrate stronger effects than others. In particular, people high in stimulus seeking - an aspect of extraversion where people respond more favorably to novel stimuli - showed effect sizes nearly twice the size of the average person. This suggests that some people are more sensitive to psi effects than others. - Psychology Today — Reality Sandwich

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Ben Okri, author

"Beware [be aware] of the stories you read or tell;
subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness,
they are altering your world." — Ben Okri

"Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love." — Ben Okri

Ben Okri (born 15 March 1959) is a Nigerian poet and novelist. Having spent his early childhood in London, he and his family returned to Nigeria in 1968. He later came back to England, embarking on studies at the University of Essex. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Westminster (1997) and the University of Essex (2002), and was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2001.

Since he published his first novel, Flowers and Shadows (1980), Okri has risen to an international acclaim, and he is often described as one of Africa's greatest writers. His best known work, The Famished Road, was awarded the 1991 Booker Prize. He has also won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Africa, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and was given a Crystal Award by the World Economic Forum. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Okri has been described as a magic realist, although he has shrugged off that tag. His first-hand experiences of civil war in Nigeria are said to have inspired many of his works. He writes about both the mundane and the metaphysical, the individual and the collective, drawing the reader into a world with vivid descriptions.

Ben Okri discusses his approach to writing on YouTube

Books by Ben Okri

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Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth, by Eric Herm

A run-in with Roundup herbicide was a transformative episode in farmer Eric Herm’s shift toward sustainable agriculture. A fourth-generation farmer, Herm tells the tale in the book Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth: A Path to Agriculture’s Higher Consciousness (Dream River Press)

Eric Herm grew up on a cotton farm near Ackerly, Texas. He left the farm to pursue other interests, traveling to various places across the world before returning to his roots. Upon arriving back on his family farm, he noticed many changes in not only the landscape but the methods of commercial agriculture that were causing more long-term problems. He began searching for answers to these problems, slowly discovering healthier organic methods which provided the inspiration for his book, Son of a Farmer, Child of the Earth.

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A large supercell thunderstorm cloud over Montana, July, 2010

Photo by Sean R. Heavey

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Image of a deep space traveler

Image of a deep space traveler. Comet Hartley II - November 4, 2010



NASA's Deep Impact (EPOXI) probe completed its flyby of comet Hartly 2 today, and it is now in the process of beaming back its collected data. This is the first photo available from the Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL).

Decisions and Tests - from Christ Mind Expressions: Book One

Published on Scribd.com - eBook in PDF format

Christ Mind Expressions
The Pierrakos Transmissions
Book One
339 pages
8.5 x 11"

View on-line or download here.

excerpt from: Pathwork Guide Lecture No. 2
1996 Edition
March 25, 1957
Decisions and Tests
(copyrighted material)
Visit: www.pathwork.org

Greetings in the name of God. I bring you God’s blessings.

My dear friends, God’s love penetrates the entire creation. It is a living force, a beam that meets itself in an eternal round, as everything spiritual must move in circular completeness. All creatures are in search of this powerful beam of love, whether consciously or unconsciously. The longing to feel this love drives, pulls, spurs humans and spirits. They will have an understanding of the yearning according to their state of development, will draw conclusions, and follow through with their will and their thoughts. Or they will not interpret these feelings correctly and will allow this driving force to act through them and even lead them into mistakes. Not realizing the real nature of the feelings and the search, the person will look for false goals and false fulfillment. However, those who reach the stage of development where they already understand what these hitherto inexplicable feelings of longing really are have taken a great step. They will also know in what direction to go.

Thus there will be fewer errors and misunderstandings about one’s own soul forces, and their messages will be translated correctly.

The love for God, the longing for God, is the driving force in every human being. Even those who have not yet found God, or who believe that they do not believe in God, harbor these strong currents in their soul. Those who experience a complete turnabout in their spiritual development and recognize God in consciousness enter into a new life. This can happen within one and the same incarnation. Whoever steps through this door will already live in a much lighter world, yet there are many more gates to pass through.

Most people find life on this earth incomprehensible. They cannot recognize its meaning and purpose because they see only through their physical eyes. The contact with their spiritual eyes has not yet been established. Therefore everything seems meaningless -- their sorrows, their trials, their loneliness. But when you understand that this life is one of many learning periods, one link in a long chain, you will at first sense and later comprehend more and more fully the connections. Then your goal will no longer be immediate happiness through the fulfillment of every single wish in this existence. You will instead direct your vision toward the whole. Thus you can bear the deprivations of this life. And thus you can pass the tests and fulfill the conditions necessary to enter a higher state of existence, a permanent happiness that cannot be taken away by any outside force.

Now I would like to talk about the group of people who have passed through the first gates, who have already recognized these fundamental truths. Such people often do not progress as well as they could. After all, how fast each individual will proceed is up to his or her free will. One person may just drift along and have to reincarnate many, many times to overcome or fulfill one thing, experiencing it again and again. Others, who have recognized these basic truths, will act differently and direct their aim toward spiritual progress -- which does not mean withdrawing from earthly problems. On the contrary: for earthly and spiritual problems are very closely connected. An earthly problem is actually the expression of a specific spiritual problem. The difference is only in how the solution of a problem is sought, from what vantage point. Only if you solve the problem on the spiritual level can you find its true earthly solution.

We often see that people know this or that, but they still do not perceive the connecting links within themselves. They still look for God and for knowledge somewhere outside of themselves, for instance through increasing their outer knowledge -- which in itself is good, but not enough.
There must be a continuous balancing. The acquired knowledge must always be applied on a personal level, digested and evaluated within, so that harmony is established. To achieve true progress, you have to grow from both sides. New outer knowledge has to be acquired when the old has been integrated and assimilated within. Knowledge must never remain theoretical. It must be put into practice and take root in your personal life. Thus every person needs to widen his or her knowledge of the true nature of creation and of the spiritual laws. But the outer knowing is only one part, which must not be taken as the whole. Without the other part, the inner assimilation, there can be no harmony in your progress, no real fulfillment, and thus actually no progress.

You have to get acquainted with yourself, attend to yourself, examine yourself, and acquire the discipline to overcome the resistance which is so difficult at the beginning. You have to observe all your notions about yourself which flatter you and with which it is so easy to deceive yourself. Then you have to cast them off or revise them. This work is something special, something different for each one of you, yet most of it is similar, or can even be the same. When we talk about the spiritual progress of the human being we mean something very individual for each one of you. And you, my dear ones, should search yourselves and ask: “What hidden part of me still does not react according to the sole reality, the spiritual laws, even if only on a subtle, inner level? Where do I lack clarity about certain things in myself?”

Such self-examination should go on at all times. Then you will be able to slowly eliminate that which is not yet right within you, so that you become happier. You have to be clear about what obstacles are in you, and to gain clarity you need inner search and also true inner will and effort. For if you lack happiness in any area, you can be sure that the lack is directly connected with a specific inner block. Were your wishes simply granted without your first eliminating the inner obstacles, that could never make you really happy. You could not build lasting happiness; it would have to dissolve. Only when you have established inner harmony, a relationship to God in which His laws are accomplished within you, is your soul mature enough to encompass happiness.

People often wonder about communication with God’s world. “Yes,” they say, “I can quite believe that such communication is possible, but what can it mean to me? What do I need it for?” My answer is that such communication can give you one of the parts necessary for your further development, namely intake from the outside. Furthermore, it gives hints, help, and direction for searching, discovering, and applying the outer knowledge to the inner problems, which is the second necessary part of development. For this, you need constant encouragement, strength, and blessing, apart from very specific, concrete help. Yet even that can be given through spirit communication.

There have always been some exceptional, wise humans to whom others could be guided. In these cases too, just as with a medium, God’s world is directly active. The particular person is then an instrument of God’s world. In one case the influence is through inspiration, in the other it operates directly. But the help from the outside, in whatever way, is an important element without which you cannot grow. You can use the knowledge thus acquired as material, as the building blocks, with which you build your life in your own way.

- oOo -

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky

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The 19 month dark star cycle

Photo of Venus at inferior conjunction  

This is a telescopic photo of the planet Venus taken on October 31st by Henry Mendt of Maracaibo, Venezuela, and found on Spaceweather.com.   

Right now, Venus is passing almost directly between Earth and the sun, an event astronomers call an "inferior conjunction." It happens every 19 months, more or less. The next such inferior conjunction between Earth and Venus will be in the first week of June, 2012, about nineteen months from now. 

Although Venus orbits the sun in 225 days, the earth is also moving in her orbit around the sun. Venus is always playing 'catch-up' with the earth, which is why it takes more than 19 months for Venus to "transit the sun" from an earth-based point of view. It is a *dark transit* because Venus is presenting its nighttime side to earth viewers. A presentation at a 2007 meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences, American Astronomical Society, diagrammed the correlations between this cycle of Venus, sunspot activity, and major disease outbreaks on Earth. You can find that information here 

When the daylight side of Venus faces toward earth, it is second only to  the moon in brightness. Depending upon the location of Venus to the sun  in its bright-side part of the cycle, Venus is known as either the  'evening star' or the 'morning star,' because it is brightest just after  sunset in the early evening, or just before dawn in the morning.  Now,  during its transit of the sun, Venus is a dark star. 

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Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky 

Natural events

This photo was taken on Saturday, October 30, 2010, over Kittilä, Finland, by photographer Sauli Kosk. I found it posted on SpaceWeather.com.

"Yesterday in Kittilä, Finland, photographer Sauli Koski witnessed a brief but unforgettable display when the rising sun shone through a morning cloud of wintery ice crystals. Fortunately he had his camera. "These were the best ice halos I have ever seen," says Koski. 'They were there for only about 10 minutes and then gone. What a delight!'

" 'It was a gem of a halo display,' agrees atmospheric optics expert Les Cowley. 'Koski saw at least 13 different arcs. Some, including two types of Parry arc, are rare. Three more arcs, the helic, Parry supralateral arc, and Moilanen arc are exceedingly rare.' "

In religious iconography, represented in nearly every culture that produced religious art, a 'halo' is a ring of light that surrounds a person to represent their sacred or holy status. Our friend Rob Robb says that he 'sees' people as glowing colors. In his many books starting with The Teachings of Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda describes the sorcerer's view of people as like luminescent egg-shapes. Western iconography tended to depict halos as rings or disks around the head. Eastern art usually had the glowing light around the entire body, and sometimes represented by the image of flames.

The physics of solar atmospheric halos, as shown in Kosk's fine photograph above, involves sunlight shining through clouds of ice crystals suspended in air.  The fire of the sun filtered through ice prisms.

Fire and ice.

Fire and ice was a metaphor mentioned in the ACIM urtext,

"Revelations induce complete but temporary suspension of doubt and fear. They represent the original form of communication between God and His Souls, before the intrusion of fire and ice made this impossible."

The reference is to a poem by Robert Frost and I wrote about it here a few years ago.

-oOo-

Tom Fox
Louisville, Kentucky
on Scribd.com