On Apr 6, 2005, at 8:23 PM, Alan Ackley wrote:
I suppose it depends some on how the words are defined, but;
If it happens, it’s real. If it’s real, it must be natural. There can’t be anything beyond the boundary of “it happens” except for “it can’t happen” or “it doesn’t happen”.
What was that Vulcan first principle of logic? "Nothing unreal exists." I don't recall whose law that was, but the ref is from the _Trek IV_ movie.
Starting with that sort of definition, there is no supernatural. Nonetheless, the bookshelves are replete with books reporting events that have been categorized as “supernatural”. Given the sheer quantity of reports, some of these events must be real, but unexplained, miscategorized, or simply beyond the reach of current human conception.
Depends on the events.
Things do happen which are not understood, or which are not well explained.
Can you enumerate such events?
I grew up in a household where occasionally things happened which defied conventional explanations. When arguments were happening, light bulbs would burn out, or the car tires might go flat. For events such as these Carl Jung coined the term “synchronistic”.
A more parsimonious explanation would be that light bulbs burned out when there weren't arguments, and tires went flat when there weren't arguments, but no one really noticed them, so there wasn't a sense of correlation for those "negative" (in the sense of bearing a hidden meaning) occurrences.
[snip Aikido discussion]
When my inner tension was finally relaxed, after years of training, suddenly I had a deeper understanding of religious literature, and was also able to see more meaning in my dreams, which prior to this had eluded me. I was then able to make sense of the flow of the Tao, as described in Taoist writings, and could see that this was the same as the Holy Spirit as described in Christianity. What Usheiba Sensei (the founder of Aikido) called “the ki of the universe”, is apparently this same thing; The Tao, The Holy Spirit, the ki, (or in Chinese, “chi”). The language creation speaks to us in synchronistic external events, is the same language as dreams.
This is also what Buddhists might describe as the union of mindfulness and awareness -- the pure focus of mind on one point, but with a broad awareness of everything else that falls into one's sphere of consciousness. It's a delicate balance and. the moment you're aware you have it, it goes away. Sigh.
I got similar states in my own martial arts training (Shotokan and Tae Kwon Do), particularly in kata/form practice. But I got the same kind of states in programming a deep algorithm or writing some intense graf of prose. It's an available event in many pursuits that, when it happens, feels almost magical in its intensity of focus, its broadness of accessibility, and most especially its ephemeral nature.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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