The Spontaneous Healing of Belief by Gregg Braden

The cornerstone of this book is the view that we do not live in a purely mechanistic universe of unbreakable laws, but that heart-felt belief can have a tangible effect on reality itself. What we know as physical reality is but an expression of a deeper reality, and that deeper reality is consciousness. The universe is what Braden terms a “consciousness computer.”

For reasons of my own, I’m already sold on the view that the universe is holographic and that we all are all one consciousness. It was interesting reading Braden’s justifications for this view, drawing in particular from the findings of quantum physics, such as the double-slit experiment.

The book is a mixture of cutting-edge science plus Braden’s personal memoirs, both from his everyday life and his travels to remote places for research. Some of the justifications he makes from personal life felt a little shaky. For instance, he talked about a man who expected to die at thirty-three because his brother had died at thirty-three, his father, too, and his father’s father. Braden believes that it was the belief in this “family curse” that was bringing about the actual result in each case; our bodies seek to mirror what we believe about ourselves. Now, the principle may or may not be true, but the scientific foundation of it cannot stand on a few anecdotal examples from Braden’s personal life. Likewise, Braden makes much of an “impossible” hand-print impression on the wall of a cave, supposedly put there centuries ago by some highly knowledgable seer who lived there and learned to wield power over reality itself, pressing his hand into the rock. I’m rather more sceptical of such tourist attractions. Nevertheless, these memoirs certainly made interesting reading.

Despite these criticisms, I do think Braden may be one of the pioneers helping to bridge the gap between science and spirituality. This gap has certainly been shortening for me personally in recent times, as I withdrew from the influence of dogmatic religion, while also realising that the world was stranger than classical physics. What I notice is a convegence of ideas. Braden’s “belief creates reality” hypothesis is not different in principle from my personal experiments with telekinesis, no different than the power of positive thinking, no different from those “manifesting wealth” teachings, no different from answered prayer, no different even from the underlying principles of Satanic ritual (and that last one is not a joke; see my review of The Satanic Bible). It is extremely interesting when ideas from so many different philosophies converge and point to the same principle: belief affects reality. It tends to make you think, “Maybe there’s really something to this notion.”

Tales from the Time Loop by David Icke

The book begins with a short autobiography, which I read with great interest, particularly to hear David Icke’s own reflections on his experiences in the early 1990s, when he had his brief “son of God” phase that caused so much public ridicule. The rest of the book is divided into four parts, or layers, as they are called.

First, “The five-sense conspiracy.” This is the largest section of the book and comprises some two hundred pages. Icke begins by filling us in briefly on the overall picture of the conspiracy, involving secret societies, hidden-hand leadership, pryamid power structures, and the various scams that are played on humanity. The bulk of this section of the book is taken up by an examination of the wars in Afganistan and Iraq in the wake of 9/11 – a tearing down of the propagana given to us by the mass media and a look at the US government’s real motivations, as well as the consequences of their actions for innocent Middle Eastern civilians. Icke’s previous book was Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Centre Disaster. Although I haven’t read that book, my guess is that the material in Tales from the Time Loop forms a sequel of sorts. The information quickly gets complicated to sift through, and I confess that at times I’m left not quite knowing what to believe. The chapter on civilian casualties is particularly moving, and at the very least the reader is left with a sense that he needs to question an awful lot more than when he hears on the TV news.

Layer 2 is “The extra-terrestrial/inter-dimensional conspiracy.” To call the information in this section startling is an understatement. Essentially, Icke’s claim is that many of the key people in positions of power (and throughout what is called the Illuminati) are possessed by entities from another dimension – entites that have a reptilian form. Icke was first introduced to this side of the conspiracy through receiving numerous reports in the late 1990s of people who witnessed another person “shape-shift” into a reptilian. When enough of these reports came to light, this indicated that there was something worth researching. 100 pages of Tales from the Time Loop is dedicated to this topic, merely a fraction of what went into his earlier book on the reptilians, The Biggest Secret, which I haven’t read. In summary, the secret rulers of the world can be traced back to antiquity, via secret societies and religions, right back to ancient Babylon and Sumer. The worship of the serpent, in various forms, can be seen far and wide in ancient religion. Human sacrifice is one of the primary ways these entities obtain energy. Such practices never ended, but go on in secret today, among the rich and famous. Reptilian shapeshifting is commonly reported in Satanic ritual abuse.

That’s just a fraction of the story. It reads like a science fiction extravaganza, and I can’t get on board with all of it. Icke’s big problem is that he never pauses long enough to let the reader catch his breath. The revelations come thick and fast, building one of top of the other, and the reader (me, anyway) is left behind somewhere along the way amidst a fog of information that he can’t hang on to as provable. Icke relies heavily on quotes from other written souces, particularly authors Zechariah Sitchin and Stewart Swerdlow. The former has written books which take an alternative view of human history and the latter claims to have had access to an underground base where reptilians were operating from. I simply don’t have enough information to make a decision. I wish Icke had simply tackled a few aspects of the reptilian theory thoroughly instead of trying to cram everything into a small space. For instance, I find it very interesting that the ancestry of the vast majority of American presidents can be traced back to Charlemagne. If that’s true, then there has been something very big and very fishy going on for hundreds of years outside the public eye. I also find it very interesting that so many Freemasons were involved in the formation of America, and that government people participate in a secret dark religious ceremony at Bohemiam Grove every year. It is unquestionable that there is something shadowy going on in the world that the public is not privy to. I just wish these themes were developed fully, but all too often Icke says, “You can read more about this in my book, X.” To be fair, though, Icke’s summaries do raise important questions and open up many avenues waiting to be explored. Every chapter has thorough footnotes about where you can go to find out more.

Layer 3 is called “It’s all an illusion”. This is where the book goes in the direction that I really appreciate, where we delve into the philosophical and the intuitive. Physical reality, as we know it, isn’t solid. Three-dimensional solidity is just a perception of the human body and brain. Underneath all of this, the universe is really an energy field. Now, you can believe that, or you can believe that physical solidity is the basis from which all else stems. Either way, it’s a belief, and none of us can get outside of our perceptions to find out. You might ask, what does it matter? Well, if the physical universe is just a perception, perhaps consciousness is a far greater thing we have imagined. Perhaps all that exists is one gigantic consciousness, and every human life is that consciousness undergoing an experience of separation from the full magnitude of what it is. The cornerstone of this part of the book is an experience that Icke had in Brazil, where he was invited to take a psychoactive drink called ayahuasca as a means of opening the door to a higher perception of reality (a similar account is told by Aldous Huxley, regarding mescaline, in his book The Doors of Perception).

Layer 4 is “Transforming the illusion.” The focus is on waking up from all the nonsense we’ve been conditioned to believe is normal life and all the traps that keep us hypnotised. The ultimate conclusion to all this is that we learn to laugh about life – to realise that this tiny life is just a game, full of endless possibilities, on the great canvas of infinite awareness. Really insightful stuff.

There were moments, in the earlier parts of the the book (especially the reptilian section), that I thought I was going to be giving this a bad review. But overall, when I’ve digested all 450 pages (and they’re pretty big pages), I find myself yet again impressed with David Icke’s insight. Once more, my mind has been stimulated to learn more and more from the wealth of information that lies ignored just outside the mainstream.

The Hologram by Jeff Behnke

This book is quite unlike anything I have ever read. For a tagline, the author says, “Enjoy this exploration of immaterialistic intuition,” which I think is highly appropriate and was intrumental in attracting me to the book. The term “The Hologram” refers to reality, and the author’s view that reality is much more fluid and changable than we are prone to think. The laws of physics themselves are not set in stone, but exist in the experience of our collective minds. We are literally making reality as we go along by probing it and measuring it.

I am fascinated by the idea that the universe is holographic in nature – that the entire cosmos is an experience of mind, that it doesn’t exist except by conscious perception. It may sound wacky, but even a cursory look at quantum physics reveals that there’s something worth investigating in the notion. This book isn’t quite an examination of the holographic universe theory. It presupposes that you’re aware of it then discusses many related topics. Central to the book is the idea that reality contradicts. We can look at the world from the point of view of materialist science or eastern religion, measuring reality from different archetypes that contradict each other. Truth is found in contradiction.

I confess I can’t really get fully aboard with this material. I don’t think reality contradicts. I think there is an objective truth to discover, even if the universe is just held together by the collective consciousness of all the spirit from all things in the cosmos. It’s too simple to consider the human experience and simply claim that we’re inventing entire galaxies just by observing them. If that were true, then the Earth would have actually been flat when we thought it was. During reading, there were times I was shaking my head, thinking “This can’t be right.” Other times I was scratching my ear in confusion. Still other times my mind was being expanded by fresh angles on ideas. And there were times when I was nodding with delight, thinking “I never saw it quite like that, but yes, that’s it, exactly!”

I finished the book with a much clearer understanding of the essence of what we call good and evil. I gained new insight into the idea that we are all one consciousness interacting with itself in a state of separation. The chief insight for me was in learning never to embrace archetypes – systematised beliefs. Behnke uses a terrific analogy (well, terrific if you’re a computer geek; others might be mystified). Ours minds tend to play “snap to grid” with belief systems. Snap to grid is a function on programs like Microsoft Word where, if you want to draw a square, the program insists that your square conforms to rigid measurements, like 5cm instead of 5.23. Even though you move your mouse pointer to a specific area, the program will “snap” it to the closest grid reference point instead. This is what can easily happen with our beliefs, whether religious or scientific. We may choose to be a sceptic, never fooled by anything, but we are unwittingly embracing the archetype that the material universe is all there is and nothing but the pursuit of evidence will ever lead you into truth. This book was a pleasant confirmation of a eureka experience I had about eight months ago, where I realised that the reason I had been so bewildered my whole life was because I was unconsciously falling into archetypes each time I ping-ponged between athiesm and Christianity. The truth lies uncovering the traps that shape your belief systems and, in doing so, refusing the archetypes.

Despite being confused by some of this book, the things I did understand were powerful, and overall I feel I’ve read something profound. The Hologram is not available in print and can only be downloaded (free) from Paranormal News. If probing the nature of reality is a subject that interests you, I recommend you give it a try.

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Infinite Love Is the Only Truth, Everything Else Is Illusion by David Icke

David Icke has written many books on the subjects of the global conspiracy and the nature of reality. I’ve read three before this one, all of them published on or before 1996. So I thought it was about time I jumped in at the deep end and read something from his more recent research. This one was published in 2005.

The book begins with a couple of chapters summarising Icke’s research into the global conspiracy and the inter-dimensional side of the manipulation, including his theories about shape-shifting Reptilians. These chapters serve only as a taster, and to really get into them properly, you need to read books like, And the Truth Shall Set You Free and The Biggest Secret – something I haven’t yet done, and therefore I have to remain on the fence with some of his assertions.

After that, the book starts going in the direction that most interests me, in a chapter called “Downloading Reality,” where the author aims to show to that the physical world is nothing more than a holographic illusion. Some of the claims are startling and fascinating – that our own DNA can be consciously modified, and this is the real explanation behind evolution. We also have the ability to heal ourselves to some extent. Icke talks in a lot of detail about DNA/RNA, and unfortunately I found myself getting confused, but that material did serve as an interesting introduction to some thought-provoking ideas.

There’s a chapter on the nature of religions. I first read Icke tackling this topic in I Am Me, I Am Free, and I was stunned by his insight. This time round, oddly, he concentrates on Judaism rather than Christianity, exposing the craziness of all the impossible rules and regulations.

Another chapter takes a look at society and invites us to take a hard look at much of what we consider to be normal life, in education, the media, health services, banking, etc. Good stuff.

Another chapter is critical of the New Age movement, which shows a dramatic shift in Icke’s views since he started out in 1990 with The Truth Vibrations. Back then he was very pro New Age. Now he believes the New Age movement to be the most enlightened of all expressions of religion, but still caught in the program. In the past, Icke spoke about our souls being on a journey of evolution. Now he denies that. Now he sees reincarnation as part of the program – another aspect of us being trapped in this physical life “matrix.”

This change in ideas is due, it seems, to an experience Icke had a few years before, when he was invited to take ayahuasca, a drink that shamens use to tap into the reality beyond our five senses. He claims that he was spoken to by a female voice for five hours. One phrase that was repeated many times was “Infinite Love is the only truth, everything else is illusion.” Getting to the bottom of that is the cornerstone of this book. For instance, if we are all one consciousness, if our separation from each other is just an illusion, if the only thing that exists is Infinite Love, and if we are everything that exists, then how can we possibly evolve by experience? I have to admit, he is asking the right questions and getting right down to the nitty gritty of what this idea of “oneness” (that he has been promoting for many years) implies.

My only criticism of this book is that the amount of new material in here is relatively small. Much of the book is a refresher course in research Icke has already expounded in previous books, and in greater detail. I have his previous book, Tales from the Time Loop (2003) on my shelf, waiting to be read, and I can tell that it contains massive amount of overlap. That said, I appreciate that Infinite Love was written to be self-contained, so that it can be understood without reference to other works.

It takes a certain type of mind to appreciate a book of this nature. You have to be unafraid to question everything you’ve been contitioned to believe, to take no norm for granted, and also to abandon skepticism in favour of allowing yourself to flirt with new possibilities. That’s me, for better or worse. I found the ideas in this book stimulating and thought-provoking. Highly recommended.

Mental Radio by Upton Sinclair

I discovered this little 1930s book by accident whilst browsing the Sacret Texts website (given the book’s age, it’s legally available there in its entirely to read online). The title intrigued me, because I’ve recently been doing my own personal experiments into psychokinesis (a.k.a. telekinesis, the moving of objects with the mind), and getting results, I might add! The topic of this book is telepathy (mind-reading), something which I’m eager to try.

First, who is Upton Sinclair? A writer of some standing in Socialist circles, it appears. That means little to me, but of more import was something I discovered when hunting for a cover image of the book to go with this review. You can’t see it on my scaled-down image, but it says “Foreword by Albert Einstein.” Sadly, the version of the book available on the website lacks this foreword, which I would have loved to read. Nevertheless, the presence of Einstein should at least lead readers not to dismiss a book of this nature out of hand.

The first two thirds of the book consists, for the most part, of a menagerie of drawings and notes made by Upton Sinclair and his wife Craig. The most frequent experiment involved Upton making a series of drawings in private, enclosing each one inside a sheet of paper, then giving the set to his wife. She would then enter a trance-like state and attempt to “see” what was drawn. After leaving the trance, she would then make her own reproduction on paper. The results were often far from perfect, but continually showed astounding similarities that could not have been random.

A book like this does, of course, stand or fall on the reader’s willingness to believe that the author is writing an account in good faith. People who are desperate to hold onto the view that physics is the cornerstone on which reality hangs will no doubt dismiss Sinclair as a crank. As for me, I got the distinct impession of a sincere and level-headed man. Since my personal discovery of psychokinesis, I have felt that this kind of knowledge is vitally important in helping us understand what consciousness actually is, in determining whether there is more to being human than just a physical brain and body. And after reading this book, I feel the importance of that study reaffirmed.

The last third of the book got me really excited. Here Sinclair makes some rational deductions about the mind, in light of his experiments, and I was ecstatic to hear him coming so close to the view that I hold – that the universe is essentially an expression of consciousness, that we are all aspects of a single gigantic mind expressing itself. He doesn’t quite make the leap, but he’s right at the gate.

Here are a few extracts. Sinclair’s attitude reminded me a lot of David Icke:

If what I publish here is mysticism, then I do not know there can be such a thing as science about the human mind … Those who throw out these results will not be scientists, but merely another set of dogmatists – of whom new crops are continually springing up, wearing new disguises and new labels. The plain truth is that in science, as in politics and religion, it is a lot easier to believe what you have been taught, than to set out for yourself and ascertain what happens.

The deduction that all our minds are connected at a deeper level:

I think a study of them [these experiments] shows that a true vision comes into the subconsiousness, not directly from the drawing, but from another mind which has some means of knowing, and sending to consciousness via the subconsciousness whatever I ask it for. Of course, I cannot attempt to prove it here. It was one of the questions to which I was seeking an answer, and the result seems to point to the existence of a deeper mind …

The suggestion that the universe is made of mind, not matter:

But I insist that until Craig and Dr. Watson, Professor Eddington and Mrs. Eddy have found out positively whether the universe is all mind or all matter, I must go on speaking in the old-fashioned way, as if there were two worlds, the physical and the mental, two sets of phenomena which interact one upon the other continuously, even though the manner of this happening is beyond comprehension.

Again, our deeper, connected minds:

What telepathy means to my wife is this: it seems to indicate a common substratum of mind, underlying our individual minds, and which
we can learn to tap.

The book concludes with these words:

We present here a mass of real evidence, and we shall not be troubled by any amount of ridicule from the ignorant. I tell you – and because it is so important, I put it in capital letters: TELEPATHY HAPPENS!

I think this book is an absolute gem. One of the most important things I’ve read thus far in the quest to understand the nature of what we are.

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The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister McGrath

This is a small book, merely 100 pages, written as a thiestic response to Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. Alister McGrath, the primary author, studied chemistry and molecular biophysics at Oxford, and moved on to study Christian theology, specialising in issues of science and religion.

Naturally, I had already read Dawkins’s book (also reviewed in this blog) before coming to this one. To summarise, I was dissatisfied with his arguments against God, disappointed by the ranting, arrogant tone of the book, and unnerved by the deceptive tactic of bombarding the reader with vague negativity about theism (and by that I mean the way Dawkins constantly provides poor quotes from thiests, with the design of infusing the notion that we’re all idiots; persuasion by pressure of numbers rather than by rational argument).

The Dawkins Delusion?, however, was a joy to read. It offered clarification of many objections I had already formulated in my mind, highlighted others I hadn’t seen, and it presented everything in a respectful tone. Reading it was like having poison drawn out of my body.

My only objection is in the title of the volume. Okay, it’s perhaps the perfect title for eye-catchability, but it’s kind of cheeky – something that Dawkins has no problem being, but something the Christian opposition should rise above. The title will instantly raise the heckles of Dawkins’s supporters, when the real aim should be to win them over to a more rational point of view.

Other than that, superb. I happen to think Dawkins’s book is crafty and dangerous (again, consult my review for justification), so I recommend reading The Dawkins Delusion? as an essential companian. Read both and make up your own mind.

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

I spotted this book on a friend’s bookshelf and decided that I was up to the challenge of having my belief in the existence of God put to the test. Having lived a significant portion of my life as an agnostic, and having jumped between agnosticism (i.e. God may or may not exist) and theism (i.e. God does exist) more times than I can remember, I think I’m more qualified than most to claim that I’m capable of having an open mind.

The hardcover edition of The God Delusion is about 400 pages long. Should it really take 400 pages to prove or disprove the idea of God? I personally don’t think so. The book is this length because Dawkins includes many related topics, some of which I found useful; others were a waste of space. For instance, Dawkins spends a whole chapter talking about how many of the scientists who appear to be theists on paper are actually athiests. Scientists sometimes use the term “God” in a loose, poetic sense. Dawkins’s argument may have some validity, but it’s hardly scientific for a reader to believe or disbelieve in a theory by counting how many scientists’ heads are on each side. We want a rational case for athiesm presented!

Sadly, before we can get to hear the crux of the argument, Dawkins has a lot of stuff to get off his chest. A lot of it comes across as quite emotional and dripping with arrogance. In introducing a quote by C.S. Lewis, on the matter of whether Jesus could have been truly “good” if he wasn’t really “God”, Dawkins can’t help himself from stating it thus: “C.S. Lewis (who should have known better) said …” Dawkins’s disagrement with Lewis was simply on the grounds that each author came at the issue with a difference set of presuppositions: Lewis with the view that the Gospel accounts are reliable historical documents, and Dawkins that they are not. And so, there was no need for such mockery.

When I came to Dawkins’s central argument, I was surprised by its simplicity. It turns out he has a big problem with the idea of “infinite regression” (i.e. if God made the universe, who made God, then who made the thing that made God, ad infinitum). Well, on that we are agreed. Infinite regression answers nothing. But Dawkins refuses to accept that the idea of a creator is a valid means of terminating an infinite regession. Long ago, I heard it argued to my complete satisfaction, something like this: Logic tells us that for every effect we need a cause. The universe began with a Big Bang. That’s not a proper explanation, because we need to explain how the material for such a bang originated. A creative agent of some kind. And, of course, we face the obvious question of who created the creator? The most logical idea that our brains can comprehend is that there should be nothing at all: no universe, no laws of physics, no anything. That would make perfect sense. Except here we are. We exist. And so, whether we like it or not, we are forced to consider, in the absense of any rational alternative, the notion that there indeed was a “first cause,” something that exists outside of time itself and is responsible for all that we see.

Dawkins denies this argument, in a chapter entitled “Why there almost certainly is no God.” He believes in evolution, as a lot of people do. In my mind, whether you do or don’t has little bearing on whether God exists. Evolution is related to biology alone. And when we’re talking about the origin of the universe, that’s cosmology. Where Dawkins errs is that he insists on cosmological evolution: the universe arrived at the form it is in today by a process of evolutionary changes. Dawkins acknowledges that this is not something that can be proven, but he stands by the principle that the simplest answer is almost always the right one (the theory of evolution claims to show how the simple gives rise to the complex without the need for an intelligent designer). God, he says, is infinitely complex, therefore he almost certainly does not exist. Did you spot the flaw in Dawkins’s reasoning? He assumes cosmological evolution to be true in order to lay his ground for disproving God (i.e. the answer to the origin of the universe must be simple, therefore it ain’t God). In other words, he assumes cosmological evolution to be true in order to prove cosmological evolution to be true: circular reasoning.

And that’s it. That is Dawkins’s single thread on which he clings to. And it’s over and done with about halfway through. The book continues for another two hundred pages, because it’s not just theism that Dawkins is attacking. It’s the idea of a personal God who hears prayer. And so, religion is under scrutiny for much of the remainder of the book. He attempts to explain the predominance of religion by theorising about us having a “God centre” in our brains – a left-over item from man’s evolutionary progress that once helped us survive, but now we’re better off without it in our more enlightened times. Pure speculation.

Dawkins talks about religion’s association with violence. He wastes a page or two quoting some hot-headed anti-athiest remarks posted online by a blogger. Why include this stuff? It’s just the remarks of an idiot blowing off steam. Oh, but I think I know why Dawkins put it in the book. The book is littered with poor examples of quotes by theists, both from antiquity and modern day. The author appears to indulge every whim to sling mud at a believer in God over some poorly thought-out comment the believer made. These quotes cannot form the basis of a rational argument against God, so why are they included? All they do is create a vague buzz of negativity in the reader’s mind about the idea of God. But perhaps that’s the idea. And if true, that makes Dawkins a fairly sinister author.

On the matter of religion and acts of violence, there is no doubt a connection. But it’s the same connect that exists between, say, soccer and violence; just look at England’s reputation for football hooliganism. The governing principle that Dawkins misses is that violence is easily associated with anything that people feel passionately about. If we rid the world of religion, we don’t cure the problem. We relieve one symptom of a problem that lies in the nature of man.

Dawkins is totally out of his depth when talking about the Bible. He sees the God of the Old Testament as a big bully, replaced by a more favourable deity in the New Testament. I, however, see a perfect unity of the two, because I’ve given them more than a cursory glance over the years. The idea of a holy God who demands absolute perfection, who cannot stand sin, who must punish sin – a God who rescued man at great cost to himself – these concepts don’t register with Dawkins. I get the feeling that he has led a fairly moral life, and if it were possible for him to believe in heaven, he would consider it his right to end up there – as a decent law-abiding citizen of earth. Even when he examines the God that he doesn’t believe in, he can’t help but shape God in his own image.

More rational athiests than Dawkins will feel disappointed by his ranting. Some athiests will of course be cheering him on (in the same way that some people think Michael Moore makes honest documentaries). Worst of all, some who are on the fence about Christianity may use the book as a form of escape. From experience, I know that we are not often as rational as we think we are at times; we can claim to seek the truth, but unconsciously we’re trying to escape from something that we desperately hope isn’t true: a God who demands our attention; not everyone has a mind that is sharpened like a razor against self-deception and crafty arguments.

I left this book feeling like I had been poisoned, but relieved that my rational belief in God remained intact. I would never say to anyone not to read something; that’s an attitude that smacks of brainwashing. But I would caution that this is a dangerous book for an impressionable person. In a spirit of fairness, I recommend also reading The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister McGrath for a well presented opposing argument.