Bible thumpers, old and newuaker, Catholic,

[mikebailey]

On Fri, 25 May 2007 malignd at aol.com wrote:

> Doesn't it strike you that if "big angels" appeared over a battlefield
> it would be one of the momentous moments in human history?  And yet you
> don't know even which war it was in which it supposedly occurred.  That
> should tell you something about the credibility of the incident.  I,
> for one, never heard of it, but that might be because I don't read the
> right books.

Angel of Mons is mentioned in GR - Wikipedia says there is no first-hand
evidence, that it was mostly based on a story by Arthur Machen, and there may
have also been a British psy-op to plant the story...WWI...oh well

doing my search on "angel battlefield" the name of Clara Barton kept
coming up; more of a secular offshoot of the concept -

>
> <<and speaking of evolution, the concept of Evolution merges with the
> Kabalistic Angel known as Metatron ...>>
>
> Well that may or may not be true, but it would certainly have come as
> news to Darwin.
>

yeah, I've lost my source on that anyway, and not finding anything
on the Net that points me back to it...

My point, if I had a valid one to begin with, has to do with
angels being concepts, inspirations, visual memory/learning techniques
and meditative aids - I have enthusiasm for them in this role

I'm not nearly as comfortable with thinking of them
as external entities who exist in our space/time acting
literally as described in the various poetry about them,
although there is so much of it...

as in the 70s song I want to ask those poets,
"I'd like to know where you got the notion"

It's possible that Vitamin B deficiencies created some of
the visionary experiences; or maybe Terence McKenna was right
and sacred plants do reveal underlying realities...

This possibility is interesting to me, but my prior - though
qualified - allegiance to scientific method inoculates me against
what seems to be a serious downside (acting like a kook)(more than
I do already)

That said, I have to venture back and forth between irrational-land
and scientific-method-ville to get satisfaction: research has found
that verbalizing does create changes in brain chemistry; people like
Mesmer have manipulated bio-electric fields with some success, and
now bio-feedback machines and Kirlian photography show that they do
exist -- it's not inconceivable that a person might find that the
chemical and electrical changes in his/her bodymind which occur
while reading or talking about, say, Lemuria, are pleasant and
useful in their own Gestalt.  Though I wouldn't want to rely on
their experiences doing this as primary training for employment
as, say, pilots, it's quite possible that enjoying fictitious worlds helps
people adjust to the real one.

Closer to the topic, just because a novel doesn't literally describe events, or
set out instructions for a manufacturing process, doesn't mean
that individuals might not derive various forms of pleasure and utility
from spending time translating its langue into their own parole...