Quote:“In 1794, Ernst F. F. Chladni published a 63-page book in which he proposed that meteor-stones and iron masses enter the atmosphere from cosmic space and form fireballs as they plunge to Earth.”

“These ideas violated two strongly held contemporary beliefs: (1) fragments of rock and metal do not fall from the sky, and (2) no small bodies exist in space beyond the Moon.”

Quote:In all ages meteoric stones have fallen on the earth. Many of

them were found by persons who were in search of them; they pre-
served them, and thus collections were made in private rarity cabinets
and in natural history cabinets. Many learned persons believed in
meteoric stones, but many others were sceptical, and their attacks
were so violent, and their mockery about stones that fell from the
atmosphere, or were thrown by the men in the Moon to the inhab-
itants of the Earth, so sharp as to shake the belief of many a
collector, and the happy possessor, fearing the mockery of the so-
called learned men, concealed his treasures, or threw them away on
the dust-hill, or in a ditch.

Quote:
“It is always unsafe to deny positively any phenomena that
may be wholly or in part inexplicable; and hence I am content to
believe that one day the question will be satisfactorily solved.” —

Quote:The  history  of  Science  in  the  last  few  decades  confirms,  more  perhaps
than  in  any  previous  age,  the  justice  of  the  words  of  the  great  mathe-
matician Arago,  that  the  word  "  impossible  "  should  be  very  sparingly
used  outside  mathematics.


.....The  best  known  of  such  records  are  those  made  1870  to  1874  by  the
late  Sir  William  Crookes,  the  great  English  chemist  and  physicist,
which  were  undertaken  with  the  medium,  Florence  Cook,  then  fifteen
years  of  age,  and  with  Daniel  Dunglas  Home.

   

Quote:"mere pleasure or displeasure is at a lower level than the will to do something good or bad."

Quote:Let us ask ourselves the question: Why is the achievement of self-knowledge so difficult? Man is a very complicated being. If we mean to speak truly of his inner life, his life of soul, we shall not begin by regarding it as something simple and elementary. We shall rather have the patience and perseverance, the will, to penetrate more deeply into the marvellous creation of the Divine-Spiritual Powers known to us as Man.

From the elementary concepts of Anthroposophy we know that in waking life the four members of a man's being—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego—are organically and actively interwoven, but that in sleep the physical and etheric bodies remain in bed, while the astral body and ego are outpoured into the great world bordering on physical existence.

Quote:The life of the human soul as presented here, first from external, exoteric observation and then from observation of a more mystical character is revealed by deeper (occult) investigation. The processes that have been described in their more external aspect can also be perceived in man through clairvoyance. 

When a man stands in front of us today in his waking state and we observe him with the eye of clairvoyance, certain rays of light are seen streaming continually from the heart towards the head. Within the head these rays play around the organ known in anatomy as the pineal gland. 

These streamings arise because human blood, which is a physical substance, is perpetually resolving itself into etheric substance. In the region of the heart there is a continual transformation of the blood into this delicate etheric substance which streams upwards towards the head and glimmers around the pineal gland. 

This process—the etherisation of the blood—can be perceived in the human being all the time during his waking life.

Quote:Just as in the region of the human heart the blood is continually being transformed into etheric substance, a similar process takes place in the Macrocosm. We understand this when we turn our minds to the Mystery of Golgotha—to the moment when the blood flowed from the wounds of Jesus Christ.

Quote:Question: What is the relation of chemical forces and substances to the spiritual world?

Answer: There are in the world a number of substances which can combine with or separate from each other. What we call chemical action is projected into the physical world from the world of Devachan—the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. In the combination of two substances according to their atomic weights, we have a reflection of two tones of the Harmony of the Spheres. The chemical affinity between two substances in the physical world is like a reflection from the realm of the Harmony of the Spheres. The numerical ratios in chemistry are an expression of the numerical ratios of the Harmony of the Spheres, which has become dumb and silent owing to the densification of matter. If one were able to etherealise material substance and to perceive the atomic numbers the inner formative principle thereof, he would be hearing the Harmony of the Spheres.

We have the physical world, the astral world, the Lower Devachan and the Higher Devachan. If the body is thrust down lower even than the physical world, it comes into the sub-physical world, the lower astral world, the lower or evil Lower Devachan, and the lower or evil Higher Devachan. The evil astral world is the province of Lucifer, the evil Lower Devachan the province of Ahriman, and the evil Higher Devachan the province of the Asuras. When chemical action is driven down beneath the physical plane—into the evil Devachanic world—magnetism arises. When light is thrust down into the sub-material—that is to say, a stage deeper than the material world—electricity arises. If what lives in the Harmony of the Spheres is thrust down farther still, into the province of the Asuras, an even more terrible force—which it will not be possible to keep hidden very much longer—is generated. It can only be hoped that when this force comes to be known—a force we must conceive as being far, far stronger than the most violent electrical discharge—it can only be hoped that before some discoverer gives this force into the hands of humankind, men will no longer have anything un-moral left in them.

Quote:
Question: What is electricity?

Answer: Electricity is light in the sub-material state. Light is there compressed to the utmost degree. An inward quality too must be ascribed to light; light is itself at every point in space. Warmth will expand in the three dimensions of space. In light there is a fourth; it is of fourfold extension—it has the quality of inwardness as a fourth dimension.

Quote:Reflected as sub-physical world:

Astral World—the province of Lucifer
Lower Devachan—the province of Ahriman
Higher Devachan—the province of the Asuras

Quote:There is mercy and there is justice in God; to the just He dispenses justice and

to sinners mercy. In the soul of the world, which is the Universal Agent, there is a
current of love and a current of wrath. This ambient and all-penetrating fluid;
this ray loosened from the sun's splendour and fixed by the weight of the atmosphere 
and the power of central attraction; this body of the Holy Spirit, which we
term the Universal Agent, while it was typified by the ancients under the symbol
of a serpent devouring its tail; this electromagnetic ether, this vital and luminous
caloric, is depicted in archaic monuments by the girdle of Isis, twice-folded in a
love-knot round two poles, as well as by the serpent devouring its own tail,
emblematic of prudence and of Saturn. Motion and life consist in the extreme 
tension of two forces. “I would thou wert cold or hot,” said the Master. As a fact, a
great sinner is more really alive than is a tepid, effeminate man, and the fullness
of his return to virtue will be in proportion to the extent of his errors. She who is
destined to crush the serpent's head is intelligence, which ever rises above the
stream of blind forces. The Kabalists call her the virgin of the sea, whose dripping
feet the infernal dragon crawls forward to lick with his fiery tongues, and they fall
asleep in delight.

Quote:The Great Magical Agent manifests by four kinds of phenomena, and has been

subjected to the experiments of profane science under four names – caloric, light,
electricity, magnetism. It has received also the names of TETRAGRAM, INRI,
AZOTH, ETHER, OD, Magnetic Fluid, Soul of the Earth, Lucifer, etc. The Great
Magical Agent is the fourth emanation of the life-principle, of which the sun is the
third form – see the initiates of the school of Alexandria and the dogma of Hermes
Trismegistus.

(10-27-2025, 04:48 PM)F2d5thCav Wrote: Sorry, this is only tangentially related.  From my experience--

1. Fear as a magical attractor is a real thing, and it is a STRONG attractor.

2. The notion of being generally good and helpful does pay one back.  Not always quickly or directly, but karma will swing by and blow one a kiss.

Aaaaaaahhh-yaaaah-yaaaah-EEEYAAAH! Swinging in like Tarzan in a totally manly way 

sniiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiffff  

Quote:The facts verified by the Dialectical Society were surprisingly
evidential: they did not, however, secure scientific assent, but
they had one excellent result-they impelled William Crookes
to study the question. Fortunately he had the assistance of two

powerful mediums with whom to experiment-Florence Cook
and D. Dunglas Home.

Quote:ON CRYPTESTHESIA (LUCIDITY) IN GENERAL
Nearly the whole of subjective metapsychics can be reduced to
a single phenomenon which the magnetizers of a past age called
"lucidity" or "clairvoyance" (hellsehen) ; which is now called
telepathy, with various shades of meaning attached to the term.
I propose to name it cryptesthesia. Myers has already used the
term "telesthesia."
The Greek etymology of the word signifies "a hidden sensibility"-
a perception of things by a mechanism unknown to us
of which we are cognizant only by its effects.


We shall therefore class mediums in two distinct groups
1. Mediums showing physical phenomena.
2. Mediums showing psychical phenomena.


(B) The second degree consists in the creation of a new personality
by hypnotism. The normal personality reappears on awaking, but
under hypnotism and hypnotic suggestion a new personality appears
which is evidently factitious, since the magnetizer imposes it at will
and can maintain it by verbal suggestion. This artificial and transitory
personality also belongs to normal official psychology.


© The third degree is a mediumistic state, i.e., a new personality
is created by auto-suggestion. Hypnotism acts through
hetero-suggestion; mediumship by auto-suggestion. There is
very little difference between the personality of Marie Antoinette
as assumed by Helen Smith of her own accord, and the same
personality as aroused by suggestion of a hypnotizer.

(D) The fourth step is when the new personality shows
cryptesthesia and really seems to know things unknown to the
medium, and even things that the secondary personality alone
could be aware of, as in the case of Mrs.Piper incarnating
Phinuit or George Pelham.

The "guide" of the medium (i.e., the new personality that appears)
then seems to be a genuinely extraneous intelligence.
These phenomena can rightly be called metapsychic because,
taking them all in all, the normal intelligence of the sensitive is
quite insufficient to explain the strange and potent cryptesthesia.
I need scarcely remark that the notion that an extraneous force
is in play is only a hypothesis.

The division shows that metapsychic science is both experimental
and observational. To neglect either method would be
to maim the science disastrously.
Experimental cryptesthesia can be studied
A. In normal subjects,
B. In hypnotized subjects,
C. In mediums,
D. In sensitives.

Quote:The phenomena that Schrenck-Notzing and Mme.Bisson have
verified with Eva bring fresh evidence on the formation of ectoplasms, evidence that is of high theoretical importance. The word
"ectoplasm," which I invented for the experiments with Eusapia,
seems entirely justified. The ectoplasm is a kind of gelatinous
protoplasm, formless at first, that exudes from the body of the
medium, and takes form later. This embryo-genesis of materialization shows clearly on nearly all the photographs. In the early
stages there are always white veils and milky patches and the faces,
fingers, and drawings are formed little by little in the midst of this
kind of gelatinous paste that resembles moist and sticky muslin

(10-28-2025, 09:24 PM)Ninurta Wrote: Not having any sort of background in Victorian Occultism, most of the above just flies right over my head as if spoken in an obscure dialect of Martian. Especially the parts hinting at Hinduism, Zoroastrainism, Kabbalism, and any permutations of those foreign and esoteric "isms" ("Ahriman", anyone?) as Victorian Occultists were wont to do.


Really, all - the entire universe including you - is just the interplay of energies... every person, tree, bush, plant, rock, radio wave, light wave, and gravity wave.

.

(10-29-2025, 05:29 AM)babushka Wrote: Sounds to me like you understand just fine. Nothing these authors say is unique to them, it's the same stuff a million other people has written about or said since the dawn of time.

I did actually find the method written down, the issue is if I say do this and that and it looks so and so and what not then immediately others copy it and make up stories and the whole thing gets diluted into pseudo whatever. Sometimes I wonder if it's done on purpose to discredit people.

Ectoplasm is just a name made to describe a phenomena, so is mist or light beings or shadow entities. We don't know what the "stuff" is so we just give it the name we have as a description (or make one up). It's an attempt at rationalizing the irrational. We don't refer to each other as made of flesh, we refer to persons and leave the rest up to the proverbial gods and assume the learned ones knows a thing or two more, the spirit is not plasma it's a spirit. We all know what flesh is, what it tastes like what it looks like how it works..no we don't know how it works, we look and we just find more questions, a bit of the puzzle here and there but never the whole. We fail at that and then try and apply the same failed process to the ethereal.

(10-29-2025, 06:43 AM)Ninurta Wrote: Notice I said "bound" by our brains and bodies, not "limited to" by them. Some people have a spark of an ability to detect those others, whether in this universe or crossing universal boundaries. That ability is not "paranormal", it's more "hypernormal" - extending beyond the normal most of us can detect into other "normals". It's not "supernatural" as in above nature,  it's "hypernatural", extending into all areas of nature that some others either can't, or won't detect.

Discussions of ectoplasm seem to be mainly confined to the Victorian Era, among occultists and spiritualists. I've never seen a photo of it from that period that I am willing to trust as genuine, but that don't mean that some "fakers" weren't trying to represent, in a limited way, some real phenomena that other folks were actually observing with their own (made of energies, detecting other energies) sensory apparatuses.

.

Quote:The occult observer is able to see a continual streaming from outside into the brain, and also in the reverse direction, from the brain to the heart. Now these streams, which in sleeping man come from outside, from cosmic space, from the Macrocosm, and flow into the inner constitution of the physical body and etheric bodies lying in the bed, reveal something remarkable when they are investigated. These rays vary greatly in different individuals. Sleeping human beings differ very drastically from one another, and if those who are a little vain only knew how badly they betray themselves to occult observation when they go to sleep during public gatherings, they would try their level best not to let this happen!

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/EthBld_index.html

Rudolf Steiner

Quote:She describes the many historical descriptions of spirit materialization, observed under well-controlled conditions by experienced researchers such as Nobel laureate Charles Richet. She acknowledges that such phenomena are ostensibly unbelievable, no matter how well-attested. She describes her own experience witnessing such phenomena in the presence of the spiritualist circle in England centered on the physical medium, Stewart Alexander. She describes levitations, matter passing through matter, materializations, and direct voice manifestations.