Linda Pendleton, author of nonfiction and fiction books, and articles, shares her thoughts on spirit communication with angels, spirit guides, and loved ones, on mediumship, UFOs, NDEs, past lives and other mystical and inspirational events.
In his sensitively insightful book, Earth In The Balance, Vice President Al Gore wrote, “It is my own belief that the image of God can be seen in every corner of creation, even in us, but only faintly. By gathering in the mind's eye all of creation, one can perceive the image of the Creator vividly. Indeed, my understanding of how God is manifest in the world can be best conveyed through the metaphor of the hologram.”
His book is essentially centered around environmental concerns but these issues are crucial to the entire human race. It is particularly striking that he used the hologram as a metaphor which best illustrates his own sense of connection to the eternal.
He went on to state, "If we are made in the image of God, perhaps it is the myriad slight strands from earth's web of life–woven so distinctly into our essence...that reflects the image of God, faintly. By experiencing nature in its fullest–our own and that of all creation–with our senses and with our spiritual imagination, we can glimpse, 'bright shining as the sun,' an infinite image of God."
Long before the advent of supercomputers and holograms, another splendid thinker arrived at similar but much more dramatic conclusions. Dr. Gustaf Strömberg's The Soul of The Universe, was published in 1940 and again in 1948 with additional appendices. His book was endorsed by none other than Einstein himself but it received less than glowing praise from the scientific community per se, perhaps because the book smacked uncomfortably of mysticism done up in scientific garb. Strömberg, an American of Swedish birth, was an astronomer and astrophysicist associated with the Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson Observatory. His stunning thesis is a prime example of genius unacknowledged in the context of its time.
Perhaps it took an Albert Einstein to recognize it. Einstein's cover blurb for the jacket of the book reads, "Very few men could of their own knowledge present the material as clearly and concisely as he has succeeded in doing." In his native Sweden, Strömberg was highly respected and the flags throughout Sweden were flown at half-mast in observance of his death in 1962.
Here is a brief sample of Strömberg's vision: “Matter and life and consciousness have their "roots" in a world beyond space and time. They emerge into the physical world at certain well defined points or sources from which they expand in the form of guiding fields with space and time properties. Some of the sources can be identified with material particles, and others with the living elements responsible for organization and purposeful activity. Some of them exist in our brain as neurones, and some of them have a very intimate and special association with their ultimate origin. They are the roots of our consciousness and the sources of all our knowledge."
Earlier in his writings, Strömberg had observed: "All our mental characteristics and faculties have their origin in the non-physical world. There lies the origin of our sensations of light and colors, and of sound and music. There is the origin of our feelings and emotions, and of our will and our thoughts. There is the source of our feelings of satisfaction and bliss, and of guilt and remorse. Our nerve cells seem to be the links which connect our physical brain with the world in which our consciousness is rooted. At death our "brain field," which during our life determined the structure and functions of our brain and nervous system, is not destroyed. Like other living fields it contracts and disappears at death, apparently falling back to the level of its origin. All our memories are indelibly "engraved" in this field, and after our death, when our mind is no longer blocked by inert matter, we can probably recall them all, even those of which we were never consciously aware during our organic life."
It is interesting to see how both the scientific and philosophical points of view today seem to be moving toward complimentary conclusions about the universe and man's place in it with much more coherence than ever noted before. Many brilliant thinkers, poets, philosophers, medical doctors, physicists and scholars are all bringing forward a sharper focus on the nature of reality. Side by side with science, we have had this quieter explosion of spiritual investigation and discovery.
Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist, best-selling author, popular radio host and TV personality, is the co-founder of string field theory (a branch of string theory), and continues Einstein’s search to unite the four fundamental forces of nature into one unified theory. His books include Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos; Einstein's Cosmos: How Albert Einstein's Vision Transformed Our Understanding of Space and Time.
Dr. Kaku is Chair and Professor in theoretical physics at the City College of New York, where he has taught for over 25 years, and has often been a visiting visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University.
He has been a guest now and then on the Coast to Coast AM Radio Show, and that is where I first heard him.
My husband, Don Pendleton, was always interested in science as well as metaphysics, and in his nonfiction writings often would marry the two, and at times, even bringing the religious into that marriage. At times, his fiction would also gave him the opportunity to do the same.
I just finished formatting Don’s sixth Ashton Ford novel Time to Time for Kindle, and in rereading it, I thought these ideas that he presented through his fictional character, psychic detective, Ashton Ford, were so very interesting. Don was a fan of the works of best-selling and controversial author, Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision, Earth in Upheaval, and Oedipus and Akhnaton; books I still have in my library. Dr. Velikovsky was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst but was best known for his scientific views on the solar system and our own existence. His theories were not accepted at the time by many in the science community but since that time more than sixty years ago, some of those theories now have been given credibility and consideration.
Don, in his fictional book, gives a nonfiction account of what happened to Velikovsky when he published his major work, Worlds in Collision. And Don’s character, Ashton Ford asks the important and revealing question: “What was the scientific/academic community so frightened of?” Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?
Are you at all familiar with Velikovsky’s books?--Or the controversy concerning his theories?
Excerpt, Don Pendleton’s Time to Time, from Chapter Thirteen:
More than thirty-five years ago, at the very dawn of the modem UFO age, a scholarly Russian Jew from Israel landed on our shores with a manuscript that would forever challenge man's view of himself, of his own history, and of his solar system. The man's name is Immanuel Velikovsky, and his Worlds in Collision was destined to ignite a fire storm of controversy that now stands as the most shameful attempt to suppress nonpolitical ideas since the Inquisition.
Velikovsky's great sin was that he chose to accept as literal truth the vast treasury of written history which modem scholars universally regard as religious myth. Another great sin was his vast intellect and fearless determination to state his views into the teeth of academic dogma and arrogance; his intrusion into the jealously guarded temples of science.
Even so, the hysterical reaction by some of the most eminent educators and scientists must have gone far beyond anything this quiet scholar could have anticipated. The language used to denounce him—even before his ideas had been published—was ferocious to an extreme unmatched in modern times, harkening back to the dark days when scientists themselves were being anathematized by the church, and to the same spirit that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and inspired Galileo to recant in order to escape a like fate.
Velikovsky did not write about or even mention flying saucers; indeed, he had undoubtedly never heard of such phenomena when he arrived in New York shortly after the end of World War II. But his story is relevant here as a stage setting for the later fire storm over UFOs, and I believe you will find it interesting as an insight into the functioning of some academic/scientific minds.
He was a medical doctor and psychiatrist with a fascination with biblical lore and an inherent sensitivity to the broad historical overview of man and his environment. Whether his reconstruction of history was right or wrong was never the issue. It was the implications of that reconstruction that caused the panic in so many institutional minds and made his very name a sore point to academicians (to this very day) who have never read a line of his book.
Velikovsky was not an astronomer or physicist, but the mere publication of his ideas was obviously highly threatening to the entire academy of astronomers and physicists here and abroad.
He was not an historian, or a sociologist, or a naturalist, or an anthropologist, archaeologist or geologist, yet many of these almost with a single voice arose to denounce and castigate the man without even coming close to a direct contact with his writings.
What caused such hysteria in our academic and scientific communities?
Velikovsky took the biblical events and other "myths" as a true account of real experiences of real men and women sharing together the real history of this planet. He then looked for logical explanations within the natural world to verify this real history. His brilliant investigation took him into the heavens as well as into the earth, and his conclusions were spectacular.
For example, though not an astronomer and with no credentials whatever to make such a statement, Velikovsky theorized that Venus did not begin its planetary existence as the other planets did, that in fact Venus did not occupy its present orbit around the sun until very recently, that in fact it was torn from the body of Jupiter by a violent upheaval within that planet and was loosed into the solar system as a comet that made several close passes at Mars as well as Earth, and settled into its present orbit during the recorded history of mankind. That "recorded history" is contained within the legends and myths for all to see.
The whole astronomical world "knew" and had long accepted the thesis that Venus has a surface temperature below sixty degrees Centigrade and that frigid Jupiter is buried beneath miles of ice. With all that learned conviction, it is easy to see how the institutions would laugh up their sleeves at the novel conclusions by Velikovsky that both planets must be quite hot, but it is not easy to understand the anger and hostility with which these conclusions were met.
Velikovsky's ideas were, of course, anathema to the body of professionals who enjoy the prestige and respect normally accorded our men of great learning. If Velikovsky was right then these guys were dummies and undeserving of their robes and honors—or so they seemed to feel.
The most prestigious American astronomer of the time, Harlow Shapley of Harvard (who apparently led the attack on Velikovsky) stated in a letter dated May 27, 1946: "If in historical times there have been these changes in the structure of the solar system, in spite of the fact that our celestial mechanics has been for scores of years able to specify without question the positions and motions of the members of the planetary system for many millennia fore and aft, then the laws of Newton are false. The laws of mechanics which have worked to keep airplanes afloat, to operate the tides, to handle the myriads of problems of everyday life, are fallacious. But they have been tested completely and thoroughly. In other words, if Dr. Velikovsky is right, the rest of us are crazy."
Shapley said it; I didn't. But Velikovsky was right. The pity is that none of these pillars of science would even consider the evidence. All of their protests were based on mere hearsay of Velikovsky's theories, long before the book was actually published.
And, for the shameful aspect, the storm of protest was geared to a single goal: the suppression of the ideas. Shapley led a broad institutional attack upon the proposed publisher of the Velikovsky manuscript, Macmillan Company, which was highly vulnerable to academic displeasure because of its large investment in textbook publishing. In a letter dated January 25, 1950, to the publisher at Macmillan, he tried to get the message across in a sly way: "It will be interesting a year from now to hear from you as to whether or not the reputation of the Macmillan Company is damaged by the publication of Worlds in Collision. Naturally you can see that I am interested in your experiment. And frankly, unless you can assure me that you have done things like this frequently in the past without damage, the publication must cut me off from the Macmillan Company."
Another member of Shapley's club, Dean McLaughlin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Michigan, wrote Macmillan on May 20, 1950: "The claim of universal efficacy or universal knowledge is the unmistakable mark of the quack. No man can today be an expert even in the whole of geology or the whole of astronomy. There is specialization within specialties. I do not mean that we are ignorant of all fields but our own; I do mean that we are not equipped to do highly technical original research in more than several distinct specialties for each scientist. But no man today can hope to correct the mistakes in any more than a small subfield of science. And yet Velikovsky claims to be able to dispute the basic principles of several sciences! These are indeed delusions of grandeur!"
The entire point of McLaughlin's letter was in protest to Macmillan's promulgation of such lies—yes, lies, as are contained in wholesale lots in Worlds in Collision."
Strange, isn't it, that the professor states in the same letter: "No, I have not read the book."
This is just a tiny sample of the unprecedented conspiracy to suppress a publication and which succeeded to the extent that Macmillan passed their hot potato off to Doubleday, which has no textbook division. But the club even went after Doubleday.
In a letter to a Doubleday subsidiary dated June 30, 1950, Fred Whipple—Shapley's successor at the Harvard Observatory—worded a sharply sarcastic broadside at the new publisher in discussing a public account of the matter: "Newsweek has unwittingly done the Doubleday Company a considerable amount of harm. They have made public the high success of the spontaneous boycott of the Macmillan Company by scientifically minded people."
Whipple then went on (in the same letter) to suggest a similar treatment of Doubleday: "There will be no revision of Earth, Moon, and Planets (a book by Whipple) forthcoming so long as Doubleday owns Blakiston (the subsidiary), controls its policies, and publishes Worlds in Collision."
Yet in a statement printed by the Harvard Crimson on September 25, 1950, Harlow Shapley said: "The claim that Dr. Velikovsky's book is being suppressed is nothing but a publicity promotion stunt. Several attempts have been made to link such a move to stop the book's publication to some organization or to the Harvard Observatory. This idea is absolutely false."
What were these great men so frightened of?
Velikovsky's thesis was to the effect that global cataclysms had fundamentally and repeatedly altered the face of the planet Earth during historical times, that the terrestrial axis had shifted, magnetic poles reversed, even a different orbit established.
In horrific convulsions, the oceans had replaced continents, Earth's crust had folded, massive volcanoes spawned new mountain chains, lava flows of up to a mile thick covered vast areas of the planet, climatological changes converted lush gardens to frozen tundra, and forests became deserts.
Civilizations collapsed in a wink and whole species disappeared as gigantic tidal waves swept along the continents, crushing and burying everything in their paths.
Stunned human survivors recorded the events as best they could, and those records survive today for any who will look and see.
Velikovsky looked, and he saw and reported it again. He also theorized a logical explanation, based entirely on the evidence, of how it all came about. Jupiter gave birth to Venus, which became a comet and roamed the solar system for eons before inevitable celestial mechanics brought the huge mass into a collision orbit with Earth.
It is not even important to my point here that Dr. Velikovsky's radical theories have been largely vindicated (though not on purpose) by new discoveries during our space age. Venus is a hot body with a very thin crust, as Velikovsky concluded, and it does rotate in a retrograde motion, again as he concluded. Jupiter is a very hot body—now even possibly thought to be a dim companion star to our sun—and it is a radio source, as Velikovsky theorized.
Many other of Velikovsky's theories, regarding electro-magnetism and sunspots and various other phenomena of our solar system, have been vindicated.
None of that is the point.
The point is that the entire scientific/academic community rose up to crush these ideas even before they could be promulgated, and with the aim of suppressing them rather than meeting them head-on in true scientific curiosity.
This is one example of a human phenomenon, the curious workings of the mind having to do with intellectual arrogance and survivalist instincts.
We will meet another example later, in the discussion of a similar conspiracy to suppress through ridicule all reasonable debates and/or researches of the UFO question.
Then we'll try to figure out why these people are so frightened.
If interested to learn more, Youtube has a series of six videos with Velikovsky (The Bonds of the Past), and discussions of his theories. I believe the videos was from the 1970s. Also, Carl Sagan (who was outspoken against Velikovsky) did a Cosmos show about him.
“All of us are here creating our future every minute.” ~Doreen Virtue, Ph.D., Angel clairvoyant
Best selling author Gregg Braden, internationally renowned as a pioneer in bridging science and spirituality, and Doreen Virtue discuss our future and where we are in the evolution of our planet (and ourselves).
I’ve never gone along with the apocalyptic view of 2012, and any other event for that matter, but instead, have believed our planet is in constant change as we are as a civilization. More about Change Here and Here in previous blogs.
I especially like Gregg Braden’s comment which I very much identify with. Maybe you will too, if you are here reading, listening, and enjoying it. He commented, also, if you were listening to this you were “probably the kind of person that other people have always looked at as being a little odd, in some ways.” And it is because we are “odd” that we are “willing to look at the world a little differently, beyond the edges of our comfort zone.”
And I join them in being a “professional odd,” as Doreen Virtue said. How about you?
and thanks, Edith, for bringing this video to my attention :-)
Walt Whitman, among the greatest poets of our times, obviously was highly sensitive to inspiration from the spiritual realm. His epic work, Leaves of Grass, serves as the title piece of an extraordinary collection of his inspired works which emerge, finally as a self-portrait of the poet and his universal images of reality. The work presents numerous references to the immortality of the soul and, in particular, to reincarnationist thought.
In Song of Myself, written in 1855, Whitman begins the opening verse with this striking understanding:
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you."
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Below is an Excerpt from my book, Whispers From the Soul: The Divine Dance of Consciousness by Don and Linda Pendleton.
ENGINES OF AWARENESS
Until modern science captured the human imagination on this planet, the engine of understanding was fueled by poets and philosophers, musicians and magicians, and other forces which unbridled human creativity. From the earliest recorded histories of mankind, the finer essences of human growth have been set free by the common assumption that our world is the abode of powerful spiritual forces with which we become intimate and join with them in the divine dance.
However, since every force within the natural world also seems bent into a common need for survival, the greatest fear of all is that death lurks behind every bush, and pain behind every joy. Since also it seems that the instinctive drive for procreation places us in an ever widening pool of activities which relate us all to one another inseparably, the common dilemma for every form of animate life is that every contact with every other life is undertaken at great risk. If love is woven into the very fabric of human consciousness, then the entire life experience continually intermingles us all into common bonds of joy and peril. It is that dance which has created and sustains the human experience on Planet Earth. Perhaps this is why there is no joy without some sorrow, no exaltation without some frustration, no growth without some pain.
It is clearly remarkable, then, that the human family has made such incredible strides forward instead of being engulfed by fears and competitions. If it is true that this universe was created some twenty billion years ago, as recognized by earth time, then the human presence on Planet Earth has been brief, indeed, and our species mere babes of the universe. The wonder is not, as some have said, that we have not blown our planet asunder by now but that we have developed the ability to do so and the wisdom, so far, not to. Obviously something more important than mere survival and more enthralling than mere power is moving the creative imaginations of humanity. Could it be true, then, that love is the magical ingredient? If not for love, then why do we put up with any of it and continue to believe that something more important than our own selfish needs and desires is at the root of this constant striving?
For all of us it seems that the need to understand and the willingness to seek our own destinies are the most powerful and moving forces behind existence itself. That drive did not begin in this century or any other but is that which drives the universe and empowers all sentient life. There were shamans and priests long before scientists, seers and soothsayers eons before physicians, oracles before preachers. All of the ancients spoke of a knowledge and wisdom beyond time and gifts beyond anything a materialistic awareness may envisage.
Our Twentieth Century equivalent of an expanded awareness will be found among the psychics, healers, mediums, astrologers, psychometrics and various others who tap into the spiritual dimensions of consciousness. But these special gifts of spiritual awareness need not be theirs alone. It may be possible for each of us, in our own way, to benefit from and enjoy the divine threads of the spiritual connection that links us all, through this dimension or another. Perhaps we need only to reach for and accept what has been ours from the beginning.
