Do this as a favor to me...if you don't want to do it for me, do it for some woman in your lifetime who may have had, has, may get breast cancer.

Go to http://www.cignafoundation.org

Click on the pink ribbon once you're at the site -- for every click in the month of October, (which is Breast Cancer Awareness Month) the CIGNA Foundation will donate $1 -- up to $100,000 -- to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation.

Cut and past this message, send it out, or cut and paste the link or link to my blog entry.  Don't leave this money on the table, help eliminate breast cancer in the lifetime of some woman, educate others so they don't have to face unnecessary suffering.

(Thanks to my best friend for sending this information my way!)

12:18:59 PM    comment []

In re: Jan Haugland’s commentary: Does the Soul or Spirit Really Exist?

Great post today by Jan.  Personally, I’m trying to keep an open mind on the subject. 

While I firmly believe that religion and science should be separate, I don’t think that spirituality and science are necessarily to be separate.  Some of our greatest scientists are and were highly spiritual people (not necessarily religious); their greatest efforts may have been guided by their spirituality.  For this reason I believe that science will continue to explore the spirit beyond the corporeal, tangible world in which we currently reside.

For example, the area of quantum physics opens new discourse on the nature of our world.  If as quantum physics explains the majority of matter is really space between protons, what exactly is this physical construct we perceive?  If it’s mostly space, is it our perception that is a construct?  If our perception is a construct, then are not both science and religious experience merely constructs as well, based upon our constructed perception?  Wherein does spirit lie, or is it the thing that ties together science and religion?

What of Bell’s work on nonlocality?  Or Bohm’s theory of implicate order?  Much of Bell’s and Bohm’s work as well as that of Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, Schrodinger  and many others suggests that things are not as they seem in the physical world; we cannot rely entirely on that science which is limited to physical vision, physical proof.  Even the act of observation influences results.  Theories of multiple dimensions, string theory, Many Worlds theory, all strongly imply that much of what we can’t explain in physical science, that which we rely on religion to answer, may yet be “fleshed out” by something between science and religion.

I’m also struck by the body of work in psychology which documents and strongly suggests a non-local entity which exists both prior to incorporation and after the body fails.  Refer to Dr. Jenny Wade’s work, A Holonomic Theory of the Evolution of Human Consciousness; her text assembles much of psychological studies to date on pre-birth/prenatal and post-death consciousness, as well as states of consciousness between.  This is science, not religion, querying only the nature of consciousness based on observation, fact-gathering and analysis – yet it strongly suggests there is something more than the corporeal we believe contains our lives.

A striking similarity between Newtonian/Cartesian science and religion is that most physical science and most religions insist one “must be present to win”.  Both are heavily invested in the limitation that the universe is only what one observes or experiences while in the flesh (or particle, versus wave), and that one cannot be anything but flesh if one were to be proven, not a demon or god.  One must be corporeal to be real – anything else is unreal.  (Many religions maintain their gods become flesh at some point, or achieve a physical incarnation, as if even gods cannot avoid the physical world.)  If one believes either quantum physics or transpersonal psychology regarding consciousness, one cannot subscribe to the limitations of existence bounded by the body.

It seems like an odd couple, psychology and quantum physics, but there they are – two fields of science taking the closest peek at the spiritual world, without even attempting to do so.  They’ve convinced me there’s more to heaven and earth than my meager physical human brain can yet conceive.  I’m so certain that there’s more than religion and Newtonian/Cartesian science have explained that I no longer identify as Catholic (as I was raised); I’m much closer to Buddhism, and/or something else as well.  Something as definable as that beyond our science and religion.  There's just so much unknown, possibly unknowable in the flesh.

Hence my position of keeping an open, virtual mind.

9:50:22 AM    comment []