A couple of days ago, not long after breakfast, my oldest daughter, who is 8, was coming upstairs to ask me a question when I heard her give a little shriek of surprise. In my house, kids are shrieking and screaming and laughing all the time, so I didn’t think twice about it. But then she came up, all a-twitter, and told me she’d seen an apparition behind her on the stairs. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the first of a series of posts on how human consciousness is structured. There are dozens of hypotheses from all over the world about how consciousness can be raised, lowered, changed, and so forth. In this series, I’d like to present some of my favorites: mythological archetypes, the Leary eight-circuit model, western astrology, the chakra system, Rudolf Steiner’s ideas, David Hawkins’s 12 levels of consciousness, and the Tarot. I’m going to describe them briefly and try to integrate them into a single model. (Then I’m going to try to run a 1.5-minute mile, fly to the moon, and cure cancer. Then I’ll have breakfast.) This is going to be challenging, but fun.

In this first post, I’ll describe Jungian archetypes and the Wilson/Leary eight-circuit model, and show how they may be describing (at least partly) the same thing.

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This is something a lot of people do. Steve Pavlina has a post devoted to it, with tons of comments; he notes in passing that, at first, he “became skilled at sensing” where they were, presumably using something akin to dowsing, but then he fell back on simply hammering key hooks next to his garage door. Lifehack.org has a post devoted to what to do about losing USB sticks. In both cases, the consensus opinion is to find a consistent place to put your things, and always keep them there, so you always know where to look. Rudolf Steiner has by far the best solution, though, which is what I’ll describe below. Read the rest of this entry »