end times and dollar signs

Having disposed of Mission and Money: Understanding the University (Cambridge University Press, 2008) by Burton Weisbrod, Jeffrey Ballou & Evelyn Asch and The Power of Pills: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Drug Development, Marketing and Pricing (Pluto Press, 2006) edited by Jill Cohen, Patricia Illingworth & Udo Schueklenk I am greatly enjoying The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers (Cambridge University Press, 2008) edited by Austin Sarat & Stuart Scheingold. The latter includes chapters on areas such as cause lawyering in 1960s US network tv, images of human rights lawyers in the British press, a deconstruction of Rumpole of the Bailey and A Civil Action, anti-tobacco litigation, and an analysis of intellectual property and other disputes regarding Gone With The Wind (eg the Wind Done Gone controversy).

tuning the 'quantum field transceiver'

It is more enjoyable than another encounter with the work of Ervin Laszlo, this time his fulsome introduction to Arjuna Ardagh's Awakening Into Oneness (Sounds True, 2007).

Laszlo, the World Futures and Akashic Field guru, exhorts (p xiv) readers to "evolve into consciousness" and then heads into Mayan '2012 end of the world' calendar territory.

Here is where the critical importance of the Oneness Blessing and the Oneness process comes in. The most reliable, lasting and effective way to change ourselves is to evolve our consciousness.

One last question: How much time do we have to reach a more evolved consciousness? The answer may be shocking to many people: for the human family as a whole, the time is less than a decade. The date I have arrived at is the same as Bhagavan had envisaged: the end of 2012. This is not mere coincidence. A major shift in the tenor of human life on this planet by the end of the year 2012 has been predicted by a surprising number of cultures, from the Mayan and the Cherokee to the Indian. That date appears to be deeply etched in the collective consciousness of contemporary humanity, and both Bhagavan and I have sensed it. In my case I came to it as an empirical insight before I did the empirical research and calculations. The latter merely confirmed the insight, with a margin of error that is not likely to exceed a few years in either direction.

The Oneness Process? It "enhances the Oneness Blessing and thus helps individuals to achieve the altered state of consciousness in which their brain operates as a macroscopic quantum system".

What the heck, you might ask, is a "macroscopic quantum system"? To use Laszlo's words it is (p xi) where the brain -

shifts from being an EM-wave and photon-wave receiver to operating as a quantum-field transceiver. It receives, as well as sends, information in the form of holographic patterns in the quantum wave field that, as an element in the quantum vacuum, underlies all things in the universe. (I have called this universal information field the Akashic Field, for its effect recalls the ancient concept of Akasha, the cosmic medium that interconnects and records all things in space and time.

The notion of the 'evolved' brain as a 'quantum-field transceiver' harks back to 1920s nonsense about brains as transceivers of 'mental radio', popularised in deliciously zany works such as Upton Sinclair's 1930 Mental Radio and several generations of anxiety in which people fretted that someone was beaming 'waves' into their brains (an activity that could be foiled - bad pun - with the classic alfoil beanie).

Elvis at least confined himself to repackaging 1860s mumbojumbo about the 'spiritual telegraph' in his song about the 'royal telephone' (ie long distance to God).

Telephone to glory oh what joy divine
I can feel the current moving down the line
Made by God the Father for his very own
You can talk to Jesus on this Royal Telephone

Central's never busy always on the line
You can hear from heaven almost anytime
It's a royal service built for one and all
When you get in trouble give this Royal line a call.

Let's look beyond the transceiver. Bhagavan is Sri Bhagavan, the Indian guru, self-announced divinity (under the name of Kalki) and founder of Oneness University ("the World's leading spiritual school helping millions of people awaken into higher state of consiousness", presumably a hit for consumers of karma cola).

(Laszlo, apart from developing the oh so modestly named Theory of Everything, founded GlobalShift University ... an institution where I'm not expecting to study or teach and that apparently resembles the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM University, an institution that released oh so scientific reports about levitation, albeit its staff bizarrely chose to fly British Airways or United rather than substantiate their claims by floating off into the aether while seated on a teatowel or prayer mat.)

I confess to a deep scepticism about intuitions that there will be a "major shift in the tenor of human life on this planet by the end of the year 2012". Apart from the condescension implicit in eliding the richness of different cultures on the Indian subcontinent into "the Indian" and the ahistorical pop culture reference to forecasting by the Mayan and Cherokee (no Comanche, Sioux or Inuit ... perhaps because they're not in tune with the A-Field or had trouble getting Edgar Cayce and Madame Blavatsky to return their calls) in my opinion the notion of the brain as "evolving" in the near future to become a "quantum-field transceiver" is problematical.

Putting aside notions of telepathy, 'remote healing' and other attributes of the Akashic Field that have been endorsed or promoted by Laszlo and his followers, the claims are traditional ... but the traditions of the 1860s, 1890s, 1920s and 1950s.

In my opinion we do not have to look back to the Mayans. We can instead recall claims that were being made by proponents of spiritualism in the Victorian era, discussed in works such as Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press, 2000) by Jeffrey Sconce, Alfred Gabay's Messages from Beyond: Spiritualism and Spiritualists in Melbourne's Golden Age, 1870-1890 (Melbourne University Press, 2001), The Other World: Spiritualism & Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1985) by Janet Oppenheim.

Those proponents may well have been sincere and smart but their claims have been authoritatively debunked or are simply untestable and thus cannot be characterised as "hard science". As New Zealand academic David Marks commented in The Psychology of the Psychic (Prometheus Books, 2nd ed, 2000) supposed phenomena such as 'remote viewing' are "nothing more than a self-fulfilling subjective delusion" ... irrespective of whether they are promoted by the local fortune teller or 'scientists who have repackaged past vogues for ouija boards, mental radio and other expressions of credulity.

We might also recall claims made by L Ron Hubbard in relation to Scientology, a belief system that is barely distinguishable from quantum mysticism (precognition, telepathy, reincarnation, remote healing, quantum field transceivers ...).

Spirituality and science are not synonymous and from my perspective - not necessarily the perspective of my peers - faith has no need to rely on science or pseudo-science for its authority.