The Astral Pages

Screen print from Unheimliche Geschichten (Scary Stories), also known as Eerie Tales, 1919, directed by Richard Oswald.

Erasing the Line Between Mysticism and Science

Not really a blog.

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Turning Lead Into Gold

In 1980, scientists actually changed bismuth into gold. Bismuth is next to lead on the Periodic Table. They could have used lead, but it would have been more difficult and more expensive. As it was, they spent many thousands of dollars for a piece of gold so small you can’t see it without an atomic microscope. Each element contains atoms with different number of protons. A Hadron Collider can accelerate atomic particles to such high speeds that when they collide, a few protons are chipped off, changing the number of protons, thus changing the element to a different element. The atomic number of bismuth is 83, lead is 82, and gold is 79.

Alchemist Hennig Brand discovers phosphorus in this 1795 painting by Joseph Wright. This has nothing to do with gold other than alchemists tried and failed to change lead into gold, but it’s a cool picture.
Hadron Collidor. CMS detector for LHC in Cessy, France, photo by Tighef , CC BY-SA 3.0, File: View inside detector at the CMS cavern LHC CERN.jpg, Created: 24 April 2014

From the Back Cover

“Synchronicities are expressions of the dreamlike nature of reality. Just like with our dreams at night, our inner process is given shape through the seemingly outer world. There is an instantaneous correspondence between the inner and outer worlds, not because they are two separate dimensions that are communicating faster than the speed of light, but because they are inseparably united as one seamless, already unified, whole continuum.”
-Paul Levy

“Science is about observation. Simply that. To really understand the true nature of the ‘reality’ that surrounds us we have to take into account subjective experiences as well as objective observations. It is only through treating anomalous experiences as sources of scientific data that we will reach a fuller appreciation of the wonders of this universe.”
-Anthony Peake

“In the last decade I have grown to appreciate the piling up of these so-called coincidences as evidence of a deep structuring to reality bearing the unmistakable signature of consciousness. The process has shocked my expectations, based as they were on scientific materialism, and caused me to re-evaluate my worldview in light of the evidence. The fact that so many disparate measurements converge on a few numbers and ratios does not appear to be random. There is more to reality than the physical.”
-Scott Onstott

“Carl Jung coined the term synchronicity; this is his definition: ‘Synchronicity is the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer.’ A shorter definition would be a meaningful coincidence. Shorter still would be to just say pay attention. The shortest definition of synchronicity is magic.”
-Mike Clelland

Bill Ectric

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