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Looking at individual diseases is informative, but it can cause us to become myopic, making broad health-related decisions based on narrow information.  It can cause us to miss the forest for the trees.  In this case, the "trees" are individual diseases and the "forest" is total mortality: the overall risk of dying from any cause.  Does eating meat increase total mortality, shortening our lifespans? Non-industrial cultures Traditionally-living cultures such as hunter-gatherers and non-industrial agriculturalists are not the best way to answer this question, because their mean lifespans tend to be short regardless of diet.  This is due to ~30 percent infant mortality, which drags down the average, as well as a high risk of death in adulthood from infectious disease, accidents, and homicide/warfare.  It can also be difficult to accurately measure the age of such people, although there are reasonably good methods available. However, there are semi-industrialized cultur

  Presented in this article are excerpts and photos from "Dr. V. Gustave Geley (Paris) on his Observations with Eva C., 1918," a concluding chapter of Phenomena of Materialisation (1920) by Baron Albert Von Schrenck Notzing.  The chapter presents  information about the research and findings of these two scientists in relation to materialization phenomena or what is translated in English as Geley's lecture topic of January 28, 1918: "Supra-normal Physiology and the Phenomena of Ideoplastics" presented at the Collége de France for members of the Psychological Institute. In his [Geley's] view, our ignorance concerning this subject is due to our lack of knowledge of the original and essential laws of nature.  Even normal physiology is full of riddles.  Thus the whole mechanism of life, and the activity of the so-called functions, are still far from being clear.  The constitution of the organism itself and everything connected with it—birth, growth, embryonic

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A friend wrote to me recently saying that in a German book on Uḷḷadu Nāṟpadu called Über das Selbst (‘About the Self’) the author has written that the absolute consciousness is connected through our navel, and asked me to comment on this. The following is adapted from the reply I wrote: I assume that what is meant here by the term ‘consciousness’ is what is conscious, which is the sense in which it is generally used in the context of the teachings of Sri Ramana or any other form of advaita philosophy. It is important to clarify this, because ‘consciousness’ is used in a variety of different senses, so its exact meaning is generally determined by the context in which it happens to be used. In this sense, the term ‘absolute consciousness’ likewise means what is conscious, but the adjective ‘absolute’ distinguishes it from any form of relative consciousness. Since any form of consciousness that experiences anything other than itself exists relative to whatever it experiences, it is not

Clairvoyance and Materialisation (1927) is the English translation of L'Ectoplasmie et la Clairvoyance (1924) by Gustave Geley (1868-1924).  In the book, Geley described nine sittings with medium ‘Eva C.'  These laboratory notes are succinct so I am presenting them in this article with book photographs inserted when mentioned.  Some of the enlargement photos show the mobile and mutable aspects of the biological phenomenon involving the amorphous substance that has come to be called 'ectoplasm.'   Geley mentioned that medium Eva C. "exteriorises the amorphous solid in exceptional abundance."  It is more appropriate in what should be a more knowing epoch to qualify this statement by attributing the manifestations to an omnipresent Force.  Geley provided some background information about his investigation of Eva's mediumship.  Mme. Bisson made Eva's acquaintance in 1909 and began to work with her.  From the outset she perceived that during the séances