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 On Saturday, May 20, 2006 while driving to the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel where Ramtha—in control of the body of his 'channeler' JZ Knight—would speak in the Hollywood Ballroom, I found myself experiencing what I would later realize to be a synchronicity incident.  I spotted a personalized license plate that said "BONMOTS" and would discover that this was an apt description of an aspect of Ramtha's unusual teaching manner.   When I'd witnessed Kevin Ryerson channel three different entities at the Philosophical Research Society in 1998, seeing his facial expressions when he first went into trance had been fascinating.  Although I don't remember having heard any 'bon mots,' I noticed that the beings who spoke through Ryerson at times sometimes referred to themselves with the pronoun 'we.'  Now, eight years later, here was another opportunity to witness channeling; however, on this occasion there was no display of the process leading int...

In a comment on one of my recent articles, How to attend to ‘I’? , Palaniappan Chidambaram asked: ‘Is being completely present to what is there is same like attending to “I”?’ Before attempting to answer this question, we need to consider what is meant by ‘what is there’, and whether this is the same as what should be meant by it. The obvious meaning of ‘what is there’ is what exists, but many things that we generally take to be existing may not actually exist, because they may only seem to exist. Therefore what we should mean by ‘what is there’ or ‘what exists’ is what actually exists and not what merely seems to exist. ‘I’ definitely does exist, because ‘I’ is what experiences both itself and all other things, so even if all other things merely seem to exist, their seeming existence could not be experienced if ‘I’ did not actually exist to experience it. The existence of ‘I’ is therefore necessarily true, whereas the existence of anything else is not necessarily true, because nothin...

A new study by yours truly begins to address the key question: can hypothalamic inflammation and leptin resistance be reversed? Leptin is the primary hormonal regulator of body fatness in the human body ( 1 ).  Secreted by fat tissue, it acts in many places in the body, but its most important effects on body weight occur via the brain, and particularly a brain region called the hypothalamus.  The hypothalamus is responsible for keeping certain physiological variables within the optimal range, including blood pressure, body temperature, and body fatness. In obesity, the brain loses its sensitivity to leptin, and this causes the body to begin 'defending' a higher level of body fatness, analogous to how a person with a fever 'defends' a higher body temperature ( 1 ).  Once a person has become obese, it's difficult to return to true leanness because this system vigorously opposes major fat loss.  Leptin resistance makes fat loss more difficult. In rodent models, leptin ...

Some of the sketches described in this article can be seen in these photographs.  In 2006 my somewhat shallow perspective of the word 'channeling' was that it often seemed to denote metaphysical philosophy commercially published and marketed for people with a gullible inclination for expressions of superficial 'feel good' spirituality.  In ensuing years while discovering many interesting books about different aspects of channeling, I have found only a few books (including some 'bestsellers') that seemingly were marketed as nonfiction despite there being no reason to make this claim about the narratives involving transcendental communication.  None of the Ramtha books could ever be associated with 'feel good' spirituality. After learning that JZ Knight was going to be interviewed by George Noory on the national radio show "Coast to Coast AM" in 2005, I decided to listen to the late night broadcast as she was somebody about whom I didn't kno...

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Last month a friend called Venkat asked me several questions in a series of three comments that he wrote on one of my recent articles, Is consciousness a product of the mind? , so this article is written in answer to his questions. In his first comment he wrote: Thanks very much for your response. I agree that it is not possible to know whether the external world (and the body-mind) exist independently of the perception of it. Equally, I don’t think that it is possible to prove that the world is just an illusion, a perception in consciousness. So I agree that one has to examine / question what the ‘I’ is. You imply that the result of this is the certainty that only consciousness is real and all else (including ‘my’ body mind) is an illusion. You commented in this blog, that Bhagavan’s ‘I am’ can be equated to the awareness that is aware of the awareness of a perception, and that we should turn our attention to this awareness. But is it possible to be ‘aware of the awareness that is aw...

Mrs. J. H. Conant (Frances Ann Crowell 1831-1875) The expression 'ascended master' is something of an enigma in relation to the ways an entity such as Ramtha is different from other transcendental communicators.  I'm not aware if there are other channelers who have described the channeling process as JZ Knight has in her autobiography A State of Mind, My Story (1987): "I was racing or flowing down a tunnel, but I couldn't see the sides.  I just remember that there appeared to be a wind taking me toward a brilliant light at the other end of the tunnel."  Trance mediums in earlier centuries wrote about being in a state of trance, sleep or unconsciousness while other personalities spoke through them.  Ramtha was quoted by JZ as having told her: ". . . you will bloom completely into that which is termed a channel.  Be it known, not that which be a medium — there are rivers of consciousness in difference between them."    In Biography of Mrs. J...