We have a striking ability to alter our psychological access to past experiences. Consider the following case. Andrew “Nicky” Barr, OBE, MC, DFC, (1915 – 2006) was one of Australia’s most decorated World War II fighter pilots. He was the top ace of the Western Desert’s 3 Squadron, the pre-eminent fighter squadron in the Middle East, flying P-40 Kittyhawks over Africa. From October 1941, when Nicky Barr’s war began, he flew 22 missions and shot down eight enemy planes (...) in his first 35 operational hours. He was shot down three times, once 25 miles behind enemy lines while trying to rescue a downed pilot. He escaped from prisoner of war camps four times, once jumping out of a train as it travelled from Italy into Austria. His wife Dot, who he married only weeks before the war, waited for him at home. She was told on at least three occasions that he was missing in action or dead. For 50 years, Nicky Barr never spoke publicly, and rarely privately, of his war-time experiences. He was very much a forgotten and forgetting hero (for further details, see Dornan, 2002). In his first public interview in 2002 on the Australian documentary program “Australian Story”, Nicky explained his 50 year silence by saying. (shrink)

“Spiritual emergence” is a profound spiritual opening that takes place in the form of different spiritual experiences that usually don’t constitute a serious problem or impairment in the everyday lives of the individuals who experience them. According to a paper by British psychiatrist Nicki Crowley, this kind of emergence is an organic process within human development, during which individuals are able to experience transpersonal elements.

Once in a great while a series of unintentional mistakes which could go unremarked, reach a mass and a wide distribution. When that occurs these mistakes take on a new life and somehow become established as a canon of 'scholarly' research. In the case of the extant literature in Spinozan academic writing, this has now gone far beyond the tipping point. Virtually all of the commentary, journals, conferences, courses and internet sites, now uniformly speak as one voice. And that voice (...) typically pronounces Spinoza's system to be seriously flawed. This chain of thought reaches back into the mid-years of the Twentieth Century. Meanwhile, there are handful of true Spinoza scholars; Hallett, Harris, McKeon, Roth and Saw, and a few others, who view Spinoza's philosophy as the greatest intellectual achievement in the history of philosophy. They see it for its comprehensive unity of thought, flawless logical presentation and masterful depiction of the entire spectrum of everything which is possible in existence in the entire universe. This, somewhat lengthy paper, sets out to enumerate and detail these egregious errors, to pair them with the corrective which will set the record straight and to move beyond that. A recommendation will be made to replace the shopworn and error prone method of 'comparative analysis' with a new rubric termed simply 'doing philosophy'. Spinoza exhorted us to assiduously avoid exposing the mistakes of others. Being a master of the inner workings of human psychology, he recognized that any form of negativity, typically closes the mind of the person who is exposed to it. But in this case there is no other choice. What is being papered over with this academic blockage and misinformation is Spinoza's brilliant explication of the wonders contained within the agency of the human mind, of how that mind can access the intelligibility of virtually everything in the cosmos and of the potential for humanity to shape its own evolutionary progression as a part of the 'unfolding of everything possible' which is 'Deus sive Natura sive Substantia'. Charles M. Saunders 11/8/2019. (shrink)