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This morning I watched some videos I streamed from a University of California TV site. An e-mail correspondent posted a link for a group of Early Christian videos that amounted to lectures given in the past few years at UC.
The link connected to a list of videos that can be watched online. I noticed that there was a one hour lecture by Elaine Pagels. She wrote the book I bought years ago called The Gnostic Gospels. I don't seem all that sure that my buying and subsequent intense reading of this book wasn't somehow preordained.
The memory of my reaction to reading her book led to me subscribing to an e-mail discussion group nearly ten years ago to discuss the Gospel of Thomas, and I've been a contributing member. I dropped out for at least a year once, but one of the moderators asked me to return, and I've been brainlessly chattering away since then.
The UC lecture by Pagels was on the Book of Revelations:
http://www.uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=15114
The first time I watched it got interrupted by visitors, although I probably got to see most of it, but I decided to watch it again to make sure I saw all of it. I found it helpful. She concluded that the reason it was written was as war propaganda against the Roman Empire. She explained why she had reached that conclusion, but clearly pointed out that her research was about how the world has used the Book of Revelations for their own purposes. Mostly for the same reason it was originally composed, to condemn the current Empire for having no pity on the outsiders.
The real reason I watched Pagels video was to gain some perspective on why the topic of her book, The Gnostic Gospels, had such a profound effect on me. Participating in the e-mail discussion group takes a huge amount of time because I compose every response or regret it if I don't. E-mail groups about religion can be murderously cruel. I ain't dead yet.
Before I lost the link I went to the UC Home page to find out if getting to their videos might be easy. It was. Real easy. All their videos are laid out in the center of the Home page and broken down by topic and subject in a logical manner that encourages exploring.
To date, I haven't done a lot of research on rheumatoid arthritis. I got a long memory of ugly deformations that were scary. My mother's sister got it after she had her second child and it really crippled her up. She was a real sweet woman and us kids were encouraged to approach her for a hug when we visited. I needed lots of hugs and so I went to her quite easily, but her hands looked like claws.
I saw a two-part video on RA by an expert in the field and decided to face my fears and watch both videos. I am is real happy it did. My diagnosed disease gives the appearance of being in remission, and I've been afraId to get my hopes up because RA is reputed to be incurable. Well, not according to this doctor. He explained very believably why. For starters, methotrexate.
This expert stated that methotrexate has been known but disregarded for a couple of decades because of cortisone, but then it came back as the fundamental drug for treating RA. Before cortisone and methotrexate the only way RA was treated was aspirin and bed rest. The disease inevitably got worse and the patient usually died early in agonizing pain.
A while back the rheumatologists at the VA in Durham put me on a very expensive drug labeled Humira. Nobody explained nothing to me about why they prescribed in, much less the side-effects or that a small infection could get out of control and kill me because it lowers the immune system such that the body can't fight common infections off well. I didn't know.
The expert on the video explained the whole deal, and for the first time I understood their unstated strategy. I probably wasn't in as much danger as I first figured, but with nobody telling me nothing I figured I had to look out for myself. The methotrexate and hydroxychloroquine have really done well by me, but the Humira is a different sort of thing that I may oughta reach for. The important thing for me now is that I'm not actually fooling myself that I seem to be in remission.
Anyone who has explored sensory deprivation or meditated for a long ti-me knows that it takes about 45 minutes to completely let go of the sensory dimension at first. What happens in float tanks (or in deep volcanic tunnels in Hawaii where heated seawater is found) is that a brain that has been getting it's stimuli from external sources through the five senses (or less) is forced to reach for an inner source In a totally dark soundless artificial environment or a natural place like a cave the brain doesn't receive any external stimuli, because it's not there any more.
The first thing the brain does is to make it's sensory system more sensitive so that it can get it's fix of sight and sound. Although sight and sound are the two biggest bandwidth hogs of brainwaves, the kinesthetic sense and the taste/smell sense are given even more than their usual share of focus because sight and sound can be totally eliminated in a sealed chamber.
The immediate chore of refocusing one's attention to the remaining three senses exclusively usually isn't enough of a task to absorb the heightened focus of the brain's sensory system. So, the brain keeps making it's sensory system more and more sensitive until the body is as alert as it can possibly get.
Yet, even then, because the brain still can't get any stimuli from the outside world it starts creating it's own stimuli to fill the vacuum created by the physical blockage of it's normal source. The stimuli it calls forth is the stuff of dreams, and this inwardly produced stimuli is apperceived in the most consciously aware state of being possible.
Why would I not conclude that the dynamic I've basically been calling a "conversion experience" for most of my adult life be called a conversion experience if that's what is really occurring? I've grown to think that in every case whether the situation centers around religion, politics, or games like chess that the conversion effect springs from the brain responding to external stimuli in it's usual way, and then, for whatever reason inverting it's focus toward an inner source, and that is the "conversion" referenced in every case.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
