Some days I find fascinating topics and other days I seem to be in a swamp of junky information. Today was the swimming in the swamp day - the phrase past lives has been overtaken by a movie. Reviews, trailerss and clips, wikipedia entries, the songs, everything. I keep thinking of the revenue that Google makes from paid retrieval listings.
After three pages, the spiritual organization named Eckankar shows up. We're now in the second set of paid-for retrievals.
This is intriguing: I've never heard of this and find out it is a religious spiritual group founded in 1965 in the U.S with Harold Klemp as its community leader. Its platform is that all people are eternal spiritual beings currently existing in a physical realm. Well, that sounds familiar for our religions. It believes in reincarnation and karma. Soul Travel and Hu Meditation are two of its practices.
There is a Living Master, isn't there? The Living ECK Master, or Mahanta, is currently Sri Harold Klemp, who took on the position in 1983. The previous Mahanta was Darwin Gross, and the founder of Eckankar was Paul Twitchell.
One scrolls past all of the ECKANKAR listings and then the cult articles start. These are things like: "Eckankar Survivor Speaks Out." In these articles this religion is referred to as a cult.
Do you know how many cults there are today? In the range of eleven, thirteen, fifteen, twelve and so on. This is an interesting experience in terms of keyword searching.
How things have changed in the keyword search realm. It is fluid, not at all consistent. Who pays to be retrieved drives what I get to see. Unless I am very specific and focused.
This is my experience naming photographs, too. Expressions and words are co-opted into commercial movies and religions with trademarks and copyrights. Take down notices pop up and I have to defend the use of words like "demure."
Past lives is a common phrase related to reincarnation and has been studied scientifically for 50 years. So one would hope for something more balanced in retrievals.
I am curious, though, and find the University of Virginia - the one academic institution which undertakes reincarnation research. They have studied 2,500 individual cases of childhood past-life memories. The article is HERE. It concludes with this: "the idea that consciousness is merely a product of brain activity, like software on a computer, does not have much empirical or philosophical support."
And the best headline in my search today - a true example of irony: "Past Lives: Advance Screenings"
Here's a Flexify manipulated image of a lily pond. Makes me think of consciousness. What would it look like visually? |
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