To Catch a Cosmic Mockingbird

By Christian Howard

First, the author confronts Hawking and his theory in GRAND DESIGN that the universe created itself. This suggests the immaculate self-conception of the universe in which it is miraculously mom, dad and child. Instead, with examples like Alexandrina Da Costa’s not eating or drinking for thirteen years, Mr. Howard shows that sometimes the laws of physics are irrelevant. Further examples like the returns from death of Eben Alexander and Anita Moorjani show consciousness exists independent of the body. Is there also consciousness independent of the ‘body’ universe?

Second, Martin Larson’s book The Story of Christian Origins shows Christianity is a jumble of ancient myths. Heaven and hell were invented by the Persians around 3000BC. The half-man, half-God savior who rose from death to save people from their sins was Osiris created in Egypt around 2700BC. Back then, Egyptians were eating their dead relatives out of respect. Being ‘born again’ was cooked up by the ruling class to protect the mummification business. They needed whole bodies to mummify and cannibalism was eating into their profits. Real flesh and blood became bread and wine. Is there anything left to believe in? Is there anything called God?

Where do we go from here? Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde said the definition of our universe will remain ‘fundamentally incomplete’ until we include consciousness. Mockingbird is a blend of quantum physics and paranormal experiences that reveal a new definition of the universe’s origins, humanity’s place in it, and how humanity relates to the dimensions beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Howard
• Release date: Jul 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476023151

Book preview

To Catch a Cosmic Mockingbird

Christian Howard

Copyright 2012 by Christian Howard

Smashwords Edition

‘When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of humility and elation combined is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mahatma Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.’

Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan,

The Demon Haunted World

CONTENTS

Introduction

New Realities

Paranormal Journeys

Cause and Effect

Many Karmas

Finding Love

Santa Claus and the Mind

Real Illusions

Perfect Beer

Cosmic Mockingbird

Goodbye God

Cosmic Wings

Epilogue

References

INTRODUCTION

There are holes in space and time. An energy comes through into our dimension and upsets what we call reality. It doesn’t even pay attention to the laws of physics. Here’s an example. A paralyzed Portuguese woman called Alexandrina Da Costa did not eat or drink for thirteen years, did not lose weight and stayed healthy the whole time. On learning of this, you might understandably respond that it’s not possible to upset the laws of physics and biology like this and someone must have secretly been giving her food. Many people at the time did in fact say her condition was nothing but a hoax. Her family and friends became so upset Alexandrina was being called a fake that they eventually appealed to local civil authorities and church leaders for a test to prove the validity of her condition. Under their guidance, Alexandrina was taken by ambulance to a hospital where she was placed under 24 - 7 surveillance by a team of doctors and nurses for 40 days. Her condition was affirmed. As the final medical reports indicated, she didn’t eat or drink anything the whole time and at the end of the test had not lost weight and was completely healthy.

It is a known fact that a person will die without liquids in less than a week, let alone forty days or thirteen years. In the case of the Hindu mystic Giri Bala, another person who did not eat, when Yogananda visited her in a 1936, she claimed not to have eaten for 56 years. Unfortunately there is no scientific data available in her case. As for Alexandrina, from a forty-day test in hospital there are considerable medical records and some of these are included here. Her doctors reported she retained her weight, and her temperature, breathing, blood pressure, pulse and blood were normal. In our time, there’s a report of a non-eater by the name of Prahlad Jani in India. In 2010 he was tested by a team of Indian army doctors and technicians while being monitored 24 – 7 under closed circuit television. He did not eat or drink during the test period and claims not to have eaten for 70 years. The doctors did allow him to brush his teeth and use mouthwash while making sure he did not drink any of it by measuring what they gave him and what he spat out. They also let him bathe but without checking the ph of the water after his baths to see if he was secretly peeing in the tub. As far as I am concerned, and no offense intended to the quality of the Indian army doctors, to remove any possibility of cheating I think the test should be repeated for a longer period and under a set of rigorous criteria with a group of international observers. This is too important not to check out thoroughly. Since Jani is still alive at this writing, he could be tested again. But regardless of the test, as you will see there is a very specific and similar paranormal event that happened to Jani, Alexandrina and Giri Bala. Only after these events were they able to stop eating. This is in contrast to an attempt not to eat in modern times by people who did not have a similar paranormal experience. Several of them in fact died. By the way, an additional supporting factor for Alexandrina’s condition is that after the medical reports of her test were released, the accusations against her stopped. And in the last thirteen years of her life during which she continued not to eat or drink, no evidence ever came up that showed she was faking it.

Giri Bala was well known for her complete fast, was in no way profiting from it and had experienced what the Hindus call cosmic consciousness. She was considered a Hindu saint. For our part as explorers, on hearing about her and the others, we must ask what would be the logic of three people who did not benefit in any way from their conditions to continue deceiving people for 13, 56, and 70 years? It isn’t logical. It would also not be logical for us to dismiss them without trying to find out what was going on. There is something here worth exploring, and what we can infer from these three cases is that there just might be some kind of life-giving energy that does in fact exist outside our dimension and does not pay attention to the laws of physics. It somehow is able to penetrate and causes physical consequences in our space/ time dimension. It can sustain human lives without normal human needs.

Two other events are important to mention because they relate directly to a form of consciousness that can apparently exist in a condition separate from a physical body and outside physical reality. They involve Anita Moorjani in Hong Kong and a practicing neurosurgeon from Harvard Medical School, Dr. Eben Alexander. Both of them had what are called NDEs - near death experiences. In Anita’s case, she had stage 4 lymphoma and all her organs had shut down. Her family had been called to be with her in her last hours, but instead of dying she left her body and went to a place she describes as pure love. She communicated with other consciousnesses on a non-physical level, and after returning to her body experienced a highly unusual and rapid non-medical healing. In his NDE involving as he put it – his brain bathed in pus from hepatitis, Dr. Alexander’s consciousness also left his body and he experienced a similar journey to a place of complete love. He also experienced a full non-medical recovery after having been brain dead. In these and the prior events mentioned, this energy apparently in control of biology and physics gives us examples of its power and suggests there may be a fully functioning dimension of consciousness independent of physical reality. But these are just a few of many, many real events that are scientifically unexplainable – the precise definition of paranormal

How could these happen? What is this energy that can apparently disrupt the reality we’re used to and where does it come from? What kind of cosmic system do we live in that allows events like these to happen here in our dimension, and more important, why? Is it something that today’s advances in science and logic can now explain or at least help us understand? Unfortunately not. Science is not helping to find answers because by definition, paranormal can’t be on their radar. Physicists work with math and formulas to develop theories, and the paranormal doesn’t fit within these boundaries. In the non-scientific community there’s no help either. Religious people immediately say this energy is God, and atheists say it can’t be because there is no God and everybody involved in paranormal events is either cheating or hallucinating. Religious people and atheists have reached a stalemate. One side says you can’t prove God doesn’t exist and the other side says you can’t prove it does.

For our purposes here at the beginning of our journey, saying it was God is not acceptable and saying it wasn’t God isn’t acceptable either. We have evidence there is something, we just don’t know yet what it is. But we need to explore what is going on from a basis of today’s knowledge and scientific advances not from flat denial, nor from accepting the myth-based beliefs developed by scientific illiterates beginning some five thousand years ago. The undeniable fact is there is something beyond our reality that often shows itself in our dimension as it did with Alexandrina and the others. The fact is that while Dr. Alexander was brain dead here, his consciousness was very much alive and functional somewhere else. And he came back to tell us about his journey as Anita did from hers. As a race of inquisitive explorers trying to locate our space in infinity, we humans would like to know what this energy beyond our accepted laws is, its source and how it functions. This is the purpose of the journey here, to find out what reality is and where it comes from.

Physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, who also with Hawking co-wrote A Brief History of Time and War of World Views with Deepak Chopra, tackled this subject and gave us their version of how the universe and everything we know came into existence. In their book the Grand Design, they follow the scientific approach and exclude anything to do with either consciousness or the paranormal. Based on accepted as well as unproven theories such as M-theory, they declare that the universe created itself and did not need help from any outside forces beyond those that are scientifically explainable. While they write that certain ingredients were necessary, they do not mention anything about the source of any preconditions required for their universe to appear. We might view this as a scientific-religious theory, that the universe experienced both an immaculate conception and a virgin birth except there weren’t any parents at all.

There’s nothing about consciousness in the Grand Design, and reviewers such as biologist Richard Dawkins were content that God was not included in the mix either, and now as far as creation is concerned, God can be considered unnecessary, irrelevant and scientifically officially dead. But some of Hawking’s peers did not like the book, nor did they agree with its conclusions. With regards to consciousness, while he did not write this in a criticism of Hawking’s book, Stanford cosmologist Andrei Linde, known for developing the chaotic inflation theory, suggests that without adding in the element of consciousness, a description of our universe and its origin must always remain ‘fundamentally incomplete’. He shows there are other views of reality offered by scientists and evident disagreements within the scientific community itself.

From their perspective of logic and intuitive perception, our mentors Teris and Ru lead us on a different kind of journey to discover the source of reality including of all dimensions beyond the bounds of our space-time universe. They suggest that nothing can exist unless it first has the potential to exist, and this includes time, space and matter. Their logic is that nothing can exist without a cause and there has to be a type of self-aware creative consciousness that contains all causal potentials before the existence of anything including a physical universe and self-aware creative humans. The obvious question is, if it in fact exists, where is this consciousness, and where are these potentials before anything physical and the laws of physics themselves can occur? What can contain them in an unmanifested state? Where was the potential for Anita’s and Dr. Alexander’s healings and the power to implement them while they were both about to die? And why would it want to heal them? Answering these questions by using all the tools available is the purpose of the exploration that follows.

As for the position taken by scientists like Hawking and Mlodinow, Teris considers it illogical for them to hold so firmly to the laws of physics alone when events such as those mentioned annihilate the basic rules of science. Consider also the laws that were destroyed by Alexandrina’s Condition. She cancelled the law of cause and effect because her body was very much alive without any physical causes that are required to keep human bodies alive. She destroyed the first and second laws of thermodynamics that state all closed systems without energy input will decay and perpetual motion can never exist. The fact is her body was a closed systems that did not decay, and she was in fact operating like a perpetual motion device for all the time she did not eat. He body was like a car running every day without any need for gas, water or oil.

She also destroyed the universal constant that states all energy was created in one shot in the Big Bang at the beginning of the universe and cannot be either added to or taken away from. This is the law of conservation of energy that states energy can neither be created nor destroyed, that it only changes form. That’s not the case here because it appears that a non-physics energy was intruding into our universe and creating a physical result and therefore an imbalance in the total original energy of the universe. Bodies that should have died and decayed did not. Teris would ask how anyone can think this universe could create itself when there is so much evidence of a conscious force outside it for which the laws of physics required for a self-generating universe are simply meaningless.

Though he did not ever say it except by inference, Teris would suggest that it was unwise of Hawking to call his book the Grand Design when he doesn’t take into account all the available evidence. As far as he and his claims are concerned, if this were hard science and the paranormal playing chess with Hawking and his self-created universe on one side and paranormal events on the other, in these broken laws of physics, that’s checkmate. And if these supposedly immutable laws of physics can be broken, then under the right circumstances any and all of them can, including those on which Hawking bases the appearance of the universe. Teris has utmost respect for all scientists who explore the physical reality in which we live and loves to watch their ideas unfold. But he would suggest that we examine this question – what original causal laws did in fact exist before time, matter and space so the laws of physics and the universe itself could appear? What came first? Was it our laws that are like putty in the hands of the energy that could sustain Alexandrina and took Anita and Eben on their journeys, or was it instead this outside-time energy? And if it was the outside time energy, did it simply let our laws and the universe appear as a kind of cosmic game, something that for this energy must obviously be some kind of holographic illusion since it can apparently change how it functions at will?

Teris and Ru have taken us on many journeys to help us understand this energy. What follows is just one of them. On this journey it’s Teris who leads the way and he wants to lead us through these apparent holes in space and time back in the other direction. That’s the mission here – by looking at some of its effects in our dimension, to explore this energy and how we and our physical universe relate to it. His thoughts are a marriage of paranormal, quantum physics, analysis of the evidence and his own evolved intuitive perception, a ceremony beyond the scope of hard science to perform. This is a journey to explore what would logically seem to be the most important ingredient in any universe or dimension inside and outside cosmic time, the ability to observe and experience it. Otherwise, to what is it real and for what purpose does it exist? This is the domain of consciousness. You’d think consciousness would be the basis for any real grand design or how could we ever know if there is one? Why would it matter anyway? What is it that cares? By the end of the journey that follows, we will know. The description of the universe and our place in it will no longer be as Linde puts it, ‘fundamentally incomplete’ because consciousness and the paranormal expressions of consciousness will be part of the equation.

But this journey is not all about equations and formulas or trying to undermine or support science or those who believe in God and religion or skeptics and atheists who don’t. This isn’t about trying to prove somebody right and somebody wrong. It’s an exploration into new thoughts as well as a lot of ignored historical facts to advance our understanding of ourselves and evolve humanity’s consciousness. If there are casualties, so let there be casualties. We all have to learn the truth about Santa Claus someday, part of growing up. At the same time, it’s also about the human factor. Teris is a grandparent who with Ru shares a deep love for our beautiful planet and all the possibilities for life it contains. That’s why he lives in the Southern California mountains where he can watch the morning sun touch the high peaks and work its way down to wake up the sleeping forest around the cabin where he lives. That’s why he loves to play and laugh with his granddaughters and keeps a photo of them close by so they can still warm his heart and make him smile when they’re not around. This is also part of the journey, it’s about love, another paranormal energy that needs consciousness to be experienced and also can’t be measured or confined to an equation, a paranormal energy needed in all lives including those of scientists like Hawking, Mlodinow and Linde and all the rest of us, believers and non-believers, skeptics and atheists, as well as our animal friends with their own levels of consciousness, like horses, and cats and dogs.

As it could have been with the others as well, maybe what happened to Alexandrina was because she too was somebody’s sweetheart, someone from beyond our time and space. And maybe it was this someone’s caring love that released her from the biological needs of our physical planet environment while she was still here in it. As Teris takes us on a journey to find the answers, if he were to tell us a little about the journey I think he would first say that yes it is definitely time to join science and consciousness and the paranormal, maybe provide what Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind said in a TV program that he hopes for - something to bring it all together. But then he’d say there has to be a point for doing it and he’d tell us the reason is what Ru says, that we humans don’t know our roots and we need to because we miss something very important by not knowing. Until we know who we are and why we’re here in this dimension on this planet, it’s as if we really are lost in space. He’d say with all the information available, we’re ready to accept the answers now. He’d tell us that human life is not all there is. It’s just another beginning, one event in a process that we now have the tools to understand in a whole new way.

He would say that our physical universe is at the end of a wormhole from somewhere else, and to get here we used a space ship called a human body with a consciousness that fits the destination of where and who we are. He would tell us we can make our human lives into a beautiful journey that at the same time leads us back the other way to re-unite with the condition that existed before the universe began. He’s going to show us the space ship and the guidance system we need for the journey back, the journey home. From his awareness, looking at how most people live and think now in the human condition, he’d say we’re like eagles walking on the ground pretending we’re mice. He’d ask if we’d like to spread our wings and learn to fly, to be eagles again and learn that we’re all part of a real Grand Design in a consciousness on the other side of the wormhole that dreams into existence all the many universes and dimensions of eternity. Above all, Teris is a teacher, a guide taking us on a hidden pathway he knows well. He wants us to see a new horizon, and the journey itself to uplift and transform all of us. It is his purpose to take us there. He is going to give us our wings.

NEW REALITIES

Marilyn and I are with our mentors Teris and Ru in a cabin high in the pine-tree covered mountains of Southern California. It’s early March. The sun is low in a clear blue sky and the air is crisp and cool. There’s a ridge on the south side of the cabin and the sun only comes up high enough to reach over it and shine on the cabin for a few hours every day. It comes up around nine and by two thirty it’s gone. Without the sun, the last remnants of winter leave slowly, as if reluctant to go away. There are snow patches on the shade side of everything that melt a little by day and freeze at night. Living things are still asleep. It will be another couple of months before the buds grow and release a flood of springtime green on the black oaks that stand among the pines and cedars patiently waiting their turn shine again.

Inside the wood-stove warmed cabin, Teris is talking to us while Ru is sitting in her chair listening quietly and knitting a royal blue Afghan. Teris has been telling us about Black Elk and Crazy Horse and their trans-dimensional experiences. He mentioned that Native American spiritual practices were based on the ancient Shamanic principles evolved in Central Russia and brought to America by those who came across what used to be the land bridge between Alaska and Siberia. Teris read excerpts from John Neihardt’s book Black Elk Speaks written from Neihardt’s personal interviews with Black Elk in the 1920s. One of these interviews includes Black Elk’s description of where Crazy Horse got his name. As you will see, there are two very important points made in Black Elk’s description that relate to our exploration. They are about what is reality and what is not, and the interaction of energy between them.

"…he went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world behind this one, and everything we see here is like a shadow from that world.

"He was on his horse in that world, and the horse, and himself on it, and the trees and the grass and the stones and everything were made of spirit and nothing was hard and everything seemed to float.

"His horse was standing still there, and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow, and that is how he got his name...he became a chief because of the power he got in his vision and he was given this power from the outer world.

He only had to think of this spirit world when he went into battle and could go through anything without being hurt. Crazy Horse was never wounded in combat.

Here in the mid -1800s in America, a medicine man and an Indian chief had been speaking of another dimension, visiting it and receiving some of this outer world’s power for action in our physical world. It is said that Crazy Horse rode between his army and Custer’s not once or twice but three times with all Custer’s soldiers shooting at him before he gave his warriors the order to attack. Crazy Horse was never hit. He eventually died while under army protection at Fort Irwin when a soldier stabbed him in the back with a bayonet, after which it took Crazy Horse some eight hours to die. While Crazy Horse received protection in battle. Black Elk received power for healing. He became a known as a great healer, and regarding his ability to heal he said it was not he who healed but the power of the outer world within. When he traveled to England in Wild Bill’s Wild West Show and performed the sacred Indian Dances for Queen Victoria, wherever he went, people were moved by his spiritual presence.

Teris pointed out something he said was important to learn in regards the trans-dimensional experiences of these two Native Americans. He wanted us to see that in the spirit world they entered, both men were conscious, alive and active. In Crazy Horse’s experience even the horse existed in the other dimension and was active in its way as well. While they were in the space they called the outer world, at the same time their material bodies were still alive here in our shadow world. They could operate in two dimensions simultaneously. Above all, he wanted us to see that it is possible for an energy from a non-physical dimension to affect things here in our physical world.

These Native Americans on their level were experiencing what Teris describes as a trans-dimensional intervention of the fourth kind – direct paranormal intervention in physical conditions with visible results that can be seen by anyone beyond our accepted laws of cause and effect.

The Native American practices were based on shamanic principles that as I said originated in Russia, Teris continued. They had their rules and approach to life, and those wanting to become shamans had to follow them.

He paused and then said:

"Now let’s go to a really organized and tightly controlled space – traditional religions. There are set beliefs, religious images, specific practices and expectations. Everybody believes the same things and follows the same rules – this is the rigidity of organized religions. The images and beliefs are so formatted that it’s almost as if the religions have their own languages with set phrases and memorized passages so members grasp immediately the ideas being communicated.

"We’re going to focus on two religions, the Hindu and the Catholic. There’s a reason for this - the people we’re going to look at are Hindus and Catholics. So you ask why people from these religions? It’s that both of them encourage long periods of personal quiet meditation away from the rush of the world. Both of them in fact expect this of their devotees because they know there is no other way to open the possibility for mystical experiences. And the point of mystical experiences is that both religions believe there are dimensions beyond the physical inhabited by conscious life forms and quiet meditation is the way to contact them.

We’re going to look at events in the lives of people who had mystical experiences and achieved direct contact. Some follow a very specific savior called Jesus and the saints of the Christian church. The others are a product of the Hindu guru–disciple system. But before I begin, I just want to mention that this is by no means a commercial for any religion. I was raised in the protestant Christian tradition and was not a Catholic. I did spend ten years in the guru-disciple system and practiced Raja Yoga. Let’s begin.

Teris stopped for a moment and then asked:

Have you ever fasted, quit eating?

Marilyn and I looked at each other.

I used to fast every Friday night and the not eat much on Saturdays, Marilyn replied. Sometimes I went for longer periods, but it was pretty hard to go on long fasts with working and looking after the kids.

"I have