Sometimes also called retro-causation. A common feature of our world seems to be that in all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time so that the cause precedes its effect temporally. Our normal understanding of causation assumes this feature to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things differently. The notion of backward causation, however, stands for the idea that the temporal order of cause and effect is a mere contingent feature and that there may be cases where the cause is causally prior to its effect but where the temporal order of the cause and effect is reversed with respect to normal causation, i.e. there may be cases where the effect temporally, but not causally, precedes its cause.

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Turns out a few dances with Mary Jane can do wonders for an aging brain.

Yes, a daily toke in later-middle and old age can help slow memory loss, or the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis, a new study suggests.

It’s a pre-emptive strike, one not effective at reversing previous memory loss. But aging boomers still shouldn’t go overboard, researchers say. In tests on lab rats, all it took was the equivalent of one human puff.

“We are not trying to make anyone high,” said Gary Wenk, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University. “We are trying to tease out the positive aspects of this plant.”

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Antinomianism comes in at least two forms: strong or weak. Weak antinomianism is permissive: one may do what is bad and nevertheless somehow remain not guilty. Strong antinomianism is normative: one is compelled to commit an offence, with the same impunity. Antinomianism as a norm is strong antinomianism: one is obliged to transgress.

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There may be another way for the universe to cause itself to begin to exist, but this way will be found dubious by many since it involves backward causation. None the less, some cosmologists, such as John Wheeler, claimed that the big bang, the first state of the universe, is backwardly caused by cosmologists observing the big bang. Wheeler’s theory makes little sense to me, unless we presuppose some sort of subjective idealism where past time and the universe itself is a creation of the human mind.

But we can have a universe that is backwardly caused to begin to exist on a theory of metaphysical realism… The atheist need not repose too much weight on the assumption that backward causation is really possible, since she can always deny its possibility and say the universe caused itself to begin to exist in the first way (via a simultaneous causal loop) or in the second way (via a half-open interval of instantaneous and causally connected states of the universe).

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Does the Bible really teach there is only one God? Or does it teach that many gods exist? Did Almighty God really create this material world? Perhaps another, lesser god, created this material world? These are important questions, because the God of whom Jesus Christ spoke is a gentle, loving Heavenly Father. Yet, the universe is overflowing with evil, cruelty, agony and death. How can one reconcile the reality of evil, cruelty, agony and death with the theory of a loving Heavenly Father?

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I find it a little ironic that the conceptualization of ideas as infectious diseases dates back far beyond The Selfish Gene. In fact, one of the first notable observations of this ideology is from the medieval Catholic Church, circa 12th century. Heresy was considered to be an infection of the mind which spread from person to person:
Heresy (from the Latin, secte) meant treason to God, the worst offense against Christian society. Heresy meant contamination — an infection from which true believers had to protect themselves.

It appears that the church knew full well that ideas worked like disease, and perhaps that their own docterine was in competition with the ideas of heretics. And this a full 700 years before the discovery of evolution. I find it mildly ironic that Dawkins would cite the Church as his prime example, but forget to cite their invention of the concept.

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Every archetype is a component of the psyche of every human being and it's the enemy shadow archetype we have to integrate first (that's the only way we can avoid projecting it). We always see the archetypes projected more readily in others than in ourselves … anger, for instance, is almost always a projection of the enemy shadow – at least in those people who haven't integrated that archetype yet. Don't let yourself get caught up in other people's samsaric webs. People will drive you crazy if you let them. Can you see the Buddha in the Nazi? Can you see the devil in the saint? These are all manifestations of archetypal projections … in reality, there is no good and evil, right and wrong – they deal with morality not spirituality.

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God is a collective memetic organism. Such organisms influence large numbers of people to behave as a group. Copies in the minds of individual human beings work together the way a multi-celled animal's component cells do, producing unified behavior. Countries, corporations, philosophies, and other "Higher Powers" that cause people to act as a group are all examples of collective memetic organisms. God is the most dangerous, only because it makes claims to the highest authority.

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Being atemporal, archetypes exist outside of time. They bleed through, irrupt, and unfold into and through time so as to incarnate and reveal themselves. Archetypes become visible by arranging and magnetically attracting events into themselves like atemporal, self-organizing fields. Archetypes synchronistically configure events in the outer world so as to express and actualize themselves on the stage of history. When the archetypal dimension is emerging, the boundary between the inner and the outer begins to dissolve, as the inner experience of the archetype becomes synchronistically enacted in the outer world.

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In a profound new scientific model concerning memory known as Morphic Resonance, (that is startlingly similar to the Gnostic concept of Anthropos, and the Qabalistic equivalent, Adam Kadmon), the human DNA molecule becomes a receiver for the human being signal, and this signal contains not only the necessary genetic information needed for the creation and maintenance of the material body but also contains a record of all accumulated human knowledge and experience. The biologist and biochemist, who developed the Morphic Resonance theory, Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., hypothesizes that "the development of forms in living creatures is governed by a morphogenetic field–a kind of biological field that can, by a process called morphic resonance, be 'tuned in' to by other members of the same species and so influence their development" (Sheldrake 1984)

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