Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Easter Island
Isolated island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean covered by hundreds of enigmatic statues. In 1722, a Dutch ship touched on the shores of a tiny island in the South Pacific Ocean, some 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) west of the Chilean coast. The sailors discovered that the inhabitants of the island had erected hundreds of man-shaped…
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Earthlights
Anomalous lights that appear close to the earth, usually in rural or remote areas, and that show movement and reappear in the same location night after night, often for years at a time. Earthlights have been reported around the world and over many centuries. Also called ghost lights or spook lights, they are sometimes associated…
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Earth centered astronomy
The theory, developed by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C.E., that the universe consisted of five elements and eight spheres. The elements were earth, air, fire, water, and ether, the sub¬ stance of which the spheres themselves were composed. Earth itself (known to be spherical because its shadow could be seen on the Moon) was…
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John William Dunne
Author of An Experiment With Time (1927) who thought dreams foretold future events. Dunne served for a short time in the British army and was an inventor and designer of some of the early airplanes. Beginning in 1898, Dunne became convinced that his dreams sometimes foretold future events as well as including information from the…
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Dualisms
From the Latin dualis meaning “containing two”; the belief that the universe has a double nature, and that therefore “the real” is either of two kinds of, or controlled by, two powers. The opposite of this, monism, from the Greek monos, “sole,” is the doctrine that everything is of the same fundamental kind. The term…
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Dr. Ruth B. Drown
A member of the American Naturopathic Association and a licensed osteopath, Drown treated patients from her radio room in Los Angeles by a process that she called Drown Radio Therapy. She used an electronic machine of her own devising to diagnose patients from samples of their blood kept on blotting paper. The sample was then…
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Remembered best for his fictional character, Sherlock Holmes, and for his involvement in spiritualism. He received a medical degree from Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary and practiced medicine in Hampshire until 1891 and then left medicine to write his detective novels, short stories and historical romances. Doyle had an interest in psychic phenomena throughout his life, but…
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Dowsing
Method of finding things, often hidden or underground, with a simple device such as forked stick or a pendulum. The dowser holds the tool and watches or feels for movement that indicates the sought material or object. Perhaps most commonly known as a way to find underground water sources, dowsing has also been used to…
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Dolphins
Mammals whose history has been speculated upon, with two very different stories resulting. First, the Darwinian scientific explanation tells how their ancestors originally came out of the sea when other forms of life started to inhabit the land, and then later as mammals they returned to the sea to make a living. Then there is…
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Divine science
One of several 19th-century “science” religions. Divine Science was founded in 1888 by Melinda Cramer, a former Quaker residing in San Francisco in the 1880s. She seems to have absorbed Christian Science from two of Mary Baker Eddy’s students, Miranda Rice, who opened an office as a Christian Science practitioner in San Francisco in 1883,…
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