Well, it is a truism that the human mind is unboundedly plastic and can come up with any perception it wants to; in other words, BS is plenty cheap, kowabunga, and there can be an infinity of invented explanations for things. Anyone can claim their particular perceptions or convictions are based on some Cosmic Source, or Priveleged Awareness, or data inaccessible to the common man, or insights brought to them by (angels, Virgins, Venusians, Leprechauns, flying cheerios....choose your vehicle). There's an unlimited supply of bushwa out there, and assertion without discernment or discrimination is a common attribute.

At the same time, the notion that there is only the Newtonian set of phenomena, and EVERYthing else is delusory, is itself so assertive, and so extreme, and so exclusive of wide--spread phenomena itself, as to appear equally delusory. Either end of the spectrum leads to madness.

It is probably more rational to allow that there are different domains at work -- the material domain mostly sticks to pretty routyine mechanical laws like thermodynamics and such. Meanwhile the domain of personal imagination, intuition and perception seems pretty well to follow its own set of laws, not unknowable but no-where near as well docuumented as those of the material doomain.

Well, obviously -- the nature of the phsyical universe is that it is nothing if not repeatable, always acting the same way in dull repetition eternally bound. Not so the universe of thought, imagination, and possibly the psirit, where creativity seems to hold much greater sway, and consequently things are MUCH less predictable. That does NOT make them any the less true, no matter what the physics-heads among us say, but it sure as hell means that the are different.

Add to these two highly differed domains the third domain of social agreement, where all of us spend a good deal of time, building collective structures of consent to things like "how to act human" and "how to be polite" and "how to see things the way others do" -- a domain with a whole separate and extensive set of entanglements, confusions and conflicts, where things are sometimes repeatable and sometimes not, where people will present timeless Truths as God-given and invariable in one moment and act out wholly contradictory convictions five minutes later...well, is it any wonder these colliding domains get a bit confused and steamed up? It's enough to make you take up the bottle, the Church, or die-hard materialism, whichever comes first!

Regards,

A