[quote]first off trance and hypnotic states were used regularly long before modern science came along! at one time they were common pratic for the treatment of ailments and pain so it is not really do to scientific study that people know about it! next the main problem I have with science is not science itself it is that anything studied that is outside of accepted popular science is dismissed outright (such as many studies in the area of Parapsychology). anything the popular scientific couminity feels is not possible is rejected outright and "flaws in the scientific method" used to reach these results are found (or made up) to keep everyone in thier safe little bubble thinking that there is nothing that hasn't been explained. we are a culture that has no new origanal ideas we go from theories from decades past and accept them as fact ( regardless as to weather they have been proven or not) and build new theories based on old unproven theories. reality is only what is agreed upon if my reality is that I can change my body through hypnosis and the power of my mind even if i do have phsyical evidence that my body has changed it would be said that there are many different things that could contribute to the change and the fact I was useing hypnosis for this purpose is just coincidence. anything outside of existing belief is dismissed and ridaculed out of hand just because they believe it cannot happen! just as with all your different explainations about the bee sting even if you had witnessed it first hand you would explain it away to fit with your preestablished beliefs of what is or is not possible. and since science still has not come to the point of fully understanding the human mind how can it say what the mind can or can not do? wouldn't a more accurate statment be it may be possible but I have never seen it happen? just a little food for thought how can we determine the limits of something we do not fully understand?[/quote]
Burden of proof. To say it's narrow minded of someone not to believe something is possible just because it hasn't or cannot be directly or indirectly proved is frankly like saying 'Just because' to win an argument. I could equally go up to a christian and visciously insist that Jesus was a homosexual and that there's no way he can prove definitively otherwise.
Seeing something is not the same as something being true or even proven, generally things are not accepted as science not because scientists refuse to leave their norms (which for a field which has consistantly existed through history primarily to consciously test accepted or believed truths is frankly ridiculous) but because the evidence is either non existant or just frankly irrelevent, and in almost all cases there is no hypothesis, cause or reasoning. Something being 'unexplained' is not an excuse to not have an explaination of how or why it happens.
The fact meditational states and 4.5 beat per second drum tones were used in aborginal and other cultures does not detract from the fact that hypnosis itself was not built upon the labourious and studied observation of these mental phenomena. Chewing willow bark used to be a method to alleviate fever and pain, that does not mean it was some rustic and mysterious natural remedy that transcends modern science, it was the salicylic acid in the bark which was studied and experimented and compounded with to eventually create aspirin.
In not wanting to start a complete derogatory argument, I'll leave with this nice succint video and say that it's rather amusing to hear someone call scientific method unoriginal through technology entirely dependent on scientific method. Peace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T69TOuqaqXI