ASK DR. BOLI.

Man and woman at window

This image does not have a caption yet. It will be published with the correct caption as soon as a thorough search of the Akashic Records has been made.


On the subject of “How Modern Science Is Making Life Better,” our correspondent “KevinT” writes, “I would be greatly interested in a blog post about the research methodology the good Doctor uses to find these amusing images. And the talents he applies to the explicatory text…”

The research methodology is probably not as arcane as our correspondent thinks it is. Every once in a while, it is an amusing pastime to look through the recent additions to the scanned publications in the Internet Archive—filtering out anything published later than 95 years ago. Any magazine opened at random will probably provide a few illustrations. They must be cleaned up and dressed in their Sunday best to be published here, but that is what the GIMP is for.

As for the explicatory text, that is a more complex endeavor. Many of the captions under these images are entirely incorrect as they are found, but the correct versions can be discovered by the methods explained more than a century ago by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. He tells us that “at a certain high stage of knowledge, man can even penetrate to the everlasting sources that underlie the passing things of time.… Those who have learnt to read such a living script can look back into a far more distant past than that which external history depicts—and they can also, by direct spiritual perception, describe those matters which history relates, in a far more trustworthy manner than is possible by the latter.” This is called reading the Akashic Records, and, as Dr. Steiner patiently elucidates, it is completely different from making stuff up.