Psychic Phenomena Quotes

When we speak of man, we have a conception of humanity as a whole, and before applying scientific methods to the investigation of his movement we must accept this as a physical fact. But can anyone doubt to-day that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable. These ties cannot be seen, but we can feel them. I cut myself in the finger, and it pains me: this finger is a part of me. I see a friend hurt, and it hurts me, too: my friend and I are one. And now I see stricken down an enemy, a lump of matter which, of all the lumps of matter in the universe, I care least for, and it still grieves me. Does this not prove that each of us is only part of a whole? For ages this idea has been proclaimed in the consummately wise teachings of religion, probably not alone as a means of insuring peace and harmony among men, but as a deeply founded truth. The Buddhist expresses it in one way, the Christian in another, but both say the same: We are all one. Metaphysical proofs are, however, not the only ones which we are able to bring forth in support of this idea. Science, too, recognizes this connectedness of separate individuals, though not quite in the same sense as it admits that the suns, planets, and moons of a constellation are one body, and there can be no doubt that it will be experimentally confirmed in times to come, when our means and methods for investigating psychical and other states and phenomena shall have been brought to great perfection. Still more: this one human being lives on and on. The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic.

For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct—at once so familiar and on reflection so strange—stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within.

I assure you," the doctor said, "that Hill House will be quiet tonight. There is a pattern to these things, as though psychic phenomena were subject to laws of a very particular sort.

Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.

Nature itself has a memory: There is some indefinable psychic element in the earth’s atmosphere upon which all human and physical actions or phenomena are photographed or impressed.                   —

When the evidence for an anomaly becomes overwhelming, and the anomaly cannot be easily accommodated by the existing scientific worldview, this is a very important sign that either our assumptions about reality are wrong or our assumptions about how we come to understand things are wrong.

Believers in psychic phenomena... appear to have won a decisive victory and virtually silenced opposition.... This victory is the result of careful experimentation and intelligent argumentation. Dozens of experimenters have obtained positive results in ESP experiments, and the mathematical procedures have been approved by leading statisticians.... Against all this evidence, almost the only defense remaining to the skeptical scientist is ignorance.

Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena…Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.

Myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul.

Within this confusion a few fundamentals remain constant: a. A strong belief is more important than a few facts. b. The stronger the belief, the fewer the facts. c. The fewer the facts, the more people killed.

Begin to study all phases of psychic phenomena… begin to read the scripture, searching for those portions of same that give the warning, as well as the instruction as to how one would seek to be an individual who may give a great deal to mankind… Then take the 30th of Deuteronomy, where there is the admonition as to the source, that it's not from somewhere else, but it is within thine own self. For that influence of the Creative Force is so near, yea closer even than thy own hand! Then analyze that, reading in connection with same all of the story of Ruth as to her sincerity. And if it needs to be, those companionships may be drawn from thine own activities, and the fear of what may be in the future will fade as the mists before the morning sun. For in the study of these, not merely read to know them, but get the meaning of universal love, not attempting to make it personal but universal. For God is love and, as ye go about to manifest same in thy conversation, ye may find the true meaning of love…

by establishing the Mental Nature of the Universe, easily explains all of the varied mental and psychic phenomena that occupy such a large portion of the public attention, and which, without such explanation, are non-understandable and defy scientific treatment.

Morton Cratzchbarken, in an admittedly sensationalized address to The National Colloquium on Psychic Phenomena last year, said that the two most stunning events of the twentieth century have been the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the destruction that came to Chamberlain, Maine, in May of 1979.

In life we are separated by boundaries political, cultural, ethical, linguistical and psychical. But in death we are all united, for all afterlife is similarly unknown

Psychic and paranormal phenomena will always be a source of controversy, because it is an inconvenient reminder that there is more to our reality than meets the eye.

No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in heterogeneous, causally unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in space, or that space is relative to the psyche. The same applies to the temporal determination of the psyche and the psychic relativity of time. I do not need to emphasize that the verification of these findings must have far-reaching consequences.

Nikola Telsa, an electrical engineer and genius in his own time, once suggested that when science begins the exploration of the non-physical phenomena, only then will it make the speediest progress in terms of discovery.

I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity. It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfils itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual.

By contrast, in the West the mere existence of psychic phenomena remains a contentious issue, despite persistent interest and popular belief. There are a number of reasons for this chronic tension. On the religious side, within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions, only God (or those he appoints) is allowed to perform miracles. Ordinary folks who perform such feats are considered suspect (by theists) if they’re lucky and heretical if they’re not. And on the scientific side, there is a widely held (but incorrect, as we’ll see) assumption that these phenomena cannot exist because they violate one or more scientific principles.

The unexpected parallelisms of ideas in psychology and physics suggest, as Jung pointed out, a possible ultimate one-ness of both fields of reality that physics and psychology study-i.e., a psychophysical one-ness of both fields of reality that physics and psychology study-i.e., a psychophysical one-ness of all life phenomena. Jung was even convinced that what he calls the unconscious somehow links up with the structure of inorganic matter-a link to which the problem of so-called "psychosomatic" illness seems to point. The concept of a unitarian idea of reality (which has been followed up by Pauli and Erich Nuemann) was called by Jung the unus mundus (the one world, within which matter and psyche are not yet discriminated or separately actualized). He paved the way toward such a unitarian point of view by pointing out that an archetype shows a "psychoid" (i.e., not purely psychic but almost material) aspect when it appears within a synchronistic event-for such an event is in effect a meaningful arrangement of inner psychic and outer facts.

Have you any alternative to offer, though?” “Yes.” Barrett returned her gaze with challenge. “An alternative far more interesting, albeit far more complex and demanding; namely, the subliminal self, that vast, concealed expanse of the human personality which, iceberglike, inheres beneath the so-called threshold of consciousness. That is where the fascination lies, Miss Tanner. Not in the speculative realms of afterlife, but here, today; the challenge of ourselves. The undiscovered mysteries of the human spectrum, the infrared capacities of our bodies, the ultraviolet capacities of our minds. This is the alternative I offer: the extended faculties of the hinnan system not as yet established. The faculties by which, I am convinced, all psychic phenomena are produced.

Myths, originally at least, are structures of the human faculty of imagination, which at some time were projected for certain reasons upon the heavens, and may be secondarily transferred to the heavenly bodies, with their enigmatical phenomena. [...] The origin of these figures was possibly psychic in character, and they were subsequently made the basis of the almanac and firmament calculations, precisely on account of this significance.

I have always disliked the term 'paranormal’ because it refers to anomalies — ‘abnormal’ phenomena not yet understood by science. It implies that psychic perception is something that exists ‘outside of what is considered normal'...This notion of ‘abnormality’ never sat well with me. I have spent too many years of my life being made to feel defective or ‘outside of normal,’ and I am no longer willing to consider my psychic abilities to be an ‘unfortunate anomaly.

Only when it comes to explaining psychic phenomena of a minimal degree of clarity are we driven to assume that archetypes must have a nonpsychic aspect. Grounds for such a conclusion are supplied by the phenomena of synchronicity, which are associated with the activity of unconscious operators and have hitherto been regarded, or repudiated, as 'telepathy' etc. Scepticism should, however, be levelled only at incorrect theories and not at facts which exist in their own right. No unbiased observer can deny them. Resistance to the recognition of such facts rests principally on the repugnance people feel for an allegedly supernatural faculty tacked on to the psyche, like 'clairvoyance'. The very diverse and confusing aspects of these phenomena are, so far as I can see at present, completely explicable on the assumption of psychically relative space-time continuum. As soon as the psychic content crosses the threshold of consciousness, the synchronistic marginal phenomena disappear, time and space resume their accustomed sway, and consciousness is once more isolated in its subjectivity. We have here one of those instances which can best be understood in terms of the physicist's idea of 'complementarity'. When an unconscious content passes over into consciousness its synchronistic manifestation ceases; conversely, synchronistic phenomena can be evoked by putting the subject into an unconscious state (trance).

Such insights, incidentally, into the forever troublesome body-soul problem are very old. Aristotle's *De Anima* is full of tantalizing hints at psychic phenomena and their close interconnection with the body in contrast with the relation or, rather, non-relation between body and mind. Discussing these matters in a rather tentative and uncharacteristic way, Aristotle declares: "...there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without the body, e.g., anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. [To be active without involving the body] seems rather a property of the mind [noein]. But if the mind [noein] too proves to be some imagination [phantasia] or impossible without imagination, it [noein] too could not be without the body." And somewhat later, summing up: "Nothing is evident about the mind [nous] and the theoretical faculty, but it seems to be a different kind of soul, and only this kind can be separated [from the body], as what is eternal from what is perishable." And in one of the biological treatises he suggests that the soul―its vegetative as well as its nutritive and sensitive part―"came into being in the embryo without existing previously outside it, but the *nous* entered the soul from outside, thus granting to man a kind of activity which had no connection with the activities of the body." In other words, there are no sensations corresponding to mental activities; and the sensations of the psyche, of the soul, are actually feelings we sense with our bodily organs.

In explaining the way that trivial, if diverting, pursuits like Guitar Hero provide an easy alternative to meaningful work, Horning draws on the writing of political theorist Jon Elster. In his 1986 book An Introduction to Karl Marx, Elster used a simple example to illustrate the psychic difference between the hard work of developing talent and the easy work of consuming stuff: Compare playing the piano with eating lamb chops. The first time one practices the piano it is difficult, even painfully so. By contrast, most people enjoy lamb chops the first time they eat them. Over time, however, these patterns are reversed. Playing the piano becomes increasingly more rewarding, whereas the taste for lamb chops becomes satiated and jaded with repeated, frequent consumption. Elster then made a broader point: Activities of self-realization are subject to increasing marginal utility: They become more enjoyable the more one has already engaged in them. Exactly the opposite is true of consumption. To derive sustained pleasure from consumption, diversity is essential. Diversity, on the other hand, is an obstacle to successful self-realization, as it prevents one from getting into the later and more rewarding stages. “Consumerism,” comments Horning, “keeps us well supplied with stuff and seems to enrich our identities by allowing us to become familiar with a wide range of phenomena—a process that the internet has accelerated immeasurably. . . . But this comes at the expense with developing any sense of mastery of anything, eroding over time the sense that mastery is possible, or worth pursuing.” Distraction is the permanent end state of the perfected consumer, not least because distraction is a state that is eminently programmable. To buy a guitar is to open possibilities. To buy Guitar Hero is to close them. A

But there is also some empirical evidence that sheds light on the relationship between quantum principles and consciousness. Anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff claims to have found evidence that anesthesia arrests consciousness by hindering the motion of electrons in microtubules, minute tunnels of protein that serve as a kind of skeleton for cells. Hameroff speculates that microtubules could be a possible site for quantum effects in the brain,17 and his speculations have led mathematical physicist Roger Penrose to endorse the hypothesis.18 Attempts to develop models of consciousness based on quantum mechanics have also been made by neuroscientist John Eccles, and physicists Henry Stapp and Evan Harris Walker.o Walker and the experimental physicist Helmut Schmidt (the latter responsible for many of the micro-PK experiments described earlier) have also proposed mathematical theories of psi based on quantum mechanics.19 These theories rest upon two propositions that are now supported by experimental evidence: that mind can influence random quantum events, and that influence can occur instantaneously at a distance.p

Former member of CSICOP Marcello Truzzi summed up the history of laboratory parapsychology: As proponents of anomalies produce stronger evidence, critics have sometimes moved the goal posts further away. . . . To convince scientists of what had merely been supported by widespread but weak anecdotal evidence, parapsychologists moved psychical research into the laboratory. When experimental results were presented, designs were criticized. When protocols were improved, a “fraud proof” or “critical experiment” was demanded. When those were put forward, replications were demanded. When those were produced, critics argued that new forms of error might be the cause (such as the “file drawer” error that could result from unpublished negative studies). When meta-analyses were presented to counter that issue, these were discounted as controversial, and ESP was reduced to being some present but unspecified “error some place” in the form of what Ray Hyman called the “dirty test tube argument” (claiming dirt was in the tube making the seeming psi result a mere artifact). And in one instance, when the scoffer found no counter-explanations, he described the result as a “mere anomaly” not to be taken seriously so just belonging on a puzzle page. The goal posts have now been moved into a zone where some critics hold unfalsifiable positions.30

We may finally summarize the emotional dilemma of the schizoid thus: he feels a deep dread of entering into a real personal relationship, i.e. one into which genuine feeling enters, because, though his need for a love-object is so great, he can only sustain a relationship at a deep emotional level on the basis of infantile and absolute dependence. To the love-hungry schizoid faced internally with an exciting but deserting object all relationships are felt to be 'swallowing-up things' which trap and imprison and destroy. If your hate is destructive you are still free to love because you can find someone else to hate. But if you feel your love is destructive the situation is terrifying. You are always impelled into a relationship by your needs and at once driven out again by the fear either of exhausting your love-object by the demands you want to make or else losing your own individuality by over-dependence and identification. This 'in and out' oscillation is the typical schizoid behaviour, and to escape from it into detachment and loss of feeling is the typical schizoid state. The schizoid feels faced with utter loss, and the destruction of both ego and object, whether in a relationship or out of it. In a relationship, identification involves loss of the ego, and incorporation involves a hungry devouring and losing of the object. In breaking away to independence, the object is destroyed as you fight a way out to freedom, or lost by separation, and the ego is destroyed or emptied by the loss of the object with whom it is identified. The only real solution is the dissolving of identification and the maturing of the personality, the differentiation of ego and object, and the growth of a capacity for cooperative independence and mutuality, i.e. psychic rebirth and development of a real ego.

There is no need, I think, of further examples to show that the concept of rta is a libido-symbol like sun, wind, etc. Only, rta is less concretistic and contains the abstract element of fixed direction and regularity, the idea of a predetermined, ordered path or process. It is, therefore, a kind of philosophical libido symbol that can be directly compared with the Stoic concept of heimarmene. For the Stoics heimarmene had the significance of creative, primal heat, and at the same time it was a predetermined, regular process (hence its other meaning: “compulsion of the stars”).104 Libido as psychic energy naturally has these attributes too; the concept of energy necessarily includes the idea of a regulated process, since a process always flows from a higher potential to a lower. It is the same with the libido concept, which signifies nothing more than the energy of the life process. Its laws are the laws of vital energy. Libido as an energy concept is a quantitative formula for the phenomena of life, which are naturally of varying intensity. Like physical energy, libido passes through every conceivable transformation; we find ample evidence of this in the fantasies of the unconscious and in myths. These fantasies are primarily self-representations of energic transformation processes, which follow their specific laws and keep to a definite “path.” This path is the line or curve representing the optimal discharge of energy and the corresponding result in work. Hence it is simply the expression of flowing and self-manifesting energy. The path is rta, the right way, the flow of vital energy or libido, the predetermined course along which a constantly self-renewing current is directed. This path is also fate, in so far as a man’s fate depends on his psychology. It is the path of our destiny and of the law of our being.

What is this Self, and how did the Shaiva philosophers of Kashmir experience It? They assert that the Self alone has absolute existence. This Self is within every human being, and in recognizing and experiencing It within ourselves, we are actually at one with the divine. What is more, the Self exists within us at all times, whether or not we recognize and experience It. As living beings we are always aware of our own existence, and the experience of existing is always present in us. Further, we never require the help of any aids in feeling our own existence. Even when we are in a state of deep dreamless sleep in which the senses and the knowing mind and intellect are no longer functioning, the Self continues to experience Itself as a witness to this state. Had the Self not existed as a witness during this time, how could we, upon awaking, recollect the void experienced in deep sleep? Thus the Self is always self-existent, self-evident, and self-conscious, and is Itself Its own proof. Shaiva philosophers, relying on their experiences of deep revelation (turya) during meditation, assert that the Self is Consciousness, and that Consciousness is actually a kind of stirring. It is not physical or psychic in nature, but it is described as a spiritual stir or urge. All living beings feel in themselves this urge in the form of a will to know and to do, and so we are always inclined toward knowing and doing. We can recognize this urge in all forms of life, even in a healthy newborn baby, or in a chick just hatched out of an egg. Knowing, the first urge, is itself an action, or something we do. The act of doing, the second urge, cannot occur without knowing. Yet neither of them is possible without willing. Willing is a sort of extroverted stirring of the above mentioned natural and subtle urge of Consciousness (Sivadrsti, I.9, 10, 24, 25). This stirring appears as a vibrative volition known in Kashmir Shaivism as spanda. It is neither a physical vibration like sound or light, nor mental movement like desire, disgust, or passion. Rather, it is the spiritual stirring of Consciousness whose essential nature is a simultaneous inward and outward vibration. The inward and outward movements of spanda shine as subjective and objective awareness of I-ness and this-ness respectively. The inward stirring shines as the subject, the Self, the transcendental experience of the pure “I”, while the outward stirring illuminates the object, the other, the immanent “that-ness” and “this-ness” of phenomena. Because of this double-edged nature of spanda, the pure Self is experienced in both its transcendental and immanent aspects by yogins immersed in the state of Self-revelation (turya). Beyond turya, one can experience the state of Paramasiva, known as pure Consciousness (turiyatita). Paramasiva, the Ultimate, is that Self illuminated within us by the glowing awareness of Its own pure Consciousness. There It shines as “I”, which transcends the concepts of both transcendence and immanence. It is “I” and “I” alone. It is the infinite and absolutely perfect monistic “I”, without any sense of “this-ness” at all. Shaivism uses the term samvit to describe this pure “I”. Samvit consists of that superior luminosity of pure Consciousness, which is known as prakasa and as its Self-awareness, known as vimarsa. The “I”, existing as samvit and samvit alone, is absolutely pure ptentiality, and is the real Self of every living being. Samvit is not the egoistic “I”. The egoistic “I” revolves around four aspects of our being: (1) deha, the gross physical body, (2) buddhi, the fine mental body, (3) prana, the subtler life force, and (4) sunya (the void of dreamless sleep), the most subtle form of finite, individual consciousness.

The general exhaustion of the cerebral functions has been pointed out by many authors. " Hystericals," said M. Fere, " are in a permanent state of psychical fatigue, which is shown by a weakening of sensibility, of motion, of the will." ' " The fundamental factor of hysteria," says M. Oppenheim, *' is irritable feebleness, an abnormal excitability accompanied with exhaustion. These characteristics are especially established in the sphere of the affective phenomena." ' M. Jolly, taking up again M. Oppenheim's conception, speaks also of an extreme nervous feebleness, which allows the exaggeration of the affective phenomena, but he adds that this formula lacks precision and does not sum up particular facts.' We think, as does this author, that it is necessary to define this cerebral weakness with more precision and explain what is meant by it. As the essential functions of the brain are psychological functions, we must show, by the analysis of the moral phenomena, wherein this psychological insufficiency consists.

Hypnotism has been used by physicians in minor operations as a sort of psychical chloroform for persons who might be endangered by an anesthetic. But a hypnotic state is harmful to those often subjected to it; a negative psychological effect ensues which in time deranges the brain cells. Hypnotism is trespass into the territory of another's consciousness. Its temporary phenomena have nothing in common with the miracles performed by men of divine realization. Awake in God, true saints effect changes in this dream-world by means of a will harmoniously attuned to the Creative Cosmic Dreamer.

Instead the attitude of the medical profession has been that miracle cures are nonexistent, that the disease of which a person was cured did not exist in the first place, either because it was an imaginary disorder, such as a hysterical conversion reaction, or else because it was a misdiagnosis. Fortunately, however, a few serious scientists, physicians and religious truth-seekers are currently in the process of beginning to examine the nature of such phenomena as spontaneous remissions in cancer patients and apparently successful examples of psychic healing. Fifteen

Prakriti is said to be composed of three forces, sattwa, rajas and tamas, which are known collectively as the three gunas. These gunas-whose individual characteristics we shall describe in a moment-pass through phases of equilibrium and phases of imbalance; the nature of their relationship to each other is such that it is subject to perpetual change. As long as the gunas maintain their equilibrium, Prakriti remains undifferentiated and the universe exists only in its potential state. As soon as the balance is disturbed, a re-creation of the universe begins. The gunas enter into an enormous variety of combinations-all of them irregular, with one or the other guna predominating over the rest. Hence we have the variety of physical and psychic phenomena which make up our apparent world. Such a world continues to multiply and vary its forms until the gunas find a temporary equilibrium once more, and a new phase of undifferentiated potentiality begins.

Former researches in the automatic phenomena of the mind have led me to study hysterical patients who present these phenomena in the highest degree of clearness. These studies, or at least some of them, have been gathered into a philosophic thesis presented at the ' Briquet, Traite de Vhystirie, 1859, p. 517. Sorbonne in 1889. We should like to take them up again to-day from a different standpoint. Instead of accidentally connecting the description of the patients with the study of philosophic problems, we wish to describe the patient in and by himself. The psychological studies will be accessory and will serve only better to explain the morbid phenomena in which, " without any possible dispute, the psychical element plays a considerable role when it is not predominant." ' We shall have occasion sometimes to refer the reader to former works in which these philosophic questions are more thoroughly discussed than it is possible to discuss them in a medical work. The method of observation plays the principal part in these researches: it is the clinical method applied to the diseases of the mind.

By themselves, those particles and forces don’t have the capability of supporting the psychic phenomena that so fascinated my twelve-year-old self. More important, we know that there aren’t new particles or forces out there yet to be discovered that would support them. Not simply because we haven’t found them yet, but because we definitely would have found them if they had the right characteristics to give us the requisite powers. We know enough to draw very powerful conclusions about the limits of what we can do.

You will find that the dullest, most functionally illiterate mental mushroom has a very definite, very “scientific” view on one thing: the impossibility of any kind of psychic phenomena.

At the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience in Lausanne, Switzerland, scientists have been studying the link between mystical experiences and cognitive neuroscience. They point out that the fundamental revelations to the founders of the three monotheistic religions—Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed—occurred on mountains, and included such components as feeling a presence, seeing a figure, hearing voices, and seeing lights. These similarities of experience suggest to the scientists that exposure to altitude might affect functions relying on brain areas such as the temporoparietal junction and the prefrontal cortex. Prolonged stays at high altitude, especially when linked to social deprivation, can lead to prefrontal lobe dysfunctions, which are commonly found during ecstatic experiences. Also, the physical and emotional stresses of climbing at altitude release endorphins, which are known to lower the threshold for temporal lobe epilepsy, which in turn might evoke such experiences. All such phenomena, then, might relate to “abnormal body processing.

Magic and miracles are the exclusive privilege of those who consistently believe. There is no such thing as ‘temporarily suspending your disbelief’ in order to access such metaphysical wonders. You either believe...or you don’t.

history amply demonstrates that science progresses mainly by funerals, not by reason and logic alone.

As science attained unprecedented power through its ability to predict and control certain limited aspects of nature, it also began to overshadow our understanding of ethics and values. History has shown that decisions affecting millions were made on the basis of industrial expediency, technological imperatives, and economic pressures. Just as the absolute power held by the church for centuries had been seductive, the growing power of science had seduced as well.6

About all we know about consciousness is that it has something to do with the head, rather than the foot.

One of the most profitable consequences of science as an “open system” of knowledge, as opposed to rigid dogma, is that the future Laws of Nature will bear as much resemblance to the “laws” we know today as the cellular telephone does to smoke signals. Both sets of laws attempt to deal with and explain the same world, but the latter set is much more sophisticated and comprehensive than the former.

This book is written from a clearly Christian point of view. We do not apologize for this. Our approach is based on empirical theology, an approach largely alien to Western Christianity but familiar to the Christianity of the East. Consistent with Eastern Christianity, we believe the Faith is not just a set of beliefs similar to any other perspective on metaphysical entities. We believe spiritual reality is an empirical phenomenon that is independently verifiable by people who are primed to experience the Spirit. From a Christian context, this is the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Holy Trinity. Spiritual reality is an integral part of the psyche or soul. Consistent with Jung’s vision, the psyche is viewed as an empirical phenomenon that cannot be reduced to anything else. As indicated above, it can be studied introspectively as well as in dreams and mythology. Nevertheless, psychic phenomena are not divorced from the physical world, but are correlated with physical events, especially brain dynamics. It is this correlation that, to some extent, allows psychic phenomena to be verified by our understanding of the brain. If

Her conclusions in a 2001 paper, “The Speed of Thought: Investigation of a Complex Space-Time Metric to Describe Psychic Phenomena,” indicate that the speed of thought is transcendent of any finite velocity. Further, she states that the speed of thought is instantaneous, not defined in units per second as the speed of light is. What

Instead of describing psychic phenomena as ‘paranormal,’ I prefer the term supernatural, because it refers to metaphysical or transcendental phenomena beyond human understanding. The supernatural does not adhere to natural laws, nor to parochial notions about what should be considered 'normal.' It can therefore not be conveniently 'explained away’ by physics or empirical science.

We cannot blame the public, science, or the media for the myths, misrepresentations, cynicism — and sometimes blatant ignorance of what it truly means to be a psychic or medium — while we continue as a community to use inaccurate, ill-conceived jargon and misconstrued concepts based on a flawed ‘sensory’ model of psychic perception.

The ineffable nuances and numinous intricacies of the supernatural do not adhere to natural laws, nor to materialist superstitions. It will thus forever remain beyond the scope of Newtonian science and the narrow mind.

Therapy” can go on for weeks, months, sometimes even years, in the pretend mode of psychic reality, where internal states are discussed at length, sometimes with excessive detail and complexity yet no progress is made, and no real understanding is experienced. Ideas do not form a satisfactory bridge between inner and outer reality, and affects do not accompany thoughts. Such phenomena are extremely well known from clinical work with eating disorders.

For example, Keith Stanovich’s psychology textbook lists paranormal phenomena as “telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition, reincarnation, biorhythms, astral projection, pyramid power, plant communication, and psychic surgery” (page 186).118 All these items are perfectly amenable to scientific inquiry, but so far only a few have been systematically investigated. Education may benefit by teaching students to avoid knee-jerk negative reactions to topics just because they seem peculiar and instead to evaluate what the evidence actually says. If there’s no body of systematic scientific evidence to rely upon (e.g., for the viability of “pyramid power”), then we can’t say much about that topic yet. But when there is evidence (as with several classes of psychic phenomena), then students should learn how to evaluate it. Professors often give lip service to the importance of teaching critical thinking skills, but in practice most of that lip is arrogant and dismissive. Another reason that the paranormal gets a bad rap is that professors are unaware of the evidence because their professors, and their professors before them, kept repeating that there wasn’t anything worth paying attention to.120 When something is repeated often enough, the lie takes on a life of its own. Political propagandists and advertising agencies have long capitalized on this fact.

It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype. It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfills itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. (AJ: 58, emphasis added)

Lucid dreaming is ‘intentional dreaming.

Lucid dreams show us the inner realities of existence which we have either been too busy or afraid to recognize.

Beyond the veil lies what our eyes cannot see. Beyond the veil lies what our skin cannot feel. Beyond the veil lies what our consciousness cannot absorb.

While it is true that serious psychic research (as distinct from psychological) and the ghost stories of fiction are far apart, yet the latter would lose much, and become mere playthings, if the former had nothing to investigate. It is my belief and my experience that “paranormal phenomena” do occur; and my opinion that the future well-being of a man might be forwarded by more attention being paid to them. There is evidence that a mystical, clairvoyant faculty of a most practical kind is commonly taken for granted in many “primitive” societies, from pre-communist Tibet to the Hebrides; and is merely bred out and killed off by industrialism, compulsory education, and the belief that every question has an answer [8].

As I’ve argued previously, there is no rule that says we need to allow self-defeating prophecies in our picture of precognition. The common assumption that people could (and would) “use” precognitive information to create an alternative future flies in the face of the way precognition seems to work in the real world. It is largely unconscious (thus evades our “free will”), and it is oblique and invariably misrecognized or misinterpreted until after events have made sense of it. Laius and his son both fulfill the dark prophecies about them in their attempts to evade what was foretold; their attempts backfire precisely because of things they don’t know (Laius, that his wife failed to kill his son, as ordered; Oedipus, that his adopted family in Corinth was not his real family). The Greeks called these obliquely foreseen outcomes, unavoidable because of our self-ignorance, our fate. Any mention of Oedipus naturally calls to mind Sigmund Freud, whom I am recruiting as a kind of ambivalent guide in my examination of the time-looping structure of human fate. Making a central place for Freud in a book on precognition may perplex readers given (a) his reputed disinterest in psychic phenomena, and (b) the fact that psychological science long since tossed psychoanalysis and its founder into the dustbin. In fact, (a) is a myth, as we’ll see, and (b) partly reflects the “unreason” of psychological science around questions of meaning. Although deeply flawed and occasionally off-the-mark, the psychoanalytic tradition—including numerous course-corrections by later thinkers who tweaked and nuanced Freud’s core insights—represents a sincere and sustained effort to bring the objective and subjective into suspension, to include the knower in the known without reducing either pole to the other. More to the point, it was Freud, more than probably any other thinker of the modern age, who took seriously and mapped precisely the forms of self-deception and self-ignorance that make precognition possible in a post-selected universe. The obliquity of the unconscious—the rules Freud assigned to what he called “primary process” thinking—reflect the associative and indirect way in which information from the future has to reach us. We couldn’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; those messages can only be obscure, hinting, and rich in metaphor, more like a game of charades, and they will almost always lack a clear origin—like unsigned postcards or letters with no return address. Their import, or their meaning, will never be fully grasped, or will be wrongly interpreted, until events come to pass that reveal how the experiencer, perhaps inadvertently, fulfilled the premonition. It may be no coincidence that Freud’s theory maps so well onto an understanding of precognition if the unconscious is really, as I suggested, something like consciousness displaced in time.

Referring to something as 'supernatural' is not to call it unreal or untrue - on the contrary. The existence of the term itself is a linguistic and cultural acknowledgment that inexplicable things happen which we identify as being somehow beyond the natural or the ordinary, and that many of us hold beliefs which connect us to spheres that exist beyond what we might typically see, hear, taste, touch, or smell. It resonates with the idea that even though we have advanced technologically, there still are elements and concerns that rest outside our arena of control or conscious understanding.

hypothesis that psychically sensitive individuals may somehow, through some as-yet-undiscovered “psychic retina,” be detecting large, rapid changes in entropy as bright beacons on the landscape ahead in time.24 May’s argument makes a certain amount of sense given the classical equivalence of time’s arrow with entropy. Things that are very rapidly dissipating heat, such as stars and nuclear reactors and houses on fire, or even just a living body making the ultimate transition to the state of disorder called death, could perhaps be seen as concentrated time. But steep entropy gradients also represent a category of information that is intrinsically interesting and meaningful to humans and toward which we are particularly vigilant, whatever the sensory channel through which we receive it. An attentional bias to entropy gradients has been shown for the conventional senses of sight and hearing, not just psi phenomena. Stimuli involving sudden, rapid motion, and especially fire and heat, as well as others’ deaths and illness, are signals that carry important information related to our survival, so we tend to notice and remember them.25 Thus, an alternative explanation for the link between psi accuracy and entropy is the perverse pleasure—that is, jouissance—aroused in people by signs of destruction. Some vigilant part of us needs be constantly scanning the environment for indications of threats to our life and health, which means we need on some level to find that search rewarding. If we were not rewarded, we would not keep our guard up. Entropic signals like smoke from an advancing fire, or screams or cries from a nearby victim of violence or illness, or the grief of a neighbor for their family member are all signifiers, part of what could be called the “natural language of peril.” We find it “enjoyable,” albeit in an ambivalent or repellent way, to engage with such signifiers because, again, their meaning, their signified, is our own survival. The heightened accuracy toward entropic targets that May observed could reflect a heightened fascination with fire, heat, and chaotic situations more generally, an attentional bias to survival-relevant stimuli. Our particular psychic fascination with fire may also reflect its central role as perhaps the most decisive technology in our evolutionary development as well as the most dangerous, always able to turn on its user in an unlucky instant.26 The same primitive threat-vigilance orientation accounts for the unique allure of artworks depicting destruction or the evidence of past destruction. In the 18th century, the sublime entered the vocabulary of art critics and philosophers like Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant to describe the aesthetic appeal of ruins, impenetrable wilderness, thunderstorms and storms at sea, and other visual signals of potential or past peril, including the slow entropy of erosion and decay. Another definition of the sublime would be the semiotic of entropy.

Authentic psychic perceptions are not merely a physical or neurological result of the ‘mind-brain’ or the ‘mind-body,’ but it instead of the metaphysical mind-soul.

And then there are fiction writers. Historians of psychic phenomena are fortunate to have a particularly rich record of precognitive experiences in the lives of writers. This is partly a natural file-drawer effect: Reports of anomalous experiences in the lives of athletes and soldiers, for example, would be relatively rare simply because sports and combat do not leave as rich a paper trail as writing. But additionally, because writing is (for some writers at least) precisely an enjoyable flow activity that engages an individual’s intuitive and creative juices, the very act of recording ideas and inspirations may induce an “altered state” conducive to channeling information from a writer’s future.39 It is like attaching a printer directly to the phenomenon of interest. In memoirs and interviews, writers often describe their creative frenzies as a kind of trance in which ideas come unbidden; some report feeling that the thoughts of some other entity or higher self are being transcribed or channeled. In the last part of this book, we will examine two writer-precogs, Morgan Robertson and Philip K. Dick, who both described feeling possessed by a feminine muse when they wrote. Is “inspiration”—which originally meant possession by a divine spirit—simply a psychologically neutral term for drawing precognitively or presentimentally on a writer’s own future?

Soul involves us in the pack and welter of phenomena and the flow of impressions. . . . Soul is vulnerable and suffers; it is passive and remembers. It is water to the spirit’s fire. . . . Soul is imagination, a cavernous treasury. . . . Look up, says spirit, gain distance, there is something beyond and above, and what is above is always, and always superior. . .. Soul replies by saying, “Yes, this too has a place, may find it’s archetypal significance, belongs in a myth.” The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul, and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows.

Pride, anger, hatred, covetousness, sloth, stupidity are mentally rejected with the rhythmic breathing out. A man may be killed by suggestion, he may kill himself by auto-suggestion. Discussion is hardly possible with Oriental mystics. When once they have answered: "I have seen this n my meditation", little hope is left to the inquirer of obtaining further explanations. The various phenomena which the vulgar consider as miracles, are produced by an energy arising in the magician himself and depend on his knowledge of the true inner essence of things. Tibetans are a strong and sturdy people; the cold, sleeping on the ground in the open, solitude and many other things from which the average Westerners would shrink, do not frighten them in the least. Whatever those unacquainted with it may think, solitude and utter loneliness are far from being devoid of charm. But, most likely, only those who have lived through it themselves can understand the irresistible attraction that hermit life exerts on many Orientals. On mani padme hum. The simplest interpretation is: In the lotus ( which is the world ), exists the precious jewel of Buddha's teaching. Another explanation takes the lotus as the mind. In the depth of it, by introspective meditation, one is able to find the jewel of knowledge, truth, reality, liberation, nirvana, these various terms being different denominations of the same thing. Nirvana, the supreme salvation, is not separated from samsara, the phenomenal world, but the mystic finds the first in the heart of the second, just as the jewel may be found in the lotus. Nirvana, the jewel, exists when enlightenment exists. Samsara, the lotus, exists when delusion exists, which veils nirvana, just as the many petals of the lotus conceal the jewel, nestling among them. Hum! at the end of the formula, is a mystic expression of wrath used in coercing fierce deities and subduing demons. Hum! is a kind of mystic war cry; uttering it, is challenging the enemy. Tibetans affirm that through mastery over breath one may conquer all passion and anger as well as carnal desires, acquire serenity, prepare the mind for meditation and awake spiritual energy. Breath, in its turn, influences bodily and mental activity. Consequently, two methods have been devised: the most easy one which quiets the mind by controlling the breath and the more difficult way which consists in regulating the breath by controlling the mind. Liberty is the motto on the heights of the Land of Snows, but strangely enough, the disciple starts on that road of utter freedom by the strictest obedience to his spiritual guide. However, the required submission is confined to the spiritual and psychic exercises and the way of living prescribed by the master. No dogmas are ever imposed. The disciple may believe, deny or doubt anything according to his own feelings. People who habitually practice methodical contemplation often experience, when sitting down for their appointed time of meditation, the sensation of putting down a load or taking off a heavy garment and entering a silent, delightfully calm, region. It is the impression of deliverance and serenity which Tibetan mystics call niampar jagpa, to make equal, to level - meaning calming down all causes of agitation that roll their waves through the mind. A flag moves. What is that which moves? Is it the flag or the wind? The answer is that neither the flag nor the wind moves. it is the mind that moves. The fact is that Orientals, excepting vulgar charlatans, do not make a show of their mystic, philosophic or psychic knowledge. Gods, demons, the whole universe, are but a mirage which exists in the mind, springs from it and sinks into it.

Yoga, whether dualist or nondualist, is concerned with the elimination of suffering (duhkha). Here suffering does not mean the pain resulting from a cut or the emotional torment experienced through political oppression. These are simply manifestations of a deeper existential suffering. That suffering is the direct outcome of our habitual sense of being locked into a body-mind that is separate from all others. Yoga seeks to prevent future suffering of this kind by pointing the way to the unitary consciousness that is disclosed in ego-transcending ecstatic states. From the viewpoint of traditional Yoga, even the pleasure or well-being (sukha) experienced as a result of the regular performance of yogic postures, breath control, or meditation is suffused with suffering. First of all, the pleasure is bound to be only temporary, whereas the innate bliss (ānanda) of the Self is permanent. Second, pleasure is relative: We can compare our present sense of enjoyment with similar experiences at different times or by different people. Thus, our experience contains an element of envy. Third, there is always the hidden fear that a pleasurable state will come to an end, which is a reasonable assumption. Yoga is a systematic attempt to step out of this whole cycle of gain and loss. When the yogin or yoginī is in touch with the Reality beyond the bodymind, and when he or she has a taste of the unalloyed delight of the Self, all possible pleasures that derive from objects (rather than the Self) come to lose their fascination. The mind begins to be more equanimous. As the Bhagavad-Gītā (2.48), the most popular Hindu Yoga scripture, puts it: “Yoga is balance (samatva).” This notion of balance is intrinsic to Yoga and occurs on many levels of the yogic work. Its culmination is in the “vision of sameness” (sama-darshana), which is the graceful state in which we see everything in the same light. Everything stands revealed as the great Reality, and nothing excites us as being more valuable than anything else. We regard a piece of gold and a clump of clay or a beautiful person and an unattractive individual with the same even-temperedness. Nor are we puffed up by praise or deflated by blame. This condition, which is one of utter lucidity and serenity, must not be confused with one of the many types of ecstasy (samādhi) known to yogins. Ecstasies, visions, and psychic (paranormal) phenomena are not at all the point of spiritual life. They can and do occur when we earnestly devote ourselves to higher values, but they are by-products rather than the goal of authentic spirituality. They should certainly not be made the focus of our aspiration. Thus, Yoga is a comprehensive way of life in which the ultimate Reality, or Spirit, is given precedence over other concerns. It is a sacred path that conducts us, in the words of an ancient Upanishad, from the unreal to the Real, from falsehood to Truth, from the temporal to the Eternal.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8

Sheep and Goats One way of independently checking the results suggested by the hypnosis studies is to examine another form of suggestion, one that is in some ways stronger than conventional hypnotic induction. These are the subtle suggestions induced in us by our culture, our personal experiences, and the beliefs we learned from parents and schools. Together, culture, experience, and beliefs are potent shapers of our sense of reality. They are, in effect, hidden persuaders, powerful reinforcers of our sense of what is real. Our deep beliefs determine what we view as logically reasonable and what we consider to be morally and ethically self-evident. As we’ll explore in more detail in chapter 14, the hidden “hypnosis” of belief actually determines to a greater degree than is commonly known what we can consciously perceive. The hypnosis experiments showed that a slight tweaking of these beliefs resulted in a different performance. Thus, we would expect that people who accept the existence of ESP—for reasons of culture, experience, or belief—will score higher, on average, than people who do not. This turns out to be one of the most consistent experimental effects in psi research. It was whimsically dubbed the “sheep-goat” effect by psychologist Gertrude Schmeidler, who in 1943 proposed that one reason that confirmed skeptics do not report psi experiences is because they subconsciously avoid them.37 People who do report such experiences Schmeidler called the “sheep,” and the skeptics she called the “goats.” These studies typically had people fill in a questionnaire asking about their degree of belief in ESP and about any psi experiences they may have had. On the basis of their responses, participants were classified as either sheep or goats. All participants then took a standardized psi test, like an ESP card test, after which the results of the sheep and goats were compared. The idea was that the performance of the sheep would be significantly better than that of the goats. In 1993, psychologist Tony Lawrence from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, reported a meta-analysis of all sheep-goat forced-choice experiments conducted between 1943 and 1993. Lawrence found seventy-three published reports by thirty-seven different investigators, involving more than 685,000 guesses produced by forty-five hundred participants. The overall results were strongly in favor of the sheep-goat effect, with believers performing better than disbelievers with odds greater than a trillion to one.

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion. —Albert Einstein In previous chapters, we saw that the perceptual forms of psi are difficult to distinguish clearly in the laboratory. Telepathy in the lab, and in life, can be explained as a form of clairvoyance, and clairvoyance is difficult to localize precisely in time. Concepts like “retrocognition,” “real-time clairvoyance,” and “precognition” have arisen, blurring the usual concepts of perception and time. It seems that we must think of psi perception as a general ability to gain information from a distance, unbound by the usual limitations of both space and time.1 As long as we are interested in demonstrating the mere existence of perceptual psi, these conceptual distinctions do not matter. But when we try to understand how these effects are possible, the differences become critical. For example, it’s important when theorizing about psi to know if it’s actually possible to directly perceive someone’s thoughts. Likewise, it’s important to know if it’s possible to perceive objects at a distance in real time. Based on the experimental evidence, it is by no means clear that pure telepathy exists per se, nor is it certain that real-time clairvoyance exists. In stead, the vast majority of both anecdotal and empirical evidence for perceptual psi suggests that the evidence can all be accommodated by various forms of precognition. This may be surprising, given the temporal paradoxes presented by the notion of perception through time. But one simple way of thinking about virtually every form of perceptual psi is that we occasionally bump into our own future. That is, the only way that we personally know that something is psychic, as opposed to a pure fantasy, is because sometime in our future we get verification that our mental impressions were based on something that really did happen to us. This means that, in principle, the original psychic impression could have been a precognition from ourselves.

In addition, participants were entirely unaware that their performance was being affected by their own future perceptions, suggesting that unconscious nervous system activity may be used to detect precognitive perceptions. Studies relying on unconscious responses may be more effective than those relying on conscious responses by bypassing psychological defense mechanisms that may filter out psi perceptions from ordinary awareness.8 Future Feelings In a recent series of experiments conducted in our laboratory at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, we’ve explored unconscious nervous system responses to future events. Strictly speaking, such responses are a subset of precognition known as “presentiment,” a vague sense or feeling of something about to occur but without any conscious awareness of a particular event.9 The unconscious responses studied in our experiments took advantage of a well-known psychophysical reflex known as the “orienting response,” first described by Pavlov in the 1920s. The orienting response is a set of physiological changes experienced by an organism when it faces a “fight or flight” situation. For human beings, the response also appears in less dangerous contexts, such as when confronting a novel or unexpected stimulus. The classical orienting response is a series of simultaneous bodily changes that include dilation of the pupil, altered brain waves, a rise in sweat gland activity, a rise/fall pattern in heart rate, and blanching of the extremities.10 These bodily changes momentarily sharpen our perceptions, improve our decision-making abilities, increase our strength, and reduce the danger of bleeding. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective because when our ancestors were challenged by a tiger, the ones who survived were suddenly able to see and hear exceptionally well, make very fast decisions, become unusually strong, and not bleed as easily as usual. It’s relatively easy to produce an orienting response on demand by showing a person an emotionally provocative photograph. Stimuli like noxious odors, meaningful words, electrical shocks, and sudden tactile stimuli are also effective. Because a person’s general level of arousal is affected cumulatively by successive stimuli, the strength of the orienting response tends to diminish after three to five emotional pictures in a row. In our study, to prevent participants from “habituating,” we randomly interspersed the photos used to produce the orienting responses within a pool of twice as many calm photos.

Die-Face Analysis In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine and his colleagues recognized and took into account the possibility that some dice studies may have been flawed because the probabilities of die faces are not equal. With some dice, it is slightly more likely that one will roll a 6 face than a 1 face because the die faces are marked by scooping out bits of material. The 6 face, for example, has six scoops removed from the surface of that side of the die, so it has slightly less mass than the other die faces. On any random toss, that tiny difference in mass will make the 6 slightly more likely to land face up, followed in decreasing probability by the 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 faces. Thus, an experiment that relied exclusively upon the 6 face as the target may have been flawed because, unless there were also control tosses with no mental intention applied, we could not tell whether above-chance results were due to a mind-matter interaction or to the slightly higher probability of rolling a 6. To see whether this bias was present in these dice studies, we sifted out all reports for which the published data allowed us to calculate the effective hit rate separately for each of the six die faces used under experimental and control conditions. In fact, the suspected biases were found, as shown in figure 8.3. The hit rates for both experimental and control tosses tended to increase from die faces 1 to 6. However, most of the experimental hit rates were also larger than the corresponding control hit rates, suggested some thing interesting beyond the artifacts caused by die-face biases. For example, for die face 6 the experimental condition was significantly larger than the control with odds against chance of five thousand to one. Figure 8.3. Relationship between die face and hit rates for experimental and control conditions. The error bars are 65 percent confidence intervals. Because of the evidence that the die faces were slightly biased, we examined a subset of studies that controlled for these dice biases—studies using design protocols where die faces were equally distributed among the six targets. We referred to such studies as the “balanced-protocol subset.” Sixty-nine experiments met the balanced-protocol criteria. Our examination of those experiments resulted in three notable points: there was still highly significant evidence for mind-matter interaction, with odds against chance of greater than a trillion to one; the effects were constant across different measures of experimental quality; and the selective-reporting “file drawer” required a twenty-to-one ratio of unretrieved, nonsignificant studies for each observed study. Thus chance, quality, and selective reporting could not explain away the results. Dice Conclusions Our meta-analysis findings led us to conclude that a genuine mind-matter interaction did exist with experiments testing tossed dice. The effect had been successfully replicated in more than a hundred experiments by more than fifty investigators for more than a half-century.

Most of the classified, mission-oriented remote viewings could not be evaluated as controlled, formal experiments, because that was not their intent. In some cases, however, unexpected information obtained through remote viewing was later confirmed to be correct, and this was important because it demonstrated the pragmatic value of this technique for use in real-world missions.

Like Wheeler, very few scientists would be happy about being associated in any way with the dreaded label “pseudoscience.” Besides incurring the fear and loathing of the mainstream, those conducting research on topics stamped “pseudoscience” may find that funding sources mysteriously dry up, journals refuse to publish their research, and opportunities for academic tenure vanish. The difficulty of getting scientists to attempt to replicate, or even pay attention to, psi experiments is related to what Thomas Gold of Cornell University has called the “herd effect.” This is the tendency for scientists (or any people, for that matter) to cluster together in groups where only certain ideas or techniques are acceptable. A scientific herd forms for essentially the same reason that sheep form a herd—to protect individuals. It is very risky for one’s career to stand apart from the herd, given the rapidly diminishing likelihood that one can continue to practice science outside the herd. Without exception, scientists who conduct psi research are high risk-takers, because the academic world lets them know very quickly that “we don’t take kindly to strangers in these here parts.” Psychological Factors It is well known that most scientists are “theory-driven” rather than “data-driven.” This means that scientists are uncomfortable with “facts” unless some theory can explain them. Parapsychological “facts” are uncomfortable because there are no well-accepted explanations for why the facts should exist. This does not mean that no scientific theories of psychic phenomena exist; actually, there are dozens. It is the adequacy of the theories that is in question. Being theory-driven also means that scientists fail to see data that contradict their theoretical expectations. This does not mean that they fail to understand the data, but rather that they have a strong tendency literally not to perceive the offending data. As discussed in some detail in chapter 14, a substantial body of conventional psychological research supports this strong consequence. Witnessing this effect in action is truly astonishing. It is like trying to get a dog to look at something that you know he will find interesting. “There it is! Look at the evidence there!” Where? I don’t see anything. “There I say. Look where I’m pointing, not at my hand!” Nope, I don’t see anything.

In addition, telepathy lent itself to controlled laboratory investigation, whereas survival research did not. It was eventually discovered that psi performance in telepathy tests did not diminish when there was no “sender.” It also proved to be nearly impossible to create a test for “pure” telepathy that could not also be explained as clairvoyance. So most researchers began to focus on clairvoyance. It may seem odd that it took any time at all to go from systematic research on survival phenomena, to telepathy research, and then to clairvoyance, before it was realized that the fundamental issue in all cases was the nature of psi perception. But this just illustrates how difficult this topic is to study. Some researchers made these leaps in short order. Others took years. Collectively it took about a half-century to come to what we now see as a “reasonable” approach. Fifty years from now, entirely new “reasonable” ideas may have evolved.

Seeing is not believing when it comes to psychic phenomena. To see, one must first believe. It truly is that simple.

The single most important Hatha-Yoga technique of purification is a particular type of breath control that is performed by breathing alternately through the left and the right nostril. This practice is intended to remove all obstructions from the network of subtle channels through which the life force circulates, thus making proper breath control and deep concentration possible. In the ordinary person, state the scriptures of Hatha-Yoga, the circulation of the life force is obstructed. The technique of alternate breathing is known as nādī-shodhana. When the subtle conduits (nādī)—or arcs of the life energy—are completely purified, the life force can circulate freely in the body, and it becomes amenable to voluntary control. Already Patanjali noted in his Yoga-Sūtra (2.52) that breath control has the effect of removing the “covering” (āvarana) that prevents one’s inner light to manifest clearly. The objective of Hatha-Yoga is to conduct the life force along the body’s central axis to the crown of the head. This flow of prāna through the central conduit—called sushumnā-nādī—is thought to awaken the full psychospiritual potential of the body. This potential is better known as the “serpent power” (kundalinī-shakti). When the kundalinī is awakened from its dormant state in the lowest center (cakra) at the base of the spine, it rushes up to the crown center. This ascent is accompanied by a variety of psychic and somatic phenomena. These include visionary states and, when the kundalinī reaches the top center, ecstatic transcendence into the formless Reality, which is inherently inconceivable and blissful. As the kundalinī force is active in the crown center, the rest of the body is gradually depleted of energy. This curious effect is explained as the progressive purification of the five elements (bhūta) constituting the physical body—earth, water, fire, air, and ether. The Sanskrit term for this process is bhūta-shuddhi. Purification of the body not only leads to health and inner balance but also affects the way in which a person perceives the world. This is clearly indicated in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sūtra (2.40), which states: Through purity [the yogin gains] a desire to protect his own limbs [and a desire for] noncontamination by others. The decisive phrase sva-anga-jugupsā has often been translated as “disgust toward one’s own body,” but this is not at all in the spirit of Yoga. Jugupsā is more appropriately rendered as “desire to protect.” The adept is eager to protect his body against contamination by others. This is combined with an inner distance from one’s own physical vehicle through sustained witnessing.

As acceptance grows, the implications of psi will become more apparent. But we already know that these phenomena present profound challenges to many aspects of science, philosophy, and religion (chapter 17). These challenges will nudge scientists to reconsider basic assumptions about space, time, mind, and matter. Philosophers will rekindle the perennial debates over the role of consciousness in the physical world. Theologians will reconsider the concept of divine intervention, as some phenomena previously considered to be miracles will probably become subject to scientific understanding. These reconsiderations are long overdue. An exclusive focus on what might be called “the outer world” has led to a grievous split between the private world of human experience and the public world as described by science. In particular, science has provided little understanding of profoundly important human concepts like hope and meaning. The split between the objective and the subjective has in the past been dismissed as a nonproblem, or as a problem belonging to religion and not to science. But this split has also led to major technological blunders, and a rising popular antagonism toward science. This is a pity, because scientific methods are exceptionally powerful tools for overcoming personal biases and building workable models of the “truth.” There is every reason to expect that the same methods that gave us a better understanding of galaxies and genes will also shed light on experiences described by mystics throughout history.

These experiences, called “psychic” or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space. For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified. Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked by scientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight. Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of “common sense.” A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is “here, in the head,” and objective is “there, out in the world.” Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive. The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn’t clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.

For now, let us take paranormal to mean something like “beyond the range of phenomena presently accepted by most scientists.” Many subjects now considered perfectly legitimate areas of scientific inquiry, including hypnosis, dreams, hallucinations, and subliminal perception, were relegated to the wackiest fringes of the paranormal in the late nineteenth century. A few hundred years before that, topics like physics, astronomy, and chemistry were so far out that those who merely dabbled in them risked accusations of heresy, or worse. This simply points out that science, like most other things, is part of an evolutionary process: odd events considered paranormal eventually become normal after satisfactory scientific explanations are developed. In this sense—although some scientists would probably shudder at the analogy—virtually all cutting-edge, basic research can be viewed as the systematic practice of probing and explaining the paranormal.

Supernatural Supernatural has several meanings; the usual is “miraculous; ascribed to agencies or powers above or beyond nature; divine.” Because science is commonly regarded as a method of studying the natural world, a supernatural phenomenon is by this definition unexplainable by, and therefore totally incompatible with, science. Today, a few religious traditions continue to maintain that psi is supernatural and therefore not amenable to scientific study. But a few hundred years ago virtually all natural phenomena were thought to be manifestations of supernatural agencies and spirits. Through years of systematic investigation, many of these phenomena are now understood in quite ordinary terms. Thus, it is entirely reasonable to expect that so-called miracles are simply indicators of our present ignorance. Any such events may be more properly labeled first as paranormal, then as normal once we have developed an acceptable scientific explanation. As astronaut Edgar Mitchell put it: “There are no unnatural or supernatural phenomena, only very large gaps in our knowledge of what is natural, particularly regarding relatively rare occurrences.”2 Mystical Mystical refers to the direct perception of reality; knowledge derived directly rather than indirectly. In many respects, mysticism is surprisingly similar to science in that it is a systematic method of exploring the nature of the world. Science concentrates on outer, objective phenomena, and mysticism concentrates on inner, subjective phenomena. It is interesting that numerous scientists, scholars, and sages over the years have revealed deep, underlying similarities between the goals, practices, and findings of science and mysticism. Some of the most famous scientists wrote in terms that are practically indistinguishable from the writings of mystics.

Measuring replication rates across different experiments requires that research be reviewed in some fashion. Research reviews can be classified into four types. A type 1 review simply identifies and discusses recent developments in a field, usually focusing on a few exemplar experiments. Such reviews are often found in popular-science magazines such as Scientific American. They are also commonly used in skeptical reviews of psi research because one or two carefully selected exemplars can provide easy targets to pick apart. The type 2 review uses a few research results to highlight or illustrate a new theory or to propose a new theoretical framework for understanding a phenomenon. Again, the review is not designed to be comprehensive but only to illustrate a general theme. Type 3 reviews organize and synthesize knowledge from various areas of research. Such narrative reviews are not comprehensive, because the entire pool of combined studies from many disciplines is typically too large to consider individually. So again, a few exemplars of the “best” studies are used to illustrate the point of the synthesis. Type 4 is the integrative review, or meta-analysis, which is a structured technique for exhaustively analyzing a complete body of experiments. It draws generalizations from a set of observations about each experiment.1 Integration Meta-analysis has been described as “a method of statistical analysis wherein the units of analysis are the results of independent studies, rather than the responses of individual subjects.”2 In a single experiment, the raw data points are typically the participants’ individual responses. In meta-analysis, the raw data points are the results of separate experiments.

Stochastic and Reactive Effects Replication may be difficult to achieve if the phenomenon under study is inherently stochastic, that is, if it changes with time. Moreover, the phenomenon may react to the experimental situation, altering its characteristics because of the experiment. These are particularly sticky problems in the behavioral and social sciences, for it is virtually impossible to guarantee that an individual tested once will be exactly the same when tested later. In fact, when dealing with living organisms, we cannot realistically expect strict stability of behavior over time. Researchers have developed various experimental designs that attempt to counteract this problem of large fluctuations in behavior. Replication is equally problematic in medical research, for the effects of a drug as well as the symptoms of a disease change with time, confounding the observed course of the illness. Was the cure accelerated or held back by the introduction of the test drug? Often the answer can only be inferred based on what happens on average to a group of test patients compared to a group of control patients. Even attempts to keep experimenters and test participants completely blind to the experimental manipulations do not always address the stochastic and reactive elements of the phenomena under study. Besides the possibility that an effect may change over time, some phenomena may be inherently statistical; that is, they may exist only as probabilities or tendencies to occur. Experimenter Effects In a classic book entitled Pitfalls in Human Research, psychologist Theodore X. Barber discusses ten ways in which behavioral research can go wrong.11 These include such things as the “investigator paradigm effect,” in which the investigator’s conceptual framework biases the way an experiment is conducted and interpreted, and the “experimenter personal attributes effect,” where variables such as age, sex, and friendliness interact with the test participants’ responses. A third pitfall is the “experimenter unintentional expectancy effect”; that is, the experimenter’s prior expectations can influence the outcome of an experiment. Researchers’ expectations and prior beliefs affect how their experiments are conducted, how the data are interpreted, and how other investigators’ research is judged. This topic, discussed in chapter 14, is relevant to understanding the criticisms of psi experiments and how the evidence for psi phenomena has often been misinterpreted.

The development of quantum mechanics in the late 1920s expanded the classical notion of fields in a way that would have shocked Newtonian physicists. Quantum fields do not exist physically in space-time like the classically inferred gravitational and electromagnetic fields. Instead, quantum fields specify only probabilities for strange, ghostlike particles as they manifest in space-time. Although quantum fields are mathematically similar to classical fields, they are more difficult to understand because, unlike classical fields, they exist outside the usual boundaries of space-time. This gives the quantum field a peculiar nonlocal character, meaning the field is not located in a given region of space and time. With a nonlocal phenomenon, what happens in region A instantaneously influences what occurs in region B, and vice versa, without any energy being exchanged between the two regions. Such a phenomenon would be impossible according to classical physics, and yet nonlocality has been dramatically and convincingly revealed in modern physics experiments. In fact, those experiments are independent of the present formulation of quantum mechanics, which means that any future theory of nature must also embody the principle of nonlocality. We’ll return to nonlocality again in chapter 16. Consciousness Fields Just as the individual is not alone in the group, nor any one in society alone among the others, so man is not alone in the universe. —Claude Levi-Strauss The idea that consciousness may be fieldlike is not new.2 William James wrote about this idea in 1898, and more recently the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake proposed a similar idea with his concept of morphogenetic fields.3 The conceptual roots of field consciousness can be traced back to Eastern philosophy, especially the Upanishads, the mystical scriptures of Hinduism, which express the idea of a single underlying reality embodied in “Brahman,” the absolute Self. The idea of field consciousness suggests a continuum of nonlocal intelligence, permeating space and time. This is in contrast with the neuroscience-inspired, Newtonian view of a perceptive tissue locked inside the skull.

One way to avoid the design problems encountered by the transcendental meditation researchers would be to keep one of the variables fixed. This could be either the number of meditators or the “target” of consciousness-induced order. Beyond this, as philosopher Evan Fales and sociologist Barry Markovsky of the University of Iowa suggested after reviewing the Maharishi effect, “Presumably, if the material world can be influenced in purposive ways by collective meditation, inanimate detectors could be constructed and placed at varying distances from the collective meditators.”6 This is essentially the approach that we took, although our motivations were based upon a logical extension of laboratory research on mind-matter interactions using random-number generators, and not by the claims of the transcendental meditators. Properties of Consciousness Whatever else consciousness may be, let us suppose that it also has the following properties, derived from a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies.7 The first property is that consciousness extends beyond the individual and has quantum field–like properties, in that it affects the probabilities of events. Second, consciousness injects order into systems in proportion to the “strength” of consciousness present. This is a refinement of quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s observation about one of the most remarkable properties of life, namely, an “organism’s astonishing gift … of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.”8 Third, the strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment, and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. We propose that ordinary awareness has a fairly low focus of attention compared to peak states, mystical states, and other nonordinary states.9 Fourth, a group of individuals can be said to have “group consciousness.” Group consciousness strengthens when the group’s attention is focused on a common object or event, and this creates coherence among the group. If the group’s attention is scattered, then the group’s mental coherence is also scattered. Fifth, when individuals in a group are all attending to different things, then the group consciousness and group mental coherence is effectively zero, producing what amounts to background noise. We assume that the maximum degree of group coherence is related in some complicated way to the total number of individuals present in the group, the strength of their common focus of attention, and other psychological, physiological, and environmental factors. Sixth, physical systems of all kinds respond to a consciousness field by becoming more ordered. The stronger or more coherent a consciousness field, the more the order will be evident. Inanimate objects (like rocks) will respond to order induced by consciousness as well as animate ones (like people, or tossed dice), but it is only in the more labile systems that we have the tools to readily detect these changes in order. In sum, when a group is actively focused on a common object, the “group mind” momentarily has the “power to organize,” as Carl Jung put it.10 This leads us to a very simple idea: as the mind moves, so moves matter.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals.

Princeton University mathematician York Dobyns found that the seven years of new PEAR RNG results closely replicated the preceding three decades of RNG studies reviewed in the meta-analysis.37 That is, our 1989 prediction had been validated. Because the massive PEAR database provides an exceptionally strong confirmation that mind-matter interactions really do exist, we can confidently use it to study some of the factors influencing these effects. Psychologist Roger Nelson and his colleagues found that the main RNG effect for the full PEAR database of 1,262 independent experiments, generated by 108 people, was associated with odds against chance of four thou sand to one.38 He also found that there were no “star” performers—this means that the overall effect reflected an accumulation of small effects from each person rather than a few outstanding results from “special people.” This finding confirms the expectation that mind-matter interaction effects observed in the hundreds of studies collected in the 1989 RNG meta-analysis were part of a widespread ability distributed throughout the population, and were not due to a few psychic “superstars” or a few odd experiments. Further analysis of the PEAR data showed that the results in individual trials were best interpreted as small changes in the probabilities of individual random events rather than as a few instances of wildly large effects. This means that the results cannot be explained by unexpected glitches in the RNG devices, or by strange circumstances in the lab (like a circuit breakdown). Rather, the effects were small but consistent across individual trials, and across different people.39 If we accept that one person can affect the behavior of an RNG, another question naturally arises: would two people together produce a larger effect? The PEAR database included some experiments where cooperating pairs used the same mental intention on the same RNG. Analysis of these data found that, on average, the effects were indeed larger for pairs than for individuals working alone. However, two people didn’t automatically get results that were twice as large as one person’s results. Instead, the composition of the pairs was important in determining the outcome. Same-sex pairs, whether men or women, tended to achieve null or slightly negative outcomes, whereas opposite-sex pairs produced an effect that was approximately twice that of individuals. Moreover, when the pair was a “bonded” couple, such as spouses or close family members, the effect size was more than four times that of individuals. There were also some gender differences. PEAR lab psychologist Brenda Dunne found that women tended to volunteer more time to the experiments, and thus they accumulated about two-thirds of the full database, compared with one-third for men. On the other hand, their effects were smaller on average than those of men, with odds of the difference being due to chance at eight hundred to one.

The “feeling of being stared at” is the focus of a subset of distant-mental-interaction studies. This is a particularly interesting belief to investigate because it is related to one of the oldest known superstitions in the Western world, the “evil eye,” and to one of the oldest known blessings in the Eastern world, the darshan, or gaze of an enlightened master. Most ancient peoples feared the evil eye and took measures to deflect the attraction of the eye, often by wearing shiny or attractive amulets around the neck. Today, most fears about the evil eye have subsided, at least among educated peoples. And yet many people still report the “feeling of being stared at” from a distance. Is this visceral feeling what it appears to be—a distant mental influence of the nervous system—or can it be better understood in more prosaic ways? In the laboratory today, the question is studied by separating two people and monitoring the first person’s nervous system (usually electrodermal activity) while the second person stares at the first at random times over a one-way closed-circuit video system. The stared-at person has no idea when the starer is looking at him or her. Figure 9.2. Effect sizes for studies testing the “feeling of being stared at,” where 50 percent is chance expectation. Confidence intervals are 95 percent. Figure 9.2 shows the results for staring studies conducted over eight decades.34 Similar to William Braud’s electrodermal studies but conducted in a context that more closely matched common descriptions of “feeling stared at,” these studies resulted in an overall effect of 63 percent where chance expectation is 50 percent. This is remarkably robust for a phenomenon that—according to conventional scientific models—is not supposed to exist. The combined studies result in odds against chance of 3.8 million to 1. Summary Given the evidence for psi perception and mind-matter interaction effects discussed so far, we could have expected that experiments involving living systems would also be successful. The studies discussed here show that our expectations are confirmed. The implications for distant healing are clear. All the experiments discussed so far have been replicated in the laboratory dozens to hundreds of times. They demonstrate that some of the “psychic” experiences people report probably do involve genuine psi. Now we move outside the laboratory to examine a new type of experiment, one that explores mind-matter interaction effects apparently associated with the collective attention of groups.

William James said near the end of the nineteenth century, “No mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” A hundred years later, Norman Cousins summarized the modern view of mind-body interactions with the succinct phrase “Belief becomes biology.”6 That is, an external suggestion can become an internal expectation, and that internal expectation can manifest in the physical body. While the general idea of mind-body connections is now widely accepted, forty years ago it was considered dangerously heretical nonsense. The change in opinion came about largely because of hundreds of studies of the placebo effect, psychosomatic illness, psychoneuroimmunology, and the spontaneous remission of serious disease.7 In studies of drug tests and disease treatments, the placebo response has been estimated to account for between 20 to 40 percent of positive responses. The implication is that the body’s hard, physical reality can be significantly modified by the more evanescent reality of the mind.8 Evidence supporting this implication can be found in many domains. For example: • Hypnotherapy has been used successfully to treat intractable cases of breast cancer pain, migraine headache, arthritis, hypertension, warts, epilepsy, neurodermatitis, and many other physical conditions.9 People’s expectations about drinking can be more potent predictors of behavior than the pharmacological impact of alcohol.10 If they think they are drinking alcohol and expect to get drunk, they will in fact get drunk even if they drink a placebo. Fighter pilots are treated specially to give them the sense that they truly have the “right stuff.” They receive the best training, the best weapons systems, the best perquisites, and the best aircraft. One consequence is that, unlike other soldiers, they rarely suffer from nervous breakdowns or post-traumatic stress syndrome even after many episodes of deadly combat.11 Studies of how doctors and nurses interact with patients in hospitals indicate that health-care teams may speed death in a patient by simply diagnosing a terminal illness and then letting the patient know.12 People who believe that they are engaged in biofeedback training are more likely to report peak experiences than people who are not led to believe this.13 Different personalities within a given individual can display distinctly different physiological states, including measurable differences in autonomic-nervous-system functioning, visual acuity, spontaneous brain waves, and brainware-evoked potentials.14 While the idea that the mind can affect the physical body is becoming more acceptable, it is also true that the mechanisms underlying this link are still a complete mystery. Besides not understanding the biochemical and neural correlates of “mental intention,” we have almost no idea about the limits of mental influence. In particular, if the mind interacts not only with its own body but also with distant physical systems, as we’ve seen in the previous chapter, then there should be evidence for what we will call “distant mental interactions” with living organisms.

Jane declared that she wound give each sitter a piece but only after she had 'stepped on it, spit on it and rubbed some pussy hairs in it.' Even so, the sitters obediently opened their mouths as the spirit deftly supplied them with the aforementioned cookie pieces. In this act, Jane supplied evidence of her presence, signaling her persistent, life-filled connection with the material.

Jane declared that she would give each sitter a piece but only after she had 'stepped on it, spit on it and rubbed some pussy hairs in it.' Even so, the sitters obediently opened their mouths as the spirit deftly supplied them with the aforementioned cookie pieces. In this act, Jane supplied evidence of her presence, signaling her persistent, life-filled connection with the material.

It is through the work of the ‘active’ or ‘true imagination’ that, as Corbin writes, ‘psychic energies that have been neglected or paralysed by our habits’ can be revived’.49 These energies can then be used to perform the work of ta’wil, the spiritual hermeneutics that can resuscitate the world of phenomena, which has fallen into the deadening embrace of mechanistic science and utilitarian exploitation. Functioning as a ‘faculty and organ of knowledge, just as real – if not more real than – the senses’, ‘true imagination’ releases ‘things’ from their bondage by returning them to their archetypal source in the Imaginal.

There is also some evidence indicating specificity, wherein certain adverse experiences appear to be related to specific psychic phenomena. For instance, being bullied as a child is closely related to intense paranoia, while sexual abuse is more closely related to hearing voices (Bentall et al., 2012). Yet, most research and treatment continues to focus on individual internal defects (i.e., “illness”) that exist separate from one’s developmental context or life circumstances, and a search for the ever-elusive genetic basis for these purported defects.

True psychic perception is so much more than rainbows, unicorns and 'woo-woo'.

The studies described here support ideas about deep interconnectedness espoused by physicists, theologians, and mystics.19 Mind and matter may be part of what physicist Victor Mansfield describes as “a radically interconnected and interdependent world, one so essentially connected at a deep level that the interconnections are more fundamental, more real than the independent existence of the parts.”20 The common link between mind and matter, as observed in these experiments, is order. Order expressed in the mind is related to focused attention, and order in matter is related to decreases in randomness. We found that the object of the focused attention does not seem to be particularly important, only that something is sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of a group. Similarly, the exact nature of the physical system used to detect the mass-consciousness effect does not seem to be particularly important, provided that it is a system that naturally fluctuates in some way and can be measured.

The results of these experiments also bear some resemblance to Jung’s concept of “synchronicity,” or meaningful coincidences in time.21 As with synchronicity, we seem to be witnessing meaningful relationships between mind and matter at certain times. But synchronicity, according to Jung, involves acausal relationships, and here we were able to predict synchronistic-like events. Jung believed that people could experience but not understand in causal terms how synchronicities occurred: We delude ourselves with the thought that we know much more about matter than about a “metaphysical” mind or spirit and so we overestimate material causation and believe that it alone affords us a true explanation of life. But matter is just as inscrutable as mind. As to the ultimate things we can know nothing, and only when we admit this do we return to a state of equilibrium.22 We are more confident than Jung about what may be possible because it appears that with clever experimental designs, some aspects of Jung’s unus mundus (one world) are in fact responsive to experimental probes, and some forms of synchronistic events can be—paradoxically—planned. We expect that Nature will reveal to us anything we are clever enough to ask for, but we also know that the revealed information is usually shrouded in unstated (and often unexamined) assumptions. At a minimum, we’re beginning to glimpse that past assumptions about rigid separations between mind and matter were probably wrong.

A Universal Fact The problem before us now is this: if the reality behind the UFO phenomenon is both physical and psychic in nature, and if it manipulates space and time in ways our scientific concepts are inadequate to describe, is there any reason for its effects to be limited to our culture or to our generation? We have already established that no country has had the special privilege of these manifestations. Yet we must carry the argument further: if the UFO phenomenon is not tied to social conditions specific to our time, or to specific technological achievements, then it may represent a universal fact. It may have been with us, in one form or another, as long as the human race has existed on this planet. Something happened in classical times that is inadequately explained by historical theories. The suggestion that the same thing might be happening again should make us extremely interested in bringing every possible light to bear on this problem. Beginning in the second century B.C. and continuing until the fall of the Roman Empire, the intellectual elites of the Mediterranean world, raised in a spirit of scientific rationalism, were confronted and eventually defeated by irrational element similar to that contained in modern apparitions of unexplained phenomena, an element that is amplified by their summary rejection by our own science. It accompanied the collapse of ancient civilizations. Commenting on this parallel, French science writer Aime Michel proposes the following scene. Consider one of the Alexandrian thinkers, a man like Ptolemaeus, the second-century astronomer thoroughly schooled in the rational methods of Archimedes, Euclid, and Aristotle. And imagine him reading the Apocalypse, various writings about Armageddon. How would he react to such an experience? He would merely shrug, says Aime Michel: "It would never occur to him to place the slightest credence in such a compendium of what must regard as insanities. Such a scene must have taken place thousands of times at the end of classical antiquity. And we know that every time there was the same rejection, the same shrugging, because we have no record of any critical examination of the doctrines, ideas, and claims of the counterculture that expressed itself through the Apocalypse. This counterculture was too absurd to retain the attention of a reader of Plato. A short time – a very short time – elapsed, the counterculture triumphed, and Plato was forgotten for a thousand years. Could it happen again?" Only a thorough examination of the ancient records can save us from the effects of such cultural myopia.

Jung is deeply and unambiguously committed to Kantian epistemology, according to which psychic life (i.e. the Kantian ‘phenomena’) is all we can really know, everything else (i.e. the Kantian ‘noumena’) being unknowable. He expresses this commitment in passages such as: [The psyche] will never get beyond itself. All comprehension and all that is comprehended is in itself psychic, and to that extent we are hopelessly cooped up in an exclusively psychic world. (MDR: 385) And: psychic happenings constitute our only, immediate experience. … My sense impressions—for all that they force upon me a world of impenetrable objects occupying space—are psychic images, and these alone are my immediate experience … All our knowledge is conditioned by the psyche which, because it alone is immediate, is superlatively real. (MMSS: 194, emphasis added) Often, however, Jung seems to cross the boundary that separates epistemology from metaphysics and assert that the psyche is metaphysically primary: I am not alluding to the vulgar notion that anything “psychic” is either nothing at all [as in eliminative materialism 11] or at best even more tenuous than a gas [i.e. a reducible epiphenomenon, as in mainstream materialism]. Quite the contrary; I am of the opinion that the psyche is … indisputably real. (ACU: 116, emphasis added)

Idealism is materialism upside down. It proposes that all that exists is pure consciousness. Everything in the physical world, all matter and energy, are emergent properties of consciousness. In its more radical form, it asserts that the entire physical world is a mind-generated illusion, somewhat like the virtual world in the movie The Matrix. Idealism runs into a miracle if it proposes that out of ephemeral nonphysical consciousness there emerges a hard, physical world. How does that happen? Once emerged, is it still connected to mind or does it go on its merry way? On the other hand, if it proposes that everything is an imaginary projection of consciousness, then the miracle is that everyone other than me is also a part of my imagination. Does that mean I still have to pay taxes? Panpsychism is the fourth main worldview. It acknowledges that mind and matter are quite real, but it also proposes that these elements of reality are inseparable and go all the way down to elementary particles and “below,” and also all the way up to the universe and beyond. The idea of a complementary relationship, where something is “both/and” rather than “either/or,” is a core concept within quantum theory. Light, for example, behaves both as a wave and as a particle, depending on how you look at it. The advantage of panpsychism is that no miracles are required to account for how matter can be sentient, or how mind can have physical consequences. It is both/and. But all is not completely rosy. The trouble with panpsychism is called the binding problem. This means that if all matter is already sentient, then every atom of your body, your cells, and your organs should also be sentient. Why then is your sense of self a unity and not a multitude? What binds it all together so that the “I” within you experiences just one self rather than trillions of tiny selves? Dealing with the New Story One of the more interesting takes on the developing new story of reality has been proposed by Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal, who, as a scholar of comparative religion, has explored the core themes of his discipline—the sacred, the paranormal, the supernormal, the mystical, and the spiritual—in a direction that few academics have dared to tred.80 He views the intense popular interest in the paranormal as more than a mere fascination with fictional miracles, but rather as a sign of the original meaning of fascination—a bewitching accompanied simultaneously by awe and terror. He defines “psychic phenomena” as “the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one,” and the sacred as what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment.

Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the mystical (mysterium) as both fucking scary (tremendum) and utterly fascinating (fascinans).80 (page 9) With the sacred viewed within this gripping, emotionally charged sense, it is hardly surprising that these topics are too disturbing to be studied either by religious scholarship or by science. The presence of real siddhis, real psychic effects lurking in the dark boundaries between mind and matter, are so frightening and disorienting that defense mechanisms immediately snap into place to protect our psyches from these disturbing thoughts. We become blind to personal psychic episodes and to the supportive scientific evidence, we conveniently forget mind-shattering synchronicities, and if the intensity of the mysterium tremendum becomes too hot, we angrily deny any interest in the topic while backing away and vigorously making the sign of the cross. Within science this sort of behavior is understandable; science doesn’t like what it can’t explain because it makes scientists feel stupid. But the same resistance is also endemic in comparative religion scholarship, which is supposed to be the discipline that studies the sacred. As Kripal says, scholars of religion “simply ignore … or brush their data aside as ‘primitive,’ ‘mistaken,’ and so on. Now the dismissing word in vogue is ‘anecdotal’ ” (pp. 17–18).80 One reason for this odd state of affairs is that real psi and real siddhis powerfully refute Descartes’s dualism, the very idea that led to the split between science, which deals with matter, and the humanities, which deal with mind. This distinction has carved up the world so successfully that when phenomena appear that harshly illuminate the artificial nature of the split, the resulting glare, says Kripal, “can only violate and offend our present order of knowledge and possibility” (page 24).80 From this analysis, Kripal arrives at his central argument: Psychic phenomena may be thought of as symbols that indicate “the irruption [a bursting in] of meaning in the physical world via the radical collapse of the subject-object structure itself. They are not simply physical events. They are also meaning events” (page 25).80 In other words, where objective and subjective meet, the fabric of reality itself blurs. This is a place that is not quite physical, and not quite mental, but a limbo that somehow contains and creates both.

What might happen when this ancient-modern integration becomes a reality? On the beneficial side we can anticipate improved health care through a vastly better understanding of the mind-body relationship. We may see development of technologies that treat aspects of the mind-body system that are well understood in the wisdom traditions but are ignored by Western medicine (for the most part). This includes phenomena such as “subtle energies.” We may see a substantial reduction in interpersonal conflict through a broader recognition of the interconnectedness of all life. As the boundaries between subjective and objective realities are better understood, the communications and energy industries may be radically altered. On the other hand, we are likely to find that some aspects of the wisdom traditions are seriously distorted and in some cases are dangerously wrong. We may find growing societal resistance at the prospect of being “absorbed” into an increasingly powerful collective mind. And we may pass through a time when horrifically powerful weapons are created that reshape space-time and possibly even alter history. As science and society begin to appreciate that some of the siddhis are real, and that other aspects of yogic lore also provide legitimate road maps of reality, we can anticipate that some scientists and scholars, especially those who have bet their careers on past theories, will become increasingly marginalized and resentful. But the teeth grinding will eventually settle down as younger investigators, who were not so entrenched in passé prejudices, reach their prime.