In his ‘The Universe Around Us’, George Ellis very prudently limits his discourse to the physical and the living world, whereas I intend to go one step further and take a peep into a world which is of the non-physical, and perhaps find a unity between the three. I am sure you will have guessed that I am referring to the world of the paranormal, of the psi phenomena. My main question is whether there is more to Man than I have sketched out.
Michael Schermer, the publisher of Skeptic, is convinced that there is not. In the September 04 issue of Scientific American, he poses the same question as I and has this answer:
“If this is all there is, then every moment, every relationship and every person counts – and counts more if there is no tomorrow than if there is. Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life’s caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known. The realization that we exist together for a narrow slice of time and a limited fraction of space elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility, a passing moment on the proscenium of the cosmos.”
I can certainly endorse every single of these well-versed words by a skeptic, but contrary to what he thinks, I opine that they apply equally well whether this is all there is or whether there is more to us. And I am convinced that there is, but perhaps not exactly in the way you may fathom (see below). I believe that we humans, and life in all its forms, are the result of an incredible combination of fortuitous circumstances, characterized by the "the anthropic principle" dealt with above. I strongly believe we are a product of Neo-Darwinian selection, but at the same time I differ with the present view of most anthropologists and biologists in the sense that I believe that in the course of the evolution of life a number of survival features developed among the species, capacities which in all fairness should not be called occult or supernatural (because they certainly are an integral part of nature) but which have nonetheless been given that label. Here, we will call them psi phenomena as the all-embracing concept. ESP (Extra-sensory Perception) and PK (Psycho-kinesis), the two which have my particular interest, are thus two of many subclasses of psi. They show the ability to:
1. Communicate instantaneously at large distances with humans or animals without the use of the normal senses (telepathy).
2. Acquire information about distant events without the apparent "intervention" of living beings (clairvoyance).
3. Acquire information about future events, often in the form of dreams (precognition).
These faculties are commonly referred to as ESP (Extra-sensory Perception)
4. The ability to perhaps influence matter, either at a distance or by contact, referred to as PK (psycho-kinesis).
I believe these faculties have, over time, lost most of their survival value among humans and domesticated animals and hence degenerated considerably so that they are now weak and uncontrollable. Once possessed, they probably deteriorate with age, as they no longer have the same survival value once we have procreated. But they are probably intact among many wild animals, e.g. fish, termites, bees, birds of passage and prey, apes etc. Moreover, their possession is probably selective so that not all animals have possessed all of them.
My plan is to give a scanty idea of how these occurrences have been treated by the scientific world down to today. I will give examples of a few of the more conspicuous theories proposed by scientists who have ventured into this field. Most of them are scared of even getting near this Pandora's Box, and with good reason, because once open (and the lid has been lifted many times), it invites all sort of cranks and swindlers and religious fanatics to come out of their holes. So in order to overcome the psychological barriers in most scientists it has been necessary to establish rules and control mechanisms much stricter than those required in other areas of research, and this together with the difficulties in acquiring funds for research in ESP has not made prospects any brighter.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in convincing people of the importance of this branch of research is the difficulty in reproducing these phenomena, a must within all scientific disciplines. But nowadays more and more scientists find ESP a meritorious research field.
Then, I will relate some of my own psi experiences with special emphasis on precognition and synchronicity, and finally, I will see if I can find a trend common to them.
But first a few words about the history of ESP research. Proper research on a larger scale of the paranormal was not carried out until the foundation in England in 1882 of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). The purpose was to investigate phenomena such as telepathy, apparitions, haunted houses and hypnosis for their possible paranormal nature. Until then, such research work had largely been undertaken on a purely personal basis; an example is the English physicist Michael Faraday who around the middle of the 18th century experimented with table-tilting.
Among the founders of SPR were distinguished scholars like Edmund Gurney and Frederick Myers. Henry Sidgwick was the society's first president. The list of succeeding Presidents over the ensuing century is awesome: Nobel Prize winners, a prime minister, a large number of professors in physics, biology, psychology, mathematics etc. Although they were rarely themselves in charge of the experiments, it serves to suggest the serious nature of the undertaking. In 1885, the American counterpart to SPR was founded and both are still active.
Since 1882, the area of research has spread out to all thinkable areas of paranormal phenomena, and hundreds of thousands of experiments have been carried out. The period up to 1930 was dominated by spiritualism, intensified by the bereaved during and after World War I who sought contact with the dead through the intervention of mediums. Their duplicity harmed parapsycholgical research to such an extent that it almost came to a halt.
However, the revolution in physics from 1900 with the emergence of the great theories (e.g. the Bohr atom, general relativity, wave theory and quantum mechanics) described previously resulted in an impression of the universe and matter as mysterious, flimsy entities. This led many people, and among them a surprising number of physicists, to seek physical explanations to psi phenomena within their own reference of expertise.
One was the English physicist and mathematician Adrian Dobbs who in 1965 proposed an original theory to explain telepathy and precognition in a physical frame; he introduced two extra time dimensions to let quantum forces play out in the one, whilst the other contained the total set of possibilities. A wave front belonging to the first dimension and moving forward along the arrow of time would supposedly at each moment collapse the wave front and materialize the event most likely to happen in the second dimension.
Another was the eminent Australian neurophysiologist and Nobel Prize laureate Sir John Eccles who, in his theory of the brain, proposed an undetectable entity which triggered acts of free will through it. His intention was not to explain psi, but as his theory assumed neither field nor wave-particle arguments it was adopted by a number of writers on psi who did not wish to commit themselves to one or the other of the two great physical theories in their search for explanations of psi.
Albert Einstein was not adverse to scientists who sought explanations of psi; he encouraged the views of a couple of his fellow scientists on the paranormal nature of certain phenomena; he wrote a preface to Upton Sinclair’s “Mental Radio” and took part in séances where he according to Sinclair managed to levitate a table without physical contact and without the presence of a medium.
ESP entered into its adolescence in the 1930s when an extensive series of experiments on a sound scientific basis was undertaken. Best known are the experiments conducted by J. B. Rhine and his wife and later widow Louisa Rhine at Duke University and finishing in 1965. In 1934, Rhine published his results in the book “Extra-Sensory Perception”, an expression he had coined himself. In 1947, he published “The Reach of the Mind” in which he took stock of his experimental results to date. Not only did Rhine experiment with persons, he investigated several hundred cases in which animals were reported to have demonstrated ESP powers.
About 1970, psi research matured. The epistemological consequences of the great theories (relativity, quantum physics) had more or less settled in the scientific community, giving the physicists and quantum mathematicians breathing space to look deeper into psi. ESP seemed to have become more respectable; a number of researchers came forward with full-fledged mathematical theories, and others with intricate speculative theories, but they all had one flaw in common: they did not offer testable theories. Others – mainly parapsychologists – entirely excluded the feasibility of a physical psi theory.
In
the 1960s, the psychiatrist Montague Ullman and the psychologist Stanley
Krippner began research at the Maimonides Medical Center’s Dream Laboratory in
New York to determine if their hypothesis, that ESP occurs more often in dreams
than in consciousness, was correct. In particular, they have focused on dream
telepathy, that is, whether a person acting as an agent can transfer his
thoughts to the mind of a sleeping subject, thereby influencing the subject’s
dreams. It turned out to be the case, but during the experiments it appeared
that some of the subjects ‘disregarded’ the agent’s instructions and
instead had precognitive dreams, that is, dreams which presaged future events.
In
1973, Ullman and Krippner published their astounding findings in the book
‘Dream Telepathy’. Case
stories from their research, as well as my personal experiences, seem to
indicate that precognition manifests itself almost exclusively through dreams,
and it would seem that the unconscious or subconscious state of mind during
sleep, and in particular during the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phases, is
practically a prerequisite for precognition, whereas premonitions (the
paranormal kind: presentiments of accidents or events of high emotional impact)
happen when awake.
I think this is a good time to relate some precognitive dreams from my life:
Another late trend has been the growing emphasis in the part which consciousness may play in psi. Man is the only being with a full-fledged consciousness. Could it be that some sort of consciousness is a prerequisite for psi, or that consciousness actually creates psi - under certain conditions? Consciousness, which is both physical and non-physical, would thus be the interface between psi and material reality. The analogy to quantum mechanics is obvious: the role of the observer in experiments as stressed by the Copenhagen school is well known, and if we add ‘conscious’ to read ‘the conscious observer’ the analogy becomes even more striking; what seems to be a common denominator in most psi phenomena? That they at a particular moment in time must have been cognized or made conscious by somebody. At Princeton University they have taken the consequence of this insight. But first let us take a closer look at the evasive concept of consciousness, which plays such and important role, either by its absence or presence, in all psi happenings:
The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) laboratory was founded in 1979 by Professor Robert G. Jahn, Dean Emeritus at Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Since then, engineers, physicists and psychologist at the laboratory have carried out rigorous scientific studies of the interaction of human consciousness with sensitive physical devices and of precognitive remote perception to reach a better understanding of the role of consciousness in the establishment of physical reality. They developed the random event generators that were later also employed by the GCP project mentioned below. The PEAR website can be found at http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/index.htm
In 1998 an international team of scientists, led by Roger D. Nelson from Princeton University, built a project called ‘The Global Consciousness Project’ (GCP). Its hardware is now a web of about 65 of the above-mentioned random event generators, called EGGS, dispersed widely on the Earth with a view to detect anomalies that cannot be accounted for by physical causes. The generators are shielded off from all imaginable exterior influences, and data from them reach the center in Princeton in a continuous flow. Anomalies are revealed through analysis designed to assess hypoheses about possible correlation of data anomalies with global events. The assumption is that fields generated by individual consciousness would interact and combine, ultimately having a global presence, especially when many people are gathered with the same aims or subjected to tragic events. These fields would interact with the EGGS, so that otherwise expected chance fluctuations are interfered with automatically to show scores significantly under or over the expected. There have been several inexplicable data. The group's claim is that September 11, 2001 did register worldwide. A number of their findings are at http://noosphere.princeton.edu/results.html in which they also publish their conclusions after the March 11, 2004 train bombings in Madrid. (The author had a modest role in calling Roger Nelson’s attention to this target of investigation).
The relationship between Man and his pet animals seemingly constitute a special case of psi; thousands of recorded instances testify to the almost incredible paranormal effects which the strong emotional links between pets and their masters may have in times of grief or fear. The stories of cats or dogs which have warned their master of impending danger are legion.The warnings would seem always to be a one-way phenomenon: the pet that warns the master, not the other way round. There are also numerous stories of pets separated from their masters over enormous distances and finding them again after untold vicisitudes.
One of the best-authenticated cases is of a cat called Sugar which, in 1951, traced its owners over a distance of 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) mountainous terrain between California and Oklahoma. Sugar was scared of cars, and jumped out of a window of one on the way out of the city Anderson at the North end of Sacramento Valley. All attempts to catch it proved fruitless, and the family carried on without it. 14 months later Sugar jumped in through the window of their new home in Gage, Oklahoma. The cat was easily identified by its special color and a hip-joint defect. No-one knows how the cat managed to cross Rocky Mountains, a desert and several canyons. The parapsychologist J. B. Rhine took a special interest in the incident and researched it thoroughly.
There
are, however, phenomena somewhere between everyday life and the supernatural
world whose manifestations are usually very commonplace and undramatic and
rarely have positive or negative consequences. They simply happen, and leave us
briefly wondering. These phenomena are improbable coincidences and synchronicity.
Improbable coincidences are the appearance, generally in pairs, of events
of great reciprocal likeness but without causal connection, and within a short
period of time (from seconds to a couple of days).
Arthur
Koestler discussed the phenomena in two books, The
Roots of Coincidence and The
Case of the Midwife-Toad. The latter is at the same time a biography over
the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer who defined the concept of seriality
as the appearance of a series of returning events with great mutual
likeness but without causal connection. He
thus excludes all normal cyclical events such as the movement of the second hand
of a watch, the change between day and night etc.
For
twenty years Kammerer meticulously recorded unlikely coincidences. I will quote
a typical example, freely adapted from Koestler’s book. Kammerer’s wife was
sitting in her doctor’s waiting room, leafing through the magazine Die
Kunst. She was charmed by some reproductions by the artist Schwalbach and
made a note of his name. A moment later the nurse opened the door and asked the
patients: “Is Frau Schwalbach here? She is wanted on the phone”.
Commonplace,
wouldn’t you agree? I think, however, most of us have had many similar
experiences without connecting them with anything supernatural, and in fact
science explains them as chance events; absolutely normal occurrences to which
we for some psychological reasons attach special importance.
Coincidences
are related to synchronicity, another phenomenon which bodes neither
dramatic events nor future disasters. It is simultaneous occurrence of two,
non-causally connected events of which one is normal while the other
resembles the first with regard to e.g. a number, a word or a situation. This presupposes
that a person recognizes the connection and the likeness.
Many
people, among them renowned physicists, are convinced that strange coincidences
and synchronicity are psi phenomena. One of the best known is Wolfgang Pauli,
the originator of the Exclusion Principle and the discoverer of
the neutrino. In 1952, together with the psychoanalysist Jung, wrote a book on synchronicity
in which these two highly different personalities tried to reach a consensus on
a common view of the paranormal. Together they claimed that non-physical, acausal energies are at play in nature.
I have had to bypass a large number of researchers and their experimental results and theories in order to follow my line of argument. If you wish to enter more profoundly into psi research, I can recommend James E. Beichler’s review ‘Yggdrasil’ on his web site http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/pdf/15.1_beichler.pdf .Beichler gives an excellent survey of psi research from its beginning down to the present day.
The
following are my personal epistemological speculations about the nature of psi,
inspired by current research and based on my own psi experiences. My position,
for what it is worth, is that
as it has been proven, beyond any possible scientific doubt, that the psi
phenomena exist, we are given the choice between seeking a physical
explanation and an epistemological or philosophical one. It leads to the
question whether it is conceivable that psi is a universal phenomenon or whether
it is constrained to life. If the quantum cosmologists are right, psi is
an all-embracing phenomenon. Obviously, no proof has been presented to support
this contention but it should not be ruled out entirely.
My
view is that there may be life and even other civilizations
thousands of light-years away but for reasons given in the chapter ‘What if We Are Alone’
, I will disregard the
possibility for the
time being. At any rate it would be pure
speculation how psi would manifest itself in an unknown civilization evolved
from an unknown life form perhaps a thousand light-years away.
This
leaves us with the urge to explain the second possibility: that life is
constrained to Earth. If this is indeed the case, it is improbable that psi is
universal, and the physical theories thereby lose their relevance. This leaves
us in a quandary, because one consequence seems to be that we must seek
explanations in a non-physical sphere, thus opening the door to all sorts of
weird theories. This is exactly what we wanted to prevent.
But
first let us follow the psi-life argument. Did psi come into being together with
life or did it ‘tag on’ to life at a later stage? Is it plausible that the
most primitive life forms have possessed correspondingly primitive psi
faculties, and as life became more and more complex, the psi faculties became
similarly refined and versatile? That would logically lead to the anthropomorfic
thesis that Man possesses the highest developed psi powers.
This
is not impossible, but reality seems to contradict the hypothesis. I suggested
earlier that Man did possess the powers in full measure at an earlier
stage but that they lost their survival value with the increasing sophistication of our culture and consequently degenerated, and that animals
still possess them in full measure.
I
am going for the former hypothesis – that psi followed life. But why did it
emerge and develop? I do not think it did so to serve individuals; rather, psi
is the result of Darwinian selection, designed to concede survival advantages to
populations of animals and humans.
It
must obviously manifest itself through individuals, and it seems reasonable to
expect certain people to be endowed with it more acutely than others, and this
has indeed been corroborated scientifically by the performance of scores of
‘psychics’.
The
instantaneous acting at-a-distance and forward into the future (or backward from
the future) of psi is arguably the most enigmatic of all psi phenomena but is at
the same time the occurrence which most resembles the enigmas of the behaviour
of elementary particles according to quantum mechanics: their instantaneous
action at-a-distance, non-locality, teleportation under certain conditions and the role of the
observer in triggering these phenomena.
One
feasible explanation could be that all events happen simultaneously and
that it is some non-physical entity in the brain which samples the eternal Now
and thus assigns each event to its place along the arrow of time, thereby
creating our sensation of past, present and future. This might explain
precognition, telepathy and clairvoyance but hardly telekinesis (PK), and it
lights a small candle of hope for a physical explanation of psi:
Looking
back at the history of science and particularly the development of the great
theories and the attempts to unify them, it seems likely that the last word is
not said yet and that further advances may even prove beneficial in the
endeavour to explain psi; my belief is that with the advance of quantum physics
and quantum cosmology into a TOE (Theory of Everything) some related and
testable theory of quantum
ESP or the like will be expounded. A TOE should incorporate all
matter, all forces and all
phenomena, including psi, as integral parts
of nature, and I have no doubt that the understanding of concepts like mind,
consciousness and time will change immensely in the process.
Please
do not be surprised if the text is different next time you look at it. The page
has been written by a Non-scientist for Non-scientists with a more than
superficial interest in the universe around us, its impact on us and our place
in it.
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Copyright Per Lassen, August 22, 2005
(The Japanese/Chinese characters in the background read “chooshizen” in Japanese, which means “supernatural”)
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