Is Reading a Psychic Phenomenon?

 In one sense, anything we do with our minds is a psychic phenomenon. True, psychic phenomena stand out as in some way unusual and powerful. The reason I’m posing the question is the news that in America fewer people are reading books.  Moreover, young people are not learning how to read.  I can understand why this is happening, in part, the ease and fun of getting online with a computer screen.

                  But I do think reading affords us the greater psychic challenge. Suppose you chose to read a novel, say by Mark Twain or Virginia Woolf or Dostoyevsky.  You must feel and imagine what you’re reading.  The words are there, but you as reader must bring them to life.   Reading forces you to actively use your mental faculties such as your imagination.  It also favors the use of your critical mind. The screen experience appeals to the lazy part of the soul. Now and then you poke a button or shoot around hitting on lots of buttons. This is not to deny the easy access to useful information or some of the fascinating forays into the world of YouTube.

                  But the screen experience, in its many contexts, is strong on manipulation. Ads of one sort or another are omnipresent in the digital universe. Wanted is your money, your time and your consciousness. And under the new AI establishment, real and pseudo-real can be hard to distinguish.  So, in this increasingly intrusive and manipulative environment, I’ll stick with my own mind to engage with  the wars and wonders, the rants and raptures of the written universe.

                  Reading can be a training of the will, a sharpening of the critical sense, and an exercise of the creative imagination. To hold your attention on the content (of whatever) is a skill that needs to be cultivated. You can’t do it if you have machines buzzing in your face all the time, interrupting you and trying to capture your consciousness. The ability to direct and hold your attention on something of interest and value can make the difference in the quality of everyday life.  I catch myself passing without thought among things worthy of notice, scenes of mirth and pathos, of a child’s spontaneity, of a homeless soul cramped in the doorway of a closed store.  We ‘read’ not only written words. We can read the meaning of somebody’s stooped head or the mood of some protestors against the latest fascist stunt or the mendacity of some greasy politician.  Reading invites us to draw on our intuitive potentials as well as our respect for matters of fact.  

                  And let’s not forget the obvious: that by reading we can mentally engage with some of the great minds or even, if we are curious, with some of the worst characters of history, like Adolf Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf. But thank goodness, we can an also read and converse with the ideas of Zoroaster, Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and countless other extraordinary human spirits remote from us in time and space. So, to answer the question: Is reading a psychic phenomenon?  Yes, I would say, if it is done with a free, open, and active imagination. The internet is a wonderful information tool but not at the price of losing the soul that can read the hidden depths of reality.  

                 

 

Cat and Mouse Consciousness

There is a worldwide movement of scholars, scientists, and everyday folks in quest of enlightenment—an awakening and exploration of the mysteries of consciousness. I count myself a humble votary of this metaphysical adventure. First, I had to survive graduate philosophy at Columbia University where the very idea of consciousness was suspect, according to the reigning materialists. Materialist science rejected the reality of anything mental or conscious.  But this assault falls on its face. Without consciousness there could be no judgement of what is real or illusory.

                  Consciousness, as we know it, has at least three different forms: our waking sensory world, the dream world produced in sleep, and the mystical world of visionary experience. There are no physical explanations of the origin of consciousness.  Consciousness is fundamental, the irreducible datum, the core of our existence. The mystery of its origins is only the beginning of the challenge. There are three properties of consciousness worth noting: memory, creativity, immortality. The worldwide movement is about exploring the higher dimensions of our evolving consciousness. I believe that consciousness research may well be the key to the survival and flourishing of life on Earth.

                  I want to relate some stories that touch on animal consciousness. We humans are not the only form of conscious life on Earth. Consciousness comes in all sorts of shapes and forms, all levels of depth and complexity. One day I was typing away on my computer when looking down on the space below the keys, I noticed a dot-sized object slowly moving. It was on its way somewhere in a straight line. It was alive, but no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence. I then placed my left index finger in front of the tiny bug, and it walked around my finger.  Again, I tried to bully the little guy and blocked his passage; but again, ignoring my intrusion, bravely he marched around my finger, showing me his proud but tiny intentionality. So I stopped annoying him.  This tiny point of life was animated by a willful consciousness.  It had to be aware of an obstacle and proved it by directing itself away from the obstacle.  I was struck by the idea of a conscious life energy operating at such a micro scale.

                  From a plucky dot of life I want to recount the tale of Clio, a cat who became a good friend of mine.  One sunny afternoon not too long ago, I opened the side door of my house and was surprised to see a smallish, grey, brown, and white-streaked cat, sitting motionless on the stoop about ten feet away from me. It sat there and stared at me. I shrugged and closed the door.  What happened was this. Thet cat showed up the next two days, and each time sat in the same place and just looked at me without moving. It was a cute cat, and I wondered why it sat so stock still when I opened the door. I never guessed it might politely be waiting for an invitation.

                  The following day when I stepped out there it was again. This time I walked up to the cat and introduced myself and pat the furry head.  We looked into each other’s eyes. Hi ! I  murmured, and for some reason I thought of the cat being the reincarnation of an unhappy woman. I stepped back toward the door into my house and this time the cat came along with me.  “Oh,” I said, “would you care to come in for a moment?”  And the cat strode right in, in unison with the steps I took. Once inside, the feline went on a tour of inspection in every room, brushing up against certain spots as if to mark them.   After the survey, the cat came straight to me who was sitting down.  I pet and picked up the  cat and we became instant friends.

                  I noticed there was a locket around its neck with a name and address. Two houses over was the home of the cat. I soon learned that the cat’s name was Clio and was let out all day but was fed if it came back to its presumptive home. If Clio were my cat, I wouldn’t let her roam free right next to a hilly road where cars regularly shoot by. I stood up and Clio followed me around for a while until I went to the door and opened it and thought “Out!”  And out went the cat. I had a distinct sensation of mental rapport with Clio.  The following day she came by for a visit, and it became a habit lasting for several weeks. Almost every day she came by. It was a ritual of contact.  She would do her thing around the house, and we would have a period of playing together, and of nestling and petting. Then I would retire to my desk or whatever I was doing. I should mention that Clio was not visiting me for food or drink. Her sole reason was social and for entertainment.  There was something she did at least once at every meeting.  I’ll call it Clio’s Whirligig.  She would do this for the sheer fun of it, a demonstration of her agility, her quasi-levitation. She would leap in the air, and sping around, trying to catch her tail; it was hilarious to behold, and she looked pleased with her performance. This was the climax of her visit.  She knew when it was time to leave and would go stand by the door and I would let her out.

                  I felt a little uncomfortable when Clio started to show up at odd hours and was hanging out for longer stretches.  She was a neighbor’s cat but seemed to want to stay with me. One night it was raining and windy, close to midnight, and I thought I heard something outside. I opened the door and there was Clio, curled up and cowering by my door.  I bent down and picked the cat up and walked to the back of the house, “Back to your house, Clio,” I said and laid her down on the wet ground and gave her a gentle shove back toward her home.  I made up my mind that I would break the habit of letting the cat in my house. We had a friendly relationship. I had no doubt that Clio was a conscious being and that we had feelings for each other. But she wasn’t my cat, so I decided not to let her in anymore.

I missed her company, and she quit trying to visit me. A month or so passed and then one day I was looking out my window and I saw Clio, standing in the street, about three feet from the sidewalk. I had a bad feeling.  The following day I got the news from my neighbor that Clio was run over by a car. Exactly what I feared might happen. I allow myself to speculate.  There are reports from the near-death universe that our pets show up in the next world. If animals have souls, why not? Why not, if immortality is a property of consciousness? If there is another world, there should be room for Clio to find her way.

If our pets carry on, why not all the living creatures of nature that have some degree and manner of consciousness and soul?  For example, why not a mouse?  The last time I had a mouse in my house I caught him live in a trap and let him go at the far end of my backyard. Recently, another mouse moved in with me, but this little guy must have a high IQ. One night I was lying in bed and about to turn off the light and sleep when I felt a tiny tug on my bedsheet. I sprang up and turned on the light and there was a mouse scrambling away from me, bulletlike shooting out of my bedroom. On three other occasions I had to halt the mouse from occupying my bedroom. This mouse stayed away from the trap I used in the past, so I had to resort to more fatal devices, steel springs and poison pellets. I’ve named him Mickey Mouse and now have set up three different traps but so far Mickey has avoided them all. I knew the very night that Mickey moved in with me. He ate a portion of an avocado I left out to ripen. Now I leave my avocadoes to ripen in the fridge.  The other night I Ieft three bananas under a basket on top of the fridge. In the morning I found the basket overturned and a good part of one of my bananas devoured.

I couldn’t help admiring Mickey’s intelligence and will power, but he was an intruder and a thief. So I decided to remove every scrap of food from sight. Instead, I dumped the scraps in sturdy garbage bags. But each time I did that Mickey would bite through the bags and snatch anything inside that was edible. Each time he did this he created a mess I had to clean up. Mickey was outwitting me, so I hid the garbage bags. But then he devised a new strategy. I noticed a bar of soap, one sponge, and two small towels were missing. Hard to believe, but he stole them all.  I had a hard time finding them. I found the sponge and the bar of soap hidden away behind my paintings in my studio and the two towels squeezed into a crack behind the stove in my kitchen. All this proved that Mickey was conscious and capable of keeping a moderately evolved human being at bay. What did stealing my bar of soap, sponge, and towels signify to Mickey? Nothing there to eat.  Maybe it was just meant to annoy me—a sign of protest, a mousey vendetta? Mickey’s thought might conceivably be: “Hey Human! You’re trying to kill me. What’s my crime? Hunger.  Starvation of the innocent is against international law.  Or does the law ignore the rights of animals?”

  I know there are more exalted realms of conscious existence worthy of exploration and pointing toward the great Next Step in Evolution.  I wanted to underscore how the lowest forms of life are in their way imbued with consciousness. There is a school of thought that sees not just living life forms, trees and animals, but the whole of physical nature as conscious.  The mountains, the rivers and seas, forests and deserts, all with their forms of consciousness.  But to feel it, to breathe and taste it, to listen to its songs and symphonies, to fly, dive, dream it—that is the question.  How to connect?

An Experience that Blew My Worldview

 

What happens when you have an experience that, well, is not supposed to happen? You are likely to confront some ironclad assumption.  Can’t be! But you experienced it.

Let me share a bit of my mind-blowing experience.   This experience takes me back to a university class I taught some years ago.  It was philosophy, and we were discussing the mind-body problem. We can all distinguish our minds and our bodies—two very different things. The problem: how do they relate to each other?

Philosophers like to tussle over that question.  During the discussion a student raised a question about the near-death experience and wanted to know if it was possible for a person to leave his body.  That would be a dramatic step into the unknown. It challenges the popular assumption of many scientists who swear by reductive materialism. However, scientists and philosophers cannot explain how consciousness came into being. It’s a stubborn mystery, but a topic for another day.

Walking out of the classroom, a student I’ll call LS caught up with me and tapped me on the shoulder. “That was an interesting talk,” she said, “and there’s something I’d like to tell you, but it’s between you and me.”  “I can keep a secret,” I replied, curious about what she had to say. “You never know how people will react—especially if you have something weird you want to share,” she added.

“I understand,” I said, “and weird is just an old German word that means become. Are you about to become something weird?” “Not right now,” she smiled with a faintly seductive air.  “I just wanted to comment on the last question about the out-of-body experience.  Is it a real experience? For sure, and I know from my own experience.”  She paused and I waited for her to go on. I could see she wasn’t inclined to get into details. So, impulsively (and sardonically) I said, “Hey! Next time you find yourself out of your body, come and visit we.” LS said nothing but gave me her enigmatic smile.  We exchanged a few more words and went our ways.

It must have happened no more than a week later.  I had forgotten the exchange with my student.   One morning I woke up, had breakfast and glanced into the living room.  I was taken aback.  Something was slightly off.  I stepped into the living room and quickly noticed that my music stand was out of place and sitting in the middle of the room.  I normally kept it flush up against the bookcase. I stood there, baffled. There was nobody in the apartment but me.  I had no doubt where the stand was when I retired last night.  What caused my music stand to move to the center of the living room?  Frozen on the spot with wonder, at that very moment, the phone rang.  I picked up, it was my student LS, and she says, “How do you like the new furniture arrangement?” 

LS explained what happened the night before. Getting into bed and drifting off she found herself hovering above her bed—out of her body. She remembered my challenge about visiting me. Suddenly, she (her disembodied consciousness) found me in my kitchen, reading and writing.  She tried to catch my attention but failed.  It was terribly frustrating.  How can she prove she came to visit me by her out-of-body express? She looked around and noticed the music stand.  She approached it and managed to move it to the center of the room. There it was, right in front of me, moved by her invisible, intangible, and inaudible self.  It was a shocking fact that I could not deny. My student left her body, traveled about 25 miles, entered through the walls of my house and physically rearranged a piece of my furniture.  It was absolutely clear that this happened, a fact that is bound to strike most people as impossible.

I know there is a great deal of data that point to the reality of psychic phenomena.  But in the end, what counts the most is personal experience. There are many compelling out-of-body (OBE) stories in the NDE literature.  The literature is growing so that one could plausibly argue that to say that Mr. X died is equivalent to saying that Mr. X had a terminal OBE. 

The implications of the OBE are highly suggestive.  If my conscious self can leave my body, it could be a statement about the afterlife. My real self is my consciousness that leaves my body at death.  Plato said that philosophy was the practice of death, of rising ecstatically out of the confines of your body into a mental universe.

There is another item from my student’s experience. Not only does she liberate herself from her body—a metaphysical blast—she moves through space in a self-directed fashion—she also can act upon the physical world, as demonstrated by LS’s movement of my music stand. This experience allows me to entertain the possible reality of invisible agents and hidden forces among us. Incorporate OBE and PK into our worldview and reality can get very interesting. My experience certainly enlarged my worldview.

If you enjoy having your mind jogged by the unexpected and the impossible, see my book: Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Anomalist Books, or Amazon.

   

 

 

 

 

Brain Malfunction and Miracles

 

The most obvious thing in the world is my consciousness.  It is also a scientific  mystery. Thanks to my consciousness, I know that I have a body and a brain. And thanks to my brain I am conscious of my relationship to my brain.  But what sort of relationship is that? If you are a devoted materialist, you would say that your brain somehow produces your mind and consciousness.  The problem is that nobody has a clue as to how brain chemistry could produce out of itself a mental universe: feelings, joy, sorrow, ambition, jealousy, hatred, love, regret, perceptions, intentions, memories, fantasies, reasonings, inferences, etc.  Instead of production, I would suggest transmission.  The brain transmits consciousness, like a radio transmits the music and talk that you listen to.

Thanks to our brains, we are conscious of our life and our existence on earth. But there is something paradoxical about the brain-consciousness connection.  There’s quite a bit of data showing that physical trauma to the brain can awaken various mental powers that rise to genius and miracle status. Why should traumatizing the brain open one to higher forms of consciousness?  I’ll mention a few examples.

The first that comes to mind may surprise you. In a near-death experience (NDE) the brain is severely traumatized—to the point of clinical death. When the heart stops the brain is deprived of blood which blanks out consciousness.  The brain is no longer functional. But—and here is our miracle—folks often have the most amazing experiences of their lives. The brain normally enables our experience of waking life; but when it ceases to function, it enables us to experience phenomena of the afterlife. That’s the extreme example of what may happen when the brain malfunctions.

There are other indications of brain malfunction that appear to unleash latent powers within us.  In the savant syndrome medical professionals deal with cases of autistic children with severe disabilities but who also display remarkable abilities, original to the point of genius. The syndrome includes several categories of phenomena: calculation prodigies and calendar reckonings, music and the plastic arts, painting, sculpture, and fantastic feats of memory. These savants had IQs less than 50, couldn’t feed or dress themselves.  And yet they had talents that were astonishing and that they themselves scarcely understood. Their malfunctioning brains somehow put them in touch with dimensions of creativity from another zone of being.  In Islands of Genius, Dr. Treffert describes adults struck by lightning or had their heads violently bashed that suddenly acquired extraordinary talents that changed their lives.  It’s hard to learn of these outcomes without marveling at the irony of nature. There are cases of people suffering from the dreaded brain diseases of aging who suddenly wake up to the living artist or musician inside them, desperate to come out.  We should take the time to muse on the unknown gifts we may be harboring within. We might learn how to tease them into active life.

 And so, being cut off, arrested, impaired, may serve to open one to creative, transformative forces.  Disruptive events may open channels of creativity that are normally inaccessible to us, sunk in the rhythms of normal life. We may have to be damaged or thrown violently off course to land on the cusp of transcendence. The game is played in such a way that we never know for sure where we are in the field of play. We need always to keep our third eye open to the half-hidden, the possible miracle.

  

  

The Strange Power of Faith

I am exploring the variables associated with psychic breakthrough and spiritual transformation. People find themselves in unbearable circumstances that prompt them to try things that they would otherwise never think of trying.  When people seek some kind assistance in a crisis, they might begin with religion. For example, they might turn to something that gives them faith, which we’re told can move mountains. Most religions call for emotional and intellectual investment in their beliefs and practices.  Casual adherence to the faith will not do; certainly not if one is hoping for a miracle.  But now for a strange illustration of the power of faith.

            In the 1950s, a Dr. West was working on a drug called Krebiozen that initially proved promising.  When a patient of Dr. West, a Mr. Wright, heard about the new cancer drug, he became excited and begged to receive it.  The man was close to death, his body covered with swollen tumors, so the doctor injected the patient, hoping for some helpful results.   Amazingly, within a few days, the tumors shrunk and melted away, and the man was released from the hospital, apparently healed and in fine fettle.  For a few months Mr. Wright lived his life in good health, until one day he read an article in the newspaper reporting that Krebiozen had proven a failure in major ways. Almost immediately the cancer came back with a vengeance. Dr. West, however, invented a story that a different dosage was needed, and injected a healthy dose of water into Mr. Wright and lo! The placebo worked and once again the cancer melted away and the patient went back to living his life until he read another article about the worthlessness of Krebiozen. Once again the patient’s faith was wrecked, and the cancer promptly returned, and this time killed him.[1] The placebo and its miraculous effect demonstrates the causal power of the mind. It also demonstrates the vulnerability of the mind. In the case of Mr. Wright, the healing was caused not by the object believed in but by the act of believing, or, we might say, by his pistis, the New Testament word for trust, confidence, terms I prefer to faith that seems more related to doctrine and dogma. The trouble with Mr. Wright’s faith is that it was based, rigidly, on one thing—which in fact was a useless horse serum.

 

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[1] Mario Beauregard

Materialism and the Death of Love

Increasingly, I find myself musing on the future of the human family. The challenge is twofold, looming climate catastrophe and the growing risk of nuclear war. I believe that we need to wake up as a species, confront the looming dangers and jointly strive to evolve a new common consciousness. Imagine you are walking along, and you notice a child has broken free from its mother and runs on to the road full of speeding cars. You see this and realize the mother is unaware of what’s happening.  Instinctively, you run onto the road and save the child. You don’t need to be a philosopher to decide to save the child; it’s the response of any normal human being. It is a matter of common human consciousness. I believe we need to evolve an expanded common sense—deeper, wider, more dramatic than usual. What’s at stake now is saving the whole of life on earth. That may be possible, if we learn to deploy the paranormal potentials that humans possess.

Consider a certain strain of Russian philosophy and the evolutionary task we are talking about. For this I rely on a remarkable book by George M. Young, The Russian Cosmists (2012). The subtitle of this book illustrates how remote this is from Soviet communism: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and his Followers. The Cosmist school of thought, which can be traced back to the early twentieth century, has scarcely been noticed, a vision linked to Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903)—a vision that draws on magical and mystical data. The result would give rise to a scientific revolution that overthrows materialism. The metaphysical conclusion: mind is the root and essence of our humanity. This is an outlook totally at odds with the materialist ethos of the powers that be.

The Cosmist believes the universe, our planet, is evolving toward a divine wholeness and perfection. This signifies an invitation to take the next step toward self-realization.  The thinking here is vast. The Russian Cosmist believes that we are capable of active, self-directed evolution; and thinks in terms of global spiritual transformation. Young calls attention to this Cosmist emphasis, which is “to turn elements of traditional occult wisdom into new directions in philosophy, theology, literature, art and science. . . a process in which thaumaturgy finds academic legitimacy, and academic knowledge becomes thaumaturgical.” (p.9). Here I should mention an item central to Fedorov’s vision, the idea of the resurrection of the dead.

 Around the same time in England, F. Myers and the founders of psychical research were studying mediumship and apparitions of the dead and making the case for postmortem survival of consciousness. Fedorov was viscerally horrified by the materialist assumption that the soul and consciousness of a person are annihilated by physical death. But if the psychical researchers made their case, the project of restoring to life all the dead bodies of human history would be superfluous. All the dead souls simply disengage from their dead bodies and enter an extraphysical environment, a kind of lucid dreamworld, freed from the constraints of physical reality.  People who have near-death experiences call this heaven. Fedorov wanted to resuscitate the dead so we could resuscitate the love in our lives. What would Fedorov say if he was privy to the mysteries of the near-death experience? It would be a response of metaphysical joy and elation. The afterlife would point to a new communism of consciousness. It would open us up to a new universe of love, wider, deeper than the shrunken, broken universe that is the tragic consequence of materialism.

 

Miracles and God: A Very Short Statement

There are three great scientific mysteries. Why is there something rather than nothing? Nobody knows. We do know that the universe emerged from nothing, 13.7 billion years ago. The second mystery is the origin of life. Biology has advanced wonderfully, but the origin of life remains unknown.  The third mystery is consciousness. Science cannot explain how life or consciousness evolved from dead matter. Consciousness lights up the universe for us—and for all living things.  The most obvious fact—that we’re conscious—and science cannot explain it.  The three gaps in our knowledge suggest we’ re missing something big—something transcendently creative. Call it God or by other names.

Our materialist friends hope to get a handle on these pesky mysteries. Good luck!  Meanwhile. the gaping holes are open doors to another worldview—to a spiritual universe and the God-idea. The open doors invite us to explore the universe of spiritual consciousness.  But since the industrial revolution and the rise of mechanistic science and technology, consciousness has been hypnotized by the main media.  It’s hard to break the spell of the mainstream archetypes; hard to snatch a breath of inspiration from a culture intent on keeping us in the materialist box.

 There may be a way out. From time to time, people have extraordinary experiences, often described as miraculous. These aren’t easily explained.  As a philosopher, I tend to focus on experiences that science cannot explain. Also, I’ve had experiences we call paranormal—precognition, telepathy, healing, apports, and so on. My favorite, I was once physically attacked by a ghost in a haunted house! My research has taught me that miracles (astonishing psi) are a universal feature of human experience.  They point to an extraphysical, transcendent reality, variously named god, the divine, the great spirit, etc.  Such experiences are found in major religions, indigenous cultures, spiritualist movements, and among mystics, poets, shamans, prophets, and all sorts ol people.

 All the transcendent powers—levitation, inedia, materialization, bilocation, precognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, empathy, the near-death experience, etc.—they are doorways into a different and richer dimension of possible experience. They are features of a higher human being, perhaps the future of our future selves. The prevailing intuition as people enter the deeper ranges of consciousness is the presence of the divine, the superhuman. Proof of this depends on direct experience. Enlightenment happens in different ways.  God and the spirits are amazingly spontaneous and unpredictable.   The good news is that science is joining the exploration of this strange god-intoxicated exploration.  Many today see signs of the next stage of human evolution, a new sense of openness and shared consciousness, a new empathy for all forms of life on Earth.  St. Augustine said, if you seek God, go within.  The miracle of our own consciousness is the best argument for the existence of God.  

See my book for details on the issue of self-transformation: Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of a Disbelief. Amazon or Anomalist Books. 

 

Galactic Death and Rebirth: A Human Analogy

On Saturday, August 23, I stumbled on a program on Radio Lab that caught my attention.  I rarely listen to the radio on Saturday afternoon, but here was an interview of an astrophysicist, her name, Faith Charity. Her career began as a nurse but she decided to quit nursing and go back to college and get into astrophysics. In the course of all this, she was happily married and gave birth to a boy.

 She soon found herself at work in the study of the evolution of galaxies—a fascinating topic.  To do this kind of research the telescope had to be focused on dark areas of the sky.  It would take days before anything would register via the telescope, and there was no telling how long it would take. But after about ten days of monitoring the dark portion of sky they were studying a host of forms that were now visible.   The telescope apparently revealed the presence of thousands of galaxies in that one dark area of the sky!  It was a promising set up to research the evolution of galaxies.  It speaks to the intelligence and imagination of our species that humans can see so far and think so deeply as to understand the evolution of unimaginably vast and distant galaxies.  It turns out that galaxies die gaseous deaths but can be resuscitated and jolted back into flourishing forms of existence.

But now to the analogy of my post title.  Apart from the metaphorical turn I’m about to press on you, I have a philosophical—and a scientific—concern.  The analogy of gazing into a portion of cosmic darkness, which eventually leads to seeing all those surprising galaxies, is gazing into our selves, and seeing no more than our bodies and the sensory world, behind which, under the right circumstances, appear all kinds psychospiritual agents and entities. We humans are enmeshed in multiple galaxies of physical and mental reality.  We inhabit an amazing universe.   

But now a sad point from the Radio Lab interview.  It was totally unexpected, but Charity was asked to recount what happened when she went with her husband Jason and little boy Woody on vacation at a beach in Oregon. They were unaware of the danger of giant waves that beset that region of the coast.  The family of three were overcome and swept away by a giant wave, killing Jason and Woody, leaving Charity who survived crushed by her loss. Much of the remaining podcast covered Charity’s struggle to restore her ability to live. She did so by means of another person who had suffered a similar devastating loss.

The analogy cited above came back to me, this time with a more emphatic slant. Just as the darkness of the night sky conceals a wealth of hidden galaxies, I now reflected on the apparent darkness that we associate with the death of our bodies. Here again science seems rather dramatically to have disclosed an unexpected trove of psychical realities. For example, the near-death experience (NDE).  Thanks to advances in medical science and technology, people all over the planet are being resuscitated from cardiac arrest and other forms of near-death.  People have experiences of extraordinary vividness and power that radically transform their personalities. The fact that emerges is the absolute conviction of life after death, and of love supreme as the key motif of the next world. All I could do, hearing of Charity’s brutal encounter with fate, is hope that what the NDEs show is for real.  In that case, Woody and Jason are not gone forever; they’re just waiting for Charity.

     

 

 

The Remover of Obstacles

Memory can be whimsical and downright inattentive.  It’s so easy to forget important, even wonderful, things.  It’s easy to be mentally thrown off course by all sorts of distracting trivia. In an age of information overload—and pseudo-information—It’s easy to lose the thread of ourselves.

The above thought was prompted while combing through my book on miracles. I was looking for a reference and I noticed the header for a section, The Remover of Obstacles: A Global Miracle. It came back to me in a second. I looked ahead at a quote from Hinduism Today from 1996: “The milk-miracle may go down in history as the most important event shared by Hindus of this century, if not the last millennium.”

This was a miracle of dematerialization. It began when a man from New Delhi dreamt that the Elephant God Ganesha told him to feed him milk. The man rushed out to the nearest temple with a statue of the popular deity and poured milk into the statue’s cup. As he did so the milk gradually but completely disappeared. This was observed by a group of people who ran off to different temples with milk to perform and witness the same phenomenon.  By the end of the day the story had spread all over India and all over the world wherever Ganesha was worshipped.  I had at the time two Indian students who reported to me in detail their encounter with the phenomenon. Both students were flabbergasted and went twice to replicate their experience they were so astonished.  The phenomenon persisted for one day, leaving India virtually bereft of milk.

I myself witnessed the dematerialization of milk on CNN! A British reporter performed the experiment for all to see. The camera is on the Ganesha figurine and empty container.  The reporter then pours some milk into the container, filling it at least halfway. Immediately, the milk slowly disappears.  No more than ten seconds pass as I watch the milk completely disappear, dematerialize. And so it was happening all over India and elsewhere. It was amusing to read the remarks and comments of people who cried fraud or came up with clumsy efforts to explain away the one-day orgy of milk drank out of existence by a thirsty Ganesha, a Hindu God known as the Remover of Obstacles.

I am tempted to ask, what obstacles were removed by this miraculous display of supernormal power?   My view is simple. The obstacle I would think is removed is a closed mind, a mind contracted by assumptions that stymie the creative imagination and courageous spirit. The spectacle prompted both awe and skepticism, some dismissing it as fraud or trying to explain it away as some trivial event.

My concern here is with the ease in which stories and facts of enormous significance are rapidly swallowed up in the constant stream of so-called news, the endless announcements and ads attempting to grab our consciousness.  Ours is a culture that systematically strives to possess our consciousness, typically for commercial or political purposes.  

 I believe we need to resist that self-incarcerating process. It’s a self-defeating tendency. We need to be shouting. “Leave our minds alone!”  We must guard and pay attention to what we feel is meaningful and to what we need to cultivate and nurture.  Our consumerist ethos couldn’t care less about the world of our intimate values and meanings.  It wants to possess us with its agendas and its ‘miracles.’ It wants to convert us to the religion of consumerism and to its ideologies.

Coming back to the story of Ganesha and the one-day miracle, we need to remember the extraordinary stories that touch and nourish our better angels.  And in fact, stories of miraculous breakthrough, stories that speak to our higher powers, exist in abundance. Materialist science ignores them. My aim and project is to gather and research this mind-blowing data and lay it before anyone with an open mind. We can and must charge our minds with information that can work toward our creative advance.  For more fascinating details about Ganesha and a host of other mind-bending miraculous phenomena, see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief . (Anomalist Books or Amazon to obtain)

 

Is Doing Nothing the Secret to Enlightenment?

 Nothing is more obvious in the business of living than our capacity for action. A casual assessment of ourselves at almost any time is likely to reveal a checklist of things that need to be done.  Things that are urgent but also some reminders of things that should be done, important things that never have been done.  Actions that you are convinced you ought to do to enhance your health, happiness, and sense of fulfillment.  And from another angle, we are, many if not most of us, driven to act, perform, and exert ourselves in one way or another.

What I’ve described above is true of the normal, sensible world that we all recognize, inhabit and view as real. However, our normal view of life and reality, while serving our everyday needs and experience, is questionable. It is possible to think of things differently, as for example through the perspective of science or metaphysics. A strictly scientific picture of reality is radically different from the world we apprehend via our five senses and practical understanding. Our black hole ridden expanding universe seen through the lens of quantum mechanics is wildly different from anything we can normally imagine.

The same radical shift of perspective is involved when we contemplate reality from a metaphysical perspective.  But what is that? Metaphysics takes common sense and science into its purview but asks different questions and attempts to take hold of the most fundamental ideas and concepts meant to explain the essence of reality. But there is something else about metaphysics that needs to be underscored.

 There are things that happen that defy common sense, and more challenging, that contradict fundamental assumptions of science.  These are apt to cause the wings of metaphysics to flutter. Take a rare phenomenon that I have studied and written about at some length—levitation. Yes, now and then, and under certain circumstances, people’s bodies defy that all-potent force of the universe, gravity, and float freely in space.   Such law-defying behaviors are called anomalies by some, miracles by others of religious persuasion.

But now, in the case of the anomaly of levitation, how does the metaphysics come in?    The answer is simple.  The records show that when Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Copertino fell into an ecstatic trance, their bodies lifted off the ground into space to the repeated astonishment of witnesses. The curious effect of this phenomenon is to shatter the metaphysical assumption of so-called physicalism.  There is no physical explanation of levitation.  One case will not do the trick.  But when the evidence builds with a multitude of phenomena that defy physical explanation (not just levitation) we are inclined to reject physicalism or materialism (if you prefer).  It turns out that mental or conscious states now qualify as fundamental factors in the structure of reality. That is an important idea with important metaphysical implications.

Instead of physical reality being construed as fundamental, mental or spiritual reality is. In fact, this shift toward the mental is something quite radical for science. To illustrate, here is a quote from Max Planck, one of the founders of modern physics: “The universe is made of consciousness, not atoms.” Surely a remarkable statement from a great physicist.  We are now able to elaborate on the odd title of this essay.

To do this we have to move from physics to mysticism. Mysticism is the study of extraordinary experiences associated with joy, peace and enlightenment. Mystical experiences may arise spontaneously in various ways and contexts ranging from religious to yogic, psychedelic, or near death.  One of the most famous mystics was the German Meister Eckhart who lived in the Middle Ages. He wrote extensively about his experiences and his ideas were often so strikingly original that he got in trouble with the religious authorities of his age.  Dying into nothingness seems to be the secret of enlightenment.

Mystics in general are explorers of the deeper regions of our consciousness.  We might put it this way.  We are all immersed in the personal field of our experience and consciousness. Our normal, everyday consciousness is occupied with our needs, desires, moods, challenges; our physical environment and activities—all facets of our normal conscious life. And all quite remote from the mystical dimension of our being.  It’s fair to say that our normal, everyday consciousness veil from our mystical potential.

Our mystical consciousness lies deep within us and is in principle accessible.   The great and obvious obstacle is that our consciousness is normally engrossed and entangled in and by the relentless struggles of our existence.  Even, says Eckhart, when we are engaged in doing the noble and heroic things of a virtuous life.  For as such our consciousness is still trapped in what we might call the sub-mystical universe.  To reach toward the realm of mystical consciousness is a radical enterprise.  Meister Eckhart prescribes a method, a practice, for breaking through the barriers that stand between us and the ultimate mystical experience, namely, detachment.  The secret is not doing, radical detachment.

After all, it would be naïve to suppose that access to the supreme human experience could be anything less than radically challenging. It can be no easy task to break free from our habitual psychic existence, the product of all our achievements and failures.  The task then is to empty oneself completely.  To do so, as Eckhart put it in a way that shocked the scholars and church leaders of his day. In effect, by emptying our minds of all distractions we force the divine to enter and fill our consciousness.

To detach oneself from every conceivable psychic distraction is to open oneself to the highest form of consciousness. So, like certain Buddhist schools of thought, emptiness and the void become symbols of the path to enlightenment. Another analogy occurs to me from what in modern times we have learned from the near-death experience. People who die and become detached from everything for short periods and then are resuscitated—the result is a powerful mystical experience.  The modern near-death experience seems to confirm the philosophy of the great medieval mystic on the role of detachment in achieving enlightenment.  Finally, I recommend for case histories of extraordinary phenomena that graphically describe the reality of the transcendent, my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief (Anomalist Books or Amazon

 

 

 

 

What Inspires Me About Afterlife Research

About 22 or so months ago I acquired a rather strange habit.  Every day at some time I would get on YouTube and do two things.  I would read and watch items covering the apartheid Israeli “state” at its daily genocide of the Palestinians: their entire culture, their land, and their lives. What I learned as the days unfolded was that there was no limit to the depravity of the murderers.  I would say to myself, going any lower than this is unimaginable—repeatedly, I was wrong. Brand new atrocities would inevitably be reported. The phenomenon is one of bottomless evil.

In contrast to the Zionist horror show, my second chosen habit during this time was to pay attention to stories of people who had near-death experiences (NDEs). I had read many books about this extraordinary experience in the past, but YouTube provides filmed stories told by the experiencers—in their words, voices, and expressive gestures. One thing struck me from all this watching and listening: these were real stories, not inventions.  I was moved listening to the different ways each person tried to convey the awesome power of their experience. Few if any who have NDEs want to return to their embodied life. The world they say they entered during their NDE was more appealing (heavenly) than the prospect of life back in their bodies.  

The NDE must surely be counted as the most extraordinary psychological phenomenon. We may, I believe, infer from NDEs three revolutionary ideas.  First, the thousands if not millions of NDEs over the whole planet clearly point to the reality of another world, another psychospiritual dimension of experience. Humans from the beginning had intuitions of  higher spiritual worlds. But now, thanks to new medical technologies, the evidence for this is hugely amplified. Second, each NDE seems tailor made to the unique person. And third, all experiencers seem to encounter some higher agent of guidance associated with a loving light, described as God or an angel.

But now to the point of connection between the two topics: the maniacal murder of children and the scientific research that points to life after death. Surely, most people should view the ND revelation to be good news. People whose lives were abruptly nipped in the bud by death would certainly be thankful. When I think about the many thousands of Palestinian children (and other innocent men and women) being slaughtered as I write, my heart goes out in hope that they will survive and enter another world, a new beginning, a rebirth day. This especially motivates me to explore the evidence for another, a higher and a different world—thank goodness!

 

 

Miracles and Human Evolution

 Is there any reason to believe that human beings have reached the climax of their evolutionary potential? Or, as a species, is there room for us to imagine a next stage of our development? To be clear, we are long way off from realizing our potential.  When we look around at the world today, we see evolved nations constantly engaged in murderous brutality toward defenseless children, women, and other civilians, even boasting about their barbarity. These rich and powerful barbarians are also wreaking havoc on the planetary environment, destroying numberless species of nonhuman animals.  Given this vast twofold assault on life everywhere on our planet, human evolution today seems to have turned suicidal—a menace to the entire planet and its living creatures.

In view of this take on the human situation, I can imagine a cynic saying, “it will take a miracle to save us from ourselves!”   Cynicism aside, I would like to intervene with  an optimistic note.  I think we have ample evidence for certain extraordinary human capacities that, once awakened, might turn the tide against the dark side of human nature.  The interesting point to underscore: unleashing these higher capacities is based on certain altered states of consciousness. The starting point for evolutionary advance is our consciousness.  

Consider an altered state familiar to us all, dream consciousness. Research demonstrates, as I know from experience, that dreaming is sometimes spontaneously conducive to precognition or telepathy. But we can also intentionally produce effects from our consciousness.   Meditative states in which a yogi or a shaman alter the shape and flow of their consciousness may result in extraordinary phenomena, for example, of healing,  levitation, teleportation, etc.

Perhaps the most spectacular altered state of consciousness comes with the near-death experience (NDE). Thanks to modern techniques of resuscitation, thousands of people have near-death experiences that radically transform them, in which, for example, they emerge newly endowed with expanded compassion and intellect. The NDE may well be the most extraordinary, altered state of consciousness. It may be the key to the next step in human evolution.

The NDE appears in almost every way to leave us with the conviction that there is another nonphysical universe that we enter when we shed our physical body at death.  In addition, the NDE points to the telepathic and empathic expansion of consciousness as constituting our future humanity.

The scientific challenge must be, how do we learn to induce this critical altered state without incurring literal near-death?  What I found was that it was possible among mystics, yogis, and shamans.  In my study of Joseph Copertino, a mystic famous for all manner of supernormal phenomena, we found a person whose entire spiritual practice was oriented toward psychically disconnecting himself from life itself.  Through fasting, meditation, and self-mastery of all ego-bound attachments, he broke through to states of mind that freed him from the normal constraints of gravity, enabling him to levitate and defy other common constraints on mental and physical life.  For example, he read the minds of the people around him so clearly and casually that his superiors asked him to be more discreet about commenting on what folks were privately thinking. If you were supposed to be deep in prayer and your mind wandered to thoughts of a steaming plate of pasta, Joseph would catch you out. Annoying, to be sure. (See my book, The Man Who Could Fly.)

The key point: Information about supernormal powers collected by critical investigators speaks to the evolutionary potential of human beings.  Given the urgent need to get on with the transformation, we ask: How do we set into motion a process leading to a truly higher education?  How do we awaken our planetary consciousness?  We need to examine the   spiritual practices known to induce breakthroughs to transformation.

Crossing psychically into the higher spaces is sought in many ways. Let me try to describe what seems to be the essence of the process.  In a normal waking moment, whether boring or fascinating, our entire consciousness is occupied, and simultaneously in many ways. We’re thinking about something, a recent event or a future scene we’r worried about; we’re having sensations, visual, auditory, tactile. There is always awareness of our body, sitting in a chair, walking, meeting or somehow connecting with other people, mentally or physically, and so on and so forth.  The entire field of our awareness is occupied with sensations, emotions, intentions, memories, assumptions, and so on and so forth.

The supernormal depths of ourselves are buried beneath all that immediate personal consciousness.  But—and this is key--it is possible, thanks to the freedom to direct our attention to one thing and to exclude all else, to radically control our mental life. Not easily done but it is open to experiment. And we have a viable concept.  What is needed is to clear the entire field of personal consciousness to make room for the transpersonal content to flow in. If so, there is a way to propel oneself into the postmortem universe of consciousness that near-death data seem powerfully to indicate.  If this is a coherent concept and hypothesis, it means that reason and empirical data, free from religion and mythology, enable us to talk rationally about the existence of a psychospiritual soul and afterworld.

The great experimental challenge of this new science of spirituality: How to empty the entire field of consciousness of its personal associations.  Well, there is a surefire method: stop your heart from beating, which cuts blood off to the brain, and you die. In this way, the near-death experience results, as we know from thousands of case histories. Our job is to figure out how to gain control of our conscious personality, creating the space that allows for the influx of what lies deep within us.  The intriguing idea is that we may be traveling through life with a treasure-chest of miracle powers within us.  The difficulty is that the extraordinary influx that awaits us is linked to the worst thing we can imagine happening to us.   For details, see my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief (Available at Anomalist Books or Amazon.

A Trio of Obvious Miracles

Pope Leo XIV, the first pope from the United States, recently declared that a miracle happened in Rhode Island. The official decree signed on June 20 said that a baby born in 2007 was inexplicably healed after a doctor prayed to a 19th-century Spanish priest, Father Salvador Valera Parra. It’s worth noting that the Catholic church is one of the few official institutions that considers it important to publicly declare and describe the occurrence of miracles.

But now what do we mean by the term miracle? Well, we often hear about the miracles of science. There the term refers to something unexpected and astonishing.  In a religious context, as in the case cited by Pope Leo, a miracle is something super-natural, outside the customary natural order, and caused by God. But there is another way to use the miracle word. More in tune with parapsychology, I grant the astonishing character of the miraculous, and the rarity. But in the parapsychological definition, the term refers to phenomena that are extraphysical; cannot be physically explained. But what is causing these deviations from physical reality?  We don’t know for sure, but there are grounds for assuming a type of mental agency, similar to, but far greater than our personal minds. The different religions interpret their encounters with this transcendent factor.  So we have many perspectives on our spiritual evolution.  Apart from the diseased psychopaths that poison life everywhere on Earth, the true and deep potential of human consciousness points to a transcendent future.

Now I need to explain the weird title of this post. It seems to me that the entire structure of reality is punctuated by three miracles, and in the sense we assigned to the word. Astronomers have inferred from the fact that the universe is expanding a point of origin about 13.7 years ago. Einstein and others believed in a steady-state universe, but the evidence points to a universe that exploded into existence at a point in time, and nobody knows how that happened.  So the universe itself is the first miracle.

Fast forward to the appearance of life on our planet.  True, modern scientific biology has advanced wonderfully but nobody knows how life emerged from dead matter.  So life is our second miracle. Of course, we generally don’t kneel in awe at the miraculous sunrise or shudder with wonder as we wolf a burger down our gullet. We are in fact swamped by what in fact are obvious miracles, the whole of nature and life in its wild multiplicity. But thanks to habit and routine our imagination of the marvelous is deadened. 

But now to our third miracle. What could be more obvious that to wake up in the morning from dreamless sleep? And yet, you at once become miraculously aware of your thinking, wanting, sensing, fearing, loving—suddenly you open to a universe of experience. And there is your third obvious miracle—your consciousness, a mystery to physical explanation.

So there is our trio of obvious miracles: the creation of the universe; dead matter coming to life; and living beings, agents of creative consciousness.  The intriguing fact is that the miracle of consciousness is just a beginning.  A door is opened to a new universe of possibilities. There are people especially endowed or somehow inclined to find out where the door of our consciousness leads.  These are the shamans, the yogis, the saints, the artists, the mediums, or the person who has an experience that knocks her or him out of their customary life orbit and on to new orbits of adventure and exploration.  There is a paradox worth mentioning, dramatically illustrated by the near-death experience.  The paradox is that when you are pushed to the edge, your normal mechanisms of escape and survival shattered, that a hidden gate may suddenly open and beckon you toward enlightenment. You have to fall apart before you are reconstructed. The saints, the yogis, the shamans deploy their methods of opening the gates of o higher consciousness.

One thing is clear from digging into the evidence for the unexplained phenomena we call miracles.  When you add up all the expansions of human ability, mental and physical, a distinctly more evolved image of the future human emerges.  How these transformations take place I try to clarify in my book, Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief.  (Available on Amazon or at Anomalist Books.) An image of a more evolved future human emerges. Ideal health seems quite within the range of the possible, along with new powers of transportation and communication and heightened access to the beauty and enjoyment of the natural world.  Perhaps most promising is the vision of a psychically more evolved humankind.   

Above all, we need to call attention to the miracle of consciousness. It took 13.7 billion years to get to us.  Our life and our consciousness are mysteries that point to unknown powers of human transformation. The powers are within us, which is part of the obvious nature of the miracle paradox. The trick is how to make the connection, how to tune in, how to start a conversation with the powers hidden inside us.