Dark Metaphysical Forces

If Young’s framework is even directionally accurate, and if even a fraction of the perspectives shared in this book are true, they are hard to rationalize as mere incompetence. In other words, it’s hard to conceive that our drift into false paradigms is purely the result of innocent mistakes.

Perhaps false paradigms are being propagated intentionally. Not many people would be needed to enact such an agenda if they can use blackmail, bribery, threats, and mind control to manipulate key individuals in society.

But why would such social engineering be important? What would entice people to brainwash the public? And how could such an agenda remain over long periods of time if people have relatively short lifespans?

The answers might lie in the domain of consciousness—realms that transcend purely physical considerations. Perhaps there are nonphysical, spiritual forces that have much longer time horizons than humans do, and they work through humans in order to enact their goals. Why they might want to do so is open for speculation, but a common theory is that dark forces literally feed off of human energy—in particular, human suffering.

Within a consciousness-centric metaphysical framework, the existence of such forces is plausible. For instance, the famed computer scientist Alan Turing stated in 1950 that the statistical evidence for telepathy is “overwhelming,” which led him to then state: “It does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies.”13 Put another way, once we accept that consciousness is not localized to, or dependent on, a brain, then it’s possible for forms of consciousness to exist that don’t have physical bodies. Broadly speaking, they’re often referred to as spirits. Maybe they even have an ability to take on different forms (known as shapeshifting).14

Along these lines, Helané Wabheh’s book The Science of Channeling (2021) compiles scientific evidence for the ability of humans to “tune in to” some of these nonphysical intelligences.15 Sometimes this can occur through voluntary invocations, but it also seems possible to tune in without being aware of it. If our brain has an antenna-like quality, then this is possible. After all, we don’t really know where our thoughts originate. It might be the case that an individual’s consciousness is constantly being influenced without the person’s explicit knowledge. Therefore, the ability to manage emotions and beliefs seems critical.

In my book An End to Upside Down Contact (2022), I document a wide variety of encounters with nonphysical forces, some seemingly benevolent and others not. The focus of the forthcoming discussion is on the darker forces. This focus is necessary because of the unquestionably deceptive nature of our reality. However, it’s important to acknowledge that benevolent forces seem to be real too. Practically speaking, if everything in the world were purely evil, it’s implausible that we’d even have the freedom to question  paradigms. Additionally, our world is filled with loving acts, which is suggestive of a benevolent spiritual force. Likewise, there are many otherworldly experiences, reported historically and in modern times, in which people have direct mystical encounters with seemingly benevolent beings—often reporting indescribable states of “unconditional love” and even being miraculously healed. Preston Dennett gives many examples in his 2019 book, The Healing Power of UFOs: 300 True Accounts of People Healed by Extraterrestrials.16Or consider Anita Moorjani’s case. She was healed after having a transformative near-death experience in 2006. She was in a coma during a bout with terminal cancer and has since tried to put into words the shift that her consciousness underwent: “What I can only describe as superb and glorious unconditional love surrounded me, wrapping me tight as I continued to let go. It didn’t feel as though I had physically gone somewhere else—it was more as though I’d awakened, perhaps finally being roused from a bad dream. My soul was finally realizing its true magnificence. And in doing so, it was expanding beyond my body and this physical world.”17 Her doctors were stunned when her tumors disappeared following the resuscitation.

Regarding darker forces, consider the work of Richard Gallagher, MD. He is a Princeton and Yale graduate and a professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College who has personal experience with patients suffering from “demonic possession.” He details such accounts in his book, Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal (2020). He states his conclusion: “A segment of [the] invisible world seems to be mysteriously but remarkably hostile to human beings and seeks their physical and spiritual destruction. On rare occasions, like some kind of cosmic terrorist, that segment shows its true colors.”18 [emphasis added]

In fact, there are some instances in which individuals intentionally summon such dark forces. Earlier this was alluded to in the discussion of the “sex magick” ritual engaged by Jack Parsons (one of the early influences at NASA), with assistance from

 L. Ron Hubbard (the founder of the Church of Scientology). One has to wonder if this sort of ritual was just the tip of the iceberg. The Telegraph summarized the situation well in its 2017 article titled “Sex, rocket science, and Satanism: Meet Nasa’s real hidden figures.”19

There is, in fact, a long history of secretive, heinous, and sophisticated rituals that date back to biblical times. They have also been described in different forms by the Aztecs and Egyptians, among others. The intent of many such rituals is to call in dark spirits, likely for the purpose of obtaining power.20The rituals give vital insights into the psychology of evil and might help us understand the drive behind deception in our world. Only minor snippets will be covered here because the details are so unpleasant.

Although many instances of ritualistic abuse are hidden, some cases have been uncovered over time. In fact, they are discussed explicitly in state laws in Idaho and Illinois, and there are clear patterns to the activities. What follows is an excerpt from a law in Idaho (1990), and the law in Illinois is similar:

18-1506A. RITUALIZED ABUSE OF A CHILD — EXCLUSIONS —PENALTIES — DEFINITION.

(1) A person is guilty of a felony when he commits any of the following acts with, upon, or in the presence of a child as part of a ceremony, rite or any similar observance:

(a) Actually or in simulation, tortures, mutilates or sacrifices any warm-blooded animal or human being;

(b) Forces ingestion, injection or other application of any narcotic, drug, hallucinogen or anaesthetic for the purpose of dulling sensitivity, cognition, recollection of, or resistance to any criminal activity;

(c) Forces ingestion, or external application, of human or animal urine, feces, flesh, blood, bones, body secretions, nonprescribed drugs or chemical compounds;

( d) Involves the child in a mock, unauthorized or unlawful marriage ceremony with another person or representation of any force or deity, followed by sexual contact with the child;

(e) Places a living child into a coffin or open grave containing a human corpse or remains;

(f ) Threatens death or serious harm to a child, his parents, family, pets or friends which instills a well-founded fear in the child that the threat will be carried out; or

(g) Unlawfully dissects, mutilates, or incinerates a human corpse.21

Along these lines, Anne Johnson Davis’s autobiographical book Hell Minus One: My Story of Deliverance from Satanic Ritual Abuse and My Journey to Freedom (2008) describes her experiences as a victim as a young girl. The foreword of the book was written by a Utah detective from the state attorney general’s office who investigated that case. He confirmed that the perpetrators wrote confession letters detailing their crimes and added, “They confessed to us—in person. The allegations were confirmed.”22

This is significant because such allegations are often dismissed as products of “false memories.” Yet this is a validated case. In other instances, it’s indeed difficult to know what is real, particularly because the rituals often involve drugging and forms of torture designed to suppress memories. But in Davis’s case, her memories came flooding back later in life (which isn’t uncommon), and through unique circumstances, she was able to confront the perpetrators who decided to confess. Often the abused individual might just be considered crazy, with no way to validate the memories.

The bigger point here is this: If even some cases are real, then we can gain insights into the broader spiritual war that we all might be involved in (whether we know it or not).

In Davis’s case, she recalls seeing dark spirits entering into the ritual.23 Jay Parker endured similar abuse as a child, including incest, and he experienced dark energies directly. When interviewed by  filmmaker Sean Stone, he recalled that a dark intelligence seemed to possess his parents while they were engaging in nefarious acts. Parker says, “My father’s eyes would flash black, solid black,” as would his mother’s.24 [emphasis added]

Along similar lines, a 60 Minutes Australia episode that aired in 1989 featured a young British girl who was subjected to ritual abuse after being brought into the circle by her own grandmother. A psychiatrist validated her experiences as real and not the product of a psychotic or imaginative mind. Clearly traumatized (almost despondent and emotionless), she spoke about being brought to a place in the English countryside that looked like a “castle.” She said the route to get there was intentionally hidden from the victims. She also noted that the people there were “very rich” and had an ability to destroy evidence of murders with chemicals. They also referred to “Lucifer,” as she recalled. She detailed the horrors to which she was subjected, including being raped, being forced to have an abortion, and then being forced to eat the fetus.25Survivors of such abuse often describe links to powerful people—even governments. Anneke Lucas, for instance, was sold by her mother into a murderous pedophile ring in Belgium with “VIPs” and people “on the world stage.” Ritual abuse was involved as well.26 She documents her accounts in her 2022 book Quest for Love: Memoir of a Child Sex Slave. Another example is Serena Faith Masterson, author of I Am Serena (2020), who was born into a satanic cult and sold into the US government’s mind-control program. As a result of this torture, she developed dissociative identity disorder, including over 300 unique personalities. Only through a rare and miraculous series of events was she able to heal and tell her story. Her message is ultimately uplifting: she feels strongly that her soul grew from the experience and that she is able to contribute to the healing of others as a result. She seems to imply that suffering, while horrific in many ways, can paradoxically lead to healing and growth.

There are many cases that show a link between dark metaphysical forces and power structures in our world. Sean Stone’s documentary Best Kept Secret (2021), and John DeCamp’s book The  Franklin Cover-Up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska (1992) provide additional insights, including links with child-sex trafficking and child pornography. Another important resource that validates the reality of ritual abuse is a more than 500-page compendium featuring essays from more than twenty-five contributors, titled Ritual Abuse in the Twenty-First Century: Psychological, Forensic, Social, and Political Considerations (2008).

The point of acknowledging this dark underbelly of our world is not to dwell on evil but rather to acknowledge reality. When we ask, Why is there so much deception in our world? What is driving this?, we’re forced to consider these deeper energies that might be behind it.

Parker sums it up by saying that “the suffering and dissatisfaction of the human soul is what feeds the [dark] spirits….It’s all an energy game….We are cattle for them, and we feed them.” Yet, in spite of the unspeakable abuse he endured, he still feels that the benevolent force is greater: “Divine love is much more powerful than anything else.”27 [emphasis added]

13As cited in Radin, Entangled Minds, 73.

14See Gober, An End to Upside Down Contact, 134–37.

15Wahbeh, The Science of Channeling. For a further discussion of Wahbeh’s work, see Gober, An End to Upside Down Contact.

16See Gober, An End to Upside Down Contact. Also see Dennett, The Healing Power of UFOs.

17Anita Moorjani, “The Day My Life Changed: February 2, 2006,” https://www.anitamoorjani.com/my-nde.

18Gallagher, Demonic Foes, 11.

19Vincent, “Sex, rocket science, and Satanism: Meet Nasa’s real hidden figures,” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2017/02/17/sex-rocket-science-scientology-meet-hidden-figures-behind-nasas/.

20See, Gober, An End to Upside Down Contact, 57–66.

21Illinois Statutes Chapter 720. Criminal Offenses §-33. Ritualized abuse of a child, https://codes.findlaw.com/il/chapter-720-criminal-offenses/il-stsect-720-5-12-33.html; Idaho Statutes, https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/Title18/T18CH15/SECT18-1506A/.

22Davis, Hell Minus One, 85–93 (Kindle).

23Ibid., 1858–1863 (Kindle).

24“RAW: Sean Stone with Jay Parker,” https://robertdavidsteele.com/sean-stone-with-jay-parker/.

25SATAN’S CHILDREN – SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE (60 MINUTES AUSTRALIA), https://www.bitchute.com/video/I1bHD2JyfmEg/.

26REALWOMEN/REALSTORIES, (UNCUT) Anneke Lucas: Sold by my mother into a pedophile network at six years of age, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTxD6VUcxZ0. Also see 58 Tsakiris, Anneke Lucas, Recovering From Unimaginable Evil |441|, https://skeptiko.com/anneke-lucas-recovering-from-unimaginable-evil-441/.

27“RAW: Sean Stone with Jay Parker,” https://robertdavidsteele.com/sean-stone-wit

h-jay-parker/.

An End to theUpside Dow Cosmos

Rethinking the BigBang, Heliocentrism, the Lights in the Sky and Where We Live

Mark Gober

"Mediumship and Survival A Century of Investigations" - Concluding Remarks

 

With regard to the evidence for survival, I have now said, probably several times over, nearly everything that I have to say. I cannot dismiss this evidence en bloc as bad evidence, as entirely the product of fraud, misrecording, malobservation, wishful thinking, or plain chance coincidence. I can find no other decisive reasons for rejecting it. I have separately argued in connection with the phenomena of mediumship, with apparitions, and with certain cases of ostensible reincarnation, that the super-ESP hypothesis will not suffice to explain the quantity of correct and appropriate information sometimes furnished. I have further pointed out that some cases present features suggestive not just of surviving memories (the sphere in which the alternative super-ESP explanation might seem to be at its strongest) but of more positive personality characteristics – distinctive purposes, skills, capacities, habits, turns of phrase, struggles to communicate, wishes, point of view. Readers must assess these aspects of the puzzle for themselves. For myself I can only say that it seems to me that there is in each of the main areas I have considered a sprinkling of cases which rather forcefully suggest some form of survival. At least – the supposition that a recognizable fragment of the personality of a deceased person may manifest again after his death without there being some underlying causal factor common to the original manifestations and the later, aberrant ones, seems impossibly magical. And it is hard to see in what terms we could conceive this underlying causal factor except those of an individual consciousness of some degree of coherence and complexity. The hypothesis of an insentient ‘psychic factor’ seems, as I pointed out at the beginning of Chapter Fourteen, to present numerous difficulties. But in this area, and in important related areas, what we know stands in proportion to what we do not know as a bucketful does to the ocean. Certainty is not to be had, nor even a strong conviction that the area of one’s uncertainty has been narrowed to a manageable compass.

Even if one accepts that in the present state of our knowledge some sort of survival theory gives the readiest account of the observed phenomena, many issues remain undecided. In the vast majority even of favourable cases the ‘surviving’ personality which claims continuity with a formerly living, or previously incarnated, personality, is only able to demonstrate such apparent continuity on a very limited number of fronts, and may, indeed, markedly fail to demonstrate it on others. This does not, of course, mean that behind the observed manifestations there does not lie the fullest possible continuity; but equally it means that the hypothesis of complete continuity is unproven, and all sorts of possibilities remain open. Is there partial or complete survival? Sentient survival, or (far worse than mere extinction) survival with just a lingering, dim consciousness? Is there long-term survival or survival during a brief period of progressive disintegration? Is there enjoyable survival, or survival such as one would wish to avoid? Survival with a physical substrate, or disembodied survival? Survival as individual, or survival with one’s individuality for the most part dissolved in something larger? Is survival the rule, or is it just a freak? To these and many other questions I can at the moment see no very clear answers.

Many people, indeed, do not require, or perhaps wish for, clear answers. They will take the mere rejection of the super-ESP hypothesis as justifying the view that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world.

Oh, easy creed

 That our beloved ones are not lost indeed

 But, somewhere far and fainter, live secure,

 While yet they plead

 With voices heard in visions live and pure,

 With touch upon the hand, that they endure,

 Only withdrawn!

For my part I think that any further decisive progress will have to wait upon the results of a great deal of further difficult and time-consuming work on a number of different fronts. By the time this work has been even partly carried out, most of us will be dead, and will thus know the answers anyway, or not know them as the case may be. And the results of the work may be to point away from the survivalist theory once again. As to this, one can at best express a tentative view as to the likely future trend of the evidence. I have given my own view. Others will estimate the situation differently.

To those hot for certainty – whether it be certainty of survival or of extinction – this answer may seem dusty enough. However it will not seem dusty to everyone. For, as I have tried to show, it is possible from a properly informed consideration of the evidence to build up a rational case for belief in some form of survival, and also a rational case against it. And a rational case, of either tendency, built on evidence, however difficult to interpret, is to be preferred to any amount of blind belief or blind disbelief. Furthermore, to persons such as myself, with an overdeveloped bump of curiosity and a liking for mysteries, what may be called a Chinese box universe – a universe made up, so to speak, of a puzzle containing another puzzle deep within it, and so on indefinitely – has much appeal. And maybe at the heart of all truth and justice lie hidden, and brought to light, will prevail. Or maybe not. But in either case the puzzles are there, and their fascination is irresistible.

What, then, of the future? How might these puzzles be further studied? I do not think that there are any short cuts to a solution, or to a dismissal of the problem. The idea of a decisive ‘test of survival’ has commended itself to many, and some public-spirited individuals have left behind them sealed packages, the contents of which they hoped to communicate after death. In only a few instances has any degree of success been reported (e.g. 110a, II, pp. 182–185; 139c); and even had successes been more frequent they might have been attributed to clairvoyance by the medium.

Recently, more sophisticated forms of test have been suggested. Thouless (159b) has proposed that persons who wish to leave a ‘test’ behind them should encipher and deposit with a reputable organization some prose passage of appropriate content. All they would need to communicate would be the keyword. A control against the possibility that mediums could crack the code by super-ESP would be obtained by having them attempt to obtain the keyword while the subject is still alive. If they fail to obtain it we must assume that it is beyond the reach of ESP. Perhaps such a project will work – a supposed Richard Hodgson communicated through Mrs Piper a ‘password’ which turned out to be the name of her own daughter enciphered in a complex manner almost certainly known to Hodgson in life (109, pp. 204n-205n). Stevenson (153a) has initiated a similar project using combination locks instead of ciphers. A positive result in such a test would obviously be of great interest and importance; but to constitute strong evidence for survival it would, I think, still need to be combined with evidence for the survival of purposes, personality characteristics, other sorts of memories, etc.

Such ‘tests of survival’ apart, it seems to me that work on the question of survival will have to proceed, piece by piece, on two broad fronts. The first would involve the slow and patient sifting and accumulation of ostensible ‘evidence for survival’ such as I have presented and discussed in this book. The second (much harder to define) would involve the sort of inquiries, factual and conceptual, which might result in our being able to build up a general framework of thought within which survival and the various categories of evidence for survival will cohere and made sense, and will cohere also with the findings of other branches of science. (On the other hand we might decisively fail to achieve such a framework of thought, and that too would be a matter of great significance.) We have (as I have tried to show) already acquired a good deal of material on the former front; but we have acquired very little on the latter. If the evidence for survival were a great deal more copious and more startling than it actually is (and it is fairly copious and sometimes quite startling) we could perhaps get by with little accumulation of material on the latter front. I can certainly imagine a state of affairs in which, as a matter of fact, no one, or no one except philosophers when actually philosophizing, would express doubts about survival. Suppose, for example, that persons ‘out of the body’ were regularly able to act as living communicators, conveyed fluent and appropriate information, etc., and could give on their ‘return’ full accounts of what had transpired, and after their own deaths continued to communicate in much the same way right up to the moment of their reincarnation as one of Stevenson’s child subjects. But such a state of affairs does not obtain. Hence, it seems to me, it has become as important to attempt to progress on the second front as on the first. We already have quite a lot of ostensible evidence for survival; we do not have a conceptual framework into which we can satisfactorily fit it.

I shall accordingly not pursue the question of what further ostensible ‘evidence for survival’ we might obtain, but shall instead move immediately to the second of the two ‘broad fronts’ on which (I argued) work on the problem of survival needs to proceed. What steps might be taken to enlarge our relevant ‘background’ knowledge in such a way that the evidence for survival comes to ‘make sense’ in an overall context which includes the findings of other sciences as well as those of parapsychology? I should expect progress on this front, if progress there is, to be slow and painful, a gradual fitting together of laboriously acquired pieces, rather than a sudden insight into their true relations. And one can set no limit beforehand upon the number of ‘pieces’ which might in the end prove relevant. In previous chapters I have suggested various kinds of parapsychological work which, it seems to me, might have relevance to this endeavour. For example:

1. Experiments directed towards obtaining mediumistic communications from living persons. Living communicators might turn out to face much the same difficulties and to get into much the same muddles, as discarnate ones; and then we might perhaps obtain some clues as to the mechanism of communication, and the tenability of what I called the theory of ‘overshadowing’, and so forth. The work might or might not cohere or combine with work on OBEs. Equally, the upshot might be to suggest that the Gordon Davis and John Ferguson cases were not freaks or frauds, and hence to strengthen the background to the super-ESP hypothesis.

2. Likewise capable of supporting the super-ESP hypothesis would be experiments with sensitives (if such could be found) resembling those studied by Osty (see Chapter Ten above). I do not think that the status of the super-ESP hypothesis can be adequately established until such experiments have been carried out utilizing modern methods of experimental design and statistical assessment, features conspicuously absent from Osty’s pioneering work.

3. Full and extensive studies of the abilities of such gifted subjects as ‘Ruth’ (see previous chapter) to generate hallucinations in themselves and sometimes, apparently in other people, might, as I pointed out, throw light on the tenability or otherwise of the theory of veridicial apparitions which I discussed in Chapter Sixteen.

4. The most urgently needed investigation in the area of spontaneous cases is, it seems to me, a detailed investigation by competent and properly equipped persons into the physical aspects of a really marked ‘haunting’. For in such cases we have, very often, localized physical disturbances that are prima facie not susceptible of an ordinary explanation; and we have also (at least sometimes) apparitions; and the problem of the relation between these two is absolutely central to all questions concerning the nature and genesis of apparitions, and ramifies into other questions. Furthermore, in some hauntings, there are certain signs of an intelligence (whose origins and nature remain to be elucidated). One might try bringing different mediums and sensitives to the spot independently of each other to see if there was any agreement in their ‘diagnoses’, and thus obtain both ‘mentar and ‘physical’ avenues of approach to the same case (cf. 97; 106; 143). From a number of such investigations, one might (with an immense and unlikely amount of luck) begin to glimpse an overall pattern within which several different kinds of ostensible survival evidence might fall into place.

However, as I remarked a moment ago, relevant discoveries are likely to come – I think will have to come – from outside parapsychology altogether. From what I said in Chapter Thirteen, it should be clear that the physiology of memory processes will constitute an area of central concern. Wider aspects of biology may come to have relevance (144). There are also many signs – which I cannot detail here – that progress in the frontier regions of physics and mathematical physics may open up new ideas for parapsychology. Recently published work on the ‘metal-bending’ phenomenon constitutes an empirai focus for these speculative ideas, but the ramification of these ideas could extend much more widely than that.

The problem that confronts survival research is not shortage of things to do, but shortage of funds, with which necessarily goes shortage of personnel. When the SPR was first founded, it had a number of very able members with private means and ample leisure. It was these persons who were primarily responsible for the immense amount of work and the significant progress that marked the first three or four decades of the Society’s existence. The situation today has radically changed. There are fewer wealthy and leisured persons, and some of the investigations that are now desirable would require sophisticated and expensive scientific equipment. Governments and grant-giving agencies have not enough funds for tackling problems in this world, and will certainly not subsidize the study of problems relating to the next. It is only if a sufficient number of interested individuals band together and contribute their money and their time that we may hope for any concerted rather than piece-meal progress to be made. There continues to be a vital role for the SPR, the ASPR, and kindred societies. The recent work of Stevenson and Osis, as well as the original labours of the SPR’s founders, have shown how much can be accomplished even by a small number of dedicated persons with moderate funds and facilities at their disposal.

Substantial parts of this book have been taken up with an attempt to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable; to reconcile, in other words, the data of modern psychology and modern neuroscience, with certain odd empirical facts that apparently suggest that human personality may at least sometimes survive bodily death. I do not for a moment pretend that I have satisfactorily harmonized these bodies of data. Each time I tie up, with fumbling fingers, a couple of loose ends, a third one slips free again. Most of the protagonists will continue to reject the opposite camp’s data without any adequate scrutiny and purely on faith – faith, that is, that because their own findings and interpretations are unshakable, or at least shakable only in inessentials, the other fellow’s findings and interpretations cannot merit serious study. It is not just, say, neuroscientists who have this attitude to the ostensible evidence for survival. Some parapsychologists (from the experimental camp) tend to take this view of the data gathered by other parapsychologists (those interested in the topics of this book). Some Spiritualists would accord a like negligent dismissal to the findings of neuroscience. I do not like this rejection of data on faith – it is at best a not very honest way of protecting oneself from the labour of having to adjust one’s opinions. A far bigger act of faith – one to which I must confess I cannot at all times rise – is to accept both sets of data, and to assume that since the universe is not in the last resort disorderly, some way of reconciling them will in the end be found.

Alan Gauld

Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory ...

 On a February morning in 1966 Cleve Backster made a discovery that changed his life and could have far-reaching effects on ours. Backster was at that time an interrogation specialist who left the CIA to operate a New York school for training policemen in the techniques of using the polygraph, or ‘lie detector’. This instrument normally measures the electrical resistance of the human skin, but on that morning he extended its possibilities. Immediately after watering an office plant, he wondered if it would be possible to measure the rate at which water rose in the plant from the root to the leaf by recording the increase in leaf-moisture content on a polygraph tape. Backster placed the two psychogalvanic-reflex (PGR) electrodes on either side of the leaf of Dracaena massangeana, a potted rubber plant, and balanced the leaf into the circuitry before watering the plant again. There was no marked reaction to this stimulus, so Backster decided to try what he calls ‘the threat-to-well-being principle, a well-established method of triggering emotionality in humans’. In other words he decided to torture the plant. First of all he dipped one of its leaves into a cup of hot coffee, but there was no reaction, so he decided to get a match and burn the leaf properly. ‘At the instant of this decision, at 13 minutes and 55 seconds of chart time, there was a dramatic change in the PGR tracing pattern in the form of an abrupt and prolonged upward sweep of the recording pen. I had not moved, or touched the plant, so the timing of the PGR pen activity suggested to me that the tracing might have been triggered by the mere thought of the harm I intended to inflict on the plant.’

Backster went on to explore the possibility of such perception in the plant by bringing some live brine shrimp into his office and dropping them one by one into boiling water. Every time he killed a shrimp, the polygraph recording needle attached to the plant jumped violently. To eliminate the possibility of his own emotions producing this reaction, he completely automated the whole experiment so that an electronic randomiser chose odd moments to dump the shrimp into hot water when no human was in the laboratory at all. The plant continued to respond in sympathy to the death of every shrimp and failed to register any change when the machine dropped already dead shrimp into the water.

Impressed by the plant’s apparent sensitivity to stress, Backster collected specimens of other species and discovered that a philodendron seemed to be particularly attached to him. He no longer handles this plant with anything but the greatest care, and whenever it is necessary to stimulate it in order to produce a reaction, his assistant, Bob Henson, ‘plays the heavy’. Now the plant produces an agitated polygraph response every time Henson comes into the room, and seems to ‘relax’ when Backster comes near or even speaks in an adjoining room. (10) Enclosing the plant in a Faraday screen or a lead container has no effect, and it seems that the signals to which it responds do not fall within the normal electromagnetic spectrum. In more recent experiments Backster has found that fresh fruit and vegetables, mold cultures, amoebae, paramecia, yeast, blood, and even scrapings from the roof of a man’s mouth all show similar sensitivity to other life in distress.

This phenomenon, which Backster calls ‘primary perception’, has been substantiated by repetition of his work in other laboratories. (86) It raises awesome biological and moral questions; since thinking about it, I for one have had to give up mowing lawns altogether, but if it were to be taken to its logical limits we would end up, like the community in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, eating nothing but cabbages that have been certified to have died a natural death. The answer to the moral problem lies in treating all life with respect, and killing, with real reluctance, only that which is necessary for survival – but the biological problems are not as easily resolved.

If dying cells send out a signal to which other life responds, why do they do so? And why should such signals be more important to a potted plant than they are to us? Alarm signals are common to all social vertebrates at least. Sea gulls have specific calls that warn their breeding colonies of the approach of predators; ground squirrels and prairie marmots have an early-warning system that alerts their colonies to the danger of air raids by birds of prey. The function of the signals is so clear that those of crows and gulls have been recorded and broadcast across airfields to frighten these birds off the runways just before a plane is due to land. Very often the alarm is interspecific – terns, starlings, and pigeons feeding with gulls all take to flight at the sound of the gull alarm call; and seals dive into the water when nearby colonies of cormorants give notice of approaching danger. (69)

Alarm calls obviously have high survival value and work well across the species line, but not all species function on the same frequencies or even with the same sense organs, so there would be a strong natural pressure toward the evolution of a common signal – a sort of all-species SOS. Pressures of this kind seldom go unnoticed, and it would seem that Backster’s discovery could be nature’s answer to exactly this need. Presumably it would begin by a compromise signal being developed among groups of closely related species in response to a common predator. Then it would be to the predator’s advantage to be able to detect the signal and anticipate its effect on his prey, and finally both predators and prey would find the signal useful in giving warning of an avalanche or flood or some natural catastrophe that could affect them all.

The search of a signal accessible to all life would naturally narrow down to the lowest common denominator. All organisms consist of cells, and the existence of a system of communication among cells would provide the final answer. We have yet to prove conclusively that such a system exists, but the odds in favor of it get better all the time.

Man’s exclusion from this warning may be only apparent. I am beginning to suspect that unconsciously we are every bit as aware of the alarm as every pigeon or potted plant. It is a well-established fact that even in sleep we respond to certain significant sounds: a mother will sleep through the roar of a passing train but wake as soon as her child cries softly in another room.

Many mothers claim to know when something is wrong even before the baby sounds his audible alarm. They may be right and tuning in to the universal alarm, but many senses are known to be particularly acute immediately after childbirth, so they could be responding to ordinary stimuli that are very subtle indeed.

The male ostrich Struthio camelus has several hens, and each of them, in strict hierarchical order starting with the dominant female, lay five or six eggs in a hollow he scrapes out on the ground. The last of a large clutch, of twenty eggs, may therefore be laid three weeks after the first one, but all hatch within a few hours of each other about six weeks later. (330) This wonderful synchronisation is vital if the cock is to look after his brood effectively, and he ensures that it occurs by listening in to the eggs as they develop. By the sounds they make, he can assess their stage of development, and if one is too far advanced, he rolls it out of the nest and buries it for a while until the others catch up. Other eggs have parents less astute, and they synchronise themselves by listening to each other. Days before hatching, the chicks of most ground-living birds, which need to hatch and run off together almost immediately, break through the small shell membrane to gain access to the air space at the blunt end. They breathe this air, and the sound of their breathing can be heard by chicks in other eggs, who know by its rate how near to hatching their brood mates are. (91) In the Japanese quail Coturnix coturnix the rate builds up to three sounds a second, and it has been shown that an artificial click at this frequency accelerates the rate of hatching of all the eggs in a nest. The embryos in most eggs make little ‘pleasure’ calls in response to a change in position when the egg is held in the hand. These can be heard with a sensitive stethoscope, but it seems certain that breeding parent birds hear these sounds quite clearly and make the appropriate response to them.

In the 1880s two French scientists discovered a boy who appeared to be able to guess correctly the page numbers of books chosen at random by another person. The condition under which the boy operated best was with the experimenter standing with the light behind him and the book open between himself and the child. It turned out that the boy was able to read the numbers from the minute back-to-front reflections on the cornea of the experimenter’s eye. (221) These reflections were only one tenth of a millimeter high, but the child’s sense of sight was so acute that this was enough to give him the information he needed. This kind of sensitivity is very rare; it is unusual for anyone to be able to see so well, but supernormal does not mean supernatural. The boy’s sight was extraordinarily good, but a powerful sense of sight is a very natural phenomenon, and a vulture could probably do as well if it could be persuaded to try.

We have not yet been able to draw any hard and fast limits to the acuity of our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. Every new probe into their potential seems to push the limits of receptivity further and further out, and new spheres of perception are continually being discovered. Many apparently supernatural abilities sooner or later turn out to be due to hyperacuity of an existing sense system and in no way extrasensory, but there is one phenomenon that keeps cropping up and has yet to be explained satisfactorily in terms of the established senses. This is ‘thought transference’, or telepathy.

Lyall Watson 

Supernature 

Possession

 

Recent Philippine history has been aptly described as “four hundred years in a convent, followed by fifty in Hollywood”. But there is obviously more to it than that. Long before either Spanish or American colonisation, the islands of the archipelago were a patchwork of well over a hundred distinct linguistic, cultural and racial groups – many of which still survive.

Cagayan Valley in north-eastern Luzon is home to one such community – an Igorot or mountain people who are marked by Christianity and post-war developments, but nevertheless leave all the most important decisions of their lives to solemn rituals that involve animal sacrifice and lead to consultation with the spirits. Communion is accomplished by aniteras or female shamans who are now rare, but carry on like gently beating hearts in dying tribal life. It was to meet one such woman that I made the long journey from Bayombong up into the forests of the Cordillera. I spent several bewitching weeks living in the old lady’s compound, watching the daily work of weaving and basket making, taking part in the evening rituals of healing and spirit worship. It was an altogether magical time, but one I remember best for my involvement in what I can only think of as a kind of exorcism.

A child was brought to the aniteras suffering from a complaint like none I have ever seen. He was said to be ten years old, and from the right side he looked about that age; but from the left, he had the appearance of an aged and diseased dwarf. From the front, you could see a line running down the centre of his body, as though the Hollywood part of his heritage had spent long hours in makeup that morning, doing their best to make one half of his body look like something designed to be exhumed by Vincent Price.

I can joke about it now, but the effect was truly horrible. The hair on the right side of his head was dark and glossy, while that on the left was dank and lifeless. One eye was clear and bright, the other squint and rheumy. Half his teeth were widely spaced and drawn out into fangs by the retreat of bloody gums, and the skin on that side of his face and down his left arm was covered in running sores. He walked slowly and with obvious pain, hunched with every other step over a left leg shortened several inches by a clawed foot. And when he spoke, which he did rarely, it was out of the twisted left side of his mouth in a snarl and in a language which nobody there understood. Nobody except me. I was astounded to hear, in amongst the deep-throated growl, a few phrases in clear and ringing Zulu – the one African language that I was able to speak when I was his age. The words were odd ones and inappropriate to that situation, but they left me feeling very vulnerable, as though I had just had my pocket picked.

The aniteras decided that the child was possessed by busao, an evil spirit – which, in the circumstances, seemed like the only reasonable diagnosis. And for three days she worked her wiles on the child, plying him with herbal potions, saturating him with ceremony and invocation. All to no avail. On the fourth night, however, she was otherwise occupied and the boy/dwarf was sitting on the ground next to a fire encircled by a group of elders, frightening me from time to time with occasional obscene twitches. The people and I were talking in reluctant Tagalog, which is no more their language than it is mine, just passing the time. Nobody was concentrating on the figure at the fire, he was not the subject of conversation and he was looking away from me into the flames. Then slowly, one by one, our gazes focused on him, the talk stopped, the air became almost heavy with condensed attention; and suddenly, as if by prearrangement, the old lady was there with us, standing tall on the edge of the circle. She hurled something into the fire, which flared up in a green blaze and she shouted very loud, very angry, a long quick string of words hurled directly at the afflicted boy.

There was a moment of silence, complete silence, then a terrible scream as the child threw himself down on the ground and began to thrash around violently. Again she shouted, and once more he screamed – a searing combination of pain and anger. It was a duel in sound, a pitched battle that raged and grew into a frenzy, and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun as the child hurled himself face down to the earth and lay still with one arm and shoulder in the glowing coals. For a long, awful moment nobody moved, and then the old woman stepped forward, gently lifted the body up and carried it away to her hut. And it was as though she took with it a great weight from our shoulders – a burden that we were not conscious of carrying, but that had been with us ever since the weird child had arrived.

The next morning, the boy was up early with the rest of the women, helping carry water. He looked straight at me for the first time and his eyes, both eyes, were clear. By that evening he was talking normally, in his own tongue, and walking with only the suggestion of a limp. And by the end of the week, his skin and teeth and hair, his whole appearance, were those of any other healthy, unmarked, active and attractive Filipino child.

I make no apologies for telling this story in such detail and without corroboration. I am not offering it in evidence, but as a starting point for a line of argument. Three things about it are of interest to me. The first is the laterality of the affliction – which, however it was caused, suggests at least a biological vector, involving just half of the brain. The second is the nature of the cure – which was both rapid and dramatic, suggesting the sort of catharsis that has mental rather than physical origins. And the third is the use of an unfamiliar language – in the presence of perhaps the only person out of fifty million in the Philippines who could have understood.

I am not claiming that the child was possessed. I discovered later that his problems had begun three years before when his mother was run over by a truck, killed and hideously disfigured as he was walking down the road with her – holding her right hand. There are, however, strong resemblances between this incident and several other accounts in the literature of what has been identified as demonic possession – most notably the case of fourteen-year-old Karen Kingston, who was cured of a similar affliction in North Carolina in 1974 by a group including three clergymen, a psychologist, a psychiatrist and a general practitioner.276Karen’s problem also began with a murder. She watched her mother stab her alcoholic father to death with a butcher’s knife and retreated into a state of helpless shock, which turned gradually from withdrawal into ugly and violent deformity. She was sent to a home for retarded children and when orthodox medicine seemed incapable of preventing the transformation of this adolescent girl into a malevolent crone, an evangelical Baptist suggested exorcism. The ceremony began, in the presence of several clinical witnesses and nursing staff, with a minister addressing the child directly as though she were possessed by a devil. “In the name of Jesus, demon come forth! Leave! Leave!” And the girl responded in kind, in a deep voice. “This child is mine! Go away! Go away! Leave us alone!”

The rest of the treatment will be as familiar to those in our culture who know anything of the rites of exorcism, or have even seen the film of The Exorcist, as the tactics of the aniteras were to her Igorot audience. Events moved from blasphemy and poltergeist phenomena to a violent crisis precipitated by forcing the alleged demon to reveal its name. The moment that the symptoms could be gathered together into a separate identity, which chose the surprisingly undemonic name of “Williams”, Karen was free of it. And over the next three days, she regained her health and intelligence and control.

I gloss over these events in a paragraph, as though conversation and conflict with a demon were part of everyday experience, For most of us, of course, they are not. None of those present in North Carolina will ever forget what happened, any more than I can ignore the dramas I experienced in the Philippines. But to me the crucial aspect of both cases, is that events were clearly culturally determined. They followed the scenario appropriate to the circumstances, drawing on beliefs and expectations relevant to those involved. The cures remain mysterious, amenable one day perhaps to the liberal tenets of the fledgling science of psychosomatic medicine, but the process was essentially traditional and social. Which is why I believe it succeeded. I suggest that the clergyman who acted as Karen’s exorcist, also played the devil’s role – just as I somehow contributed a few words of Zulu to the Philippine performance. Neither of us was conscious of doing so, but I am convinced that at some saman level we were involved. We added social weight to an individual dilemma and helped move it to communal resolution.

Which brings me back to Adam Crabtree, the Canadian psychotherapist who is impressed with the way some of his patients behave during “theradrama” sessions. “I have often seen them,” he says, “operating from very little information, ‘become’ the person that they were portraying to such perfection that they even used that person’s characteristic gestures and peculiar phraseology.” He goes on to consider the way an actor experiences the enactment – “Often he has the sensation of being taken over and losing himself during the dramatization” – and suggests that this talent is more than just skill or telepathy. It involves the presence of the person being portrayed.67

I think he may be right.

Let me return, however, for the next step in the argument, to those Zulu phrases. Parapsychology has a name for the ability to use a language of which a person has no ordinary knowledge. It is called xenoglossy or “foreign tongue” and comes in two forms. “Recitative” xenoglossy is the utterance of fragments of a strange language, as one might parrot Latin phrases without having any idea of their syntax or actual meaning. And “responsive” xenoglossy, which is something far more intelligent, involving an ability to converse in the unknown language. The distinction is vital.124

It is possible to pick up a Serbo-Croatian dictionary and learn some words by rote. It is possible even to study the section in the front that deals with the rules of pronunciation and grammar, and acquire a rudimentary knowledge of these. But this will not immediately transform you into a fluent speaker of Serbo-Croat, able to talk your way around Yugoslavia. There is a gap between the theory and practice of any foreign language which requires just that – practice. You can read all the books in the world about cycling, but you still have to learn to ride by trial and error, by wrapping your muscles and your mind around the problem until the technique falls into place. Then it is yours for life.

The Filipino child was not speaking Zulu, he was practising recitative xenoglossy. There are many similar examples in the literature on spiritism – of mediums reciting the Lord’s Prayer in Greek or throwing in the odd word that turns out on later analysis to be Egyptian or even Hawaiian. Some of these borrowings can be traced to a phenomenon known as cryptomnesia or “hidden memory”, in which we dredge up information from unconscious areas without being aware of doing so. Early this century, for example, a spirit who called herself Blanche Poynings created some excitement in mediumistic circles. She appeared through a hypnotised woman and provided impressively detailed information about life during the time of Richard II and Henry IV. The case seemed to be one that provided evidence for survival, until it was discovered that there was a novel called Countess Maud which included the character of Blanche and all the historical detail; and the book had been read to the sitter as a child.81Latent memory of this kind clearly surfaces on some occasions, but it is far from being the whole answer. I cannot imagine any set of circumstances which could have brought a ten-year-old boy in the Cagayan Valley into contact with Zulu at any stage of his life. Nor am I disposed to assume that he was possessed by the discarnate spirit of a Zulu witchdoctor. It seems altogether more reasonable to assume that somehow, the mechanism is still far from clear, he was able to recite phrases that were familiar to me, borrowing them from my mind as I might purloin a word here or there from Serbo-Croat.

An outrageous conclusion? Perhaps, but there is some evidence for social leakage of this kind.

Alister Hardy once said: “I have myself become convinced of the reality of telepathy from two experiences I had many years ago, but they are anecdotal and of no scientific value; yet to me they are as important and as real as any observation I have ever made in natural history.” Both experiences involved a Mrs. Wedgwood in Lincolnshire, who entertained officers from Hardy’s regiment during World War I and claimed to be able to “see” things. On one occasion she suddenly said, “Oh, I can see your brother quite clearly. I can see him sitting at a table drawing what I think must be some engineering plan; on a large sheet of white paper I see him painting what seem to be squares and oblongs of red and blue.” What she described was exactly what Hardy himself had been doing all that afternoon, entirely on his own, preparing diagrams to illustrate a talk on military history. A year later, Hardy was working as a camouflage officer and spent hours painting a large sheet of white card with a vivid pink distemper and sitting, watching, waiting for it to dry before going out to dinner with Mrs. Wedgwood. Her first words to him were “Oh, what have you been doing? I see a large pink square on the table in front of you.”147These accounts, as Hardy said, are anecdotal. Many people have such experiences. I include his here partly because they are his, and partly because he was not only a great naturalist but an accomplished artist, someone with a good visual memory, on whom shape and colour made a strong impression. Strong enough, perhaps, to overflow.

Some of the best results in controlled tests on the transfer of information by apparently extrasensory means, come from the Ganzfeld or “whole field” technique, which tries as far as possible to reduce patterned sensory input. Subjects are put into a relaxed position, with halved ping-pong balls over their eyes, in diffuse light, to a background of unstructured “white noise”. This withdrawal of attention from the immediate environment seems to help in picking up weak signals.324 Someone in a dream state is presumably isolated in much the same way and there is a certain amount of evidence to show that sleepers are subject to telepathic impressions.380 But if I am right about broadcasts having particular biological relevance in crisis situations, then the leakage between organisms ought to be most marked when the transmission is strong – when the need is greatest. As it was for that Igorot child in the midst of his grotesque dilemma.

The nearest laboratory equivalent to the real life situation is perhaps the technique of “sensory bombardment”, in which subjects are given a comprehensive audio-visual experience inside a wrap-around cinema screen equipped with quadrophonic speakers. The effect of this combined assault is so overwhelming that most subjects put up their own private censors and slip into an altered state of consciousness. And in the process, some of them seem to gain access to information not normally available to them. They make saman contact.

The English philosopher H. H. Price came, I think, closest to a description of what happens in his analysis of shared awareness as a “field of interaction”. Sama is not a thing or an entity and contact through it does not have an all or nothing character. It is not a kind of knowing, so much as a mixture of fact, feeling and expectation – a shared experience. “Telepathy,” said Price, “is more like infection than knowledge.” And once infection has taken place, once information has been transferred, its nature and future is governed by the recipient, who controls the course of the disease.

If the child in the Philippines had been able not only to use a Zulu phrase or two, but to make appropriate reply in Zulu to my questions, he would have been showing responsive xenoglossy. Which would have been even more dramatic, and a sound basis for arguing that actual possession was indeed involved. As it was, he made no response at all, but there are those who have apparently done so. In addition to the unexpected Arabic and Serbo-Croatian talents of Billy Milligan, which remain unresolved, there are several other examples.

In 1974, a thirty-year-old lecturer in public administration at the Nagpur University in India suddenly underwent a profound change in character. One day, Uttara Huddar was a quiet, single woman with modern tastes, whose home language was Marathi. The next, she dressed and acted like a married woman, spent much of her time in religious exercises, called herself Sharada – and spoke fluent Bengali. Ian Stevenson, a psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, examined her in the company of Bengali experts, who not only declared her competent in the language, but doubted that anyone from Nagpur could speak it in the way she did, without any trace of Marathi accent. Uttara’s family insist that she never learned, nor had the chance to learn, Bengali. Yet she undoubtedly does speak it – at least during those periods, which may last from one day to several weeks at a time, when she appears to become Sharada and has to give up teaching.353A skill of this order, apparently acquired without the usual training and practice, deserves to be regarded as truly paranormal. I can see no way that it can be explained by telepathy, saman contact, social facilitation or access to a collective unconscious. Knowledge of, and active use of, a language are very different things. One brain might have access to the information in another, but it is very difficult to conceive of any way that a muscular skill could be transmitted. Speaking a strange language requires long and arduous training of the muscles of the tongue and lips and it is hard to see how such control could be achieved – even by a brain transplant. And yet … I could be underestimating our ability to adapt. There are at least two other well-documented records of people who appear to have suddenly acquired manual skills that require an equivalent degree of practice and control.

In 1961, following the death of her husband, a British housewife called Rosemary Brown began to play the piano well enough to give accomplished performances of difficult compositions. These were unknown to the world of music, but their style was familiar. So they should be, says Mrs. Brown, because the composers are Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven and Monteverdi, who “take over my hands like a pair of gloves”.34In 1968, following an outbreak of poltergeist activity in his family home, Matthew Manning realised that he was somehow responsible and began to exploit and direct the phenomenon. He produced “automatic writing” in a variety of scripts, including Arabic, and even more impressively – a portfolio of “automatic drawings” in the style of Dürer, Picasso, da Vinci, Beardsley and Klee. Although Manning has no appreciable artistic talent in his own right, the drawings are highly accomplished, done very quickly, always in the distinctive style of a particular well-known artist, but are not always reproductions of any known work. “It’s not me,” says Manning, “I simply switch on the energy.”234

The sudden acquisition of linguistic, musical and artistic skills presents a real problem for any explanation of the paranormal. They seem to rule out any possibility of telepathy or extrasensory perception – even of the more naturalistic saman kind I have been suggesting. Which would appear to leave us with just two other possibilities: true possession – the actual invasion of an alien entity; or reincarnation – which in the final analysis amounts to the same thing, except that the entity involved is dead.

I have philosophic and biological problems with both suggestions, and intend to deal with these later, but want first to take a closer look at the actual limits of the senses. They can be surprisingly elastic.

BEYOND SUPERNATURE.

 by Lyall Watson

Where is the past?

 As the man gazed off into space, the room he was in became ghostly and transparent, and in its place materialized a scene from the distant past. Suddenly he was in the courtyard of a palace, and before him was a young woman, olive-skinned and very pretty. He could see her gold jewelry around her neck, wrists, and ankles, her white translucent dress, and her black braided hair gathered regally under a high square-shaped tiara. As he looked at her, information about her life flooded his mind. He knew she was Egyptian, the daughter of a prince, but not a pharaoh. She was married. Her husband was slender and wore his hair in a multitude of small braids that fell down on both sides of his face.

The man could also fast-forward the scene, rushing through the events of the woman's life as if they were no more than a movie. He saw that she died in childbirth. He watched the lengthy and intricate steps of her embalming, her funeral procession, the rituals that accompanied her being placed in her sarcophagus, and when he finished, the images faded and the room once again came back into view.

The man's name was Stefan Ossowiecki, a Russian-born Pole and one of the century's most gifted clairvoyants, and the date was February 14,19S5. His vision of the past had been evoked when he handled a fragment of a petrified human foot

Ossowiecki proved so adept at psychometrizing artifacts that he eventually came to the attention of Stanislaw Poniatowski, a professor at the University of Warsaw and the most eminent ethnologist in Poland at the time. Poniatowski tested Ossowiecki with a variety of flints and other stone tools obtained from archaeological sites around the world. Most of these lithics, as they are called, were so nondescript that only a trained eye could tell they had been shaped by human hands. They were also precertified by experts so that Poniatowski knew their ages and historical origins, information he kept carefully concealed from Ossowiecki.

ft did not matter. Again and again Ossowiecki identified the objects correctly, describing their age, the culture that had produced them, and the geographical locations where they had been found. On several occasions the locations Ossowiecki cited disagreed with the information Poniatowski had written in his notes, but Poniatowski discovered that it was always his notes that were in error, not Ossowiecki's information.

Ossowiecki always worked the same. He would take the object in his hands and concentrate until the room before him, and even his own body, became shadowy and almost nonexistent. After this transition occurred, he would find himself looking at a three-dimensional movie of the past He could then go anywhere he wanted in the scene and see anything he chose. While he was gazing into the past, Ossowiecki even moved his eyes back and forth as if the things he was describing possessed an actual physical presence before him.

He could see the vegetation, the people, and the dwellings in which they lived. On one occasion, after handling a stone implement from the Magdalenian culture, a Stone Age people who flourished in France about 15,000 to 10,000 b.c, Ossowiecki told Poniatowski that Magdalenian women had very complex hair styles. At the time this seemed absurd, but subsequent discoveries of statues of Magdalenian women with ornate coiffures proved Ossowiecki right

Over the course of the experiments Ossowiecki offered over one hundred such pieces of information, details about the past that at first seemed inaccurate, but later proved correct He said that Stone Age peoples used oil lamps and was vindicated when excavations in Dordogne, France, uncovered oils lamps of the exact size and style he described. He made detailed drawings of the animals various peoples hunted, the style of the huts in which they lived, and their burial customs—assertions that were all later confirmed by archaeological discoveries.1

Poniatowski's work with Ossowiecki is not unique. Norman Emerson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Toronto and founding vice president of the Canadian Archaeological Association, has also investigated the use of clairvoyants in archaeological work. Emerson's research has centered around a truck driver named George McMullen. Like Ossowiecki, McMullen has the ability to psychometrize objects and use them to tune into scenes from the past. McMullen can also tune into the past simply by visiting an archaeological site. Once there, he paces back and forth until he gets his bearings. Then he begins to describe the people and culture that once flourished at the site. On one such occasion Emerson watched as McMullen bounded over a patch of bare ground, pacing out what he said was the location of an Iroquois longhouse. Emerson marked the area with survey pegs and six months later uncovered the ancient structure exactly where McMullen said it would be.2Although Emerson began as a skeptic, his work with McMullen has made him a believer. In 1973, at an annual conference of Canada's leading archaeologists, he stated, “It is my conviction that I have received knowledge about archaeological artifacts and archaeological sites from a psychic informant who relates this information to me without any evidence of the conscious use of reasoning.” He concluded his talk by saying that he felt McMullen's demonstrations opened “a whole new vista” in archaeology, and research into the further use of psychics in archaeological investigations should be given “first priority.”3

Indeed, retrocognition, or the ability of certain individuals to shift the focus of their attention and literally gaze back into the past, has been confirmed repeatedly by researchers. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1960s, W. H. C. Tenhaeff, the director of the Parapsychological Institute of the State University of Utrecht, and Marius Valkhoff, dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Witwatersfand, Johannesburg, South Africa, found that the great Dutch psychic, Gerard Croiset could psychometrize even the smallest fragment of bone and accurately describe its past.4 Dr. Lawrence LeShan, a New York clinical psychologist, and another skeptic-turned-believer, has conducted similar experiments with the noted American psychic, Eileen Garrett.5 At the 1961 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, archaeologist Clarence W. Weiant revealed that he would not have made his famous Tres Zapotes discovery, universally considered to be one of the most important Middle American archaeological finds ever made, were it not for the assistance of a psychic.6

Stephan A. Schwartz, a former editorial staff member of National Geographic magazine and a member of MIT's Secretary of Defense Discussion Group on Innovation, Technology, and Society, believes that retrocognition is not only real, but will eventually precipitate a shift in scientific reality as profound as the shifts that followed the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin. Schwartz feels so strongly about the subject that he has written a comprehensive history of the partnership between clairvoyants and archaeologists entitled The Secret Vaults of Time. “For three-quarters of a century psychic archaeology has been a reality,” says Schwartz. “This new approach has done much to demonstrate that the time and space framework so crucial to the Grand Material world-view is by no means as absolute a construct as most scientists believe.”7

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

MICHAEL TALBOT

Psychokinesis on a Grander Scale

 

So far, PK effects produced in the lab have been limited to relatively small objects, but the evidence suggests that some individuals at least can use PK to bring about even greater changes in the physical world. Biologist Lyall Watson, author of the bestselling book Supernature and a scientist who has studied paranormal events all over the world, encountered one such individual while visiting the Philippines. The man was one of the so-called Philippine psychic healers, but instead of touching a patient, all he did was hold his hand about ten inches over the person's body, point at his or her skin, and an incision would appear instantaneously. Watson not only witnessed several displays of the man's psychokinetic surgical skills, but once, when the man made a broader sweep with his finger than usual, Watson received an incision on the back of his own hand. He bears the scar to this day.12

There is evidence that PK abilities can also be used to heal bones. Several examples of such healings have been reported by Dr. Rex Gardner, a physician at Sunderland District General Hospital in England. One interesting aspect of a 1983 article in the British Medical Journal is that Gardner, an avid investigator of miracles, presents contemporary miraculous healings side by side with examples of virtually identical healings collected by seventh-century English historian and theologian the Venerable Bede.

The present-day healing involved a group of Lutheran nuns living in Darmstadt, Germany. The nuns were building a chapel when one of the sisters broke through a freshly cemented floor and fell onto a wooden beam below. She was rushed to the hospital where X rays revealed that she had a compound pelvic fracture. Instead of relying on standard medical techniques, the nuns held an all-night prayer vigil. Despite the doctors’ insistence that the sister should remain in traction for many weeks, the nuns took her home two days later and continued to pray and perform a laying on of hands. To their surprise, immediately following the laying on of hands, the sister stood up from her bed, free of the excruciating pain of the fracture and apparently healed. It took her only two weeks to achieve a full recovery, whereupon she returned to the hospital and presented herself to her astonished doctor.13Although Gardner does not try to account for this or any of the other healings he discusses in his article, PK seems a likely explanation. Given that the natural healing of a fracture is a lengthy process, and even the miraculous regeneration of Michelli's pelvis took several months, it is suggested that perhaps the unconscious PK abilities of the nuns performing the laying on of hands accomplished the task.

Gardner describes a similar healing that occurred in the seventh century during the building of the church at Hexham, England, and involving St. Wilfrid, then the bishop of Hexham. During the construction of the church a mason named Bothelm fell from a great height, breaking both his arms and legs. As he lay dying, Wilfrid prayed over him and asked the other workmen to join him. They did, “the breath of life returned” to Bothelm, and he healed rapidly. Since the healing apparently did not take place until St Wilfred asked the other workmen to join him, one wonders if St Wilfred was the catalyst or again if it was the combined unconscious PK of the entire assemblage?

Dr. William Tuf Ls Brigham, the curator of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu and a noted botanist who devoted much of his private life to investigating the paranormal, recorded an incident in which a broken bone was instantaneously healed by a native Hawaiian shaman, or kahuna. The incident was witnessed by a friend of Brigham's named J. A. K. Combs. Combs's grandmother-in-law was considered one of the most powerful women kahunas in the islands, and once, while attending a party at the woman's home, Combs observed her abilities firsthand.

On the occasion in question, one of the guests slipped and fell in the beach sand, breaking his leg so severely that the bone ends pressed visibly out against the skin. Recognizing the seriousness of the break, Combs recommended that the man be taken to a hospital immediately, but the elderly kahuna would hear none of it Kneeling beside the man, she straightened his leg and pushed on the area where the fractured bones pressed out against his skin. After praying and meditating for several minutes she stood up and announced that the healing was finished. The man rose wonderingly to his feet, took a step, and then another. He was completely healed and his leg showed no indication of the break in any way.14Mass Psychokinesis in Eighteenth-Century France

Such incidents notwithstanding, one of the most astounding manifestations of psychokinesis, and one of the most remarkable displays of miraculous events ever recorded, took place in Paris in the first half of the eighteenth century. The events centered around a puritanical sect of Dutch-influenced Catholics known as the Jansenists, and were precipitated by the death of a saintly and revered Jansenist deacon named Francois de Paris. Although few people living today have even heard of the Jansenist miracles, they were one of the most talked about events in Europe for the better part of a century.

To understand fully the Jansenist miracles, it is necessary to know a little about the historical events that preceded Francois de Paris's death. Jansenism was founded in the early seventeenth century, and from the start it was at odds with both the Roman Catholic Church and the French monarchy. Many of the beliefs diverged sharply with standard church doctrine but it was a popular movement and quickly gained followers among the French populace. Most damning of all, it was viewed by both the papacy and King Louis XV, a devout Catholic, as Protestantism only masquerading as Catholicism. As a result, both the church and the king were constantly maneuvering to undermine the movement's power. One obstacle to these maneuverings, and one of the factors that contributed to the movement's popularity, was that Jansenist leaders seemed especially skilled at performing miraculous healings. Nonetheless, the church and the monarchy persevered, causing fierce debates to rage throughout France. It was on May 1, 1727, at the height of this power struggle, that Francois de Paris died and was interred in the parish cemetery of Saint-Medard, Paris.

Because of the abbe's saintly reputation, worshipers began to gather at his tomb, and from the beginning a host of miraculous healings were reported. The ailments thus cured included cancerous tumors, paralysis, deafness, arthritis, rheumatism, ulcerous sores, persistent fevers, prolonged hemorrhaging, and blindness. But this was not all. The mourners also started to experience strange involuntary spasms or convulsions and to undergo the most amazing contortions of their limbs. These seizures quickly proved contagious, spreading like a brush fire until the streets were packed with men, women, and children, all twisting and writhing as if caught up in a surreal enchantment.

It was while they were in this fitful and trancelike state that the “convulsionaires,” as they have come to be called, displayed the most phenomenal of their talents. One was the ability to endure without harm an almost unimaginable variety of physical tortures. These included severe beatings, blows from both heavy and sharp objects, and strangulation—all with no sign of injury, or even the slightest trace of wounds or bruises.

What makes these miraculous events so unique is that they were witnessed by literally thousands of observers. The frenzied gatherings around Abbe Paris's tomb were by no means short-lived. The cemetery and the streets surrounding it were crowded day and night for years, and even two decades later miracles were still being reported (to give some idea of the enormity of the phenomena, in 1733 it was noted in the public records that over 3,000 volunteers were needed simply to assist the convulsionaires and make sure, for example, that the female participants did not become immodestly exposed during their seizures). As a result, the supernormal abilities of the convulsionaires became an international cause celebre, and thousands flocked to see them, including individuals from all social strata and officials from every educational, religious, and governmental institution imaginable; numerous accounts, both official and unofficial, of the miracles witnessed are recorded in the documents of the time.

Moreover, many of the witnesses, such as the investigators from the Roman Catholic Church, had a vested interest in refuting the Jansenist miracles, but they still went away confirming them (the Roman Catholic Church later remedied this embarrassing state of affairs by conceding that the miracles existed but were the work of the devil, hence proving that the Jansenists were depraved).

One investigator, a member of the Paris Parliament named Louis-Basile Carre de Montgeron, witnessed enough miracles to fill four thick volumes on the subject, which he published in 1737 under the title La Verite des Miracles. In the work he provides numerous examples of the convulsionaries’ apparent invulnerability to torture. In one instance a twenty-year-old convulsionaire named Jeanne Maulet leaned against a stone wall while a volunteer from the crowd, “a very strong man,” delivered one hundred blows to her stomach with a thirty-pound hammer (the convulsionaires themselves asked to be tortured because they said it relieved the excruciating pain of the convulsions). To test the force of the blows, Montgeron himself then took the hammer and tried it on the stone wall against which the girl had leaned. He wrote, “At the twenty-fifth blow the stone upon which I struck, which had been shaken by the preceding efforts, suddenly became loose and fell on the other side of the wall, making an aperture more than half a foot in size.”15

Montgeron describes another instance in which a convulsionaire bent back into an arc so that her lower back was supported by “the sharp point of a peg.” She then asked that a fifty-pound stone attached to a rope be hoisted to “an extreme height” and allowed to fall with all its weight on her stomach. The stone was hoisted up and allowed to fall again and again, but the woman seemed completely unaffected by it She effortlessly maintained her awkward position, suffered no pain or harm, and walked away from the ordeal without even so much as a mark on the flesh of her back. Montgeron noted that while the ordeal was in progress she kept crying out, “Strike harder, harder!”16

In fact, it appears that nothing could harm the convulsionaires. They could not be hurt by the blows of metal rods, chains, or timbers. The strongest men could not choke them. Some were crucified and afterward showed no trace of wounds.17 Most mind-boggling of all, they could not even be cut or punctured with knives, swords, or hatchets! Montgeron cites an incident in which the sharpened point of an iron drill was held against the stomach of a convulsionaire and then pounded so violently with a hammer that it seemed “as if it would penetrate through to the spine and rupture all the entrails.” But it didn't, and the convulsionaire maintained an “expression of perfect rapture,” crying, “Oh, that does me good! Courage, brother; strike twice as hard, if you can!”18

Invulnerability was not the only talent the Jansenists displayed during their seizures. Some became clairvoyant and were able to “discern hidden things.” Others could read even when their eyes were closed and tightly bandaged, and instances of levitation were reported. One of the levitators, an abbe named Bescherand from Montpellier, was so “forcibly lifted into the air” during his convulsions that even when witnesses tried to hold him down they could not succeed in keeping him from rising up off of the ground.19

Although we have all but forgotten about the Jansenist miracles today, they were far from ignored by the intelligentsia of the time. The niece of the mathematician and philosopher Pascal succeeded in having a severe ulcer in her eye vanish within hours as the result of a Jansenist miracle. When King Louis XV tried unsuccessfully to stop the convulsionaires by closing the cemetery of Saint-Medard, Voltaire quipped, “God was forbidden, by order of the King, to work any miracles there.” And in his Philosophical Essays the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote, “There surely never was so great a number of miracles ascribed to one person as those which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbe Paris. Many of the miracles were immediately proved upon the spot, before judges of unquestioned credit and distinction, in a learned age, and on the most eminent theatre that is now in the world.”

How are we to explain the miracles produced by the convulsionaires? Although Bohm is willing to consider the possibility of PK and other paranormal phenomena, he prefers not to speculate about specific events such as the supernormal abilities of the Jansenists. But once again, if we take the testimony of so many witnesses seriously, unless we are willing to concede that God favored the Jansenist Catholics over the Roman, PK seems the likely explanation. That some kind of psychic functioning was involved is strongly suggested by the appearance of other psychic abilities, such as clairvoyance, during the seizures. In addition, we have already looked at a number of examples where intense faith and hysteria have triggered the deeper forces of the mind, and these too were present in ample portions. In fact, instead of being produced by one individual, the psychokinetic effects may have been created by the combined fervor and belief of all those present, and this might account for the unusual vigor of the manifestations. This idea is not new. In the 1920s the great Harvard psychologist William McDougall also suggested that religious miracles might be the result of the collective psychic powers of large numbers of worshipers.

PK would explain many of the convulsionaire's seeming invulnerabilities. In the case of Jeanne Maulet it could be argued that she unconsciously used PK to block the effect of the hammer blows. If the convulsionaires were unconsciously using PK to take control of chains, timbers, and knives, and stop them in their tracks at the precise moment of impact, it would also explain why these objects left no marks or bruises. Similarly, when individuals tried to strangle the Jansenists, perhaps their hands were held in place by PK and although they thought they were squeezing flesh, they were really only flexing in the nothingness.

THE HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE

MICHAEL TALBOT

Apparitions of the Dead and Communication with Them

Direct experiences of encounters and communication with deceased persons do not occur only around the time when these people died or as part of the NDEs, but also at a later date, spontaneously or in the context of holotropic states induced by psychedelics, experiential psychotherapies, or meditation. Naturally, the data of this kind have to be evaluated particularly carefully and critically. The simple fact of a private experience of the deceased does not really amount to very much and can easily be dismissed as a wishful fantasy or hallucination. Some additional factors must be present as well before the experiences constitute interesting research material. It is also, of course, important to make a distinction between those apparitions that seem to satisfy some strong need of the percipient and others, where any motivation of this kind cannot be found. 

It is important to mention that some of the apparitions have certain characteristics that make them very interesting or even challenging for researchers. There are a number of cases reported that describe apparitions of persons unknown to the percipient, who are later identified through photographs and verbal descriptions. It also is not uncommon that such apparitions are witnessed collectively or by many different individuals over long periods of time, such as in the case of “haunted” houses and castles. 

In some instances, the apparitions can have distinct distinguishing bodily marks accrued around the time of death, which is unbeknownst to the percipient. Of particular interest are those cases where the deceased convey some specific and accurate new information that can be verified or is linked with an extraordinary synchronicity. I have myself observed in LSD therapy and in Holotropic Breathwork several amazing instances of the second kind. One example of such is an event that occurred during the LSD therapy of Richard, a young depressed patient who had made repeated suicide attempts. 

In one of his LSD sessions, Richard had a very unusual experience involving a strange and uncanny astral realm. This domain had an eerie luminescence and was filled with discarnate beings that were trying to communicate with him in a very urgent and demanding manner. He could not see or hear them; however, he sensed their almost tangible presence and was receiving telepathic messages from them. I wrote down one of these messages that was very specific and could be subjected to subsequent verification. It was a request for Richard to connect with a couple in the Moravian city of Kroměříž and let them know that their son Ladislav was doing all right and was well taken care of. 

The message included the couple’s name, street address, and telephone number; all of these details were unknown to me and the patient. This experience was extremely puzzling; it seemed to be an alien enclave in Richard’s experience, totally unrelated to his problems and the rest of his treatment. After some hesitation and with mixed feelings, I finally decided to do what certainly would have made me the target of my colleagues’ jokes had they found out. I went to the telephone, dialed the number in Kroměříž, and asked if I could speak with Ladislav. To my astonishment, the woman on the other side of the line started to cry. When she calmed down, she told me with a broken voice: “Our son is not with us anymore; he passed away. We lost him three weeks ago.” 

Another example involves a close friend and former colleague of mine, Walter N. Pahnke, who was a member of our psychedelic research team at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, Maryland. He had a deep interest in parapsychology, particularly in the problem of consciousness after death, and worked with many famous mediums and psychics, including his friend Eileen Garrett, president of the American Parapsychological Association. He was also the initiator of our LSD program for patients dying of cancer. 

In the summer of 1971, Walter went with his wife Eva and their children for a vacation in their cabin in Maine, situated right on the ocean. One day, he went scuba-diving before lunch, by himself, and did not return. A systematic and extensive search involving the Coast Guard and several famous psychics failed to find his body or any part of his diving gear. Under these circumstances, Eva found it very difficult to accept and integrate his death. Her last memory of Walter when he was leaving the cabin involved him full of energy and in perfect health. It was hard for her to believe that he was not part of her life anymore and she could not start a new chapter of her existence without a sense of closure for the preceding one. 

Being a psychologist herself, she qualified for an LSD training session for mental health professionals that was offered through a special program in our institute. She decided to have a psychedelic experience with the hope of getting some insight into this situation and asked me to be her sitter. In the second half of the session, she had a very powerful vision of Walter and carried on a long and meaningful dialogue with him. He gave her specific instructions concerning each of their three children and released her to start a new life of her own, unencumbered and unrestricted by a sense of commitment to his memory. It was a very profound and liberating experience. 

Just as Eva was questioning whether the entire episode was just a wishful fabrication of her own mind, Walter appeared once more for a brief period of time and asked Eva to return a book that he had borrowed from a friend of his. He then proceeded to give her the name of the friend, the room where the book was, the name of the book, the shelf, and the sequential order of the book on this shelf. Giving Eva this kind of specific confirmation of the authenticity of their communication was very much in Walter’s style. During his life, he had had extensive contact with psychics from different parts of the world and had been fascinated by the attempt of the famous magician Harry Houdini to prove the existence of the Beyond. Following the instructions, Eva was actually able to find and return the book, about the existence of which she had had no previous knowledge. 

One of the psychologists participating in our three-year professional training had witnessed a wide variety of his colleagues’ transpersonal experiences during our Holotropic Breathwork sessions, and had also had several of them himself. However, he continued to be very skeptical about the authenticity of these phenomena, constantly questioning whether or not they deserved any special attention. Then, after one of his Holotropic Breathwork sessions, he experienced an unusual synchronicity that convinced him that he might have been too skeptical and conservative in his approach to transpersonal experiences and ESP phenomena. 

Toward the end of his session, he had a vivid experience of encountering his grandmother, who had been dead for many years. He had been very close to her in his childhood and was deeply moved by the possibility that he might really be communicating with her again. In spite of a deep emotional involvement in the experience, he continued to maintain an attitude of professional skepticism about the encounter. He knew that he had had many real interactions with his grandmother while she was alive and that his mind could have easily fabricated an imaginary encounter using these old memories. 

However, this meeting with his dead grandmother was so emotionally profound and convincing that he simply could not dismiss it as a wishful fantasy. He decided to seek proof that the experience was real, not just in his imagination. He asked his grandmother for some form of confirmation and received the following message: “Go to aunt Anna and look for cut roses.” Still skeptical, he decided to visit his aunt Anna’s home on the following weekend and see what would happen. Upon his arrival, he found his aunt in the garden, surrounded by cut roses. He was astonished. The day of his visit just happened to be the one day of the year that his aunt had decided to do some radical pruning of her roses. 

Experiences of this kind are certainly far from being a definitive proof of the existence of astral realms and discarnate beings. However, these astonishing synchronicities clearly suggest that this fascinating area deserves the serious attention of consciousness researchers. Of special interest is the quasi-experimental evidence that is suggestive of the survival of consciousness after death that comes from the highly charged and controversial area of spiritistic seances and mental or trance mediumship, as I examined in Volume I. Although some of the professional mediums were occasionally caught cheating, a number of others—such as Mrs. Piper, Mrs. Leonard, and Mrs. Verrall—successfully passed credible research tests (Grosso 1994). 

An interesting innovation in this area is the procedure described in Raymond Moody’s book Reunions (Moody 1993). Using perceptual ambiguity involved in mirror-gazing, Moody induced in his subjects convincing visionary encounters with deceased loved ones. Some of the spiritistic reports considerably stretch the mind of an average Westerner, let alone a traditionally trained scientist. For example, the extreme form of spiritistic phenomena, the “physical mediumship,” includes, among others, telekinesis and materializations, upward levitation of objects and people, projection of objects through the air, the manifestation of ectoplasmic formations, and the appearance of writings or objects without explanation (“apports”). In the Brazilian spiritist movement, mediums perform psychic surgeries using their hands or knives, allegedly under the guidance of the spirits of deceased people. These surgeries do not require any anesthesia and the wounds close without sutures. Events of this kind have been repeatedly studied and filmed by Western researchers of the stature of Walter Pahnke, Stanley Krippner, and Andrija Puharich. A relatively recent development in the efforts to communicate with spirits of deceased people is an approach called instrumental transcommunication (ITC), which uses modern electronic technology for this purpose. 

This avenue of research began in 1959 when Scandinavian filmmaker Friedrich Jurgensen picked up human voices of allegedly dead persons on an audiotape while recording the sounds of passerine birds in a quiet forest. Inspired by this event, Latvian parapsychologist Konstantin Raudive conducted a systematic study of this phenomenon and recorded more than 100,000 multilingual paranormal voices allegedly communicating messages from the Beyond (Raudive 1971). 

More recently, a worldwide network of researchers, including Ernst Senkowski, George Meek, Mark Macy, Scott Rogo, Raymond Bayless, and others have been involved in a group effort to establish “interdimensional transcommunication” (ITC). They claim to have received many paranormal verbal communications and pictures from the deceased through electronic media, including tape recorders, telephones, fax machines, computers, and TV screens. Among the spirits communicating from the Beyond are supposedly some of the former researchers in this field, such as Jurgensen and Raudive (Senkowski 1994).

The Way of the Psychonaut: Encyclopedia for Inner Journeys Volume Two 

by Stanislav Grof, M.D., Ph.D.

When Science Becomes Scientism: Carl Sagan and His Demon-Haunted World

The challenging observations from consciousness research amassed in the second half of the twentieth century and the basic tenets of transpersonal psychology encountered incredulity and strong intellectual resistance in academic circles. Transpersonal psychology, as it was born in the late 1960s, was culturally sensitive and treated the ritual and spiritual traditions of ancient and native cultures with the respect they deserve in view of the findings of modern consciousness research. It also embraced and integrated a wide range of anomalous phenomena, paradigm-breaking observations that academic science has been unable to account for. However, although comprehensive and well substantiated in and of itself, the new field represented such a radical departure from academic thinking in professional circles that it could not be reconciled with either traditional psychology and psychiatry or with the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of Western science. 

As a result of this, transpersonal psychology was extremely vulnerable to accusations of being irrational, unscientific, and even “flaky,” particularly by scientists who were not aware of the vast body of observations and data on which the new movement was based. These critics also ignored the fact that many of the pioneers of this revolutionary movement had impressive academic credentials. These pioneers generated and embraced the transpersonal vision of the human psyche not because they were ignorant of the fundamental assumptions of traditional science, but because they found the old conceptual frameworks seriously inadequate in accounting for their experiences and observations. Much of the resistance came from representatives of the academic community, who saw the current scientific worldvew as an accurate and definitive description of reality and clung to it with stubborn determination, impervious to any evidence countering it. 

The nature and intensity of some of the mainstream scientists’ reaction to any form of spirituality, in general, and to transpersonal psychology, in particular, seems to mirror the fanaticism of religious fundamentalists. Their attitude lacks solid scientific grounding, ignores or distorts all existing evidence, and is impervious to facts of observation and logical arguments. Closer scrutiny reveals that what they present as an image of reality that has been scientifically proven beyond any reasonable doubt is a colossus on clay feet supported by a host of a priori metaphysical assumptions. 

One of the most salient examples of this category of scientists was Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University in New York City. An outstanding representative of his field, he achieved worldwide acclaim by his participation as experimenter in most of the unmanned planetary probe missions, by founding the project SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and creating the highly acclaimed TV series Cosmos. He also designed, jointly, with Frank Drake, the gold plaque with the message of Earthlings for extraterrestrial civilizations carried by Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system. Shortly before Sagan’s death, of myelodysplasia, his science fiction novel Contact inspired a widely acclaimed movie with the same name. 

However, instead of enjoying his professional success and reputation in the area of his expertise, Carl Sagan embarked for unknown reasons with unusual emotional charge and determination on a crusade against everything he considered irrational, unscientific, and occult. He assumed a highly authoritative position of an arbiter and judge of observations reported by a variety of experts from several other disciplines, including parapsychology, thanatology, psychedelic research, anthropology, and comparative religion. 

To accomplish his goal of sanitizing the culture from the pollution by occultism and superstition, Carl Sagan became one of the founding members of an organization called CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal), associated himself with the journal entitled The Skeptical Inquirer, and employed the services of magician James Randi to help him prove that all claims of the paranormal were fraudulent. The epitome of his efforts was his book of passionate philippics against the dangers of irrationality, The Demon-Haunted World (Sagan 1997). 

My first contact with Carl was through an enthusiastic letter I received from him shortly after the publication of my book Realms of the Human Unconscious (Grof 1975). In this book, I described that my patients undergoing LSD psychotherapy often experienced deep regression, in which they relived with intense emotions and physical feelings the memory of their biological birth. I was able to distinguish four experiential patterns that were associated with this process, reflecting the consecutive stages of childbirth, and referred to them as basic perinatal matrices (BPMs). 

BPM I is related to prenatal existence in an advanced stage of pregnancy before the onset of delivery. BPM II reflects the experience of claustrophobic terror and hopelessness experienced by the fetus during the stage of childbirth when the uterus is contracting, but the cervix is not yet open. BPM III is associated with the difficult passage through the birth canal that begins after the cervix is sufficiently dilated. And, finally, BPM IV reproduces the experience of the moment of birth and the immediately following period of reconnection with the mother. Full conscious reliving of birth is then experienced as psychospiritual death and rebirth. 

Carl was particularly fascinated by my description of the fourth perinatal matrix, which typically involves visions of brilliant light and of various archetypal figures appearing in this light. In his opinion, expressed in an article published in 1979 in the Atlantic Monthly magazine (Sagan 1979a), this observation rendered a mortal blow to the claims of the mystics, who often report visions of divine light and of celestial beings. He concluded that what mystics consider to be supernatural light and angelic beings is actually the infantile memory of emerging into the light of the operation room and seeing cloaked obstetricians and nurses. The misperception of this situation as numinous is thus a result of the immature eyesight and cognition of the newborn. 

Carl’s interpretation of perinatal visions taken from my book was in sharp conflict with my own description of this phenomenon. After having observed literally hundreds of experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth, I realized that the reliving of birth functions as a gateway to the Jungian collective unconscious and that the archetypal visions that accompany it are ontologically real and cannot be derived from our experiences of the material world. This is an issue of great theoretical relevance in view of Carl’s provocative statement about the nature of reality that opened Cosmos, his magnum opus: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be” (Sagan 1983). 

Carl later repeated his argument in his book Broca’s Brain (Sagan 1979b), in which he dedicated to this issue an entire chapter entitled “The Amniotic Universe.” He certainly had the right to draw his own conclusions from my observations. However, disregarding my own interpretation and hallowing me as a debunker of mysticism was another matter. In doing this, he also discounted the fact that the entire second half of Realms of the Human Unconscious, the book he was referring to, was dedicated to a detailed description of spiritual experiences with many clinical examples. The material in it was actually one of the sources of transpersonal psychology, a discipline seeking a synthesis of genuine spirituality and science. 

As transpersonal psychology, with its efforts to legitimize spirituality, continued to grow and gain more ground in the academe, it became a major irritation for Carl and the CSICOP group. Carl finally asked me, as a surviving member of the small group of professionals who had founded transpersonal psychology, to meet with him in a session of open confrontation and discuss theoretical issues related to this discipline. I accepted his invitation and met him in his hotel room in Boston. Other participants in this meeting included my wife, Christina, Carl’s wife, Ann Druyan, and Harvard psychiatrist and researcher John Mack, our mutual friend. 

Carl started the session by reminding me of my responsibility as a professional trained in medicine and psychology to be careful what information I release to the public because the words of educated people with academic titles are taken more seriously by lay audiences. He emphasized that it was essential for scientists to offer seasoned and unadulterated scientific truth to those who are unable to make their own independent judgment. He then began citing a series of instances in which people were deceived by various hoaxes, scams, and frauds. He brought up the case of the German horse named “smart Hans” (“der kluge Hans”), which, according to the claims of his owner, was able to perform mathematical computations; a fraud involving a figure excavated in Italy that allegedly was a petrified giant; and a few other instances. At this point, I interrupted Carl and told him I felt that what he was describing had no relevance for the subject we were supposed to discuss. 

“What do you think is relevant for our discussion?” he asked. 

“It is the problem of the ontological status of transpersonal experiences,” I answered, “such as experiential identification with other people and other life forms, veridical out-of-body experiences, visions of archetypal beings and realms, or ancestral, racial, karmic, and phylogenetic memories. Are they hallucinations and fantasies without any basis in reality or instances of authentic connection with dimensions of reality and sources of relevant information that are normally inaccessible for our consciousness?” 

“Give me examples!” he urged me, appearing puzzled and confused. 

I described several instances in which individuals in non-ordinary states of consciousness identified experientially with various aspects of the material world or experienced the historical and archetypal domains of the collective unconscious and were able to gain access to information that was clearly far beyond what they had acquired through the conventional channels in their present life time. Three of these examples involved experiential identification with animals (eagle, whale, and lion), two of them historical events (see the stories of Renata and Karl), and one the obscure archetypal vision of the Terrible Mother Goddess of the Malekulans in New Guinea (see the story of Otto). 

Listening to my stories, Carl regained his composure and assumed an authoritative teaching role. “Oh, this is what you are talking about? Well, that’s easy to explain; not a big mystery there,” he said. “American children watch television on average about six hours a day. They see a lot of various programs, including those that contain scientific information, such as Nova or the Discovery Channel. They forget much of it, but their brains, being the miraculous organs they are, record it all. In non-ordinary states of consciousness, then, this information is used to generate what appears to be new relevant information. But, as you know, there is no way we can access information that did not enter our brain through the senses. If such information emerges, they must have received it somewhere at some time during this life.” 

I felt frustrated. Carl was using here the old dictum of British empiricist philosophers that had become a popular tenet of monistic materialistic science: “Nihil est in intellectu quod non antea fuerit in sensu” (Nothing is in the intellect that prior to that was not in the sensory organs). If my subjects’ experiences contained some seemingly new information, they must have acquired it sometime, somewhere, somehow during this lifetime through sensory input. This should be clear to anybody who has studied natural sciences; how could any educated person see it differently? 

Feeling that we were facing a blind alley, I resorted to thanatology, a discipline studying death and dying. In the last few decades, researchers in this field had accumulated some fascinating observations concerning out-of-body experiences in near-death situations. Unlike many other transpersonal phenomena, these experiences are easily subjected to objective verification. Since this material had been widely publicized in best-selling books, television talk shows, and even a number of Hollywood movies, I expected that it would not be difficult to make my point. 

I referred to a number of thanatological studies that had independently con firmed that during out-of-body experiences in near-death situations, disembodied consciousness is capable of perceiving the immediate environment, as well as various remote locations, without the mediation of senses. In a fascinating study described in Ken Ring’s book entitled Mindsight (Ring and Cooper 1999), the capacity of disembodied consciousness to perceive the environment appeared even in people who had been congenitally blind for organic reasons. They were not only able to see for the first time in their lives, but what they saw could be consensually validated. In Ken’s terminology, they had “veridical out-of-body experiences.”

In this context, I also quoted an example from the book Recollections of Death, written by Michael Sabom, a cardiosurgeon who had studied near-death experiences of his patients (Sabom 1982). I told Carl that one of Michael Sabom’s patients was able to describe in detail the procedure of his resuscitation following cardiac arrest during an operation. He reported that his disembodied consciousness first watched the procedure from a place near the ceiling. Later, it became interested in the procedure and floated down to a position where it could observe from close up the gauges on the equipment. During the interview following successful resuscitation, the patient was able to reconstruct to Michael Sabom’s surprise the entire procedure, including the movements of the little hands on the measuring devices in correlation with the interventions of the surgical team. 

Having described this case to Carl, I asked him how he would explain this event in the context of the worldview to which he subscribed. He paused for a while, and then he said assertively: “This, of course, did not happen!” 

I shook my head incredulously, not believing what I just had heard. “What do you mean, this did not happen? Cardiosurgeon Michael Sabom reported this in his book based on the research he had conducted with his patients. What is your explanation for what I just have described to you? What do you think all this is about?” I asked. This time the pause was even longer; Carl was clearly thinking very hard, struggling to find the answer. “I’ll tell you,” he finally broke the long silence. “There are many cardiosurgeons in the world. Nobody would have known the guy. So he made up a wild story to attract attention to himself. It’s a PR trick!” 

I was shocked. Carl’s last words seriously undermined the respect I had had for him. I realized that his worldview was not scientific, but scientistic. It had the form of an unshatterable dogma that was impervious to evidence. It was also clear to me that our discussion had reached an insurmountable impasse. I saw that Carl was willing to question the integrity and sanity of his scientific colleagues before considering that his belief system might require revision or modification to fit the new data. He was so convinced that he knew what the universe was like and what could not happen in it that he did not feel the slightest inclination to examine the challenging data. 

My experience with Carl’s determination to preserve his scientific beliefs was later further confirmed by a scandal involving CSICOP and the so called “Mars effect.” In their studies, originally designed to debunk astrology, French statisticians Michel and Louise Gauquelin demonstrated that in the birth chart of prominent athletes Mars appeared with statistically significant frequency in the ascendent or zenith (Gauquelin 1973). To their surprise, their study thus supported rather than refuted astrological prediction. The statistical probability that this could have happened by chance was one in five million. In later years, the Gauquelins tested astrological predictions involving five planets and eleven professions and found significant results; their data were later replicated independently by other researchers. 

After the results of the Gauquelin study had been published, three CSI COP members, Paul Kurtz, George Abell, and Marvin Zelen, incensed by this report, got involved in the controversy, first by a critical response and later by their own study. After a number of heated exchanges, rather than admitting that they essentially confirmed the Gauquelin results, they resorted to conscious falsification of their own data. This fraud was exposed in an article entitled “Starbaby” by Dennis Rawlins, cofounder of CSICOP and a member of its ruling executive council (Rawlins 1981). When Rawlins realized that the organization was committed to perpetuating its ideological position and not to discovering the truth, he concluded that honesty was more important than an indiscriminate witch-hunt against the paranormal. 

In 1984, when I was invited to lecture at the World Congress of Astrology in Luzern about my research related to the psychological importance of the trauma of birth and about the Basic Perinatal Matrices, the program actually featured Michel Gauquelin as one of the presenters. It also included another convert to astrology, Hans Eysenck, the famous fierce critic of Freudian psychoanalysis.

When the Impossible Happens 

Adventures in Non-Ordinary Realities

Stanislav Grof M.D., Ph.D.