Does humanity really divide into the sheep and the goats? I think so. I don’t think the concept controversial. What I have in mind here is the difference between believers and scoffers. There is a phenomenon in parapsychology called the Sheep-Goat Effect. Those inclined to believe in the psychic experience it more and score in tests above average; goats score below average. The phenomenon is well proved.
I don’t doubt the phenomenon; what interests me more is how to explain it. The classification reminds me of William James’ distinctions between the healthy- and the sick-minded, meaning roughly the same thing as “goat” and “sheep” respectively—the well-adapted and the sickly sensitive. The sickly-minded are more likely to be intensely religious; the classification appears in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. If we define reality as simply the world of stimulus and response, being adapted to it is much favored in our secular age. In religious times, being in harmony with God matters more. Realistic adaptation is the hall-mark of Freud’s mental health, the core of Darwinism, neo and otherwise. To be sure, if you can’t breathe, there is little else to talk—or think—about. Adaptation to the world is a good thing, as Martha Stewart might say. And healthy adaptation makes perfect sense if our criterion of value is physical survival for as long as possible. This model might be “collectivized” to make it a little more descriptive of what we really see. What we see is people willing to sacrifice themselves for the collective good, not least in the profession of arms. Modernity sees genetic engineering behind this behavior. We’re chemically programmed to be altruistic; sociobiology has spoken. Darwinism can explain virtually anything by simply invoking the invisible hand of Survival.
But here I demur. Survival needs justification. Translated into plain English Darwinism says that matter in one form strives to maintain itself by persisting and reproduction. The doctrine doesn’t explain why this is so. If its proponents claim merely to be descriptive, they’re not descriptive enough. Why would something that can’t be destroyed in the first place strive so hard to maintain extremely complex forms of itself? Survival as such lacks meaning. The word demands a qualifier, as in survival for what? A roses is a rose is a rose? Ultimately this means that the goats, so-called, adhere to an excessively primitive form of belief. What you see is what you get, they say. They feel no need to explain the strangeness of the world. Not feeling any need, they don’t. All right.
But this gives me a vector of approach. Indeed in parapsychology (if not in religious thought) the sheep and goats simply behave in a certain way; parapsychology does not say that sheep will to believe, scoffers will to doubt. People simply are. Some people are open to psychic reality; others are not. My personal experience confirms this. Interest can’t be compelled. There are those, both sheep and goats, who actively promote their point of view, eager to persuade those who don’t share it: the missionaries of faith and of atheism. I consider these people busybodies, well-meaning but often a pain.
Here is a reasonable hypothesis. Real differences in degree of perception mark different individuals. In effect that seems self-evident. If we wish to give the life-phenomenon some reasonable meaning, we would imagine it is a process of development. Those who sense, feel, perceive, intuit (however vaguely) another dimensionality would, of course, appear from a certain perspective to be sickly, in the Jamesian sense. They are looking out of this world rather than being busy about its laundry and dry-cleaning. From the perspective of the process itself, however, they may be healthier in that they are beginning to adapt to their future environment.
I often think of this as dense and open. I picture openness as having, as it were, a hole at the top of my head by means of which I can feel the airs of another reality moving. I don’t see sheep as having and goats as lacking merit. I also see the difference but as only one of degree. Even the densest have some inkling of the zone beyond the border. Nor does sensitivity equal intelligence. Some of the most sensitive people are very stupid, some of the densest very bright. Matters of merit exist on yet another level. The issue is to make the most of the state in which we are. But this view goes a long ways to explaining why it is that humanity divides into camps and why it is so difficult to have a single great system of belief.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Friday, February 20, 2009
Super-Psi?
The notion that souls depart and live on in another world comes to every child sooner or later as a cultural transmission. It may be negatively slanted (“Ignorant people believe…”) or positively; the fact remains that people don’t discover this point of view; they inherit it. Any kind of investigation thereafter is thus a second-order activity. Some people in every generation get engaged in the debate; they seriously ask themselves if the tales they’ve heard are true or false; if individuals go much beyond that, they’re part of a kind of enterprise.
Assuming my own experience is average, most people learn about these things from figures of authority (grandmothers, impressive aunts, etc.). Outer circles of adults confirm what they have heard. There is broad consensus on the matter. It’s part of the culture. Thus it is disbelief in the cultural transmission that requires initiative, not acceptance. But that initiative is also aided by processes of enlightenment. In our day “achieving” disbelief is a part of growing up; we discover that it’s not the storks that bring the babies—and that the dead stay in the grave. Human personalities, however, are interestingly layered. The cynical, bright, adult layer floats on top of an archaic world of childhood feeling, and in certain circumstances people can descend again and, from within a deeper layer, they can actually believe what they deny on their brittle surface— namely that mother, dad, or the child is still alive up there, somewhere, in heaven. We are more complex than we seem.
Two Approaches. But let’s look at the more conscious processes of resolving the debate. Two alternatives are open; they are both used in a mixed form. One is a process of reasoning from patterns of reality; that’s the philosophical approach. The other is based on experiencing or evaluating empirical evidence. In the West that evidence is usually associated with communications with the dead, with apparitions and, since the 1970s anyway, with near death experience reports. Reincarnation studies, although pioneered by Ian Stevenson from the West, are predominantly based on reports of experiences provided by people in the eastern world.
I will explore the philosophical approach some other time, but note here that that approach produces as strong an argument as any; indeed, in my opinion, it is the most persuasive. Those who think this way, however, can point to the best empirical evidence as confirmation.
What Constitutes Evidence? How do we know that NDE reports are true, that mediums are really communication with someone dead, or that apparitions are the dead? Interestingly enough, mere reports of having been to heaven, claims by mediums that Grandpa sends his love, or statements, however amazed, that Joe appeared to me and held out his arms as if to embrace me—none of this is hard evidence. Hallucination, self-deception, or fraud may be the explanation. The only thing that constitutes real evidence is some kind of information from the dead (or near-dead) to the living of a certain kind. But of what kind? The information must contain something only the personality on the other side could possibly know or could only obtain over there.
I stress the centrality of information on purpose. The very fact that such information is necessary to establish the evidentiary value of the seeming contact has led to a positivistic interpretation of such phenomena. Before we get to that, some examples now to make these matters more concrete.
Super-Psi. Indeed such cases, and such evidence, are powerfully indicative of the truth of survival claims. It strikes me as rather interesting that one element of humanity simply can’t accept such evidence. Thus from within the very center of paranormal studies has arisen a new explanation to discount the evidence; that’s super-psi. This doctrine emerged in the twentieth century as a counter to the survival hypothesis; in effect it materializes the spiritual.
To put the matter as simply as possible, the advocates of super-psi explain all paranormal phenomena, not least cases indicative of survival, by means of telepathy and other similar so-called psychic powers. These are considered to be universally present in humanity but overlaid by sensory information. Super-psi would explain each of the three cases above. The teenager did not see Aunt Lizzy in heaven but, instead, picked up the fact that she had died telepathically from other members of her family and had then woven that fact into a fantasy while in a semi-conscious state; the entire near-death experience was nothing but a fantasy. In the second case, the medium managed to pick up information about the leather-bound antiques Jean had sold, her misgivings about the sale, and the value of those books to her husband, by telepathic means from Jean herself. No communication with the dead needs to be assumed here. In the third case, Margaret’s vision of her husband was simply her own telepathic reception of his final agonies. Super-psi, therefore, is able to explain it all using what its proponents envision as ordinary but usually hidden human power. No heaven, no beyond—and death retains its sting.
Super-psi proponents can and do make claims for psi far more fantastical than any survival hypothesis. The very fact that such an explanation could emerge and get some traction at all, especially in a field traditionally comprehensive in its approach, suggests that in the case of survival, as in every other, the empirical approach must be judiciously combined with a philosophical inquiry to produce the total picture.
Assuming my own experience is average, most people learn about these things from figures of authority (grandmothers, impressive aunts, etc.). Outer circles of adults confirm what they have heard. There is broad consensus on the matter. It’s part of the culture. Thus it is disbelief in the cultural transmission that requires initiative, not acceptance. But that initiative is also aided by processes of enlightenment. In our day “achieving” disbelief is a part of growing up; we discover that it’s not the storks that bring the babies—and that the dead stay in the grave. Human personalities, however, are interestingly layered. The cynical, bright, adult layer floats on top of an archaic world of childhood feeling, and in certain circumstances people can descend again and, from within a deeper layer, they can actually believe what they deny on their brittle surface— namely that mother, dad, or the child is still alive up there, somewhere, in heaven. We are more complex than we seem.
Two Approaches. But let’s look at the more conscious processes of resolving the debate. Two alternatives are open; they are both used in a mixed form. One is a process of reasoning from patterns of reality; that’s the philosophical approach. The other is based on experiencing or evaluating empirical evidence. In the West that evidence is usually associated with communications with the dead, with apparitions and, since the 1970s anyway, with near death experience reports. Reincarnation studies, although pioneered by Ian Stevenson from the West, are predominantly based on reports of experiences provided by people in the eastern world.
I will explore the philosophical approach some other time, but note here that that approach produces as strong an argument as any; indeed, in my opinion, it is the most persuasive. Those who think this way, however, can point to the best empirical evidence as confirmation.
What Constitutes Evidence? How do we know that NDE reports are true, that mediums are really communication with someone dead, or that apparitions are the dead? Interestingly enough, mere reports of having been to heaven, claims by mediums that Grandpa sends his love, or statements, however amazed, that Joe appeared to me and held out his arms as if to embrace me—none of this is hard evidence. Hallucination, self-deception, or fraud may be the explanation. The only thing that constitutes real evidence is some kind of information from the dead (or near-dead) to the living of a certain kind. But of what kind? The information must contain something only the personality on the other side could possibly know or could only obtain over there.
I stress the centrality of information on purpose. The very fact that such information is necessary to establish the evidentiary value of the seeming contact has led to a positivistic interpretation of such phenomena. Before we get to that, some examples now to make these matters more concrete.
- A person, a teenager, say, reports an NDE. As part of that account, she claims to have seen Aunt Elizabeth in heaven. Aunt Lizzy was part of a group, including grandma and grandpa, receiving the teenager up there. Now it so happens that the teenager’s family had just recently heard of Aunt Lizzy’s death in California. The death took place some time after the teenager was hospitalized in a severe accident. The teenager didn’t and couldn’t have known that Aunt Lizzy had passed on. The teenager’s knowledge, therefore, is taken as hard evidence of another world.
- In a séance a woman, Jean, learns, listening to a medium, that her late husband is very much upset that Jean sold what the medium calls the “leather bindings” which had been Jean’s husband’s pride and joy. Jean had met the medium for the first time this very evening. Jean is bowled over by this information. Her husband had owned a very valuable set of old leather-bound books, antiques that he had purchased as a young man. And, indeed, Jean had recently sold them to an antiquarian at a very decent price with lots of second thoughts.
- A woman, Margaret, awakens at night. In a dim light, but unmistakably visible, she sees the figure of her husband standing there in combat uniform. His left hand is extended toward her in a gesture of greeting. The whole of her husbands left side is covered in blood; he appears to be standing on one leg. Weeks later she learns that her husband died after emergency amputation of his left arm and leg necessitated by the explosion of an improvised explosive device. The date of his death coincides with the date of her vision.
In each of these illustrative cases—they are not actual cases although just such cases are common—an element of information is present apparently proving that only a paranormal or spiritual faculty could have conveyed the information from sender to recipient.
To put the matter as simply as possible, the advocates of super-psi explain all paranormal phenomena, not least cases indicative of survival, by means of telepathy and other similar so-called psychic powers. These are considered to be universally present in humanity but overlaid by sensory information. Super-psi would explain each of the three cases above. The teenager did not see Aunt Lizzy in heaven but, instead, picked up the fact that she had died telepathically from other members of her family and had then woven that fact into a fantasy while in a semi-conscious state; the entire near-death experience was nothing but a fantasy. In the second case, the medium managed to pick up information about the leather-bound antiques Jean had sold, her misgivings about the sale, and the value of those books to her husband, by telepathic means from Jean herself. No communication with the dead needs to be assumed here. In the third case, Margaret’s vision of her husband was simply her own telepathic reception of his final agonies. Super-psi, therefore, is able to explain it all using what its proponents envision as ordinary but usually hidden human power. No heaven, no beyond—and death retains its sting.
Super-psi proponents can and do make claims for psi far more fantastical than any survival hypothesis. The very fact that such an explanation could emerge and get some traction at all, especially in a field traditionally comprehensive in its approach, suggests that in the case of survival, as in every other, the empirical approach must be judiciously combined with a philosophical inquiry to produce the total picture.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Serious Literature
Last September I chanced across Carl B. Becker's Paranormal Experience and Survival of Death (SUNY, 1993). It's not only a superb survey of the state of knowledge and of speculation pro and con in recent times but also an original assessment of this field in context of the philosophy of science and resistance to the paranormal within the bastions of science. The approach is refreshingly mature.
There is much more serious literature on this subject than I had anticipated, but it's relatively inaccessible to the layman. Most of us don't have access to first-class academic libraries where the expensive journal literature is readily available. Adult-style books are there, of course, but very expensive. The popular literature is not worth pursuit. It exists to serve a very different mentality.
Becker's book is just the sort of serious orientation a very small group of people need—those who look at these matters from a rational point of view—not with the object of debunking what they view as scientific heresy but, rather, trying to understand what is actually known. The book, at around $29 for a new copy from Amazon, is a treasure.
Becker carefully delineates subjects he omits. Among these are déjà-vu, precognition, mediums and spiritualism, hallucinations, ghosts and haunting, and phantom limbs. I regret the omission of precognition; it's probably the strangest of paranormal phenomena. In my view the déjà-vu experiences are closely linked to precognition, in the sense that they are probably spontaneously surfacing memories of forgotten precognitive dreams. At the same time I understand fully why Becker leaves the subject to the side: the linkage to survival of death isn't very strong.
Becker concentrates on reincarnation, apparitions, out-of-body and near-death-experiences (OBEs and NDEs). In treating of NDEs he omits discussion of the so-called life review, in part because only a minority of experiencers report it, and "within this narrow segment of people who experience a life-review, there is little agreement about its nature."
The book features a bibliography of 538 items, including books and journal articles across a wide spectrum, from ancient to modern, including some opposing views. All of the big names are present (Moody, Rhine, Ring, Ian Stevenson, Tart, and others — also old friends of mine like Ouspensky and Toynbee and, surprisingly, Castaneda). Anyone searching for serious literature will find a plentitude of starting points here.
There is much more serious literature on this subject than I had anticipated, but it's relatively inaccessible to the layman. Most of us don't have access to first-class academic libraries where the expensive journal literature is readily available. Adult-style books are there, of course, but very expensive. The popular literature is not worth pursuit. It exists to serve a very different mentality.
Becker's book is just the sort of serious orientation a very small group of people need—those who look at these matters from a rational point of view—not with the object of debunking what they view as scientific heresy but, rather, trying to understand what is actually known. The book, at around $29 for a new copy from Amazon, is a treasure.
Becker carefully delineates subjects he omits. Among these are déjà-vu, precognition, mediums and spiritualism, hallucinations, ghosts and haunting, and phantom limbs. I regret the omission of precognition; it's probably the strangest of paranormal phenomena. In my view the déjà-vu experiences are closely linked to precognition, in the sense that they are probably spontaneously surfacing memories of forgotten precognitive dreams. At the same time I understand fully why Becker leaves the subject to the side: the linkage to survival of death isn't very strong.
Becker concentrates on reincarnation, apparitions, out-of-body and near-death-experiences (OBEs and NDEs). In treating of NDEs he omits discussion of the so-called life review, in part because only a minority of experiencers report it, and "within this narrow segment of people who experience a life-review, there is little agreement about its nature."
The book features a bibliography of 538 items, including books and journal articles across a wide spectrum, from ancient to modern, including some opposing views. All of the big names are present (Moody, Rhine, Ring, Ian Stevenson, Tart, and others — also old friends of mine like Ouspensky and Toynbee and, surprisingly, Castaneda). Anyone searching for serious literature will find a plentitude of starting points here.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Gauguin’s Questions
Paul Gauguin (1848-1931), the French impressionist painter, once entitled one of his large Tahitian paintings: "Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going?" Back when I first saw a print in the 1960s—I was in the Army then, in Europe—his questions struck me sharply because they are, after all, the questions we all sometimes ask. I'd been asking the same questions ever since my consciousness reached a certain point in childhood. Yes, I was that sort of child.
Formulating my own answers has therefore been a lifelong enterprise. Humanity's answers are encased in religious doctrines, philosophy, and science. Now, of course, I have a certain kind of temperament. Mine inclined to draw me into hopeless quests. I don't view the answers on offer as commodities—choose this one, choose that. I'm inclined to go into things on my own—boldly to go where (alas!) all sorts of people have gone before. Just because.
I was raised a Catholic and managed to become an atheist by age 14 or so. That lasted until I was about 19 or thereabouts. At that point my perspectives expanded. It had dawned on me that modern theories offered no nutrition. They lack content. By content I mean meaning. That word itself is a big subject. What I have in mind here is ultimate meaning rather than the "stands for" sort of thing. Modernity, derived from a narrow scientific view of reality, ultimately offers none. All is matter. Matter may have emergent properties, as the happy phrasing has it, meaning that it can bubble into life. It may be viewed as ordinary stuff or as electromagnetic radiation, energy. In any case the story may be told in a sentence. Life is matter, matter chemistry, chemistry is elements, elements are built of sub-atomic particles, and these, examined further, dissolve into mysterious probability waves that, under certain circumstances, may behave like particles. And the meaning is…? Nothing there. No content.
Religious beliefs are filled with meanings. My reconciliation to the phenomenon of religion came in my early adulthood when I realized the difference between religion as a creative intuition and religion as a doctrine, thus as an authoritarian ideology. In my own lexicon "myth" has a positive connotation. I think of myths as carriers of truth accessible to the human intuition. The difference between a great work of art—say Dante's Divine Comedy—and a great myth is one merely of degree. And in that sense I came not only to accept humanity's religious universes but greatly to value them. At the same time I continued to distance myself from religion as institutional regimentation. That sort of thing—the institutionalization and reification of great poetic or mystical insight—I consider a deterioration, decadence, and ossification of something once alive. There is a Sufi saying that "the channel doesn't drink." Religious institutions may carry a living message without actually embodying it. The living stream I value, not the structure of commands. Morality arises from within, cannot be imposed from without. When it is, it is but conditioning.
The real truth of things and spirits interests me above all. Thus I value science because it has a truth about reality at some level—but by no means all the truth. There are ranges of reality that fall within the purview of science but are excluded from it because they're on the strange border between matter and something else. That area interests me a great deal as indicative of something beyond. So do phenomena that seem to arise in the Beyond and sweep into our realm from time to time mysteriously. The least of these phenomena, to give an example, are meaningful coincidences. At the more energetic end are mystical experiences and vast phenomena like the rise of new religious visions that, for millennia, sometimes, shape our very culture.
This much will serve as sketching the outlines of my interests.
Formulating my own answers has therefore been a lifelong enterprise. Humanity's answers are encased in religious doctrines, philosophy, and science. Now, of course, I have a certain kind of temperament. Mine inclined to draw me into hopeless quests. I don't view the answers on offer as commodities—choose this one, choose that. I'm inclined to go into things on my own—boldly to go where (alas!) all sorts of people have gone before. Just because.
I was raised a Catholic and managed to become an atheist by age 14 or so. That lasted until I was about 19 or thereabouts. At that point my perspectives expanded. It had dawned on me that modern theories offered no nutrition. They lack content. By content I mean meaning. That word itself is a big subject. What I have in mind here is ultimate meaning rather than the "stands for" sort of thing. Modernity, derived from a narrow scientific view of reality, ultimately offers none. All is matter. Matter may have emergent properties, as the happy phrasing has it, meaning that it can bubble into life. It may be viewed as ordinary stuff or as electromagnetic radiation, energy. In any case the story may be told in a sentence. Life is matter, matter chemistry, chemistry is elements, elements are built of sub-atomic particles, and these, examined further, dissolve into mysterious probability waves that, under certain circumstances, may behave like particles. And the meaning is…? Nothing there. No content.
Religious beliefs are filled with meanings. My reconciliation to the phenomenon of religion came in my early adulthood when I realized the difference between religion as a creative intuition and religion as a doctrine, thus as an authoritarian ideology. In my own lexicon "myth" has a positive connotation. I think of myths as carriers of truth accessible to the human intuition. The difference between a great work of art—say Dante's Divine Comedy—and a great myth is one merely of degree. And in that sense I came not only to accept humanity's religious universes but greatly to value them. At the same time I continued to distance myself from religion as institutional regimentation. That sort of thing—the institutionalization and reification of great poetic or mystical insight—I consider a deterioration, decadence, and ossification of something once alive. There is a Sufi saying that "the channel doesn't drink." Religious institutions may carry a living message without actually embodying it. The living stream I value, not the structure of commands. Morality arises from within, cannot be imposed from without. When it is, it is but conditioning.
The real truth of things and spirits interests me above all. Thus I value science because it has a truth about reality at some level—but by no means all the truth. There are ranges of reality that fall within the purview of science but are excluded from it because they're on the strange border between matter and something else. That area interests me a great deal as indicative of something beyond. So do phenomena that seem to arise in the Beyond and sweep into our realm from time to time mysteriously. The least of these phenomena, to give an example, are meaningful coincidences. At the more energetic end are mystical experiences and vast phenomena like the rise of new religious visions that, for millennia, sometimes, shape our very culture.
This much will serve as sketching the outlines of my interests.
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