Experience . . . Statistics

Personal experience, by and large, cannot be contradicted by the person who has it. You lived it and therefore you know that it is true. I added the phrase “by and large” because I’ve encountered reports, here and there, of a handful of people who had paranormal experiences but, being ideologically convinced that such things can’t be true (and never mind the experience), have managed to explain them away. All paranormal research begins with personal reports, of course. Even at the very beginning of such research, most notably in 1882 with  the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England, attempts were made to exract salient elements of such experiences and then to examine them statistically. Thus in this field—which aspired to be viewed as science—virtually all surveys feature statistical analyses showing that results obtained varied from results obtainable by chance.

The first notable survey of this kind, on thought-transference, was called Phantasms of the Living. By then, already Frederic W.H. Myers, one of SPR’s founders, had renamed thought-transference “telepathy.” The authors of the book were Edmund Gurney and Myers, both founders of SPR, and Frank Podmore, associated with the Fabian Society. The book is strangely named. It should’ve been called Thought-Transference or Telepathy, but telepathy was then imagined to operate like a communications system, e.g., telegraphy, with a sender (agent) interacting with a receiver (percipient). Electromagnetism had been discovered already (in 1973), but the concept of a field had not yet wandered into areas like psychology. In Gurney et al’s conceptualization, the message itself was an apparition, image, or other unreal (read immaterial) something—hence, from Greek, a phantasm.

In this work, which also features a brief statistical analysis of the results of card-guessing experiments, the bulk of the evidentiary presentation consists of longish anecdotes collected as letters; the first tells the story; others confirm its legitimacy. The authors classify these cases by type but do not apply statistics to the results. Thus we have a spectrum present here: personal experience is one pole, statistics at the other; the middle is a dense survey of anecdotes.

I’ve read multiple modern works of this type. They usually feature the briefest of extracts from anecdotes and masses of statistics. Reading Phantasms it occurred to me that the book makes the best case for the phenomenon. It relies on the reader’s patience to absorb what ultimately becomes a somewhat tedious mass of cases. In that slow digestion, not on the bare fact (this woman knew that her sister had just died 300 miles away at exactly 10 to 9 pm) but endless other details showing the life situation of the “agent” and of the “percipient” are rubbed in, you might say—along with pages and pages of cautionary notes on the believability of the claims made. The statistical sense slowly grows as this reading progresses. Thus one obtains the nearest thing to a “collective experience”; the endlessly repeated details make it ever more real.

I came to feel more and more, while reading, that a telegraphic one-to-one model does not accurately characterize the underlying phenomena. We seem to be dealing with an invisible linkage between people known to one another. A very few actually experience this linkage in certain rare case: when the agent is in deep trouble (drowning, say) and the percipient is relaxed (going to bed, reading, even asleep). The number of such cases—and the ordinary characteristics of agents and percipients—forces the conclusion that all of us are potentially capable of feeling this link. But the vast noise of ordinary waking thought blocks it most of the time. Rupert Sheldrake once wrote a book entitled Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Phantasms could have been entitled People Who Know When Their Loved Ones Are Dying. The preponderance of cases are of this kind.

All those tables of statistics are mildly interesting in other works, but nothing like the feeling of overwhelm one experiences reading the cases in Phantoms. Real life is captured by statistics. But when I go shopping, I almost never think about the GDP.

On Fields and Energy

Throughout time people have used concepts drawn from what these days is called science and have then applied to the spiritual ranges of experience (or vice versa). Our time is no different from others except in the flavor of the thing. The “spiritual” is below the salt these days, disparaged, and held to be naïve and superstitious. And use of such concepts as “field” and “energy,” consequently, are used by writers on the spiritual or the psychic not because they actually communicate anything tangible or graspable—but because these words enjoy a kind of authority, the authority of Science writ large. The question arises. Is it legitimate to borrow scientific terms to describe psychic experiences? Let’s take a look.

My Dictionary of Physics defines “field” as “A region under the influence of some physical agency.” Interesting definition, when you think about it: a field is a chunk of space. A football field is therefore aptly named; it’s a piece of ground under the influence of football. But the word is actually used in another way when people write it. They use it to mean electric, magnetic, or gravitational force. Its use in New Age or “metaphysical” parlance, therefore, is simply an assertion that some kind of psychic force exists of such a nature that its influence extends over space. Telepathy or remote viewing are thus legitimately described as field phenomena in that some force conveys information between points not capable of explanation using the medium of light, sound, electrical transmission, or chemical signaling.

Let me next turn to the concept of “energy.” Here is the dictionary definition. It is “the quantity that is the measure of the capacity of a body or a system for doing work.” Work (W) turns out to be any kind of force that causes change in something else. By definition, when body A exerts force on body B, A loses W and B gains what A loses.

What I find fascinating here is that the terminology of science is pure abstraction; it is conceptual. Space may be huge (earth moon enclosure) or small (the region my little magnet affects). Force or work may be of all kinds of different kinds—my lifting of a heavy grocery sack or lightning striking a tree. These are mental constructs of generic applicability—but narrowly applied to three known physical forces by science when a field is mentioned. But they can be legitimately used anywhere else as well—wherever we perceive action, work or force exerted over any kind of space. The chief difference in using such terminology in physical science and in so-called metaphysical studies lies in the instrument used.

In studying psychic experiences, the only suitable instruments are minds. And there’s the rub. Their powers of perception are enormous, but their chief drawback is their singularity. We cannot check an individual mind from within. We cannot precisely confirm what it is perceiving. The individual may lie. The individual may misinterpret what he or she experiences. Objective knowledge is therefore very difficult to obtain. Minds are fantastic instruments but very difficult to calibrate precisely.

This difficulty—of supervision, of confirmation—has some odd side-effects. It causes us to limit the application of science to what we call the material level. But the matter-mind duality, as usually applied, may be a fiction. One way to put this may be by saying that we’re incapable of detecting mind in matter or matter in mind—and in both directions because our instruments are too coarse. What I’ve seen of reality—the patterns of things in general—persuade me that this is so. We’re drawing artificial lines based on our ability—or lack thereof—to produce hard evidence, capable of confirmation by third parties, for perhaps the most important range of reality we experience, namely the psychic. But there is really nothing wrong with using concepts like field or energy—much in the same way as science uses these for magnetic, electrical, and gravitational forces—for other forces that we can observe. What is wrong in “metaphysical” discussions is the sloppy and casual use of such concepts—or the attempt to snatch a certain phony legitimacy for our claims by appealing to authority. Scientists no more understand what an electromagnetic field is than I understand what a soul is. But we are both attempting to grasp the operation of invisible forces by some of the phenomena that they leave behind.

What Does "Higher Power" Mean?

One of the more interesting books around—especially for people who read such blogs as this one—is Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. The book is by Rupert Sheldrake and is subtitled “And Other Unexplained Powers of Animals.” The amazon.com link to the paperback is here. I read the book in fascination. I consider Sheldrake to be one of our time’s most original thinkers about biology. He is also a creative experimenter and a genuine scientist. In certain narrow circles of scientific orthodoxy, to be sure, he is a heretic. But never mind them. What the book demonstrates is that dogs as well as other animals appear to have what for them—for us too, for that matter—are “higher powers.” Telepathic abilities are classed as paranormal at least. Animals also evidently have powers of orientation in the wild inexplicable by ordinary sensory capacities. They seem to have a kind of sight that, traditionally, we call “second sight.” Yes, they’re at home in border zones much as some people are. And, as with us as well, the talent isn’t uniformly present. Nor are these capacities limited to mammals; birds display such powers too.

I start here with animals to make a point. We have a reflexive way of assuming that higher powers, when they manifest, must come directly from God—and if not from God then still from some higher, conscious entity. I’ve pondered this matter for quite a long time and have another take on the matter. But let’s begin with some sorting.

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By “higher powers” I mean phenomena like miraculous healing, ecstatic states, and prophetic visions. In these cases God does the healing, God manifests in the ecstatic states (or the mystic experiences union with God), and God sends the prophetic vision. To be sure, in all of these instances, the phenomenon itself transcends ordinary experience; it is therefore logical enough to use a word that signifies the Transcendent writ large as its cause. But when people speak of God this way, they have something more concrete in mind. They imagine an Agency, distinct and separate, acting deliberately in this specific case whereas, in all other cases, God acts in a more nebulous and indirect way. This must be what people mean. If God sends me a prophetic message but lets you read tea leaves, the only way to understand the distinction is that God intervenes in reality deliberately in some but not in other cases.

People don’t usually invoke divine action to explain telepathy. It is a paranormal power but mild in effect and common enough to be assigned to a lower agency, say to a “talent” or to a “gift.” But notice that even here, using the word “gift” suggests a divine dispensation given to some, not to others. By contrast, people rarely assign a run of bad luck to God. But why not? If in one case God rewards us for being good, in others he might punish us for our careless acts of stupidity. Finally, when in legalese we speak of an “act of God,” what we mean then is simply “accident”; the lawyers don’t intend to suggest that floods, lightning strikes, or tornadoes are literally acts of God.

I think I’ve outlined the issues sufficiently here to show that referring strange, unusual phenomena to God serves no rational or meaningfully explanatory purpose. I strongly lean toward the view that God cannot be pulled down to our level and assigned roles in our ordinary experience. Technically this is known as negative theology: man should not presume. Furthermore, the use of God as a mechanism of explanation amounts to little more than saying, “It happened because it happened.”

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Let’s look at these phenomena from another perspective. Let’s look at miraculous healings. Healers are often involved. They often speak of a flow of energy or of a power that aids them—and they report feeling this whatever in themselves. The consequence, namely healing, is assigned to a “higher” power only because the healing is extraordinary. It is also highly desirable. We give the desirable a “high” value. But what exactly happens in a healing? Some kind of rearrangement of matter takes place. Cancerous cells are destroyed, their remains carried away as waste. Chronic chemical, hormonal balances are restored because the organs that produced or failed to produce them are realigned in proper ways. Something physical happens or no healing could possibly take place. This process requires two factors, it seems to me. One is some kind of knowledge about the right arrangements of the biochemistry and bone structure involved. The other is some kind of energy that removes obstructions and speeds up a process that, in ordinary healing, takes its own sweet time. Let’s examine these factors.

The knowledge may be present in the body already, but the body’s mechanisms may be too weak to implement the healing. In that case the healing stream overcomes weakness, energizes natural processes, possibly catalyzes reactions, and thus leads to rapid recovery of a status quo ante. An alternative possibility is that the healing current itself carries both knowledge and energy. That concept needs special parsing.

When we speak of “energy” in these cases, the justification for using the word is the reported experience both of healers and those who are healed. But the energy involved is not the sort we usually experience—thus mechanical pushes and pulls, gravitational attraction, electrical current, heat, or, more generally, radiation. The very reason why such healings are “miraculous” is because something very different is present. Or is it?

Here things become complicated because, ultimately, we don’t really understand what life really is. We think it is ordinary energy manifesting in material structures. But let us suppose that life itself is just as transcendent a phenomenon as the healing current itself. We don’t think so because we’re all too used to its normal manifestations. One possible explanation of miraculous healings is that they are a temporary intensification of life energy, something that always flows through our bodies but in a relatively thinned-out form. It may be possible to tap into it in such a manner that it flows much more abundantly, and when it does, it will manifest its ordering powers rapidly, setting this right where, in our body, it encounters disturbances in what should be the healthy pattern.

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I began this post with a reference to Sheldrake. I’ll also end it on that note. Sheldrake’s theories of morphic fields suggest a way of thinking about miraculous cures along the lines I’ve just sketched in above. I’ll discuss that application of the morphic field theory in a future post and continue this outline then. For now, as the medievalists used to say, satis.