The Paranormal
The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence
Nikola Tesla
The actual, the real, the true… is not visible
Max Planck (The Father of the Quantum)
The stuff of the world is mind stuff
Sir Arthur Eddington
When I started this book, I expected that a chapter on The Paranormal would need to be long and thorough, but now I’m not so sure. If Dogmatised Science didn’t even blink when presented with the brainless Lorber student, then any evidence for the paranormal would have no effect whatsoever.
§ There’s none so blind as those that choose not to see.**
Nevertheless, we should look at the subject as there is an explanation for it which fits well with Idealism, Yoga, and all the material offered in previous chapters.
‘The paranormal’ falls into two broad categories: parapsychological research, and the rest. ‘The rest’ tends to be anecdotal, and is thus unacceptable by definition to many scientists.
§ But I do wonder whether the anecdotal (one-off) event of a fifty-ton asteroid landing on New York would count as evidence for the hypothesis that ‘asteroids sometimes hit cities’. Presumably not, as a one-off sighting of a ghost doesn’t seem to count for the hypothesis that ‘ghosts sometimes appear’.
And why is it acceptable to ignore astonishing anecdotal evidence such as a tennis ball which spontaneously everted (turned itself inside out), as reported by Lyall Watson in Lifetide? Lyall Watson apparently held degrees in botany, zoology, geology, chemistry, marine biology, ecology and anthropology, and a doctorate in ethology. I think we might agree that he knew how to observe, how to think clearly, and what counts as evidence.
Parapsychology research really began in the 1930’s, at Duke University in the USA. It tends to be mechanically based, and seeks statistical evidence for ESP (Extra Sensory Perception). Thus, in the early days, people spent hours trying to guess which Zener card (see Chapter 1) would turn up next. It was not spectacular work, but it produced several sequences of guesses requiring odds of several millions to one against chance. Curious, and evidential I would say; but not definitive.
Ghost-hunting is a tricky occupation too, as film and video evidence can easily be misinterpreted or faked. There are some photographs which do seem to defy explanation, but they frequently look fakeable, and of course there is no shortage of skeptics who are certain that ‘If something looks even approximately fakeable, then all events of this nature must be fakes’. Dreadfully poor logic, but it is currently quite acceptable in the Materialist world.
§ Clearer minds have always taken a more rational stance: ‘I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.’ Carl Jung.
So leaving aside card guessing and ghost-hunting, what are we left with? A surprising amount, actually. Ever since the days of table-turning and early spiritualism in the nineteenth century, there has been a small number of scientifically-minded people devising experiments to check whether paranormal events genuinely occur, and if so, what they mean. This work was preceded by the slow trickle of Indian philosophy into Britain from the Raj, in the early nineteenth century. Mainly it was viewed through the distorting lens of dogmatic Victorian Christianity, and was thus routinely misinterpreted and trivialised. Then The Theosophical Society was established in New York in 1875, which presented a sort of synthesis of Yogic and Buddhistic ideas, repackaged to suit Western minds. The writings of Yogi Ramacharaka and Swami Vivekananda followed later.
§ ‘Theosophy’ derives from the Greek ‘theos’ (a god, the Deity) and ‘sophia’ (wisdom), and may be defined as ‘wisdom as possessed by the god/s’. It claims to be a new presentation of the secret doctrine or perennial esoteric wisdom underlying all the world’s religions, sciences, and philosophies. See bibliography.
Theosophy attracted the attention of Thomas Edison, Frank Lloyd Wright, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats (Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923), George Bernard Shaw (Nobel Prize in Literature 1925), Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, the educationalists Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner, and the artists Klee, Kandinsky, Gauguin and Roerich, among many others.
It is possible that the term ‘Sufi’ also derives from ‘sophia’.
Scientific study of the paranormal began in 1882 with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research in London. (The American SPR followed three years later.) It was founded by the Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge University, along with some of his academic colleagues, and from the start it busied itself with the mysteries of hypnotism, and also with the deepest mystery of all: did people ‘survive’ death or not? The researchers decided to work with mediums: the seers, witches, wise women and nature’s children of old, who were enjoying some new-found respectability thanks to spiritualism. Mediums claimed to contact people from ‘the other side’. The SPR thought that the information mediums came up with could surely be either verified or proved to be nonsense.
The research produced some impressive results receiving messages from beyond containing information which later checked out, but which could not reasonably have been known to the medium or anyone in the room. However, the skeptics of the day (and there were many, particularly in the higher echelons of Science) would not accept that anything whatsoever could possibly be real evidence and thus insisted that everything thought to be evidence must be error or fraud.
§ The reputation of Theosophy still retains a quite irrational negative tinge since the onslaughts of the C19 bigots. I recommend looking at it for yourself and making your own mind up. Try Leadbeater’s Outline as a starting point:
http://www.archive.org/details/outlineoftheosop00leadrich. I don’t recommend Madame Blavatsky; very heavy going. If you’re prepared for some shocks try AE Powell’s books, which are also available on the www. I would start with The Etheric Double.
The bigots’ case was strengthened because a lot of Victorian ‘psychics’ were indeed frauds, using Music Hall trickery to deceive the bereft and the naive.
‘Spirit photography’ followed on the heels of proper photography, and if you’ve ever seen any of these ghastly crude caricatures, you can only shake your head in wonder that anyone could take them seriously. Also, the few apparently genuine psychics whom the SPR filtered out from the liars and the deluded, were not above massaging their own ‘messages’ from time to time. Their reasoning was that too much was expected of them; that they were not like those new-fangled talking-machines, and could not perform to order; they could only receive messages when conditions were right both for themselves and for ‘the other side’. So, when a half dozen well-heeled gentlemen turned up of an evening to hear wonders reported from beyond, well, what’s a girl to do? She gotta live, ain’t she, and a shilling here and a shilling there can’t be turned down just like that, guv’nor. I’m a good girl, I am.
§ The mediums were usually women of little education, but they weren’t all called Eliza, the heroine of My Fair Lady. That couple of sentences above just seemed appropriate to me, by way of setting the social tone of these early investigations.
As it became clear that mediums could only transmit concepts that their own minds were suited to in terms of subtlety and experience, more sophisticated mediums began to be used. As the evidence for survival crept upwards, the SPR began to attract serious and educated people, despite the current zeitgeist of triumphant and scornful Dogmatic Materialism.
§ Shortly after the death of Frederic Myers, a classical scholar and one of the SPR’s founders, there began a series of automatic writings (an alternative to the Ouija board), produced by a number of mediums not in communication with each other, with interlocking messages full of classical allusions. The mediums would not have properly understood the import of the allusions, whose complexity seemed to indicate an organising intelligence, taken to be Myers and others out to prove their own ‘survival’. This ‘cross-correspondence’ (produced over some 30 years) seems still to be good evidence for ‘survival’, as no other satisfactory explanation has been suggested. Incidentally, one message claiming to come from Myers reported that communicating via a medium was like ‘standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary’. That would be Eliza, then.
Among them were two Nobel Prize winners: Lord Rayleigh and Charles Richet; and William James, the Professor of Psychology at Harvard, Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister of Great Britain and Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of Birmingham University.
§ Lodge lost his son in the First World War and later wrote an interesting book about his experiences of trying to contact him via mediums. See Raymond, or Life and Death.
Supporters included Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lewis Carroll and Carl Jung, as well as Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of the Theory of Evolution, and the man most responsible for Darwin publishing On the Origin of Species.
Sir William Crookes’ careful scientific work was, and still is, highly thought of. He worked in chemical analysis, disinfection, photography, spectroscopy, metallurgy, polarized light, solar and terrestrial spectra, the spectrum microscope, the photometer, meteorology, astronomy (taking standard photographs of the moon), wireless telegraphy, the conduction of electricity, cathode rays, plasmas, and diamonds. He devised the Crookes radiometer, and the Crookes tube, the forerunner of the television tube.
He discovered two new chemical elements thallium and helium, and paved the way for a third, protactinium. He was a member of the Government Eclipse Expedition in 1870.
He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1863, and became President. He was also, at various times, the President of The Chemical Society, The Institution of Electrical Engineers, The Society of Chemical Industry, and The British Association. He founded the Chemical News, and became editor of the Quarterly Journal of Science.
He received a Royal Gold Medal for his researches, the Davy Medal, and the Sir Joseph Copley Medal. The French Academy of Sciences awarded him a gold medal and a prize of 3,000 francs.
He was knighted for services to science and was awarded the Order of Merit, an honour limited to 24 living persons. He also found the time to father ten children.
§ As far as I know, he did not invent the stop-watch. But I may be wrong in this.
Crookes was initially sceptical about psychical research, but explained that:
‘I consider it the duty of scientific men who have learnt exact modes of working to examine phenomena which attract the attention of the public, in order to confirm their genuineness or to explain, if possible, the delusions of the dishonest and to expose the tricks of deceivers.’
He insisted that his investigations
‘…must be at my own house, and my own selection of friends and spectators, under my own conditions, and I may do whatever I like as regards apparatus.’
He investigated mediums and witnessed rappings, the movement of things without physical cause, levitation, and the appearance of luminous objects and writings, with no normal human input. I think one of the experiments of this careful, intelligent, and scrupulous man will stand as a White Crow. A famous medium of the day, Daniel Dunglas Home, had been witnessed to levitate to a variety of heights on dozens of occasions, and to produce rapping and knocks in houses at will.
§ Crookes reported in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (Vol. 6, no. 15, 1889):
‘On one occasion I witnessed a chair, with a lady sitting on it, rise several inches from the ground. On another occasion, to avoid the suspicion of this being in some way performed by herself, the lady knelt on the chair in such a manner that its four feet were visible to us. It then rose about three inches, remained suspended for about ten seconds and then slowly descended.
‘At another time two children, on separate occasions rose from the floor with their chairs, in full daylight under (to me) most satisfactory conditions; for I was kneeling and keeping close watch upon the feet of the chair, observing distinctly that no one might touch them.
‘The most striking instances of levitation which I have witnessed have been with Mr Home. On two separate occasions have I seen him raised completely from the floor of the room. Once sitting in an easy chair and once standing up. On each occasion I had full opportunity of watching the occurrence as it was taking place.’
Crookes had a wooden cage made, wrapped with copper wire, built especially to contain an accordion. In Crookes’ own report:
‘The accordion was a new one, having been purchased by myself for the purpose of these experiments at Wheatstone’s, in Conduit Street. Mr Home had neither handled nor seen the instrument before the commencement of the test experiments.
‘Mr Home sat in a low easy chair at the side of the table. In front of him under the table was the aforesaid cage, one of his legs being on each side of it. I sat close to him on his left, and another observer sat close to him on his right, the rest of the party being seated at convenient distances round the table.
‘For the greater part of the evening, particularly when anything of importance was proceeding, the observers on each side of Mr Home kept their feet respectively on his feet, so as to be able to detect his slightest movement. Mr Home took the accordion between the thumb and middle finger of one hand at the opposite end to the keys. Having previously opened the bass key myself, and the cage being drawn from under the table so as just to allow the accordion to be pushed in with its key downwards, it was pushed back as close as Mr Home’s arm would permit, but without hiding his hand from those next to him. Very soon the accordion was seen by those on each side to be waving about in a somewhat curious manner; then sounds came from it, and finally several notes were played in succession. Whilst this was going on my assistant went under the table, and reported that the accordion was expanding and contracting; at the same time it was seen that the hand of Mr Home by which it was held was quite still, his other hand resting on the table.
‘Presently the accordion was seen by those on either side of Mr Home to move about, oscillating and going round and round the cage, and playing at the same time. Dr A. B. now looked under the table, and said that Mr Home’s hand appeared quite still whilst the accordion was moving about emitting distinct sounds.
‘Mr Home still holding the accordion in the usual manner in the cage, his feet being held by those next him, and his other hand resting on the table, we heard distinct and separate notes sounded in succession, and then a simple air was played. As such a result could only have been produced by the various keys of the instrument being acted upon in harmonious succession, this was considered, by those present to be a crucial experiment. But the sequel was still more striking, for Mr Home then removed his hand altogether from the accordion, taking it quite out of the cage, and placed it in the hand of the person next to him. The instrument then continued to play, no person touching it and no hand being near it.’ (Pictures thanks to ?)
Crookes continues:
‘The investigators present on the test occasion were an eminent physicist, high in the ranks of the Royal Society, whom I will call Dr A. B.; a well-known Sergeant-at-Law, whom I will call Sergeant C. D.; my brother; and my chemical assistant.’
§ These people were Crookes’ chemical assistant, Mr Williams; Crookes’ brother Walter; Sir William Huggins, the eminent physicist and astronomer, and ex-president of the Royal Society; and Sergeant EW Cox, a prominent lawyer.
He added:
‘It argues ill for the boasted freedom of opinion among scientific men, that they have so long refused to institute a scientific investigation into the existence and nature of facts asserted by so many competent and credible witnesses, and which they are freely invited to examine when and where they please.’
This refusal to investigate continues to this day, a century-plus later.
§ For a fuller account of this experiment try
http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/books/crookes/researches/investigation.htm
Many believed that Crookes would expose as fraudulent the phenomena he investigated, but he insisted that his investigations ‘point to the agency of an outside intelligence’. This shocked his dogmatised Scientific colleagues, who were certain that all of spiritualism was fraudulent, and Crookes’ final report so outraged the Scientific establishment that there was talk of depriving him of his Fellowship of the Royal Society.
One anonymous attack in the Quarterly Review, described Crookes as ‘a specialist of specialists’. If we look back to Crookes achievements in multiple areas of science, we can only lament at the mindset of the bigot.
§ It is apparent that scientists are only officially Great when they support the Materialist dogma. Otherwise their works are ignored, suborned, or ridiculed.
Newton, ‘the greatest scientist of all time’ suffered from this, as did Alfred Russel Wallace. If these great men were abused, how much more must less famous men have had to endure? As of now Rupert Sheldrake is a prime target, but he is not alone. James Lovelock faced the wrath of the Materialist Establishment when he published his Gaia Hypothesis… that the Earth is a complex self-regulating system. They accused ‘Gaia’ of being teleological (‘having an end in view; a purpose’: anathema to Materialists, if not to Darwin). JL ‘adjusted’ his turn of phrase to assuage their diktats. But he stuck to his guns. Many people who have studied the evidence now consider Gaia a sound Theory. The Yogic/Esoteric Philosophy is clear that the self-regulation Lovelock discovered is indeed teleological: it is there to somehow enable complex Life to evolve and flourish.
I think the accordion experiment is enough. But there is another report which I think also qualifies as a White Crow. In 1920, Professor Charles Richet (Nobel prize in Physiology/Medicine 1913) set out to produce a permanent relic of a paranormal event. The medium was Franek Kluski, a man who had survived being shot in the heart and being declared clinically dead. Under closely controlled conditions, and with multiple witnesses (including Richet), Kluski produced several effects including partially-physicalised fingertips, which would touch the sitters. The main experiment involved floating a 10cm layer of molten wax on a bowl of heated water situated in front of the ring of sitters. Kluski’s hands were firmly gripped at all times, and he had no assistant. His task was to ‘form’ a whole semi-physical hand, and to cause it to be plunged multiple times into the molten wax. The ensuing wax ‘glove’ was allowed to cool. It was then filled with plaster and the wax was melted away, leaving a permanent plaster cast of the event. The experiment was repeated a number of times, and great precautions were taken against the possibility of fraud, even down to secretly inoculating the wax with a marker chemical immediately before the experiment started. The ‘glove’ was subsequently tested for the secret marker. It was present. Thus the glove had been produced from the wax in the bowl and could not have been smuggled in.
(Photo thanks to the Institut Métapsychique International.)
For the full account of the conditions and results of the experiment visit www.metapsychique.org/The–Kluski–Hands–Moulds.html
There can be no Materialist explanation for the accordion and the wax glove except systemic deception and fraud, involving previously heroic figures in the world of scientific investigation. There is no evidence of such fraud. And anyway, what motive would a Nobel Prize winner have for sticking his neck out in such a provocative manner, risking the ridicule and abuse he predictably received from his colleagues and peers?
The Idealist explanation is more interesting, and of course, more rational:
- Mind came first in the universe.
- Thus Mind made Matter (somehow… clearly, the ways of Higher Mind are not likely to be comprehensible to Lower Mind. The frog cannot understand the prince.)
- Matter ranges from very fine mental, through astral and etheric, down to densest physical.
- Thus Mind manipulated Matter (presumably via mental ‘form’) down through the various increasingly dense ‘bodies’ via some sort of solidification similar to an electrical ‘stepping-down’ process.
Only the body dies. The Mind does not. Thus discarnate entities are not a problem, and would explain such things as ghosts, poltergeists and possession In the cases above, it would seem that the medium engages the cooperation of discarnate beings (‘spirits’) to precipitate physical matter via their own mind power and a Platonic form, enough to squeeze an accordion or make a former for a wax glove to deposit upon. If we follow the logical progression above then both of the White Crows above start to make sense. In fact the accordion episode is now easy to ‘explain’; and the wax glove only a little harder.
§ Obviously, this is the most elementary precursor to a full explanation, which may lie beyond the capacity of Lower Mind, in the realm of panmentia and Higher Mind.
A Great Surprise…
It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth
Sherlock Holmes (as told to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it
Albert Einstein
If the Yogic/Esoteric doctrine is correct, Man is essentially a non-physical being who incarnates into a suitable body in which to exercise his own powers of choice (between acting selfishly or unselfishly) according to his karmic needs on his journey from frog to prince. It would seem that the body has evolved along its own route, apparently according to Natural Selection. It is quite literally a vehicle. Life is a Mind school. The physical vehicle for the Mind is that of a self-obsessed and sex-mad monkey. For convenience, I’ll stick with ‘evolution’ for body-form development, but will call the higher form, concerning the development of Mind, ‘DarwinPlus’ (D+).