Posted on 20 March 2012, 18:39

So said a senior professor of psychology to a doctor friend of mine on learning the subject of his postgraduate dissertation: Telaesthesia Between Twins. I have studied this dissertation of more than 300 pages, and I believe the scientific rigour of his work to be unimpeachable: there were very many impressive examples of paranormal communication between the sixty pairs of twins that he was studying. He was in fact awarded the postgraduate degree, but this did not prevent some bitter complaints from some other doctors to the Medical Council about permitting my friend to investigate this topic. So why that remark from the professor, and why those complaints from other doctors?

Galvani, the discoverer of electricity, remarked, “I am attacked by two very opposite sects — the scientists and the know-nothings. Both laugh at me, calling me ‘the frogs’ dancing master’. Yet I know I have discovered one of the greatest forces in nature.”

“Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis (below) (July 1, 1818 - August 13, 1865) was the Hungarian physician who demonstrated that puerperal fever (also known as “childbed fever”) was contagious and that its incidence could be drastically reduced by enforcing appropriate hand-washing behaviour by medical care-givers. He made this discovery in 1847 while working in the Maternity Department of the Vienna Lying-in Hospital. His failure to convince his fellow doctors led to a tragic conclusion, [he committed suicide] however, he was ultimately vindicated.”

Alfred Wegener who put forward the theory of Continental Drift suffered similar rejection, as did Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, the scientists who first demonstrated energy derived from Cold Fusion. 1989.

Similarly, psychic research, although often thoroughly scientific, is acknowledged neither by mainstream science, nor by the great religions. Serious scientific research into the paranormal is forced into the margins.  Galvani saw himself attacked by “the scientists and the know-nothings” even though having “discovered one of the greatest forces in nature”: it is not so different with psychic research.

One could ask whether those attacking our science are mad or bad.

I have been reading an article on global warming, how US Democrats, the more educated they are more concerned they are about it, and how US Republicans, the more educated they are, the less likely they are to be concerned about it.  To those who believed putting scientific facts on the table would change minds and hearts this is a baffling and worrying problem. Question: are some Republicans mad or bad?

In a previous blog, I discussed Leslie Kean’s UFO’S, Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials go on to Record. Those who have read this book might well say that it provides near certainty that UFOs are a reality, and that they may be inter-dimensional phenomena.

Subsequently, reading MSNBC Microsoft and National Broadcasting Company on the Internet, I read an article by James Oberg, who is introduced thus:  “NBC News space analyst James Oberg is a 22-year veteran of NASA Mission Control in Houston, and the author of numerous books on space policy and exploration”. The title of the article is “UFO book based on questionable foundation.”  In the article Oberg debates the question of how reliable airplane pilots are in reporting aerial phenomena.. only. No specific incident is discussed, no mention of government officials, or generals. No mention of worries about UFOs appearing around sensitive military installations, and disabling them, nothing weakening Oberg’s message, namely, “Ignore this book.”
 
Embedded in his text there is a link, “Story: Skeptic misses point behind UFO book”.  If we think to click this link, we will then discover Leslie Kean’s reply to Oberg , pointing out that he has not actually addressed the evidence provided in the book.

If we Google “James Oberg” we find that he is, a CSI [or CSICOP] fellow and long-time contributor to Skeptical Inquirer. If we Google “CSICOP or Skeptics” in Wikipedia, we will discover that they don’t do scientific enquiry, but exist to discredit scientists and others that they, as Materialists, do not approve of, in the media.  So again, is James Oberg mad or bad?

To be charitable as well as realistic I believe we should say that James Oberg, the sceptical scientists, and the Republicans face the same challenges trying to sort out fact from fiction as the rest of us. It is the human lot that each of us is able to be a little bit expert about very little, and we have to rely on the small expertises of countless others in order to get by. We tend to get our worldview from others of our social group, whether it be our families, our church, our social class, our political persuasion, and those responsible for our education. With our perceived lacks of expertise, we put our faith in others. We feel safer this way, for if we conform to the beliefs of our group, then we have the intellectual and emotional support of our group. If we don’t conform, then we lose that support. If we are church officials, or members of an academic faculty, we may even lose our livelihoods if we do not conform. Even today in many parts of the world political or religious dissent may result in our very deaths.

We also need to consider where each of us is, in our emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development. We don’t expect much abstract thinking before our teens, and it takes quite a lot of time to develop empathy with others, and to have altruistic love. Even though we may accept the reality of the spiritual world, we may not feel safe to surrender to it. Carl Jung suggested that we need to be reasonably emotionally healthy before we delve too deeply into what he called the Unconscious. The danger for the emotionally unstable, Jung suggested, is that they will drown in the sea of the Unconscious. The call to surrender to spirit, perhaps another way of speaking about a conversion experience, can sometimes be experienced in late adolescence, but quite commonly it comes in middle age.

For these reasons, exasperated as we may become with each other, including the causes for exasperation that I have been discussing, we need to understand individual situations in which each of us find ourselves, and “forgive each other our trespasses.”

It has been said that to prescribe our conclusions is to preclude our research. Science can be a wonderful way in which people of all types of faith and beliefs may communicate with each other, but only when we are prepared to put aside our conclusions and judgements in favour of dispassionately looking at the data in front of us. Often we are able to do this, sometimes we are not.
There is a quotation from Leo Tolstoy (below) that I like: “Love is life, all, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.”

When I spoke of the need to conform to the worldview of our various social groupings, I could have referred to the mutual love that we often experience in such groupings. Working together, collaborating and communicating, is what happens in such groups.

Where there is a conflict of ideologies, the right course of action is probably to share our personal experiences. What happens in parapsychology laboratories is valuable in that it can show the activity of the psychic or spiritual to those who desire proof provided in that context. But in general I consider the telling of trustworthy human experience is the best way, and enables us to empathise with each other in the way that we need. Michael Tymn does this, and a great many others. I believe that each story can have its effect.

Acknowledgement: The articles mentioned in this blog have been supplied by my friend Norman Kjome, in Michigan. My thanks to him.

When Cognitive Science Enters Politics
by George Lakoff
www.rockridgeinstitute.org

James Oberg UFO book based on questionable foundation
James Oberg

Leslie Kean’s Reply… Sceptic misses the point

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Next blog, April 3

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Posted on 06 March 2012, 9:27

I’ve been reading Guy Lyon Playfair’s If This be Magic, the Forgotten Power of Hypnosis with great interest, especially to find out what he has to say about healing through faith. I have a friend who is a Pentecostal missionary in Brazil, and he conducts very large meetings where those present are invited to come up for the laying on of hands and for healing.
 
Remarkable and well attested healings often do occur, but of course many people with apparently strong faith do not experience such healing. The temptation in those circumstances is to conclude that there was something wrong with the faith of the person seeking to be healed or with the powers of the healer. Playfair’s book shows that the situation is much more complicated than this, and although he does not give final answers, he raises a lot of important questions.

But before I discuss his questions I have a question of my own: my Pentecostal friend would say that his healings came about by the power of the Holy Spirit, while Playfair sees the healings coming about by the power of hypnotism, when normal medical practitioners would say that healings come about both by the normal healing processes of the body, and by the efficacy of medical science. But are we complicating things unnecessarily with our differing terminologies?

Tibetan Buddhist Tilopa, (988 – 1069), (below) wrote:

Though words are spoken to explain the Void,
The Void as such can never be expressed.
Though we say “the mind is a bright light,”
It is beyond all words and symbols.
Although the mind is void in essence,
All things it embraces and contains.

Mind embraces all, whether we call it spirit, medicine, or magic. I personally don’t want to distinguish.

To get back to Playfair’s questions:

On page 11 he describes a sixteen year old patient suffering from ichtheosis, or fish skin disease, “a misleading term, for the vile black substance that covered most of his body had none of the functional beauty of real fish skin. He had been born with it, and it had become thicker and darker throughout his life, during which he had been in another several hospitals without being cured. At school, he had been treated like an outcast causing the unpleasant appearance and equally unpleasant smell. Not surprisingly, he was shy and withdrawn, and the chances of leading a normal life seemed minimal.”

In 1951, Dr Albert A. Mason, (below an anaesthetist who was also a skilled hypnotist, suggested that he be allowed to treat the patient with hypnosis. Unaware of the full diagnosis, he assumed that the patient was suffering from a type of wart. He was good with warts. He duly hypnotised the patient, told him that the warts were going to fall off the left arm, and ask him to come back the following week.

“About five days later “, he reported, “the horny layer softened, became friable, and fell off.” Underneath it was what appeared to be normal skin.  After another five days, the patient’s left arm was completely clear from shoulder to wrist. The right arm had not changed.

When the surgeon heard what he had done, he was shocked. It was not a case of warts, but “rather a case of congenital ichthyosiform erythrodermia, not only congenital, meaning that the patient had been born with that, but also structural and organic. This meant that the patient’s skin had no oil forming glands that would enable its outer layers to flake off and renew themselves. His black armour plating would just go on building up.”

Mason had further sessions with the young man until most of his body was healed. The healing appeared to be permanent, and of course his life was very much happier.

Later, our hypnotist offered further sessions to complete the healing. Now he was unable to hypnotise the patient and had to leave well alone. The hypnotist subsequently tried to treat eight other ichthyosis sufferers without success. In 1961 Dr C.A.S. Wink, an Oxford general practitioner also had partial success with two similar cases.

“Mystery was being added to mystery. Why should hypnosis succeed is one patient, and then fail with eight others? Why should he be unable to hypnotise his original patient four years later? Why should Wink succeed with two patients? Why it should some parts of the body respond to suggestion under hypnosis more than others? Above all, why on earth should any part of the body respond at all?”

At page 18 of Playfair’s book we read that, “in 1975,  French psychiatrist Dr Leon Chertok managed to produce a handsome blister on the arm of a patient by placing a coin on that and suggesting that it was very hot, which it was not. An intriguing detail was that the patient reported feeling no sensation of heat at all, and yet her skin reacted as if something extremely hot has indeed come into contact with it – on the exact spot where the coin had been placed.”

This clearly demonstrates the power of mind to injure the body, and to make it sick. “Pointing the bone,” curses and spells can have deadly effect.

Page 262: Playfair writes, “It is becoming more and more difficult to separate aspects of religion from what I have been calling psi, the paranormal mental and physical effects of telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis. Forty years ago, reviewing the results of ten years experimental research in the laboratory, J B Rhine wrote: “The mental system has determinative influence which produces registrable effects without any conceivable physical intermediation. These effects reveal the stand of intelligent purpose and do so in a way that is nevertheless physically a cause-and-effect phenomena .” This, I suggest, is the basis of an explanation not only of PK, but also of prayer, which need no longer be considered as miraculous or magical, but as wholly natural and testable phenomena. The same applies to natural healing, whether this is brought about by hypnosis, mesmerism, suggestion or personal faith.”

I wholeheartedly recommend close study of Playfair’s book. But I think that there is more to be said. In his study of healing through hypnosis Playfair largely looks at things from the point of view of a medical practitioner attempting to treat a patient’s physical disorder. The focus is on a one to one cause and effect situation.

Studies of consciousness in all its modes over the past one hundred and fifty years, show that it is not realistic to view individual minds as separated entities. Dreams that correctly foretell future events, synchronicities linking people in various parts of the world, effective prayer, and all other sorts of paranormal phenomena, show our minds to be entangled in a mysterious whole beyond the reach of our rational minds. There are many influences on our individual minds that can be uncovered by our reason:  the many beliefs that the individual may have acquired, the consensus reality of the community to which the individual belongs to.  Taking all this into consideration, we should not be surprised that individuals are not healed even though they have faith.

In conclusion, you might like to study what St. Stephen has to say about sickness and healing. See my Afterlife Teaching of Stephen the Martyr, Section 80-1. Here is an excerpt:

“I will speak as many of your great healers often speak. That many diseases or disorders of the body, more than are realised, are caused through the state of mind. If that state of mind through prayer, and through good reception, be put in peace and love, then disorders and sicknesses that are apparent, will cease to be so. Arguments against prayer, even by great healers themselves, are often that the correction of that which was wrong, was correction of the mind only. We cannot agree, for what the Father has made the Father has made perfect. The perfection that we are able to accept is often like the readers of your book, acceptance with reluctance!  And in part, with mistrust!

“I say to all here now, in all disorders that are even in this room and beyond, that the mind and our free will have caused, our hearts and minds may cease to pray.  Often when we fail in this task, we create even more sickness by our judgement upon ourselves. That is why we pray for you must know that only in prayer, can the Father reach to us. And when the Father reaches he is accepted, then disorders can no longer be apparent. What we pray for is not that we’d be remodelled, or corrected, but that we become into a consciousness and to be at one with the Father. When we are at one with the Father then we are at one with all that is perfect. That we may often try with the mind to pray, and not apparently succeed, may worry and discourage from prayer..But I say this, that each prayer is answered, each time prayers are made with the heart. For we know when we truly pray. Those times that we allow the Father to come close to us perfection is very near. We worry often that limbs may be torn, and that our bones may disintegrate, that the whole body must groan. When we truly pray it is also possible that these things also may be corrected and find perfection.”

To read more about Albert Mason: http://www.melanie-klein-trust.org.uk/masoninterview.htm

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Michael’s revised edition , Afterlife Teaching From Stephen the Martyr is published by White Crow books and available from Amazon and all good online book stores.

Paperback               Kindle

If This be Magic: The Forgotten Power of Hypnosis is available from Amazon and all good online book stores.

Paperback               Kindle

Next blog, March 6

http://whitecrowbooks.com/blogs