Michael Prescott's Blog

New blog alert!

Marcel Cairo, a professional medium and frequent commenter here, has started his own blog. I was part of a group reading by telephone with Marcel a couple of weeks ago, and a great deal of personal and meaningful information came through. I was going to write about it, but frankly, most of the material (for all four sitters) is probably just too personal to make public. It was a most enlightening experience, even though Marcel himself was dissatisfied, calling it "a bad day at the office." As a friend of mine said after reading my notes, "If that's a bad day, what's a good day?!"

Anyhow, check out Marcel's blog. His essay on a reading he had with famed medium John Edward is a good place to begin.

Any publicity is good publicity

The latest issue of TV Guide (Feb 5-11) contains this embarrassing correction:

Oops! Actress Candis Cayne was erroneously referred to as a female impersonator (Behind the Scenes, 1/15).

Oops, indeed.

Bully for skepticism!

Item: Nineteenth century physicist William Crookes, later knighted for his contributions to science, conducts a series of seances with the young medium Florence Cook and declares her to be genuine. Crookes' detractors not only allege that he has taken leave of his senses, they insinuate that he is having an illicit affair with Florence. Though there is no evidence to support these claims, they continue to this day. Crookes saves his reputation only by retreating from the study of the paranormal.

Item: Richard Sternberg, editor of a small publication associated with the Smithsonian Institute, agrees to publish a peer-reviewed article by Stephen Meyer, an advocate  of Intelligent Design. He thinks "that by putting this on the table, there could be some reasoned discourse." Instead, his "colleagues and supervisors at the Smithsonian" are enraged. They take away Sternberg's master key, ostracize and harass him at work, and spread rumors that that the article was not peer reviewed and that Sternberg is not a scientist. (These rumors are false.) An official review of the matter discloses that "officials at the Smithsonian worked with the National Center for Science Education -- a group that opposes intelligent design -- and outlined 'a strategy to have [Sternberg] investigated and discredited.' "

Item: After the publishing house Macmillan announces acquisition of Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision, which makes unorthodox claims about the origins and history of the solar system, famed astronomer Harlow Shapley lobbies the publisher to prevent the book's publication. He fails. According to philosopher David Stove, Shapley then arranges for "denunciations of the book, still before its appearance, by an astronomer, a geologist, and an archaeologist," none of whom have read it. Other reviews by "professors who boasted of never having read the book" follow, and Velikovsky is "rigorously excluded from access to learned journals for his replies." The anti-Velikovsky forces then compel the firing of the long-time Macmillan senior editor who bought the book, even though it has become a bestseller. They also get the Hayden Planetarium's director fired "because he proposed to take Velikovsky seriously enough to mount a display about the theory." Under intense and continuing pressure, Macmillan eventually transfers the book to rival Doubleday, "which, as it has no textbook division, is not susceptible to professorial blackmail."

Item: Research chemists Fleischman and Pons claim to have discovered cold fusion, a room-temperature nuclear process. They are ridiculed as incompetents, and a research paper put out by MIT savages their work, stating that MIT's physicists have been unable to replicate the pair's results. The prestige of MIT succeeds in destroying the chemists' reputations, and they become objects of public derision. Later experiments, however, indicate that some unknown reaction is indeed taking place. Meanwhile, dissident scientist Eugene Mallove produces evidence that the MIT report was fudged. The MIT researchers actually did detect the anomalous heat reported by Fleischman and Pons, but altered their graphs to conceal this fact.

Item: After Timothy Leary claims that LSD, when used under proper supervision, has mind-expanding properties, he is convicted of marijuana possession and sentenced to thirty years in prison. Though his conviction is eventually overturned by the Supreme Court, Leary is rearrested, this time for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. His sentence is ten years in federal prison. Remarkably, he escapes from prison and goes abroad, only to be recaptured by American agents in Afghanistan. Says Wikipedia, "He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21 mil. in 2006), the highest in U. S. history to that point; President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him 'the most dangerous man in America.' " Facing an incredible 95 years in prison and housed in solitary confinement, Leary finally agrees to cooperate with authorities in exchange for leniency.

Item: Wilhelm Reich claims to have mastered a new kind of energy called "orgone." The US government finds him guilty of making false claims and sentences him to two years in federal prison. Government agents confiscate his research notes and publications, dumping them wholesale into an incinerator. Reich dies in prison, of heart failure.

Item: In 1981 biologist Rupert Sheldrake publishes his book A New Science of Life. Reviewing the book, Sir John Maddox states, "This infuriating tract... is the best candidate for burning there has been for many years." (Evidently he hasn't heard of Reich, whose works actually were burned.) In a later interview Maddox expands on his opinion: "Sheldrake is putting forward magic instead of science, and that can be condemned in exactly the language that the Pope used to condemn Galileo, and for the same reason. It is heresy." (Emphasis added.)

I'm not endorsing the validity of all the unconventional theories mentioned above. In particular, I think Velikosky and Reich are unlikely to have been correct. All that interests me, in citing these instances (and there are many others that could be added to the list), is this question: What are the powers of establishment science so afraid of? Why would people who are genuinely confident that they have reason on their side resort to character assassination, ostracism, threats, and even police action to enforce their opinions?

In other words, why do the self-styled defenders of reason, science, progress, and civilization so often act like bullies and thugs?

A bad Time

Here's an excellent letter written by Michael Tymm to Time magazine, regarding some snarky and specious claims by Steven Pinker. Most likely, Time won't print it - mustn't air any opinions outside scientific orthodoxy, you know - but at least you can read it here.

Michael maintains a very worthwhile blog, metgat.zaadz.com . Check it out!

----

To the Editor of TIME Magazine

Dear Editor:

Steven Pinker states that "scientists have exorcised the ghost from the machine, not because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain." (Time, Jan. 29, "The Mystery of Consciousness").  In support of this comment, he says that "attempts to contact the souls of the dead" by scientists of a century ago "turned up only cheap magic tricks."  He further suggests that near-death experiences have been shown to be nothing but a symptom of an oxygen-starved brain.

As someone who has spent nearly two decades studying the extensive research into the "survival of consciousness" (at death) conducted by the reputable scientists and scholars referred to by Pinker,  I believe the real dupe here is Pinker, who obviously is basing his remarks on hearsay from fellow scientific fundamentalists.  If he had really dug into the research done by such esteemed scientists and scholars as Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, Sir William Barrett, Professor William James, Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, Dr. James H. Hyslop, Dr. Richard Hodgson, and many others, there is no possible way he could make such a statement.  Certainly, there were many magicians and frauds around at the time, but these scientific men, all of whom started as skeptics or debunkers, were not as easily duped as Pinker.  Except for James, who took the scientifically safe route and sat on the fence, they all found a preponderance of evidence, if not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, that consciousness does survive bodily death.  As a good overview of their research,  I recommend Ghost Hunters:  William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, a 2006 book by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Deborah Blum. 

As for the near-death experience, Mr. Pinker has obviously not done his homework. However, I doubt that space permits me to go into that here.   

As I see it, we have two things to fear -- religious fundamentalists and scientific fundamentalists.  I could add in a third -- a gullible media that seemingly endorses (based on the editorial) the biased and uniformed opinions of scientific fundamentalists like Pinker.

Sincerely,

Michael E. Tymn

Mind, consciousness, and OBEs

Two different lines of discussion just came together for me in an interesting, albeit entirely speculative, way.

First, I got an email from a reader whose screen name is Eteponge. He discussed the fact that many out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences contain a mixture of valid and invalid perceptions. He gave the example of someone in an out-of-body experience who perceived a barbecue set in the neighbor's yard, when in fact there was no such barbecue, and the example of someone who hovered over his own body and perceived himself wearing long johns, when in fact he was not wearing them.

Second, I had a conversation with the medium Marcel Cairo, in which he said that mediumship seems to involve the spirits searching the memory banks of the medium and the sitter in order to find the nearest match for a particular idea they wish to get across. He compared it to combing through an index of images and words and experiences, in search of the closest "fit" to what the communicating entities want to express.

Okay. Now let's see if we can put these two things together and come up with some explanation for the strange mix of accurate and inaccurate perceptions in out-of-body experiences and related phenomena.

We'll begin at the beginning – with the nature of reality. Let's imagine that the reality we see around us is only a construction put together out of the raw materials of a deeper reality, much in the way that a hologram is constructed out of the information encoded in the wave-interference patterns preserved on a holographic plate. This is physicist David Bohm's theory, which he developed at length. Like any analogy it is imperfect, but it does have its interesting features.

A hologram is created when a focused beam of light passes through (or reflects off) the holographic plate. In Bohm's theory, consciousness plays the role analogous to the light beam. Consciousness decodes the encoded data and constructs a multidimensional space-time reality out of it.

One interesting thing about holographic plates is that a very large number of wave-interference patterns can be superposed on the same plate. Which pattern is decoded depends on the angle of the light beam. A shift in the light beam can construct a new image. (This theory and its implications for psi phenomena are discussed at length in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe.)

Now let's say that the amount of information that our consciousness decodes is normally limited by the built-in restrictions of the central nervous system. Since the central nervous system has limited capacity, and the information must be "piped through" it in order to allow us to function in the physical world, there is a sharp limit to how much we can perceive of the world around us.

But in an out-of-body experience, consciousness is set free of the body and is no longer restricted by the constraints of the nervous system. Thus, vastly more information can be decoded and passed along to the mind. (For our purposes, consciousness is what perceives, while the mind is what labels and conceptualizes.)

Not only does extracerebral perception entail much more information than consciousness normally processes, but it is possible that consciousness, liberated from the body, may roam more freely "across the dial," so to speak. Varying our analogy for a moment, body-restricted consciousness is locked in, for the most part, to a particular channel on the radio spectrum, while bodiless consciousness can pick up other frequencies.

These other frequencies correspond to the superposed wave inference patterns in the holographic plate. That is, consciousness ordinarily is directed at a specific angle that constructs a certain specific hologram. But out-of-body consciousness is free to explore other angles of view and to construct other holograms that are normally outside our range of perception.

Now, if this is anything like the true situation, then we would expect to encounter some problems in out-of-body experiences and related phenomena. During these experiences, consciousness will be decoding enormously more data than usual - data gathered not only from its regular plane of perception, but from adjacent planes, as well. Many of these new data will be unfamiliar, difficult to label and categorize. This will inevitably lead to errors as the mind struggles to integrate unfamiliar data/impressions into the overall picture.

Thus, consciousness may pick up something of a particular shape which the mind cannot identify. The mind finds the nearest match or fit for this impression, and the nearest match is a barbecue. The mind then chooses to identify the perception as a barbecue in the neighbor's yard, and to really "see it" that way, even though there is no barbecue.

Or for instance, consciousness may detect an aura around the body, but the mind, unaccustomed to seeing auras, chooses to see it as long johns covering the body.

Where consciousness detects what is familiar and expected, there is no error. Where it detects something unfamiliar and difficult to integrate, it seeks a match. This match may be wrong.

In near-death experiences people may see Jesus or Hindu deities; conceivably a dying child could see Santa Claus; in his book The Golden Ass, the Roman writer Apuleius relates the story of his entranced vision of the goddess Isis. We need not believe that consciousness is literally perceiving these things – that Santa or Isis is actually real. Consciousness is perceiving something unfamiliar, and the mind matches it to the nearest item in the mental catalog. Different people have different catalogs, different image sets to choose from. It's almost like doing a Google image search under different search parameters. The parameters you set will determine the matches you get.

For this reason, Buddhists warn us that what is perceived -- whether in ordinary life, in trance, in out-of-body experiences, in near-death experiences, or in death -- is to some extent a product of our own preconceptions. The mind matches unfamiliar data to their nearest familiar analogs from the mental memory banks.

We do this even in regular life when we encounter something "unprocessable." Someone seeing a UFO in the Middle Ages might have seen it as a floating castle or a flying dragon. Today we would probably see it as a spaceship. Something is being perceived, but if it is outside normal categories of thought and perception, we reduce it to a familiar, easily labeled idea/image. And we really do "see it" that way. We can even photograph what we see. The photograph itself is just another thing that we see and is processed by the mind in precisely the same way.

With vastly more information to process in extracerebral perception, and with access to entirely unfamiliar realms, the chance of making errors of this type is greatly increased. Note, too, that perception includes all modalities, not just sight. Our entire experience is a stream of perceptions mediated by familiar categories of thought. When bafflingly unfamiliar elements intrude into the experience, we have a tendency to reduce them to the familiar. In short, our mind makes errors because it is unable to properly integrate the new perceptions. The experiences are real, but they vary according to the interpretation of the individual mind.

Or maybe not. It's just an idea ...

Rats!

Here's an interesting little synchronicity.

Just yesterday I rewrote a scene in my latest book. This particular scene, a flashback, takes place in L.A.'s Chinatown in 1904. Back then the rumor was rampant that "Chinamen" (as they were called) ate rats. I specifically added this detail to the scene during yesterday's rewrite.  A character observes rats in an alley and thinks to himself that the locals could have a banquet.

Today I received an email from a friend (who knows nothing about my book) reporting that some Chinese restaurants allegedly serve rat meat in place of chicken. The rather disgusting email contained graphic images of dead rats being skinned, cut up into chicken-like parts, and fried.

Writing about rats as Chinese food one day ... getting an email on the same topic the day after. Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Maybe I'll steer clear of the Kung Pao "chicken" for a while.

Meditation as medication

Speaking of happiness ...

(HT: Drudge.)

The bluebird of happiness

In my continuing attempt to make my blogging as effortless as possible, today I'm simply pasting in a long comment that I previously posted on J. Carson Black's blog.

Some of the other commenters were getting more and more exercised about the real or imagined failings of the Bush administration. After sparring with them a little, I ended with these thoughts ...

----

The political issues aren’t worth pursuing, since there’s no common ground, but there is one point I’d like to make. It’s just this: Happiness comes from within.

I spent twenty years of my so-called “adult” life thinking that happiness was the product of external forces or circumstances. Whenever I felt unhappy, I would look around me for the cause. And I would always find it, because there are always things to be unhappy about. Then I would think, “If only …” If only such-and-such a condition could be changed, I would be happy, or at least happier.

If only … Bill Clinton (or Ronald Reagan) weren’t president.
If only … my agent could get me a better deal.
If only … my publisher would promote my books more, or put them in hardcover.
If only … I lived in a warmer/colder/sunnier/rainier climate.
If only … I were taller, in better shape, more outgoing, more athletic.
If only … my next-door neighbors were not so noisy, or the faucet wasn’t leaking or the mattress wasn’t lumpy.

You get the idea. It took me a long time to grasp a very obvious point. None of these external things mattered to my happiness very much at all! In fact, they were largely irrelevant. Even if one or more of these things came true, whatever momentary happiness I felt would soon be eroded by the intrusion of new worries and complaints.

When I see people bitterly criticizing public officials and policies in a very personal way, what it tells me is that they believe their happiness would be assured “if only” those officials or policies were changed. They hate Bush (or whomever) because they see him standing in the way of their happiness. He is the one obstacle! Without him, we would be happy! If only he would go away … But “if only” is a formula for frustration, because happiness doesn’t work that way.

A study was done of people who suffered near-total paralysis as a result of catastrophic accidents. Overnight these people went from being fully mobile to being paraplegics. Yet one year later, on average, they rated their overall happiness as roughly the same as it had been before the accident. Some of them even reported being happier now than they were before! How is this possible? It’s possible because happiness is not a function of external circumstances, except in the very short term. You can bet that all of these patients were unhappy and depressed immediately after the accident. But the mood passed and they reverted to their “baseline” level of happiness.

Or how about lottery winners? Most of them end up no happier than they were before they won the jackpot. Sure, they were happy at first. Ecstatic, thrilled! But it passed, and soon they’re back to worrying about the crick in their neck or the stone in their shoe.

The same is true for all of us. We get a great book contract, and we’re happy … for a day or a week. Then the feeling wears off. Our political party wins an election, and we’re happy for a short time. But then they disappoint us, or we stop following the news so much, or something else comes up, and we’re not so happy anymore.

When we invest a lot of energy in external things, we lose sight of what’s internal. As the toads say, there will always be warts and rumors of warts. And there will always be corrupt and incompetent public officials, frustrations and setbacks in our personal and business lives, leaky faucets and lumpy mattresses. Instead of granting these things power, it’s better to render them impotent to affect your mood. “If only that faucet wouldn’t drip …” can easily became, “The faucet is dripping. So what? Does it really affect me in any serious way? Will it matter to me personally, a year from now, or even a week from now? If not, why worry?” And the same is true even for “big” things like the war on terror. “If only we weren’t fighting radical Islam …” But we are, and we will be; the jihadists aren’t giving up any time soon; meanwhile our life is going by. So why not think, “We’re in a war, but how does it stop me from doing and being what I want? It doesn’t? Then why am I letting it get to me?”

Blaming Bush (for instance) because we feel frustrated or unhappy is only a ticket to even more frustration and even more unhappiness. This is true whenever we place the responsibility for our own feelings on anybody or anything outside ourselves. It doesn’t matter whether we’re unhappy “because of” Bush or our publisher or the weather. None of those things is the real cause, only a projection of our own feelings onto the outside world. Happiness comes from within.

Or, to misquote a line in the New Testament: “The cares of the world will come over you, but take heart - you can overcome the world.”

He's right, I'm wrong (I guess)

Still reading Deepak Chopra's new book, Life After Death. In the last 100 pages or so, he makes continual references to the idea that all subatomic particles are blinking in and out of existence all the time. He has written about this before, and I chastised him for it on my old blog, because I thought he was making an error.

It turns out, however, that I am the one who is (probably) wrong.

In a nutshell, my objection to Chopra was that he was confusing "virtual particles" with "real particles," a.k.a. "physical particles."  Virtual particles do indeed wink in and out of existence; they cannot be directly observed, but their effects can be measured. Real or physical particles, on the other hand, persist over time and can be directly observed.

So far, so good, or so I believed. But today, when I did a little more online research into the subject, I found an interesting Wikipedia piece that cast doubt on my views. According to Wiki:

The term [virtual particle] is rather loose and vaguely defined, in the sense that it clings to a rather incorrect view that the world is somehow made up of "real particles": it is not; rather, "real particles" are more accurately understood to be excitations of the underlying quantum fields. As such, virtual particles are also excitations of the underlying fields, but are "temporary" in the sense that they appear in calculations, but never ... as the observable inputs and outputs of the physical process being modeled.... As such, their existence is questionable; however, the term is useful in informal, casual conversation, or in rendering concepts into layman's terms.

I don't pretend to fully grasp this, but as best I can tell, the idea is that all particles, both virtual and real, are actually excitations of quantum fields. As these fields become more excited, more particles appear; as they become less excited, the particles are reduced in number.

Or as a different Web article puts it:

Quantum field theory describes processes in which particles are created or destroyed. When a quantum field becomes more excited, the number of quanta of excitation increases. This occurs because new particle-antiparticle pairs are created from radiation. When a quantum field becomes less excited, the number of quanta of excitation decreases. This is achieved by processes in which particles and antiparticles collide and annihilate one another to produce radiation.

Moreover, the dividing line between real and virtual particles does not seem very clear. Wiki again:

It is sometimes said that all photons are virtual photons. This is because ... the photon was emitted somewhere (say, a distant star), and then is absorbed somewhere else (say a photoreceptor cell in the eyeball). Furthermore, in the photon's frame of reference, no time elapses between emission and absorption. This statement illustrates the difficulty of trying to distinguish between "real" and "virtual" particles as mathematically they are the same objects and it is only our definition of "reality" which is weak here. In practice, a clear distinction can be made: real photons are detected as individual particles in particle detectors, whereas virtual photons are not directly detected; only their average or side-effects may be noticed.

So while the distinction can be made experimentally, it apparently is harder to distinguish between the two types of particles conceptually.

I'm still not sure this justifies Chopra's claim that all particles are blinking in and out of existence continually (and therefore the universe as a whole is continually remaking itself from moment to moment). For one thing, the existence of virtual particles remains theoretical, even though their effects can be mathematically calculated and observed. Possibly there is another explanation for these effects. And even if we have trouble conceptually distinguishing between virtual and real particles, it may not follow that there is no distinction. Maybe we just haven't learned the right way of understanding it yet.

So while I still suspect that Chopra is overreaching a bit, I have to withdraw my earlier claim that he is flat wrong. His position is at least defensible. What remains unclear to me is whether so-called real particles, like electrons, are considered to be permanent or temporary. If they are excitations of a quantum field, one would think they are temporary; yet I was under the impression that the electrons of today are the same ones that existed billions of years ago - which would make them pretty permanent. Perhaps a certain level of quantum excitation is effectively permanent, and so the particles arising from that state are always with us?  

Weak tea

I've read the first 150 pages of Deepak Chopra's hugely hyped book Life After Death: The Burden of Proof. So far, I'm profoundly unimpressed.

Chopra appears to have done virtually no research. Instead he relies almost entirely on Hindu mythology. For all his talk of having an open mind, he never seems to have opened his mind to the possibility that the religious doctrines he learned in childhood might not be the final answer to the mysteries of life and death.

On one of the rare occasions when he cites any empirical evidence - an experiment in mediumship conducted by Gary Schwartz in which Chopra took part - he concedes that he felt he was in contact with his deceased father, but immediately backtracks and says that it may have only been fragments of his father's memory resonating in the Akashic records, or something that like. He is so wedded to the idea that personality and memory dissolve immediately after "crossing over" that he simply ignores any evidence to the contrary.

Maybe the last 100 pages will prove more enlightening, but so far, I think Chopra would have done better to stick to his usual subject matter. For a book subtitled The Burden of Proof, Chopra's Life After Death offers precious little empirical evidence of any kind. The sad thing is that the casual reader unacquainted with 150 years of research in this area will come away from the book with the impression that belief in postmodern survival is supported by nothing but wishful thinking. That this is far from true becomes clear only by reading better books. As excellent starting points, I'd recommend Is There an Afterlife? by David Fontana, Immortal Remains by Stephen E. Braude, and Mediumship and Survival by Alan Gauld.