Michael Prescott's Blog

A message from J.E. Kennedy

J.E. Kennedy wrote me a nice email regarding my blog post on his review of Chris Carter's book, and, at my request, gave me permission to post the entire message.

Consider this post a continuation of "Kennedy v. Carter," published on January 25.

Here's the email:

George Hansen recently suggested that I take a look at the discussion on your blog of my review of Chris Carter’s book. It appears that the discussion has been limited because my review has not been openly available. I have now put it on my website for those who are interested at http://jeksite.org/psi/jp12rev.pdf. In writing the review, I thought the last paragraph was the most important point. In the posted review, I also added a link to a concise summary of my conclusions about paranormal phenomena at http://jeksite.org/psi/conclusions.pdf. I developed that summary because there is such a strong propensity to try to put me (and everyone else) into simplistic, polarized boxes for proponent or skeptic, without recognizing the problematic gray area that has actually dominated psychical research for the past 130 years. As noted in the book review, parapsychology is stuck and will remain stuck until the problematic areas are confronted.

I noticed some comments that parapsychology lacked resources to do good research. That may indicate that those participating in your blog are not aware of George Hansen’s discussion of the decline of parapsychology at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0jMPQnVV-U. In fact, parapsychology had substantial resources and was growing into the 1980s, but was unable to produce results that could maintain the interest of the funding sources. The current lack of resources reflects the failure to produce effective research results when they had the opportunity. This is another manifestation of the failure to confront the problematic properties of psi (as well as possibly poor management of research programs).

Jim Kennedy

Hit the links!

Two links of possible interest.

First, NDE researcher Dr. Melvin Morse is scheduled to go on trial for allegedly "waterboarding" his daughter.

Second, Dr. Patricia Churchland, who has written critically about NDEs, has a rather odd interview with Skeptiko.

Breathing fire

Some early-morning thoughts on the nature of objective and subjective reality ... Some of this material owes a debt to Robert Lanza’s book Biocentrism.

First, definitions. By “objective,” I mean existing independent of consciousness. By “subjective,” I mean existing only with regard to consciousness. And by “consciousness,” I mean any perceiving mentality, not necessarily a human mind.

It has long been understood that certain properties of the physical world are objective in one sense but subjective in another. Color is the example most often cited. Color is objective in the sense that it exists as a particular wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum, and as such, it can be expressed as, or reduced to, pure information; a wavelength can be expressed in purely mathematical terms. On the other hand, what we normally think of as color is subjective in the sense that it is known only to a perceiving consciousness. The color red exists objectively as a point on a spectrum; it exists subjectively as our experience of redness.

Sound is objective in the sense that it exists as a particular wavelength, and subjective in the sense that it requires a perceiver – an auditor – to to be something more than a wavelength. The old puzzler that begins “If a tree falls in the forest ...” can easily be answered if we understand that the sound made by the tree is only a wavelength unless and until it is rendered by consciousness into a subjectively perceived sound.

I would argue that the same logic holds true for any perceptual quality. Take smoothness. Objectively, smoothness is reducible to the chemical constituents of a particular object. Subjectively, smoothness exists only for a perceiving consciousness.

In short, I’d suggest that what we call physical things are simply sensory models – assemblages of perceptual properties such as color, shape, texture, sound, and scent.

This point is controversial. It is often argued that while some properties, such as color, are necessarily subjective, other properties are objective. An apple, for instance, is said to exist objectively in terms of shape, weight, density, etc., but subjectively in terms of properties like color. The argument is that if the perceiver were removed from the scene, the apple would still exist as a round, thick, heavy physical object, but it would not have the property of redness because there would be no visual mechanism to perceive redness.

But I would suggest that, without a perceiving consciousness of some kind, the apple would exist only as its informational properties, which include every aspect of its physical being. It would exist in the same sense that a virtual apple in a computer game exists when the monitor is shut off. All the informational content (Including shape, weight, and density) is there, but it is not being rendered into a sensory model. The computer may continue running the program, and the ongoing career of the virtual apple may be plotted in informational space, but there is no model of the apple on the screen.

So, to my way of thinking, there is no hard and fast distinction between one set of properties and another. The redness of the apple and the weight of the apple are equally subjective in one sense, and equally objective in another. Both properties are objective in that they can be expressed as, or reduced to, mathematics. They are subjective in the sense that they exist for us as aspects of perceptual models.

Stephen Hawking notably asked, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” The idea is that the space-time cosmos can be reduced to mathematics, but what makes the mathematics “come alive” as a physical, experiential reality? I would suggest that consciousness is what breathes fire into the equations. Consciousness makes the mathematics come alive. Each perceiving consciousness renders its own private model of the world and inhabits this mental space. A bumblebee perceives the colors of the flowers it pollinates; these colors are part of its mental space, and would not exist, except as wavelengths, in the absence of the bee’s awareness. Moreover, the flowers themselves, no less than their particular colors, are sensory models that would not exist without a perceiving consciousness, any more than the virtual-reality models of flowers in a computer game would continue to exist (as models) if the render engine stopped functioning.

It is possible to frame this argument in terms of certain interpretations of quantum physics, by claiming that if the “collapse of the wave function” requires an observer, then nothing can assume definitive physical form until it has been perceived. An objection to this line of reasoning is that, according to the theory of quantum decoherence, it is possible for the wave function to collapse even when no observer is present. A counter-argument is that decoherence merely expands quantum superposition, but does not actually resolve it until an observer enters the picture. In any event, the bottom line is that decoherence, like any other theory, can be confirmed only by observation; in the absence of observation, it remains only a theory, and as such is reducible to equations and formulas; it’s observation that breathes fire into the equations.

Note that according to this viewpoint, reality is both objective and subjective. The underlying informational content, which corresponds roughly to Immanuel Kant’s noumenal realm, is objective because it exists independent of an observer. The assemblages of properties as sensory models that constitute what we call physical reality, corresponding to Kant’s phenomenal realm, are subjective, because these models exist only in the context of an observing consciousness. In fact, consciousness plays a more active role than the word “observation” would suggest; consciousness serves to render the information into perceptual models. All physical reality is experiential reality, and there can be no experience without an experiencer. A universe devoid of consciousness would not be a universe, in the sense of a space-time cosmos, at all. It would be a sea of information, endlessly processed, but never rendered into sensory models. It might also be said to exist in a state of perpetually unresolved superposition, if an observer is necessary to collapse the wave function.

It seems to me that this general approach avoids the problems of both physicalism and idealism. Physicalism interprets reality purely in physical terms, and leaves no room for consciousness except as an epiphenomenon. Idealism interprets reality purely in terms of consciousness, and tends toward solipsism. Physicalism downplays or ignores the central fact of our existence — namely, our own consciousness. Idealism suggests that everything is subjective, and that there can be no such thing as objective reality or objective truth.

The approach outlined here, however, leaves room for both subjective consciousness and objective reality. Our personal mental space is modeled by our own consciousness and is thus subjective, but it is grounded in an informational matrix that is independent of us and common to all observers. Whether reality is ultimately dualistic (information and consciousness) or monistic (information existing within consciousness, or consciousness emerging out of information) is a deeper question. I think I would need to have my morning coffee before I tackle that one ...

Kennedy v. Carter

The title of this post may sound like a debate between two Democratic presidents, but actually it’s all about psi.

George P. Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, recently sent me a highly critical review of Chris Carter’s book Science and Psychic Phenomena. Written by J.E. Kennedy, it appears in Vol. 76, No. 2 of the Journal of Parapsychology. The review is available online, but most of it is behind a pay wall (though I guess you could sign up for a free trial to access the whole thing).

Kennedy finds Carter’s tone overly combative and absolutist:

This book presents a very judgmental black and white perspective of parapsychology: Virtually everything skeptics say is wrong, and virtually everything proponents of psi say is right.

He places particular emphasis on Carter’s discussion of a meta-analysis of autoganzfeld (ESP) experiments. In Kennedy’s telling, it is impossible to objectively decide between the meta-analysis performed by skeptics, which yielded results no better than chance, and the meta-analysis performed by parapschologists, which yielded results significantly better than chance. He writes:

[Carter] claims the nonsignificant meta-analysis results by Milton and Wiseman occurred because they "botched their statistical analysis of the ganzfeld experiments" (p. 99). According to Carter, the statistical mistakes included not doing an analysis of direct hits that pooled all the experiments and using a cutoff time that excluded a certain study.

However, these controversial decisions are examples of the large number of decisions that must be made in a post hoc meta-analysis, and they show why post hoc meta-analyses are intrinsically unconvincing for controversial topics. The many methodological decisions for post hoc meta-analyses have no clearly right or wrong answer, and different decisions produce different results. For example, the analysis of pooled direct hits is not a standard meta-analysis technique, but it can be applied in some parapsychological meta-analyses and has sometimes been reported as a secondary analysis. Carter's opinion that it is the correct analysis appears to be largely based on the fact that it happens to give an outcome that he prefers in this case.

The large number of methodological decisions for meta-analyses, like other types of post hoc analyses, provides great opportunity for researchers to consciously or unconsciously bias the results. The endless debates about different possible statistical tests, inclusion cutoff criteria, data trimming, data transformations, and so forth, have no convincing resolutions. My experience working in medical research for the past two decades has been that researchers increasingly recognize that meta-analyses cannot be used to resolve controversial issues (Kennedy, 2006). Different conclusions from the same set of data have been reported in medicine as well as parapsychology (Kennedy, 2004).

Now, I don’t know exactly how Carter presents this subject in the revised version of his book, because the version I own is the original one, which was published in 2007 under the title Parapsychology and the Skeptics. But in the original edition, at least, his argument (which is pretty standard among parapsychologists) goes like this:

The year 1999 was marked by a challenge to Honorton’s claims of replication with the autoganzfeld. The challenge appeared in the form of a short article by psychologists Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman, in which they presented the results of thirty ganzfeld studies completed since 1987 ...

These 30 studies were retrieved from 14 papers written by 10 different principal authors from seven laboratories… The combined hit rate for these 30 studies is 27.5% … At the end of their brief article Milton and Weissman concluded: "The new ganzfeld studies show a near-zero effect size and a statistically nonsignificant overall accumulation …"

The problem with the Milton and Weissman study was that it simply lumped all studies together, regardless of whether the status of each study was confirmatory or exploratory. In other words, Milton and Wiseman made no attempt to determine the degree to which the individual studies complied with the standard ganzfeld protocol …

[In the Journal of Parapsychology, parapsychologists] Bem, Palmer, and Broughton wrote: "… several studies contributing negative z scores to the analysis [results were less than expected by chance] had used procedures that deviated markedly from the standard ganzfeld protocol. Such a development is neither bad nor unexpected. Many psi researchers believe that the reliability of the basic procedure is sufficiently well-established to warrant using it as a tool for the further exploration of psi. Thus, rather than continuing to conduct exact replications, they have been modifying the procedure and extending it into unknown territory. Not unexpectedly, such deviations from exact replication are at increased risk for failure. For example, rather than using visual stimuli, Willin modified the ganzfeld procedure to test whether senders could communicate musical targets to receivers. They could not. When such studies are thrown into an undifferentiated meta-analysis, the overall effect size is thereby reduced, and perversely, the ganzfeld procedure becomes a victim of its own success."

Bem, Palmer and Broughton set out to test their hypothesis that the decline in average scoring was due to studies that were meant to be exploratory rather than confirmatory. Accordingly, three independent raters unfamiliar with the recent ganzfeld studies, and unaware of each study outcome, were asked to rate the degree to which each of the recent studies deviated from the standard ganzfeld protocol …

The raters assigned a rank to each of the forty studies … The ranking ranged from “1” to “7”, with a rank of “7” indicating the highest degree of adherence to standard protocol as described in two articles written by Honorton in the early 1990s.

As hypothesized, hit rates were significantly correlated with the degree to which the experimental procedures adhered to the standard protocol. If we define as “standard” those studies that rank above the midpoint of the scale (4), then the standard replications obtained an overall hit rate of 31.2 percent; the non-standard studies obtained a hit rate of only 24%.

In light of this, let us return to Kennedy’s objection. Again, he wrote:

The large number of methodological decisions for meta-analyses, like other types of post hoc analyses, provides great opportunity for researchers to consciously or unconsciously bias the results. The endless debates about different possible statistical tests, inclusion cutoff criteria, data trimming, data transformations, and so forth, have no convincing resolutions.

I realize that the statistical issues here are extremely complex, and I'm certainly not qualified to address them. But on the surface of it, it appears that Carter has gotten the better of this argument. The issue of consciously or unconsciously biasing the results seems to be adequately addressed by the parapsychologists’ decision to reevaluate the studies using raters unfamiliar with both the the experiments and the results. There can hardly have been either conscious or unconscious bias on the part of people who knew nothing about the work in question. And while Kennedy makes it sound as if the criteria for inclusion or exclusion in the meta-analysis were purely arbitrary and endlessly debatable, it seems clear enough that some commonsense rules could be applied – and in fact were applied by the team of “blind” raters who ranked the studies. In particular, it should be obvious that autoganzfeld tests focusing on the reception of visual stimuli ought to be separate from autoganzfeld tests focusing on the reception of audio (musical) stimuli.

Kennedy’s larger point no doubt has merit; I’m sure there are many problems, gray areas, and unresolved questions involving meta-analysis. But in the case of the autoganzfeld meta-analysis, it seems to me that the parapsychologists adequately addressed the skeptics’ null results.

As for Carter’s combative tone, it’s not necessarily the approach I would use – I’m more comfortable with the humorous, low-key approach taken by Greg Taylor in his book Stop Worrying! There Probably Is an Afterlife — but it surely has its place in the debate, especially at a time when some skeptics are becoming increasingly militant (see, for instance, the kerfluffle surrounding Rupert Sheldrake’s contribution to the TED lecture series). Sometimes it's best to talk softly; other times, it can be more effective to shout.

===

In other book-related news, I've been reading the opening part of First Sight: ESP and Parapsychology in Everyday Life, by James C. Carpenter. Here's part of the book's description:

Often seen as supernatural, unpredictable, illusory and possibly dangerous, ESP, telepathy, clairvoyance and other parapsychological activities are actually happening all the time and help us make sense of everyday experiences ...

Drawing upon a broad array of studies in contemporary psychology, the author integrates a new model for understanding these unusual abilities ... In doing so, he illustrates how the field of parapsychology, which, historically, has been riddled with confusion, skepticism and false claims, can move from the edges of science to its center ... Further study of this theory is likely to lead to a “technology” of parapsychological processes while drastically revising our conception of the science of the mind toward a new science more humane and more replete with possibility than we have imagined in the past.

The book is well written, and Carpenter seems very knowledegable. And any book that makes such extravagant claims deserves a hearing. So I intend to read the whole thing, even though it irks me to spend $28 for an ebook when my own titles are going for only three bucks apiece!

The big con

Roger said that he didn't know if he could believe in God. He had his doubts. But toward the end, something really interesting happened. That week before Roger passed away, I would see him and he would talk about having visited this other place. I thought he was hallucinating. I thought they were giving him too much medication. But the day before he passed away, he wrote me a note: "This is all an elaborate hoax." I asked him, "What's a hoax?" And he was talking about this world, this place. He said it was all an illusion. I thought he was just confused. But he was not confused. He wasn't visiting heaven, not the way we think of heaven. He described it as a vastness that you can't even imagine. It was a place where the past, present, and future were happening all at once. ["Roger Ebert's Wife on His Final Moments" - Esquire]

I find this little story extremely affecting, and Roger Ebert’s quote —“This is all an elaborate hoax” — very powerful. I think he was on to something profound, something that other people have stumbled on, as well.

The more deeply I look into these things, the more apparent it is to me that the physical world is not the whole story. This theme runs through a wide stream of philosophy, going back at least as far as Plato’s allegory of the cave, running through Kant’s distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal, and persisting today in certain interpretations of quantum physics, such as David Bohm’s model of a holographic universe.

It seems to be a common theme of great writers, also. Meville, for instance:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? [Ahab in Moby-Dick]

Or Shakespeare:

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. [Prospero in The Tempest]

It strikes me as interesting that many people report the experience, especially when they are growing up, of perceiving their life as a movie or a story. I remember feeling this way myself, at times. I also remember talking to a friend of mine in high school, who confided in me that he often thought of his own life as a novel. This sense of the basic unreality of life — its made-up-ness, so to speak— tends to fade as we grow older, but some people never forget it entirely.

Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout
The pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
And though she feels as if she's in a play
She is anyway. [The Beatles, “Penny Lane”]

Mystics like Eckhart Tolle are probably getting at the same idea when they speak disparagingly of the “drama” of our lives, the Sturm und Drang of our daily existence, which is dominated by ego-directed conflicts and anxieties. To move past the ego is to see the drama from an outsider’s perspective, the vantage point of “the witness,” the still, small voice within us that remains aloof from everyday neurotic worries and fears — the voice, I think, of the higher self.

If physical reality is only a kind of made-up drama, then it would stand to reason that our liberation from the physical – i.e., death – would be experienced as a translation to a higher and “realer” form of reality. And this is precisely how many people who have had near-death experiences do describe it. They say that ordinary physical reality seems mundane and dull compared to the expanded consciousness and hyper-aware perception they remember from their out-of-body adventure. While the afterlife is often compared to a dream, people who have tasted death tell us that it is this life that's the dream.

Row, row, row your boat,
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream. [campfire song]

Recently I saw a small child in a pizzeria who had just learned how to throw things on the floor. Predictably, he was indulging in this newfound power, joyfully tossing one toy after another off the table, much to the consternation of his mother. This behavior can, of course, be interpreted in terms of developing motor skills, and this interpretation is undoubtedly true as far as it goes. But it occurred to me that it is not too different from the behavior one might expect if one were, say, to take control of an avatar in an unfamiliar computer game. The very first thing one might do in that situation is to try out the character’s moves by learning to operate its limbs and navigate the (virtual) environment. One's first experimental moves would necessarily be clumsy and pointless — merely disjointed attempts to get a sense of how to work the mechanism — not unlike a toddler’s clumsy efforts at controlling the unfamiliar avatar that is his own body. (It also occurred to me that a spirit, having spent some timeless period in a realm of thought-forms and relatively unmediated consciousness, might take a certain pleasure in being able to grab an object and smash it — to make a real impact on its physical environs.)

Naturally, the attempt to figure out exactly how this all works – to come up with a Theory of Everything that will make sense of it all and offer a clearly defined model and mechanism – is intellectually absorbing. But I suspect that the details will be well beyond us for the foreseeable future. The whys and wherefores of the system are probably far too complex to be compacted into a form that our incarnate minds, operating largely within the limits of our neurological systems, can handle.

And maybe the details don’t matter too much, except as a matter of intellectual curiosity, which amounts to little more than intellectual pride. What seems to be important is not knowing all the ins and outs, or being able to model the system in some scientifically compelling way, but rather to grasp what Roger Ebert grasped: “This is all an elaborate hoax.”

Once we know that, we're in on the secret, and perhaps we can start to smile a little at the Big Con.

Rise of the robots

Roger Knights pointed me to a piece by David Gelernter that's been receiving quite a bit of attention online. It's "The Closing of the Scientific Mind," and it covers the rise of a philosophy Gelernter characterizes as "roboticism," a sort of transhumanism that aims to dispense with all distinctively human qualities and transform humans into cyborgs. It's supported by currently trendy ideas in the philosophy of mind that dismiss subjective experience as an illusion. Gelernter is having none of this, and he makes a good case for the transcendent importance of our subjectivity and our essential humanness.

The piece is too long and complex to excerpt, so I'll just wait here while you go read the whole thing.

(Waits, humming "Greensleeves.")

Okay, are you back? Now, I think ... Hold on. You didn't really read it, did you? You just kept right on reading this post.

That won't work. Go off and actually read the darn thing this time.

(Waits, tapping foot impatiently.)

There. Now that you've really read it, I have just a couple of comments of a critical nature.

First, though Gelernter is admirably unafraid to reject the crude physicalism of people who say there is no such thing as consciousness and that subjectivity is an illusion (an illusion experienced by whom, pray tell?), he still seems somewhat committed to materialism in a weak form. That is, he asserts without argument, as a self-evident truth, that minds are dependent on brains: "no mind can exist apart from the brain that 'embodies' it." He thus seems to tacitly assume that consciousness ultimately arises from matter as an emergent property of physical systems; and to this extent he is embracing the same position he caricatures as the theory of the Origins of Gravy (that somehow, when you cook a roast, the gravy "just comes").

I would suggest that minds depend on brains in order to operate in the physical sphere, but that the extinction of the brain does not mean the extinction of the mind. That Gelernter himself believes in personal extinction is evident from his argument that religion will have to become more this-worldly and less centered on an afterlife. It seems likely that he takes this position because he finds the idea of an afterlife untenable. What makes it untenable for him, I suspect, is his assumption that there can be no minds without brains.

The other point I'd make is that Gelernter's diagnosis of the problem is perhaps more astute than his remedy, which involves a revival of traditional religion along more socially conscious lines. I am doubtful that traditional Christianity and Judaism (or other traditional religions) can really be retrofitted to address modern doubts and questions. A robust answer to roboticism probably requires a new approcah, one that makes use of empirical evidence to buttress its philosophical assertions. Predictably, I think this kind of evidence can be found in the study of psi, mediumship, past-life recall, near-death experiences, and related phenomena. The encyclopedic Irreducible Mind offers a compendium of evidence of this sort, much of it published in mainstream (not parapsychology) peer-reviewed journals.

For me, this path, first marked out by the early psychical researchers like Myers, Lodge, Hodsgon, and William James, offers greater promise than reliance on millennia-old sacred texts, no matter how creatively reinterpreted.

I'd also suggest that the computational view of the mind, summarized by Gelernter, can perhaps be combated most effectively by looking at the space-time universe itself as the product of information processing - an approach that makes information, rather than matter or energy, into the ground of (physical) being, and arguably opens the door to a powerful role for consciousness in "rendering" these data into the images that we call sensory reality.

In that connection, let me point out that computer scientist Brian Whitworth has edited and simplified the introductory chapter on virtual-reality theory at his website. Some of the later, more technical chapters have left me behind, and I doubt he would be interested in my freewheeling speculations on consciousness, but as best I can tell from my layman's perspective, his bold and creative approach is yielding some provocative results.

Dream a little dream

This is just something I've been thinking about. I have no idea if it has any validity.

We sometimes hear that, when dreaming, our "astral body" leaves the physical body and explores a nonphysical plane. Our dreams are said to be garbled recollections of this exploratory activity.

In this respect, it's interesting to look at some of the most common dreams. For instance, many people have dreams in which they are flying through the air. This type of travel is consistent, at least, with an out-of-body experience; OBErs often say that they float weightlessly, or flash from one location to another at the speed of thought.

For my part, I've often had dreams that involve a sort of levitation. Sometimes I dream that by concentrating very hard, I'm able to lift myself off the ground and float up to the ceiling. Amusingly, I tend to bob up and down, lightly bouncing off the ceiling, while exploring the room from that vantage point. I often find myself impressed at how easy it is to do this, and I wonder why it ever seemed difficult.

In other dreams, I've imagined myself floating down the street, surrounded by other people who are similarly levitating. In one vivid dream, I effortlessly rose up over the trees, and was then able to step from treetop to treetop, kind of bouncing along in languid slow-motion.

The most obviously OBE-like dream I've had involved my rising up out of my sleeping body and then floating up the stairs to the second level of my home. Was it a true OBE, or only a dream? I don't know, but it was certainly vivid.

I find that I often have dreams involving travel by plane, train, or auto. The airplane dreams are especially interesting, in that the plane (usually a big jetliner) is flying low to the ground, swooping over telephone poles and trees. There is no sense of danger. Again, this could possibly suggest a memory of some unusual form of movement. The idea of travel, in and of itself, is consistent with moving from one plane of reality to another. Some hospice nurses have reported that patients in their last days will report vivid impressions of an impending trip by plane, ship, etc., suggesting that the subconscious can interpret a physical change like death (or leaving the body) in terms of conventional travel.

A very commonly reported dream is the one where you suddenly find yourself naked in public. The usual psychological explanation is that you have a deep-seated fear of personal exposure or public embarrassment, which comes out symbolically. This probably is part of it. But I wonder if the dream could also represent the ego's muddled interpretation of an out-of-body experience in which you suddenly notice that your "astral body" is unclothed, or at least not clothed in the usual way.

Then there is the old "oh my God, I'm back in high school" dream. No doubt it reflects, in part, unpleasant memories of one's formative years; but could it also represent a confused recollection of some sort of a learning experience conducted on the "astral plane"? After all, near-death experiencers, mediumistic communicators, and patients hypnotically regressed to a point supposedly "between lives" have reported that continuing education (so to speak) is a large part of their agenda.

At the very least, it is unusual that dreams about flying in levitating, traveling to new places, finding yourself physically changed (naked), and attending classes would be so common. Why these themes, and not others? And what is really going on when we're asleep?

Those gnarly Gnostics

Gnosticism is a very old and complicated spiritual tradition, and I don't claim to be well-versed in it. But as I understand it, the essence of the Gnostic position is that our universe was not created by the one true God, but by a lower-level deity, the demiurge, who messed things up. This explains the imperfections of earthly life. It also casts doubt on the beliefs of most mainstream religious persons, who, according to Gnosticism, worship a mere imposter.

Now, I don’t buy the idea that some inept, delusional godling created the space-time cosmos. But even if the idea lacks metaphysical validity, it may hold some psychological and even historical truth.

At least as far as the Christian tradition is concerned, the Gnostic position seems to be, in part, in response to the willful and capricious God of the Hebrew Bible, who is always smiting his enemies, prescribing arbitrary rules, and blustering belligerently. Yes, there’s a more positive side to job, especially in the writings of prophets like Amos and Isaiah, but the negatives are all too clear. And some of those negatives carried over to the New Testament, as well.

If we see the God of the Old Testament as the supreme ruler of the universe, we may find him baffling and inexplicable. But suppose we view him in another way - as a projection or expression of the human ego. Suddenly he becomes a lot more understandable - even "relatable," in the parlance of scriptwriters today.

In this respect, the Gnostic viewpoint may actually make sense. It's not God who is childish, dishonest, destructive, and delusional; it's the ego. The Biblical God displays these qualities only because he is drawn in the image of the ego.

This notion raises a further possibility, at least to those who are open to the idea of channeling and even materialization or direct-voice mediumship. It has sometimes been observed that descriptions of early “face-to-face” encounters with God (notably, Moses’ experiences in the Tabernacle) match standard accounts of séance phenomena – a dark, enclosed space; a mysterious disembodied voice; a particular individual with inborn intuitive talent, who is indispensable to the phenomena.

It is at least possible that such experiences were part of an unbroken line of shamanistic traditions extending back into prehistory, and that such communions with the spirit world were originally understood as encounters with spirit guides (one’s ancestors, a departed chieftain or teacher, or some legendary figure), not with an all-powerful God. After all, it seems likely that the earliest religions recognized a multiplicity of spiritual authorities and were not monotheistic. Some residue of this tradition is found in the Bible itself – for instance, in the word Elohim, translated today as God, but literally meaning gods or spirits. It is also found in the plethora of Catholic saints with their various functions and intercessory formulas. The idea of a single transcendent God may have been a relatively late development, while the original tradition (still preserved to some extent in folk beliefs, spiritualism, and New Age ideas) may have grown out of séances in which discarnate spirits were channeled or manifested.

In this scenario, the utterances of “God” would actually have been the words of discarnate entities who were not necessarily any more intellectually, morally, or spiritually advanced than the flesh-and-blood audience they addressed. It is also possible, of course, that the medium’s own ego got mixed up in the communications, and that the messages were adjusted to suit the propagandistic needs of the ruling authorities.

So when the Gnostics dismissed Yahweh as a childish, delusional sub-deity, they may have been on to something – not because the actual Mind behind the cosmos fits that unflattering description, but because the all-too-human mentalities of lower-level spirits may have been misinterpreted as the word of God. The Gnostics, with their sophisticated Platonic understanding, may have seen through this historic error – and ticked off a lot of orthodox believers in the process.

Finally, there’s another way of looking at the Gnostic position – a way that’s even more speculative than the foregoing.

Suppose we accept the Kantian idea that the human mind is, in a sense, a co-creator of space-time reality – that “true” reality exists in a nonphysical realm (of pure information?) and the consciousness imposes the properties of space and time on this spaceless, timeless source. From this perspective, consciousness could be seen as the demiurge – the being that participates in creating the universe, and imagines itself (in its egotism) to be uniquely powerful and productive.

In other words, the childish, delusional pseudo-God of the gnostics is … us.

If there’s any truth to this, then the imperfections of earthly life can perhaps be traced to errors (or suboptimal choices) that we ourselves make in “rendering” the source code into the physical environment we navigate. Conceivably a better understanding of our rendering capabilities would lead to better results – as is perhaps the case with spiritual masters who are said to be able to cure illness, manipulate matter and energy, and transcend ordinary physical limits. Perhaps if we really understood and mastered our deepest capabilities, we would finally have eaten the fruit of the forbidden tree and “become as gods, knowing good and evil.”

And knowing (gnosis) is what Gnosticism is all about.