Michael Prescott's Blog

Guest post: The death of the Western Myth and the cold comfort of “belief” thereafter

Matt Rouge is back with his second guest post. Take it away, Matt!

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In my first post here, I wrote:

[In the Mist, t]here is no one to confirm that, yes, one is just so right about everything. Indeed, the contradictions and issues one perceives impugn one’s ability to sort them all out, to paint the Big Picture once and for all. Should Michael permit, it is lack of ease and comfort in the Mist that I would like to explore in my next guest post.

Thanks, Michael, for permitting!

For more background, please read the above post, but I am going to get right into things here. One tenet of the Skeptic (capitalized per Roger’s excellent recent guest post) mythos is that “belief”¹ is, as Marx characterized it, the opiate of the people. Thus, if we believe in God, we desire the comfort of a Sky Father in benign control of things, and if we believe in the Afterlife, we do so merely because we don’t want to die forever. Skeptics on the other hand, thanks to their superior intellectual constitution, are able to accept the harsh truth that God and the Afterlife do not exist.²

Yet, as I asserted in my preceding post, Skeptics are just as much in the Chamber of Maiden-Thought (and outside the Mist) as the religious fundamentalists and other “believers” they excoriate. Why? Because they have not accepted the death of the Western Myth.

The Western Myth³ is a concept I am introducing here, and I think it’s an essential one. Very much necessary yet currently lacking in the discourse of our culture, indeed of our world. What is this myth? On the surface, it is the strong, confident bones of Abrahamic religion, which includes Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.⁴ To wit, there is a God, He created, knows, and understands all, which in turn means that all is understood, known, and created with a specific and perfect intention. Things are designed to work right, and when they don’t, that is our fault. In other words, when things go wrong, it is because we are sinners. Simple.

Thus, if you are gay, that’s your lifestyle choice, and you are a sinner, inasmuch as God didn’t create gay people, and He didn’t design people to be gay. If you stray in your marriage, you are a sinner, inasmuch as God designed the institution of marriage to work; He designed monogamy to work. There ought to be peace, yet due to bad people, there exist crime, war, and every ill of society. But don’t call it flaws in human nature; call it original sin.⁵ Or maybe Satan or Iblis is tempting you. Someone. Something.

Ah, but it’s so easy to ditch all this simplistic thinking, isn’t it? Just stop believing in those silly religions! Then we’ll all be thinking as correct as can be, right? Right?!

Not so fast. However much we wish to reject the surface beliefs of the Western Myth, its underlying assumptions are likely to stick around and mislead us. Let’s look at some examples:

• Freud was as big an atheist as they come, but he saw people more or less as perfect blank slates from birth, mentally. If you have a mental problem or illness, it’s due to things that were done to you. Probably by your mother in a time you can’t remember. In other words, it’s the fault of humans. Genes… what are those?
• Marx was as big an atheist as they come, but he saw class struggle and its end result as a historical necessity. Communism was meant to happen, and it would work. Later he would be treated as a virtual god in a secular religion.
• Similarly but at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Ayn Rand was as big an atheist as they come, but she saw her “objectivism” as being simply the truth, and so do her followers today. They believe that if government would only get out of the way and let the winners win and the producers produce, we would be living in a Libertarian utopia. It would just work.
• In the West and East, on the Left and Right, there has always been the desire to see leaders as right by nature. Comrade Stalin is just right. Chairman Mao is just right—consult the Little Red Book for details. The Fürher is just right. The Party is just right. The guru is just right. The Pope is infallible when he speaks ex cathedra. The Bible, al-Quran, Book of Mormon, and so on are infallible. The Constitution of the United States is a document inspired by God and should be upheld at all costs. The examples of this type of thinking are endless.
• It’s not just the big issues of politics and religion. There is a tendency in matters of health to see the body as inherently healthy—if only people wouldn’t screw it up. Do you have diabetes or heart disease, or are you overweight? Didn’t you know that the right diet and exercise prevent that kind of thing! And if the conventional wisdom doesn’t work for you, then a vegan/low-carb/paleo/gluten-free diet will do the trick, since it just works.⁶
• Shall we delve into self-help and management advice? Let’s not. Suffice it to say there are a million books prescribing some type of mind hack or management method that is the way toward ultimate success. Once you know the truth, it just works. Of course, if it doesn’t work, that means that you didn’t follow the method correctly.
• Here’s one more. I think the whole global warming/climate change things is a good example of the Western Myth at work in a presumably secular but actually quasi-religious manner. There is a right way for the global climate to be, but we humans have sinned by producing greenhouse gases, and thus we will pay for our sins through a global climate catastrophe that will probably make us go extinct. We can only expiate our sins through the penance of drastically reduced carbon output.

Thus, the Western Myth is about much more than believing in a capital G “God”; it’s an approach to ontology (reality), epistemology (knowledge), eschatology (final destiny of things), and indeed all of the big questions we humans face. Ultimately, it is an approach to things that keeps us in the Chamber of Maiden-Thought and out of the Mist. I would say the approach comprises the following three beliefs:

1. The answers to all questions are known by God or an authority figure. At the very least, all things are knowable.
2. There is way to live (or do anything) that will result in optimal results. Things only go wrong when we violate this system.
3. There are no contradictions. If something seems to violate the belief system, the person who experiences this perception is incorrect.

Skeptics think they have escaped the Western Myth by denying the theistic belief system of the West, but they have merely traded one surface for another while maintaining the underlying approach. They’ve repainted that ugly old Chevy, but the engine and transmission are the same. To wit:

1. Science has discovered everything of importance thus far, and it is our only tool for discovering anything of importance. It hasn’t figured out everything, but in time it probably will.
2. If people would simply give up their stupid religions and superstitions, we’d be living in a perfect world, or at least a much better one. Rational thinking is the key to peace and prosperity.
3. Any phenomenon we say doesn’t exist, doesn’t exist. Each and every example to the contrary is the result of a hoax, hallucination, or misperception.

It is true that Skeptics hold beliefs that would pain most people, such as the belief that there is no God or Afterlife. They feel that they are therefore cognitively superior to those who don’t have the fortitude to embrace their surface belief system. Yet, as inheritors of the Western Myth, they have established a world that is as cognitively neat and trim as that of the most believing fundamentalist.

A further error they commit is the one referenced by the title of this post: they assume that people who have not embraced their surface belief system live in comfort within their beliefs. Yet giving up the Western Myth means traveling out of the Chamber of Maiden-Thought and into the Mist, where ease and comfort are not to be found.

As for myself, I have read about NDEs (near-death experiences), read transcripts of ADCs (after-death communications), and had many spiritual experiences of my own. Yet the vast majority of the accounts I have read do not indicate the presence of an ultimate controlling authority, nor have my own experiences revealed one. Put simply, people having near-death experiences do not shake hands with a God who then tells them “how it all works.”⁷

I will not say that the accounts bring no comfort at all; indeed they do. They indicate to me that there is a very good chance that I will not cease to exist when I die, that all the effort I am expending now to gain knowledge and grow as a person will not disappear in an instant. But the fact that these accounts bring some degree of comfort does not bring comfort itself. ADCs and my own spiritual experiences mesh nicely with the information presented in NDEs, and such meshing is good, it gives credibility to the “big picture” that begins to form, but it too brings only some comfort and not comfort itself.

Indeed, I remain in a state of discomfort and yes, to some extent, fear, for one must consider again the nature of the Mist, per Keats:

[A]mong the effects this breathing is father of is that tremendous one of sharpening one's vision into the nature and heart of Man—of convincing one's nerves that the World is full of misery and Heartbreak, Pain, sickness and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken'd and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a Mist—We are now in that state—We feel the burden of the Mystery.

Put another way, when we are open to what we see and all its complications and apparent contradictions, we go “down the rabbit hole,” as Alice did in Lewis Carroll’s tale. For example, most NDEs are pleasant, but how do we deal with negative NDEs? In most NDEs, people present accurate information (i.e., they see the living as living and the dead as dead). How do we deal with the rare ones that do not? Most NDEs are fairly consistent in how they present God/Spirit/Source. How do we deal with those that present a specific religion as being true? Do we simply ignore the cases we don’t like as outliers, or do we try to integrate them somehow?

Here’s another example, a big one, at least to me. I say we need to be open to all phenomena, a principle that Skeptics of necessity must violate. Thus, I am open to UFO and related phenomena. I think there is absolutely no way that all of the cases come down to hoaxes, hallucinations, and misperceptions. Yet I have absolutely no idea of how to integrate the phenomena into my belief system. There are many arguments against UFOs being actual extraterrestrial craft, and one of the most famous of UFO researchers, Jacques Vallée, believes firmly that they are not. Per Wikipedia,

Vallée proposes that there is a genuine UFO phenomenon, partly associated with a form of non-human consciousness that manipulates space and time. The phenomenon has been active throughout human history, and seems to masquerade in various forms to different cultures. In his opinion, the intelligence behind the phenomenon attempts social manipulation by using deception on the humans with whom they interact.

Very well. If we suppose that he is correct, then how do we integrate that into a Universe in which NDEs are also true? If this non-human consciousness has some power over us, then what prevents it from having infinite power, and so on?

This to me is the most tantalizing fact: Regardless of how we feel about all the phenomena, and regardless of how contradictory or lacking in order we perceive them to be, we still exist in a Reality that is stable enough for us to exist and think about these matters. As a corollary of this fact, we likewise know that there is not a power in the Universe with the will and capability of destroying the Universe and life, since we are here.

Based on this fact and the phenomena I have perceived, I intuit the intention for us to understand Reality, which is in turn undermined by the intention (not necessarily a different intention!) for us not to understand Reality completely, or for Reality not to be completely understandable in the first place. It is this contradictory nature of things that occupies my brain on a daily basis and seems to threaten at times to burn out the neural circuits.

This approach within the Mist directly contradicts the Western Myth, which explicitly holds that the answers are known and contradiction is impossible. This approach I take seems to me correct, and it does give the comfort of feeling I understand something instead of nothing, yet the comfort is ultimately cold. The machine is beautifully designed and capable of efficient and cost-effective production, but there is always a wrench thrown in the works.

The Skeptics think that giving up “God” and the afterlife is the big challenge that people must face and will eventually face, since that’s just right, and the right thing will happen given enough time. But it is not so. The big challenge is to acknowledge the phenomena in all their complexity and let the Western Myth die. To leave the Chamber of Maiden-Thought as a species and go bravely into the Mist.

 

¹Scare quotes because Skeptics use the word “belief” yet it does not operate in the mind as they think it does.

²Skeptics are correct that many beliefs are held out of a desire to assuage our fears and find comfort. They tend, however, to reason fallaciously that whatever belief brings us comfort must be “too good to be true.” Skeptics also correctly point out that religion and superstition bring people a great deal of fear, so in any case it’s difficult to sort out exactly why people believe as they do. It’s no doubt a combination of wishful thinking, social pressures, and the actual truth of many of the things believed. Skeptics are blind to the fact that they too are affected by wishful thinking (i.e., that each and every example of the paranormal is easily dismissible bunkum) and social pressure.

³I am distinguishing the Western Myth from the Eastern Myth (and other belief systems, such as African, Native American, etc.), although of course they share many things in common. Western culture has been dominated by the notion of a unitary, omniscient, omnipotent “God” who created all and therefore intended all in a way that the East has not. Nevertheless, owing to what may be called “human nature,” the East has produced a similar belief in infallible authority, such as the omniscient Buddha. As humans, we really want to believe that the answers are known—if not by us, then by somebody.

⁴There may be a tendency these days to think of Islam as a belief system of the Middle East and East, but it is very much comes from the same geographical and intellectual region as Judaism and Christianity. Consider that Thomas Aquinas cited Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who wrote extensive commentaries on Aristotle, and the picture becomes a bit more clear.

⁵I happen to think that the doctrine of original sin is pretty smart in essence. There is something inherently broken in everything, though not for reasons that Christianity would like to recognize. More on this perhaps at a later date …

⁶It’s more complex than this, of course, now that we understand genetics a bit, but there is still a tendency to see a particular diet or health regime as the way to health.

⁷This is not to say they receive no information at all about the working of Reality; they absolutely do. But the information they receive, outlier cases excepted, does not confirm the beliefs of any particular religion, nor does it confirm the existence of a unitary, all-controlling “God,” nor does it deliver a complete explanation of things. I think the teachings of Seth are a good example of information that jibes well with NDEs and explains a lot while shying away from a definitive explication of “how it all works.”

Addendum to footnote 7:

In reviewing this post, Michael wrote, “Some NDEs do involve the feeling that total knowledge of reality is being imparted, and that it all makes sense, it's all part of a master plan, every smallest detail happens for a reason, etc. I believe some other transcendent mystical experiences also take this form. Of course the NDErs (and others) find it impossible to convey more than a fraction of this infinite knowledge in words upon their return, but they do claim to have seen the whole plan.”

In response, I would say first that the nature and content of the “master plan” that is presented or experienced by NDErs and mystics seems to be significantly different than the nature and content of the Western Myth. From my reading, they see a reality (a kind of final or ultimate state of things) that is unitary and non-hierarchical and in which all of elements (people, spiritual entities, etc.) come together in a fully organic and autonomous fashion. The eschatology of the Western Myth is much more primitive than this: the righteous with God in Heaven, the evildoers in hell, and a “God” who has manipulated the pawns from start to finish. Forgive my negative characterization, but it’s definitely not to my taste, nor does it seem to be true based on observation of the world and history.

Further, NDErs and mystical experiencers describe, in my general interpretation, a kind of “ultimate rightness to things” that vastly transcends the concepts and content of the Western Myth. To cite one of my own spiritual experiences, I experienced a state once either before, during, or after sleep (that was not a dream) in which entities were communicating with each other and I was communicating with them, but we were not using symbolic language or even mental concepts as we know them. This jibes with what I have read about higher-dimensional communication and cognition, and it also jibes with the ineffability that people who experience the “master plan” describe. People who experience the “master plan” are not told “how it works,” and they can’t convey such a thing to others with words, since Ultimate Reality does not “work” on the level of our human cognition.

I think NDErs’ and mystics’ experience of the “master plan” is a true reflection of reality, actually, but I don’t think it solves the “problem” of the Mist. Perhaps I can make this quandary the topic of my next guest post, if Michael again permits!

Exorcising grief

Here's a brief but interesting Q&A with William Peter Blatty, author of The Exorcist. The death of his son led him to a belief in life after death.

He makes several good points - distinguishing between evidence and proof, noting the importance of examining cumulative evidence in its totality, and suggesting that cases of possession are attributable to the spirits of deceased humans, rather than demons. 

Hail to the king!

There was a time when I opined frequently on political topics on this blog. Eventually I took pity on my long-suffering readers and stopped talking about politics. Today, however, I’m doing a rare political post.

I justify this ill-conceived departure from the norm by pointing out that, although political, this post is nonpartisan. It’s more of a philosophical rumination, inspired by two essays I read recently, both by a Houston Baptist University history professor, Collin Garbarino. The essays are “Laughing at the Death of Our Republic” and “No, America Is Not Collapsing Like the Roman Empire Did.” 

(Similar ideas, but presented from a more pessimistic perspective, were apparently put forward by F.H. Buckley in a 2014 book, The Once and Future King, reviewed here. I haven't read this book, though I've sent a sample to my Kindle.) 

Garbarino has a provocative take on American history and our current state of affairs, and the more I've thought about it, the more it seems to ring true. In fact, it's one of those points that seem obvious once they are made explicit.

Our original system, a constitutional republic, is dead and gone, he argues. And it has been dead for some time. Does this mean America is going the way of ancient Rome, which started out as a republic and ended up with an imperial system? Garbarino says no: 

We’re not heading for an imperial system because we’ve already worked out an alternative to our dead republic. … We now have an elected monarchy. Sure, we don’t call it that, but that doesn’t change that that’s what we have. …

We didn’t end up with an imperial system (and we won’t) because history isn’t cyclical, and Americans stopped trying to emulate Rome. We found a way to navigate the end of republican government without 60 years of violence [which Rome endured in its civil wars]. Our elected monarchy is actually far superior to Rome’s imperial system. We have a tradition of peaceful transition and a constitutional method for succession, two things that Rome never mastered.

One thing we do have in common with the ancient Roman Empire, however, is that we still pretend that we have a republic. Both America and Rome managed to inaugurate new forms of government without actually changing the constitution. Hundreds of years after Augustus, some Romans still paid lip service to the Republic, even though they recognized that political power rested in the person of the emperor. We do something very similar.

On paper, our American form of government has changed very little over the last 200 years. In reality, our government operates in a manner that would be unrecognizable to the drafters of the Constitution. Every branch of government has gone through a radical change in its relative power, and we didn’t have to rewrite much of anything. …

Forms of government are like a man’s facial hair. We don’t get from clean-shaven to beard overnight, but at some point we’ve got to make a judgment call. I’m looking at what we’ve got now, and it’s pretty hairy. Not that there’s anything wrong with a beard. …

The idea of “Rome” lasted for more than 2,000 years, long outliving any of its particular forms of government. This is the genius of countries like Rome, Britain, and America: Change without acknowledging it. This is true conservatism. Conservatism finds a way to navigate the future without breaking with the past. This genius is why people continue to argue over history. Transition is messier than a clean break. It’s also much more stable, and it’s most stable when no one notices that it’s occurring.

[“No, America Is Not …”]

Note that Garbarino is not at all alarmed by this development. He is actually quite sanguine. For one thing, the transformation has already taken place, and we’ve pretty much gotten used to it, even without realizing it. For another, the American political system has been in a state of evolution from the beginning. Garbarino writes:

I don’t think America is in decline. … On the contrary: America’s relative power in the world is at its height. Of course, one might justly characterize our current geopolitical situation as a worldwide race to the bottom, so perhaps saying America is still on top won’t impress anyone too much. …

I find the conflation of the idea of “America” with any particular form of government, in this case a republic, unhelpful. My stance is that America has persisted under various forms of government. The first happened to be a republic, but those days are long passed [sic].

(“No, America Is Not ...”)

Garbarino traces the origin of an elected monarchy to the Civil War and the administration of Abraham Lincoln. He argues that Lincoln's creation of the IRS set in motion a chain of events resulting in a vast federal bureaucracy that inevitably took power away from the legislative branch. I don't know if Lincoln's administration is the proper starting point or not, but I do think the basic claim is correct – our large, unelected bureaucracy has fundamentally changed the federal government and the relationship of the executive and legislative branches. During the era of the spoils system, when presidents filled nearly all civil service positions with party operatives, the bureaucracy was effectively an extension of the presidency. Today, civil-service protections make it impossible for presidents to stock a whole federal agency with handpicked cronies, but a president still appoints the top people. In many ways, the president and his bureaucracy are the only game in town – and, Garbarino says, the voters know it.

We’ve moved into a period in which everyone expects the president to act as an elected monarch. Few Americans vote—except for a presidential candidate, because the president is seen as being the only person who can fix our problems. Is it any wonder that we invest so much time, money, and emotion in the presidential election cycle?

The typical American—and, indeed, Congress—views the president as having the powers of a monarch. The president himself knows that he has the powers of a monarch. It seems that the only people in America who aren’t convinced of the president’s status as our elected king are four, maybe five, justices on the Supreme Court.

(“Laughing at ...”) 

As Garbarino observes, only lately are we coming to understand that the US has undergone a slow but radical metamorphosis. I would add that for the most part, we understand it imperfectly, through a prism of partisan distortion. When George W. Bush was in office, his critics said he was "shredding the Constitution," abusing his office, signing too many executive orders, etc. Now that Barack Obama is president, his critics are saying the same things about him. From Garbarino’s point of view, both Bush and Obama governed in ways that the founding fathers wouldn't recognize, yet they did so because the system itself has changed. In today’s America, any president is going to behave like an elected monarch, because that is what the modern American president has become.

In short, the American system has evolved from its republican origins, in which the president was decidedly secondary to the Congress, to an elected monarchy in which the Congress plays a considerably reduced role and the president dominates the political scene. Congress, by and large, has been content to surrender its prerogatives to the so-called “imperial presidency," just as the Roman senate did not mind handing off its powers and responsibilities to a succession of emperors and a growing imperial bureaucracy.

In both instances, the context was similar. The Roman senate – paralyzed by infighting and factionalism, weakened by corruption, and out of touch with the average citizen – was increasingly unable to get anything done. The same has been true of our own Congress in modern times. Despite a few periods of congressional activism, the general trend has been for Congress to dither and dawdle while failing in even its most basic duties – to pass a budget, for instance.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and the vacuum of political power left by the decline of the legislative branch has been filled by presidents who use executive orders and the machineries of the federal bureaucracy to get things done. Obama has pushed further than his predecessors, but in doing so, he is simply following the century-long trend of an expansionist executive branch.

If Garbarino is right, the transformation of the US governmental system is a fait accompli. It's not what the founders intended, and there are certainly many opportunities for abuse, but the original republican system wasn't perfect, either, and fostered plenty of abuses of its own. In many ways the elected monarchy with its inefficient but orderly bureaucracy has functioned better than the laissez-faire constitutional republicanism of the 18th and 19th centuries.

I might add that if this is true, maybe we should stop fretting so much about the nettlesome issue of political dynasties. In an elected monarchy, political dynasties are probably what we should expect. The rule of the "elites" in Washington and on Wall Street, in corporate boardrooms and on college campuses, may be equally unavoidable. After all, Imperial Rome was run by a small coterie of wealthy and influential families while the masses of people ignored politics and went about their business, usually unmolested and often quite prosperously.

For years I've sensed this fundamental shift in America, and I’ve hoped for an American Cicero who could revive the ideals of the original constitutional republic. But no Cicero has arisen, and, come to think of it, the historical Cicero succeeded only in slightly delaying the end of the Roman republic. He died a martyr to a lost cause.

Rather than resisting a change that has already largely taken place, it might be better to just go with it. An elected monarchy isn't the kind of America we may have thought we wanted, but it appears to be the America we’ve got. We’ve lived with it this long. Maybe it's time we made our peace with it.

Interview: Alan Joshua, author of The SHIVA Syndrome

Thanks for agreeing to this interview, Alan Joshua. Can you describe your new book, The SHIVA Syndrome?

First, the title can be misleading. Although the Hindu god Shiva is on the cover, it is symbolic and only mentioned in the book. SHIVA is an acronym for a special mind research project. The novel is cross-genre, consisting of speculative fiction, conspiracy fiction, psychology/mythology/anthropology/research fiction, with one foot in the present, and the other in the immediate future. I guess that makes it “fact-tion.”

It opens with the destruction of an actual city, Podol’sk (southwest of Moscow). Russian mind researchers lose control over their subject resulting in the obliteration of the city and the deaths of thousands—an event that leaves a mysterious one-mile deep crater in its wake.

Beau Walker is a research psychologist, parapsychologist, and reluctant empath. He is forced to join a research team, code-named SHIVA, to investigate the enigmatic event. During the story, Walker must fight past political and military deceptions and a host of deadly adversaries to unlock the riddle of the SHIVA syndrome.

In the excerpts I read, the writing seems very slick. Is this your first work of fiction?

Yes and no. I wrote an unpublished novel about cloning and an unpublished dystopian short story that’s still looking for a home. SHIVA is my first published novel. As far as looking “slick,” it has been in the hands of a number of editors who were helpful producing the final product.

What do you hope to accomplish with The SHIVA Syndrome?

My hopes are that SHIVA can entertain and educate the readers into recognizing that there is a helluva lot more to parapsychology than horny vampires and staggering zombies. Many people are completely unaware that parapsychology has been studied seriously, under experimental conditions since the 1930s. In addition, beyond the sensationalism of bending metal, “miraculous” healings, etc., people who demonstrate psi ability are all-too-human. As in Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is a very human story to be told. I try to touch on that in the novel.

Who is the book aimed at?

Well, I’ve had a variety of beta readers—from seventeen years of age and up, who were captivated by the possibilities shown in the book. Some read it for the action and adventure while others became fascinated by what some call “latent human potentials.” My goal was that every reader would be curious about the true nature of parapsychology—not just the commercial packaging—and take away something of value about the illusion we call reality. As Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, although a very persistent one.”

How did you come up with the idea?

Some of the basic ideas came from parapsychological research—others and mine. I learned a great deal about the psychology of individuals capable of performing so-called “paranormal” activities, Later I recognized that, although my research involved “psychic” or spiritual healing, it also applied to other paranormal abilities as well. Yet another realization was that the technology for a SHIVA project exists today.

What led you from clinical psychology to an interest in psi and near-death experiences?

My interest in psi existed since I was a child. When I reached my twenties, I read The Sacred Mushroom, my first serious book, by Andrija Puharich. This was followed by many other books, including Dream Telepathy, a classic in its field by Drs. Ullman and Krippner, and Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science, Understanding the Nature and Power of Consciousness, by Edgar D. Mitchell. I had no idea that twenty years later Dr. Krippner would be on my doctoral committee at Saybrook University and a valued friend. He’s a giant in the field and I urge readers to get to know him and his writings.

A recent post on the website of Psychology Today magazine reports: “It appears that psychologists are more skeptical about ESP than other scientists and academics. In one survey of 1,100 university professors, almost half as few psychologists believed that ESP is a ‘recognized fact or a likely possibility’ as other academics such as natural scientists and arts and humanities professors.” Why do you think this is?

I read the article and was thoroughly impressed. I agree with Dr. Taylor’s assessment and conclusions. He is “on the money.” I can’t repeat the entire article, but I agree that there is a negative bias towards the paranormal among psychologists and other scientists. Dr. Taylor points out that it may be rooted in the difficulties psychology encountered becoming accepted as a genuine science. Of course, the negative bias doesn’t apply to all psychologists. Many secretly embrace the concept, unwilling to risk the wrath of the empiricists and jeopardize their professional standing. Quantum physics, however, in its formulation of string theory, has led us away from the physically-based blinders of nineteenth century science and into the postulation of an energy universe with eleven or more dimensions and multiverses.

There’s another problem in the terminology: “parapsychology” and “parapsychologist.” “Parapsychology” came into use in the 1920s as meaning “beside psychology,”something different, apart. But parapsychologists are not, in fact, psychologists. They come from a variety of disciplines, from philosophy to physics. A nicely illustrative list can be found at www.psychicscience.org/researchers.aspx.

I believe advances in quantum physics will inform psychology and other disciplines of the validity of parapsychological phenomena. I hold a firm belief that we hunger to understand what lies beyond the limits of our senses and drives us towards the “paranormal” for answers not supplied by science or religion.

What is your opinion on the reality and/or metaphysical significance of psi and NDE’s?

These are two questions in one. I have no doubt about the reality of psi, and consider it as an extension of normal consciousness, not a separate entity. This is even mentioned in my book. The Bible and other ancient texts are replete with what we now call psi phenomena. There is sufficient laboratory research to satisfy me – as well as personal experiences – that there is something significant to be learned from these. They are not simply quirky manifestations, but are far broader, a deeper understanding of the nature of reality—and ourselves—that demands further investigation. Closed-mindedness will not make these anomalies disappear.

On the subject of NDEs, I keep a skeptical position: neither in favor of its existence or against. As a matter of fact, I can see where NDEs may have a relationship with the issue of the reality of psi. But I can’t get into that here.

Have you explored related issues such as spontaneous or induced after-death communications, mediumship, deathbed visions, apparitions, and reincarnation memories?

I haven’t personally explored NDEs, only read about them. What are the odds that, in my “psychic” healing research, seven of ten healers I interviewed experienced NDEs?

I have attended séances, witnessed mediumship, and I did some informal—and stunning—research into reincarnation. I was friendly with a man who consulted with a well-known psychic/medium. He had many family antiques. Although a particular piece of furniture had been in his possession for years, the medium was able to tell him about a secret drawer that, upon examination, he was able to find. It’s very hard to scoff when you’re a firsthand witness to a situation like that.

Have you personally experienced or witnessed any examples of psi or expanded consciousness (OBEs, NDEs, mystical states, etc.)?

I’ve experienced what you’re calling “expanded consciousness.” Some very personal things occurred that I can’t share, proving to me that William James was right when he said, “Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, … all about it … lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”

As far as OBEs, I had two patients in psychotherapy, who had never revealed to anyone their personal experiences. One was a young man who, at bedtime, would leave his body. When he told his mother, she said it was the “devil’s work,” and frightened him silly. Although this wasn’t the main focus of our work together, I had him read a book entitled Journeys Out Of the Body, by Robert Monroe. He then realized that OBEs were experienced by many people, whether religious or not, and not necessarily as demonic.

A second patient was receiving gynecological surgery. While under anesthesia, she suddenly realized that she was floating above the surgical team operating on her below. She was not frightened, but felt a sense of peacefulness. This was not a typical NDE, but an OBE. The state of peacefulness she felt was so enticing that she was tempted to stay in that state. Then she thought of her children and felt suddenly anxious. That was enough to “snap” her back to her body and unconsciousness. Later, she awakened later in her hospital room and remembered what had happened. The surgeon visited her; she asked how the surgery had proceeded. He said it went fine, without a hitch. Later, the surgical resident visited. She asked him the same question. He smiled and shook his head, then told her, “We thought we’d lost you there for a while.” This corroborated the experience for her.

How open are your colleagues to this subject matter?

We’ve already talked about Dr. Taylor’s article. However, I can give a personal example. While in a doctoral program at Temple University. I was in a seminar and decided – since it was a course on thinking processes – to present on parapsychology. Knowing beforehand that I would be dealing with bias, I invited a local psychic to attend and give mini-readings on the eight people in attendance. The results were split. When the professor returned from his “reading,” his face was grim; he had virtually nothing to say. However, his student assistant was extremely talkative, especially about the psychic’s ability to tell him that he had an outstanding scar on his knee (he was wearing jeans), although she referred to the wrong knee. He was clearly shaken by the information she provided. This was the only presentation of the entire semester where the students approached and thanked the presenter – me. This did not endear me with the professor.

Do you think the scientific consensus on psi and NDEs is changing as more and better evidence piles up?

First, there is no accounting for selective attention, intentionally ignoring phenomena that are unexplainable or at odds with the popular worldview. To be a true skeptic is to be open-minded to possibilities. Scientific prejudice is no better than other forms that have haunted humankind for ages. It’s what almost caused Galileo’s death and that of countless others.

Second, it takes an enormous amount of evidence—and time—to change a paradigm. Some traditionalists would rather go to the grave holding on to outdated, outmoded views rather than entertain the possibility of something new—and potentially frightening. So, to answer your question, accepting psi and/or NDEs is especially threatening because it is asking the scientific and theological community, as well as the population as a whole to rethink their conception of reality. This ironic where theology is concerned. The Old and New Testaments are filled with miraculous and parapsychological happenings.

In The SHIVA Syndrome, you write about research indicating that gamma brainwaves serve to harmonize brain activities. Last year a study was published in which low-gamma spikes were recorded in the brains of rats immediately after the onset of cardiac arrest. Do you think these spikes indicate the high-level coordination of global brain activity consistent with consciousness, or is the overall level of activity in the dying rats’ brains too minimal for the gamma spikes to matter?

Although the body of knowledge is growing, we still know too little about the brain and nervous system as a synergistic whole. It would be premature and overly simplistic to make any comments about what gamma actually means at this point. Remember, although it was discovered many years ago, gamma was shelved as a research area. Only since digital EEG came into being was it brushed off to be re-examined. Consequently, there is a way to go before anything firm can be said.

You also write about the entorhinal cortex as a means of coordinating activities involving the hippocampus (the “old brain”) and the neocortex (the “new brain”). What are the possible implications for sleep and dreams?

Yes, I incorporated this into The SHIVA Syndrome, but more as an extrapolation of science than established fact. That isn’t to say that what I offer in the book is incorrect. Not enough research has been done to provide any kind of firm statements. I have no doubt that there are many as yet undiscovered paths of communication between the so-called old brain and new brain, but I urge more advanced mind research laced with new and creative hypotheses. Rephrasing Gene Roddenberry, human consciousness, not space, is the “final frontier.”

For psi?

The same statements I made above can be applied to psi. Again, we cannot look at psi events simply as hiccups of human behavior. The implications are more far-reaching. Psi fits into a far broader framework, one that challenges existing paradigms and philosophies. It also has ramifications that extend into religious matters. So, for me, the whole area is emotionally charged and requires a concerted effort – an interdisciplinary team effort – to even approach the subject.

For NDEs?

If NDEs are, in fact, real, what does that say about our view of physical reality? Once again, there is a challenge to our philosophy, our notions of religion, as well as science.

In a message to me, you wrote that some proposed answers to questions raised by psi and NDES “challenge the very nature of reality is conceived by the Western mind.” Do you think psi and near-death experiences require a paradigm shift? Or do you think the current materialist paradigm can accommodate these phenomena?

Any physically-based paradigm is inadequate to approach psi and NDEs. A paradigm shift is needed, indeed. Shifts of that type are not easily accomplished.

If a paradigm shift is needed, can you offer a thumbnail sketch of a model that might be better suited to our explorations of consciousness? Or is it too early for that?

It’s far too early for that type of model. Numerous models of consciousness exist already. Each offers some element(s) of truth. But the development of a paradigm of the magnitude you are questioning is going to require an investment of time, energy, finances, and the capability of setting aside the egos and biases found in science and elsewhere. It would take a heroic search for truth.

Finally, how close is science to replicating the experiments described in The SHIVA Syndrome—and should it?

Mind sciences have much of the technology available, but research of that type is of low priority—unless it relates to national security and the military. Unfortunately, quite a bit of funding—including the remote viewing experiments of Targ and Puthoff—has been supplied by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. This issue is touched upon (as fiction) in the novel.

Thanks very much, Alan Joshua.

Readers can find more info about The SHIVA Syndrome at alanjoshua.com, Alan's Facebook page, and the Champagne Book Group website.

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