Michael Prescott's Blog

Medium uncool

As you may have heard, famed Brazilian spiritual healer "John of God" (aka João Teixeira de Faria) has been arrested and faces charges of molesting and even raping numerous women who came to him for treatment.

The Washington Post reports:

Zahira Lieneke Mous, a Dutch dance choreographer, made the pilgrimage four years ago, seeking to heal sexual trauma she said she had suffered in the past.... She recounted in an interview with Brazil’s Globo TV last week how she waited in line twice to experience his healing. On the first visit, he scribbled a prescription for an herb she was told would help her. The second time, he offered a private consultation — a “spiritual cleansing.” Mous agreed. “You’re made to feel special somehow,” she told Globo TV.

She waited until everyone else in line had their turns, until finally she was alone, and “John of God” invited her into his office. And then into his bathroom.

That’s where Mous said he raped her — all while leading her to believe it was part of her healing.

She is among hundreds of women who have recently come forward with sexual abuse allegations ...

There are said to be as many as 300 women claiming abuse, although of course it's impossible to know how many of these claims are well-founded. Making things even worse for the medium, he initially missed a deadline to surrender to authorities and is believed to have withdrawn millions of dollars from several bank accounts, presumably in a bid to flee the country. He is now in police custody.

Although I've occasionally run across accounts of psychic/spiritual healing that seem legitimate — for instance, the George Chapman case — it's fair to say that this area attracts a huge number of charlatans preying on desperate people. And of course there is no reason why even a legitimate medium could not be guilty of gross personal misconduct; as far as I can tell, there is no correlation between psychic or mediumistic abilities and personal character, just as there is no correlation between musical or artistic talent and personal virtue. It is also possible that a legitimate medium could be corrupted over time by the adoration of his followers, gradually changing from a sincere spiritual seeker to an ego-driven cult leader.

In this case, I have no idea what the real story is — whether John of God has always been a fake, or whether he once had (and possibly still has) legitimate abilities but succumbed to the temptations of money, power, fame, and sex. Conceivably, the allegations are untrue or exaggerated; it appears that roughly a dozen women have filed complaints, so I'm not sure where the estimates of hundreds of victims are coming from.

Overall, though, I'd say it looks very bad for John of God and those who believed in him.

Full immersion

I started to post this as a comment, but like Topsy, it "just growed"; so I made it a post in its own right.

The issue we were discussing was why we are so inclined to doubt or deny psi phenomena and postmortem survival even in the face of considerable evidence.

And the basic point I wanted to make is that, if physical reality is designed to be a fully immersive environment, then we would expect to feel a lack of certainty about continued existence on another plane. The more certain we are of nonphysical existence, the less "fully immersed" we are in this environment.

In this regard, it's interesting to note how easy it is to forget (or suppress?) evidence of psi and survival. I’ve noticed that unless I immediately write down a striking psi experience — say, a confirmed premonition or an amazing synchronicity — I will be totally unable to recall it even thirty minutes later. I’ve also noticed that it’s remarkably easy to forget case histories (of experiments with mediums, say) that really ought to be memorable.

Many people have pointed out that parapsychology seems to be perpetually reinventing the wheel, devising new experiments to establish the validity of telepathy and clairvoyance even though experiments from decades ago already proved these phenomena by any reasonable standard. It’s as if the whole field of psi research is in a state of permanent denial, or at least doubt.

George Hansen, author of The Trickster and the Paranormal, would probably ascribe all this to the liminality (marginal nature) of psi. He would point to the marginal status of shamans, medicine women, necromancers, and ghost hunters in most societies — including ours, which relegates the paranormal to horror fiction, humor, and "woo." This socially mandated liminality, he would say, keeps us from accepting the paranormal or even taking it seriously.

I'd argue that Hansen's "liminality" may be best understood as a built-in feature of the universe, which helps to ensure our continued full immersion by marginalizing anyone who starts to see "behind the veil," and by sequestering and scrubbing our own memories before they can be preserved long-term. It’s equivalent to the steps taken by The Matrix to keep everybody believing in the shared illusion.

If you look at it this way, doubts and even denial in the face of intellectually convincing evidence are actually additional proof of the "virtual reality simulation" nature of the cosmos. Why else would humans experience this continuing deep-level dissonance between repeatedly observed facts and our intractable feelings?

• Why would we feel impelled to dismiss and forget our own experiences and to marginalize and ridicule those who claim to be in touch with other levels of consciousness?
• Why would we react in a panic to the very idea of experimenting with mind-altering chemicals, even throwing people in jail for doing so?
• Why would we pass laws penalizing psychics and mediums, or uphold religious injunctions against dabbling in the occult?
• Why would a whole cadre of intellectuals spend their lives, or at least much of their free time, combatting any suggestion that the paranormal could have some validity?
• Why do so many people say they’re never really convinced, no matter how much evidence they see?
• Why do researchers who choose to study the paranormal find themselves ostracized, their careers sidetracked, their reputations maligned?

Some people would say the government or a secret cabal is behind it all, but I really don’t think so. Governments and cabals are notoriously inept. What’s far more likely is that the world works this way because this is how it’s supposed to work. The game is rigged. We are biologically hard-wired and socially conditioned to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. If we notice him anyway, we are inclined to forget. If, despite everything, we remember, then we risk our own social, professional, and intellectual banishment (a prospect that gives us an additional incentive to forget).

Guest post: A message from mom

I received an interesting testimonial from commenter GregL, who previously contributed a post composed soon after his mother's passing. At the time, struggling with his own skepticism, he wrote, "Like a flame dancing in the wind I now move between despair and hope, a dichotomy of opposing beliefs. Probably never to be resolved until my own passing. I hope I see her there."

It appears he received some additional evidence that pushed the needle at least somewhat in the direction of belief.  

———

Mom Communicates

“When you begin to doubt your own experience, you are one step inside the madhouse” –Dean Radin (paraphrased)

Mom was gone. The house seemed preternaturally “empty.” We were trying to adjust to a life without her in it. The little room she loved was, as yet, untouched. The little red walker stood in the corner; her black cane leaned against the wall. The rosary she prayed on each night was still hanging gently from her bedpost. The intercom monitor sat on the nightstand, still turned on in case she needed us. But she would never need us again. The bed bars remained on her bed as if to hold some unseen little lady safely as she slept.

We found it hard to watch television in the den adjacent to her bedroom. The loveseat that she always sat in was hauntingly empty to our right. There was a silence that, somehow, spoke loudly of her absence. Yet we knew we had to try, and we had to succeed. It was a heavy damp fog of grief, and we struggled within it.

Then, on July 3rd, the noises started. As we were lying in bed, in our room, which was directly above mom’s room, we heard a noise. It started as a slight knocking noise, as if someone was knocking on the wall. At first, I thought, it must be the furnace, but it could not be the furnace, we were in the middle of summer. I then thought it certainly must have something to do with the air-conditioning. I shut it off. The knocking continued.

The next night the knocking grew in intensity. It now sounded exactly as if someone was pushing that little red walker, and was having trouble getting out of the bedroom, knocking impatiently against the wall and the doorway in an attempt to exit the room. My wife and I spoke about it in bed. I tried to sound nonchalant: “Sounds like something going on in mom’s room tonight.” Cathy just responded with a “yes, I hear it.” Then it stopped for the night. The next morning, I went down and checked that little room to see if the walker was moved. I saw that nothing was moved. Everything in mom’s room was exactly as we had left it, the walker still sat silently in its corner, and every other item remained in its correct place.

Sleeping was still difficult and on the afternoon of July 5th, I decided to lie down and take a nap. The intercom that we used to listen for my mother at night was still turned on, although it had remained silent since mom’s passing. I don’t know why I kept it turned on. I guess the act of turning off that intercom had a symbolic “finality” to it that I could not yet accept. It was a good thing that I left it on. As I lay in my bed, right next to the little intercom on my nightstand, it crackled to life. Here is the notation I made in my journal right after it happened:

7/5 I hear a voice on the intercom. It sounds like a woman, but crackly, distorted. It tries one word and “crackles” off.

I jumped out of bed and searched for Cathy. I told her of the incredible thing that just happened. I promptly began to try and figure out how this could be. My skepticism got the best of me and I managed to explain it away. I thought that a “stray” radio signal might have been picked up and “broadcast” over the intercom, although this had never happened in the year and a half that we had used it. I thought it would surely not happen again. But it did! Here is what I wrote the next morning.

7/6 Morning. The voice again! About 6 AM the intercom crackles, then one word. Unintelligible. It sounds more like a woman’s voice now!

Okay. Two days in a row. The sound that I called a “crackle” was the sound of the intercom suddenly projecting a loud static-like interference. It erupted from dead silence to emit a short stream of static. Within the static was a woman’s voice, sounding like she was attempting to talk through a bad telephone connection. All she could get out was one word, and then the “connection” appeared to be lost. I could not make out the word.

Unfortunately, Cathy was not there for the first incident and sound asleep by my side during the second. She believed me, but I did not believe myself. I still made every excuse as to why this must be a natural occurrence. Perhaps, somehow, that little intercom was picking up some radio interference, or, since I was the only one who heard it, maybe it was all happening in my mind. Was I losing it?

The knockings and bumping in the night continued, coming and going, day to day. There would be a day or two without noise and then a night when, for an hour or so, there would be a banging and knocking heard coming from my mom’s little room. I would go down the stairs, fully expecting to see her coming out of her bedroom door. Nothing would be there, nothing would be amiss, and the knockings would never happen when I was in her room.

Then all would go quiet. No more pounding and movement in the downstairs bedroom. The intercom on my nightstand was silent. It stayed like this for a few days. Then the movement and rustling and knocking coming from my mother’s bedroom would start again. Next it would be silent for a few days and then begin all over again. I would constantly go down the stairs to see what was happening. Every time I did, my mom’s room would go silent. All of her things were in their proper place. Nothing was out of order.

The funny thing was that the disturbances and noises would only begin after we had gone to bed for the night. There was never a disturbance or knocking or any other noise coming from my mother’s room while we were awake and watching television in the very next room. It would begin only after we had gone upstairs. I kept the monitor on just in case the voice might come through again.

We became acclimated to the noises. Lying in bed we would hear the knocking and the pounding and one of us would say to the other, “It sounds like mom is visiting us tonight.”

I attempted levity by saying that she was “the only ghost that we are not afraid of.” The intercom, however, remained silent. It was as if my mother had given up trying to initiate a voice communication with us.

Then it happened. On July 27. We had gone to sleep for the night. It was about 10:30 PM when the noise started to come from that room. There were loud knocks and bangs. Once again it sounded exactly like my mother was struggling with her walker, banging into the door and the doorway, trying to get out of that room and get to the bathroom. I listened intently. This may sound strange, but like several times before, I decided to ignore the noise and get some sleep. I rolled over on my side and said to my wife, “We have a lot of activity happening down there tonight.” “We sure do,” Cathy responded. Immediately after we spoke, the intercom began to hiss and crackle. It got louder and, clearly, within the static came a woman’s voice, once again only one word, but this time it was “Cathy!” It was clear! We both heard it clearly!

Chills ran up and down my spine. “Did you hear that?” I almost shouted to my wife. “I did, and I’ve got goosebumps all over my whole body,” she responded. So did I. The voice was clear, and it said my wife’s name. My mom, when she was alive, would regularly call Cathy on that intercom. It seemed like she had managed to do it again. It seemed like she had answered the request that I made to her in the hospital. She had come back to let us know that she still survived. Just like in life, she never quit trying. She tried until we both heard her voice and could verify to each other that she was there.

What do we make of this? What do the skeptics say? An errant broadcast that somehow spoke my wife’s name? Just at the same time that noises were coming from my mom’s room? Was there someone outside our bedroom window speaking my wife’s name?

A mutual delusion? The sceptic in me pondered all these possibilities and more. All I know is that this time we both heard the voice. This time the evidence for its reality was twice as strong as when I was the only one who heard it.

Unfortunately, after we both verified that we heard it, the voice never spoke through that intercom again. The noises coming from mom’s room also stopped. I must say that I miss hearing that voice and those noises. It is as if my mother realized that she got through, and realizing that she accomplished her mission, she could go on her way.

As I pondered the effect that this had on my feelings about a life after death, I ran across the quote from Dean Radin that opened this essay. “When you begin to doubt your own experience, you are one step inside the madhouse.” Yet I still have some doubts. Less than before, but still doubts remain. Perhaps I will never reach certainty until I get there myself.

———

Postscript. In an email, GregL adds, "One thing I can say is we never had any 'rapping' before or since those few weeks after my mom’s passing, and no intercom EVP either. The world is a strange place and truly filled with mystery."