What's On Your Mind: The Psychic Phenomena

Someone asked me recently what my interests are. I answered that one of them is consciousness studies. He drew blank and said, "What is that?" I should have told him about two books, The Sense of Being Stared At, and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Do these books sound erudite? A respected scientist, Rupert Sheldrake, wrote them. They helped lead me into a fascination with consciousness studies, which I discovered is a fresh, exploding field of study. When I heard that Sheldrake was giving a workshop locally, I had to attend. At the session, I found a seat in the back row near a rear entrance. At one point, the person next to me got up to unlock the door when someone knocked. He then helped the late arrivee locate an empty seat. I thought this unassuming gentleman was a lowly staff person, maybe the janitor. I found out later he was the senior researcher at the institute and a groundbreaking author in the consciousness field--Dean Radin. I had no idea. So now I am reading his books. Just out in paperback is his The Conscious Universe, in which he makes the case for how science itself supports the validity of psychic phenomena. He gives an exhaustive history of what scientific studies have occurred that support "psi," studies that rigorously follow the best methodologies sanctioned by the most skeptical of scientists. Because modern science has well-earned respect, while distrust of superstition and mystical fakes abounds, Radin says most scientists are not even aware of how many carefully conducted experiments investigating psychic phenomena have occurred at major universities, and even by the CIA, at taxpayer expense. "The fact is," says Radin, "all scientists who have studied the evidence, including the hard-nosed skeptics, now agree that something interesting is going on that merits serious scientific attention. My antennae are up. Discrete events and bits of matter, localized and observable as we know them, are not the true and whole story. We can study and measure material items, but what gives us their meaning? The brain is a remarkable instrument that gives order to the messages introduced by our senses. But is there something out there before our brain records it? The old, standard opinion was that what we see is what is there, and it was there before we saw it, just as it is, now that we see it. The new perception is that energy freezes into form at our behest. When we take a look, we see something. What is it? It is what our brain cooked up from the ingredients supplied. We are not gods, but because of our connection to the universe, we take part in the creation of the world we know. Our consciousness partakes of the quantum energy realm in a way that is freer than the machinations of our brain. Consciousness is the mediation of the spiritual to the material realm. Our brain is the facilitator. Consciousness contains the idea, the brain gives it an assigned seat. Without the brain, consciousness is ephemeral, ghostly; and without consciousness, the brain presents gibberish. The two work as a team. Reality spans both the spiritual and material realms. And we can know this is true by scientific proof or by experience, whichever method we are good at. Giving credence to both methods will bring us to truth most securely, because both kinds of perception are entangled. If you listen to physicist Evan Walker, you would not find this surprising. He tells in his book, The Physics of Consciousness, about how to measure or quantify our mental operations. If you think of consciousness in time units, a thought takes less than a second--probably less than a tenth of a second. But if you break it down too small, like a quadrillionth of a second, you would not distinctly experience anything at all, for hundreds of cycles would pass before any of our brain synapses would fire up. Our experience level would be too fine for our brains to notice the bigger patterns. We would experience "infinite sameness as the mark of our existence." But this is not our experience. The experience of time, he figures, as a separate element of consciousness," is about 1/25 of a second. What he is getting at, I think, is that consciousness and the brain are two different entities, but they work so closely together that we do not think of them separately. Yet each without the other is meaningless. Consciousness without a sense of time units, to give the brain a chance to register, would be "infinite sameness" (seemingly nothing would happen), but a brain registering neural sensations would present no meaningful picture without consciousness' interpretations. Each depends on the other and each contributes to, or tones, part of the whole picture. The following sentence in Walker's book reached out and grabbed me. "We do not see the outside world, but instead we see the 'inside' of our brain! . . . What we see is ourselves, our consciousness." When I read that sentence, I looked outside at a tree near me, and I had the sensation that the tree was there only because I interpreted it as being there. My observation created its form. Without my observation--my consciousness working in partnership with my brain--the tree might be there in the quantum world, but is only there for me to walk up to and touch because of my brain-consciousness teamwork. What my personal "team" tells me is there, is me experiencing my consciousness in the world where I physically operate. Then Walker nailed the point for me when he said that "when you drive down the highway at 60 miles per hour, you are really about 11 feet in front of where you think you are just because of the delay in the nervous system." So what I experience as reality is not quite the real thing. It does not quite square up, because of the limitations of my physical brain, but it is a pretty close approximation, because my consciousness works through my brain to give me a good idea of what is there. So one could say the tree is not really there "as I see it," but what I see is as good a way of describing what is there as any of us humans could come up with --and we all happen to agree because, having similar brains, we all see the same thing. If you wanted to experience my tree, to picture it and know it, there is a better than even chance that I could send its image to you telepathically, thinks Radin. The tree not only is real, even if no one ever looks to see it, but its reality is in my brain, in that I created it by the way I ordered my sensory input, and I could inform you of it without help from material senses. Good luck trying to keep your thoughts to yourself. Any person that knows you intimately may very well know what you are thinking before you realize you are thinking, if they tune in to "psi." If you think I am crazy, so was Abraham, Jesus, Galileo, Einstein, not to mention Sheldrake and Radin, and a host of others dead and not yet born, who aspired to tap other realms of insight. Think of that! Doug Good