Science, the paranormal and spirituality: Espiritualidade e ...

Spirituality Matters! The ASPSI e-Newsletter, 2012

 Science, the paranormal and spirituality:
                                    A new beginning
                                     by James E. Beichler

        Science, the paranormal and spirituality form a spectrum of sorts, ranging from the
physical world and the logic that science uses to describe and probe it, to consciousness and
 intuition where the roots of the paranormal and spirituality can be found. The paranormal
  mediates between our scientific and spiritual worldviews, just as consciousness seems to
   bridge the enormous chasm between our internal mental image of self and the external
 material world. Therefore, a scientific study of paranormal phenomena seems the best way
 to understand spirituality at a higher level of physical reality than just our normal intuitive
feelings for the world in which we live, our purpose in the world and how we interact with it.
 Within this context, the scientific study of the paranormal can be broken down into several
    historical periods. Each period coincides with specific developments and advances in
   scientific worldviews that are sometimes separated by paradigms shifts, both large and
   small. This fact is important because a new change in scientific worldview has recently
begun to emerge and it coincides with new advances in the scientific study of consciousness
    which will greatly enhance and alter our worldview of the paranormal and spirituality.

                                  The ‘Pre-Scientific’ Period

     The pre-scientific period of the paranormal incorporates everything from the beginning of
recorded history and science, through the first Scientific Revolution (from 1600 to 1687) to about
1850. It is characterized by the lack of any formal scientific inquiry into the paranormal. There were
only misguided speculations which attempted to relate physics to the paranormal, supernatural and
occult in a very naive manner. No more than this could have been expected since this same period
of history was marked by the establishment and expansion of Newtonian physics itself and the
emergence of the other sciences. The ‘pre-scientific’ period of the paranormal was a time of
discovery and application within the early Newtonian paradigm. The Newtonian laws of motion and
gravitation carved out a new science of nature from the background of natural phenomena that we
observe and experience in our world.

                                The ‘Early-Scientific’ Period

    Michael Faraday was one of the first noteworthy scientists to respond to the occult excesses of
the modern spiritualism movement in the early 1850s. Faraday’s investigations represented the first
recognition of a possible scientific relationship (or lack thereof) with the paranormal and psychic

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Spirituality Matters! The ASPSI e-Newsletter, 2012

phenomena. In other words, some scientists began to pay attention to the Modern Spiritualism
movement as soon as it developed in the mid-nineteenth century. At first, it might seem that
scientific issues were being raised by the spiritualists, but it would be truer to say that psychic
phenomena (levitation, apports and physical manifestations) and issues that bordered on areas
within the scientific domain were being raised by nonscientists and this was worrisome to the
scientific and scholarly communities. This concern became so serious that the Society for Psychical
Research was founded in 1882 to deal with questions and concerns stemming from the modern
spiritualism movement. However, any and all attempts to explain spiritualist and paranormal
phenomena at this time were based on Newtonian physics, which presented a problem for the
scientific study of the paranormal because the Second Scientific Revolution began in 1900 and the
Newtonian dominance of physics and science slowly succumbed to paradigm changes. The ‘early
scientific’ period of the paranormal, however, lasted for another three decades.

                                The ‘Middle-Scientific’ Period

      The first implications of a new attitude toward scientific studies of the paranormal came during
the 1920s as the Second Scientific Revolution solidified its advances (1927), but the truly significant
changes only came after 1930. Experiments by F. Cazzamali and later by Hans Berger (1928) with
the newly developed electroencephalograph (EEG) equated one-centimeter waves detected in the
human brain to the transmission and reception of telepathic thought. Berger’s theory was more
precisely a classical electromagnetic theory of psi, although it utilized new advances in the biological
science of the human brain. Electromagnetic connections to psi became so popular that the novelist
Upton Sinclair penned and published his book Mental Radio (1930), proposing that telepathy was
electromagnetic in origin. On the other hand, J. W. Dunne (1927) developed a theory of telepathy
and precognition based directly upon a special relativistic model of nature. Each of these theories
reflected new realities in physics and science in general, but did not reflect any of the methodological
changes which separated the new field of parapsychology from the older psychic research associated
with Modern Spiritualism. That particular momentous change came with the work of J. B. Rhine in
Durham, North Carolina.
      Rhine brought scientific studies of the paranormal into the laboratory and thus transformed the
psychic elements of the paranormal from the spiritualism movement into parapsychology as it is
known today. He accomplished this task by isolating the subtle effects of psi evident in telepathic
communication and clairvoyance and using modern statistical methods to analyze the results. He
moved psychic studies from anecdote and personal experience to verifiable experiment, although the
question of verifiability is still debated today. This fundamental change in method altered psi
research and affected the development of parapsychology for the remaining decades of the twentieth
century. Parapsychology thus became an objective experimental science as opposed to a subjective
only science based upon anecdotal evidence, which was far more susceptible to fraud and personal
bias.
      Parapsychology progressed slowly but effectively over the following decades. This new science built
a stock of statistical evidence implying the existence of psi and the paranormal and honed its
experimental skills on the ever sharpening criticisms of its skeptics. While the stock of statistical
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Spirituality Matters! The ASPSI e-Newsletter, 2012

evidence for psi slowly accumulated, speculative hypotheses and theories of psi were proposed to
explain the newly discovered subtle effects attributed to psi. Many but not all of the new theories
were ‘physical’ in nature, but were generally proposed by non-physicists.

                                 The ‘Late Scientific’ Period

     The few physicists and physical scientists that studied psi and the paranormal prior to 1970
when the ‘late scientific’ period began worked in the field of parapsychology rather than physics or
paraphysics. It was only when physicists began to conduct psi research in greater numbers in the
mid to late 1960s that scientists began to think of themselves as working in the field of paraphysics
rather than parapsychology. This change in attitude coincided with several other events including the
acceptance of the Parapsychology Association as a fully fledged member of the AAAS (American
Association for the Advancement of Science) in 1969 and a new philosophical view of how
consciousness was to be interpreted in relation to quantum physics. These events reflected new
changes of attitude within the physics community itself whereby a more expanded view of the
universe as a whole resulted, primarily from space exploration and related advances in astronomy
and cosmology.

     The “emergence of paraphysics” as a new natural science was announced in articles by James
Beal and Brendan O’Regan in Edgar Mitchell’s 1974 book Psychic Exploration. While the book was
technical in nature and covered several physical aspects of current psi research, one whole section of
the book was dedicated to the new paraphysics. Other publications also emphasized the newly
recognized relationship between physics and psi. For the first time, books which either focused on
the physics of psi or contained specific articles covering the topic began to appear. During this same
decade, the top secret ‘Stargate’ remote viewing initiative began under the watch of Hal Puthoff and
Russell Targ at the Stanford Research Institute while the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies
Research) Lab began its own line of research at Princeton University under Robert Jahn. The 1970s set
the tone for physical research in psi and the paranormal for the next several decades.

                        Paraphysics, Parapsychology and beyond

     Attitudes changed from viewing psi as a purely mental ‘mechanism’ to a physical but non-
material mechanism during this time period. The major question to be answered then became ‘what
does physics have to do with the paranormal at all?’ Before the 1970s, many scientists separated the
whole of our experienced world, not just the paranormal and spirituality, into a part that was purely
mental and a part that was purely physical. The Cartesian split between mind and matter, dating back
to the mid-seventeenth century, had survived the Second Scientific Revolution intact if not
enhanced and was only challenged for the first time in the later middle decades of the twentieth
century. Scholars had earlier argued that physics had nothing to do with the paranormal, let alone
spirituality, because they were completely mental phenomena, i.e., products of mind rather than
products of the material world which forms the domain of physics. Yet that was a false argument,
because mind, at the very least, interacts with the physical world which is explained by physics, even

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Spirituality Matters! The ASPSI e-Newsletter, 2012

if it is not itself material.
       Physics is the most basic and fundamental of all the sciences, so it is to physics that any
questions regarding physical reality itself are directed within the sciences and whatever mind and
consciousness are, they are integral parts of our commonly experienced reality. All other sciences
reduce to physics in the end so if science is to explain mind, consciousness and the paranormal at all,
the task automatically falls physics. Unfortunately, the paranormal and spirituality are not accepted
topics of study within physics by the physics community at the present, so the term paraphysics
seems justified to fill this conceptual gap. In just the last two decades, an area of study called the
‘physics of consciousness’ has emerged which also deals with the paranormal to a lesser degree.
       Taken together, these trends indicate that the emergence of any new paraphysics ‘must’ be an
integral part of a newer scientific revolution that is slowly beginning to take shape. Science was
clearly moving toward a paraphysics or ‘something like it’ in the 1970s, but more recently normal
science seems to have moved beyond even that. In other words, paraphysics or ‘something like it’
would need to be ‘invented’ if paraphysics did not already exist. The truth is that those physicists
and physical scientists that began to study the paranormal in the 1970s expected immediate
revolutionary and paradigm changing results, but no such results were forthcoming. Their hope
began to fade in the late 1980s and thereafter, but it did not fade away completely or disappear.
Instead, something new emerged in the 1990s – a much broader scientific interest in all aspects of
consciousness, both within and outside of physics, psychology and parapsychology.
       Since mind and consciousness could not be so easily pinned down within the physical or
biological sciences, a new buzz-phrase also emerged – physical correlates of consciousness. As it is
now stands, scientists hope and expect to discover where mind and consciousness first emerge
within the brain by studying the physical correlates of consciousness in neurons. Scientists have
powerful and wonderful new tools for accomplishing this task that are far advanced from the old
days of the EEG – MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machines and fMRI (functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging) machines. This new technology allows scientists to see inside the brain while it
is functioning in real time. So it would seem that changes within physics as well as outside of physics
and psychology are driving physics toward a new more comprehensive understanding of mind and
consciousness out of which the possibility of paranormal phenomena, the survival of consciousness
after death and spirituality will eventually emerge.
       In fact, research pressures from outside of the parasciences community have become so great in
the past decade that both consciousness and the paranormal may soon emerge as normal science,
regardless of any past research and input from the experimental parapsychology community.
Neuroscience and neurophysiology have advanced so far that universities around the world have
established advanced degree programs in neurophysics – the physics of neurons and neural nets in
the brain – as well as laboratories to conduct research in this new academic field in just the past ten
years. Although these new programs do not deal directly with subjects such as the paranormal, psi,
mind and consciousness, their research directly and profoundly affects these subjects. In fact, it
seems that neurophysics is presently poised to overcome paraphysics and neurophysiology may well
replace parapsychology.
       In the fall of 2011, a laboratory at Stanford University used an fMRI machine to ‘read’ the

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Spirituality Matters! The ASPSI e-Newsletter, 2012

minds of people watching movies. Without actually saying so, the scientists in this lab have proven
beyond a shadow of a doubt that thoughts originating in the human brain can be picked up by a
machine outside of that brain, even when that machine has no direct material contact with the brain
or skull, and those ‘signals’ can be interpreted by a computer to reproduce the ‘thoughts’ they
represent. The laboratory has posted the images on the internet (on YouTube) for all to see. It
would seem that the next step would be for another mind or consciousness to take the place of the
fMRI machine and prove once and for all that telepathy (ESP) is possible. Some people may find
this sequence of events disconcerting for a number of different reasons, but it does not need to be.
However, parapsychologists and paraphysicists must take note because they could be rendered
irrelevant. The parasciences are no longer ahead of the game at the forefront of science and are
beginning to fall behind. Science, the paranormal and spirituality are about to radically change.

                                           References

James E. Beichler. (2001) “To Be or Not to Be! A ‘Paraphysics’ for the New Millennium.” Journal of
    Scientific Exploration 15: 33-56. Available online at
    http://www.scientificexploration.org/journal/jse_15_1_beichler.pdf.
James E. Beichler. (2003) “From Spiritualism to Spirituality: The scientific quest to explain the
    psychical aspects of human nature.” Presentation at the annual meeting of the ARPR, 2003.
    Published in Proceedings of Academy of Religion and Psychical Research.
James E. Beichler. (2006) “Trend or Trendy? The development and acceptance of the paranormal by
    the scientific community.” Presentation at the annual meeting of the ASPSI, 2006. Published in
    Proceedings of the Academy of Spirituality and Paranormal Studies, Inc.
James E. Beichler. (2009) “A Mysphyt Revolution: The logical nature of spiritual enlightenment.”
    Journal of Spirituality and paranormal Studies 32, 4.
References and links to scientific papers, images, and news releases for the new experiments with the
    fMRI can be found online at http://gallantlab.org/.
 YouTube. (2011) “Reconstruction from Brain Activity.”
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo.

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