What is it like to communicate with spirits?

Several months ago, there was a thread in a discussion forum on what it is like to perceive psychically. While I have described some of my experiences taking classes in mediumship on my web site, there are some aspects to the experience that I didn't include on my web site which I explained more fully in the discussion forum...

In mediumship class, I experienced several different types of psychic perceptions. Most of the time I perceived things visually. Occasionally I would also get words, smells, sounds, emotions, other sensations, and make gestures.

• Visual perceptions would appear in my mind's eye, like remembering what something looked like, like a dream, like hypnogogic imagery. It was quite an ordinary sensation which is why it can be hard to teach some people to recognize their psychic perceptions. They are expecting something extraordinary and mystical, and overlook the ordinary.
  

• Sometimes I would feel words in my mouth as if I was about to say them. Other times words would come to me as if I was thinking them.
  

• Smells seemed to be real, and outside myself as if others could smell them too.
  

• Sounds also seemed to be real, outside myself as if others could hear them.
  

• I usually didn't recognize that I was being influenced when I used a gesture. A couple of times I was told by different sitters that a gesture I made during the reading was significant. The gestures were uncharacteristic of me and very meaningful to the sitter.
  

• Other types of sensations would also occur. Often, if I asked the spirit how he died, I would feel a sensation in the part of my body associated with the cause of death. For example, I would sense a tingling in my chest if the spirit had died of a heart attack.
  

• I would occasionally feel emotions. Once when the spirit wanted to convey her love for the sitter, I felt how she felt. It was a very moving experience.
  

Communicating with spirits is different than other forms of psychic perception because the perceptions are induced by spirits. They can influence your body with their mind the way you would influence your own body with your own mind. Because of this, you don't have to be very psychic to get impressions from spirits because they do part of the work by influencing you. You don't have to rely entirely on your own abilities. This is especially true in a class setting because of the presence of spirit guides and the skill spirits develop with practice. The longer a student has been in class the better the spirits of his deceased friends and relatives will be at communicating with living people. Having a group of psychics together in the same place seems to have an effect that makes psychic perceptions easier too. Also, some spirits will be a good match for a particular person, and it will be easier to perceive communications from them than other spirits. It's a lot like when you meet someone and you immediately know you like that person and can you understand each other easily when you speak with him, you just have a similar way of thinking about the world. It can be like that when communicating with a spirit.

When I would do a reading in class, I would look around the room and one of the people there would somehow stand out from the rest. This could be a pronounced visual effect as if I was viewing just that one person through a telephoto lens. That is how I knew who I was going to give a reading to. Then I would close my eyes and I would see a person (the spirit) in my mind's eye. I would describe the spirit and the sitter would say if he recognized the spirit. I would mentally ask the spirit questions like what he did in life, and what he used to do when he was with the sitter. I would usually get some type of visual answer which I would describe to the sitter. If I asked how he died I would usually feel a sensation the part of the body that was associated with his death. For example, if he died of a heart attack, I would feel something in my chest. All of this often worked very well and the sitter could identify the spirit and confirm the information I conveyed.

Sometimes when I was giving a reading in class, I would also get a strong impression of the personality of the spirit. I think this is one way mental mediumship is superior to physical mediumship. It is harder for the spirit to lie to a good mental medium because of the mental contact.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Physicists study whether the universe is a computer simulation. Has Intelligent design become mainstream or is there a double standard?

The article, Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation (by George Dvorsky at io9.com), is about physicists who are trying to determine if the universe is a computer simulation or not. I thought this was interesting because it is an investigation in the field of intelligent design. In most other cases where scientist want to investigate intelligent design, they are ostracized and persecuted and accused of doing pseudoscience. What is different about this situation? It seems to me there is a double standard. What gives these scientists immunity from persecution while so many others are singled out by skeptics for ridicule?

If it is reasonable to investigate if the universe is a computer simulation, is it also reasonable to investigate if the genetic code, the mechanism of transcription of DNA into mRNA, and mRNA translation into proteins is a type of self replicating computer that might have been produced by intelligent design? There are good theoretical reasons to doubt whether it was possible for the genetic code to have originated by evolution. The article The Finely Tuned Genetic Code by Jonathan M. at evolutionnews.org explains the problem:

The genetic code is finely tuned. It was either designed or it evolved from a random code to a finely tuned code.

Indeed, the genetic code found in nature is exquisitely tuned to protect the cell from the detrimental effects of substitution mutations. The system is so brilliantly set up that codons differing by only a single base either specify the same amino acid, or an amino acid that is a member of a related chemical group. In other words, the structure of the genetic code is set up to mitigate the effects of errors that might be incorporated during translation (which can occur when a codon is translated by an almost-complementary anti-codon).

However there are many reasons to doubt that the genetic code could evolve:

Changes in codon assignments would be catastrophic to the cell because such a mutation would ultimately lead to changes to the amino acid sequence in every protein produced by the cell.

...

Furthermore, the question is naturally raised as to what selective-utility would be exhibited by the new amino acids. Indeed, they would have no utility until incorporated into proteins. But that won't happen until they are incorporated into the genetic code. And thus they must be synthesized by enzymes that lack them. And let us not forget the necessity for the dedicated tRNAs and activating enzymes which are needed for including them in the code.

If the genetic code is finely tuned but did not evolve, it must have been designed.

References

Here is an excerpt from the article Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation (by George Dvorsky at io9.com):

Physicists say there may be a way to prove that we live in a computer simulation

Back in 2003, Oxford professor Nick Bostrom suggested that we may be living in a computer simulation. In his paper, Bostrom offered very little science to support his hypothesis — though he did calculate the computational requirements needed to pull of such a feat. And indeed, a philosophical claim is one thing, actually proving it is quite another. But now, a team of physicists say proof might be possible, and that it's a matter of finding a cosmological signature that would serve as the proverbial Red Pill from the Matrix. And they think they know what it is.

According to Silas Beane and his team at the University of Bonn in Germany, a simulation of the universe should still have constraints, no matter how powerful. These limitations, they argue, would be observed by the people within the simulation as a kind of constraint on physical processes.

So, how could we ever hope to identify these constraints? Easy: We just need build our own simulation of the universe and find out. And in fact, this is fairly close to what the physicists are actually trying to do. To that end, they've created an ultra-small version of the universe that's down to the femto-scale (which is even smaller than the nano-scale).

...

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Best Skeptic is an Ex-Skeptic! Some of the Best and Worst Skeptics of the Twentieth Century

Someone over at a discussion forum I participate in asked who were the best skeptics of the twentieth century. I replied with some of the ones I thought were best - people who started out as skeptics but changed their views when they examined the evidence. I also included some of the individuals who I thought were the worst skeptics - skeptics who were embarrassingly wrong or who engaged in misleading behavior in the pursuit of perpetuating skeptical myths. This is not a complete list of either:

Worst:

Linus Pauling (Winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry) said, "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." However, he was proved embarrassingly wrong when in 2011 Dan Shectman won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals.

Best (The best skeptic is an ex-skeptic!):

Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander: Alexander started out as a skeptic but after his near death experience he said, "consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact".

In an interview at skeptiko.com, Alexander said:

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

... consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

Dr. Charles Robert Richet (1850–1935, Winner of the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine). Richet initially scoffed at psychical research but after thirty years of his own investigations he came to believe in telepathy, precognition, ectoplasm, and cryptesthesia (the ability of mediums to obtain information about spirits).

Richet admitted that in the 1870s, he dismissed and even scoffed at parapsychology research being carried out by prominent scientists like Frederic Myers and William Crookes.
(From: When skeptics become believers at netplaces.com/evidence-of-the-afterlife)

Later Richet wrote in his book Thirty Years of Psychical Research:

Perhaps-and I admit it-the innumerable experiments published by eminent men of science would not have convinced me, had I not been a witness of the four fundamental facts of metapsychics. I was an unwilling witness, in no way enthusiastic, very critical, extremely distrustful of the facts that forced themselves upon me. I was able to verify, under unexceptionable conditions
and despite my desire to disprove them, the four essential facts of metapsychics.

These four personal experiences, all four of which carry obvious proof, determined my belief, and that not at once, but after long consideration, meditation, and repetition.

A. Cryptesthesia. Stella, in presence of G., whose family she does not and cannot have known, gave the first names of his son, of his wife, of a deceased brother, of a living brother, of his father-in-law, and of the locality where he lived as a child.

B. Telekinesis. While Eusapia's head and hands were held, a large melon weighing six pounds was moved from the sideboard to the table, the distance between them being over a yard.

C. Ectoplasms. Eusapia was in half light, her left hand in my right and her right in my left tightly held, and before Lodge, Myers, and Ochorowicz, a third hand stroked my face, pinched my nose, pulled my hair, and gave a smack on my shoulder heard by Ochorowicz, Myers, and Lodge.

D. Premonitions. Alice, at 2 P.M. told me, for the first and only time, that I should soon give way to violent anger before one, two, three persons whom she designated with her hand as if she saw them. At G P.M. the unlikely and unforeseeable impertinence of a person absolutely unknown to Alice provoked me to one of the strongest and most justifiable fits of anger of my whole life before two other persons, an anger that led to my receiving a challenge to a duel, the only one I have ever received.

Richard Hodgson:

Richard Hodgson was a skeptic. He had investigated Madam Blavatsky and exposed her as a fraud. Hodgson's investigation of Mrs. Piper proved she was psychic.

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851–1940). Lodge started out as a skeptic but after attending sessions with mediums, he came to believe they could communicate with spirits. He eventually published a book of communications from is deceased son Raymond.

(From: When skeptics become believers at netplaces.com/evidence-of-the-afterlife.)

Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge was a prominent British physicist and mathematician credited with significant contributions in the fields of thermal conductivity, thermo-electricity, and electricity. He was the first to transmit a radio signal, even before Marconi, and was also the developer of the Lodge spark plug. Just like other scientists of his time, Lodge did not believe in the possibility of communicating with an afterlife.

In 1883, he came across stage performer Irving Bishop and was impressed and intrigued by the idea of thought transference and telepathy. He began thinking of the possibilities that can arise from the concept of dislocation between body and mind. He stated, “I began to feel that there was a possibility of the survival of personality.” Lodge later went on to study the American medium Leonora Piper in 1889, followed by other investigations and research into methods of different popular mediums of the time. He also wrote a book on communication with the spirit of his son who died in a battle. The book was published in 1916 and was called Raymond, or Life After Death.

Sir William Crookes: 1832-1919. Crookes started out as a hostile doubter but later came to believe that Daniel D. Home demonstrated psychokinesis.

Crookes first began his investigations into 'psychic' phenomena in 1869 as a hostile doubter. In his article, 'Spiritualism Viewed by the Light of Modern Science' he declared:

"The increased employment of scientific methods will produce a race of observers who will drive the worthless residuum of spiritualism hence into the unknown limbo of magic and necromancy."

However...

Crookes' experiments with Daniel D. Home demonstrated the existence of a 'psychic force' wholly ignored by science.

Crookes stated:

"Of all persons endowed with a powerful development of this Psychic Force, Mr. Daniel Dunglas Home is the most remarkable and it is mainly owing to the many opportunities I have had of carrying on my investigation in his presence that I am enabled to affirm so conclusively the existence of this force."

Worst:

Skeptical Investigations explains how the skeptical organization CSICOP while trying to debunk astrology, actually found evidence supporting astrology and "In order to get the result they wanted, ... had to commit a total of six statistical blunders...".

The statistician and psychologist Michael Gauquelin had done a statistical analysis providing evidence that astrology might have some basis in fact. His analysis showed a correlation between the position of Mars in the sky at the time of birth and the odds of a person becoming a sports champion...

In 1976, in an attempt to make this embarrassment go away once and for all, Harvard professor of biostatistics and CSICOP fellow Marvin Zelen proposed a simplified version of the original Gauquelin study which he subsequently performed with the assistance of CSICOP chairman and professor of philosophy Paul Kurtz and George Abell, a UCLA astronomer. In order to get the result they wanted, the trio had to commit a total of six statistical blunders, which are discussed in detail in the article The True Disbelievers: Mars Effect Drives Skeptics to Irrationality by former CSICOP fellow Richard Kammann. Proper analysis showed that the new study actually supported the Gauquelin effect.

Lots more worst skeptics here.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Marcello Truzzi, an honest skeptic.

Someone in an internet discussion forum I participate in asked the members of the group who their Favorite CSICOP Fellow is. CSICOP is an organization of skeptics. I answered with my favorite past CSICOP member: Marcello Truzzi. Truzzi was a founding member of CSICOP and co-chairman. He felt CSICOP should include some people who believed in paranormal phenomena and he was forced to leave the organization because of his views. He believed that scientific experiments had demonstrated ESP is a real phenomenon and he was critical of pseudoskepticism. He was the first to express the idea that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" in those words, but he later came to recognize the flaw in that belief is that the definition of extraordinary is not something that can be measured objectively.

The wikipedia article on him gives a brief biography.

Truzzi founded the skeptical journal Explorations and was invited to be a founding member of the skeptic organization CSICOP as its co-chairman with Paul Kurtz. Truzzi's journal became the official journal of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) and was renamed The Zetetic ("zetetic" is another name for "skeptic"). The journal remained under his editorship. He left CSICOP about a year after its founding, after receiving a vote of no confidence from the group's Executive Council. Truzzi wanted to include pro-paranormal people in the organization and pro-paranormal research in the journal, but CSICOP felt that there were already enough organizations and journals dedicated to the paranormal. Kendrick Frazier became the editor of CSICOP's journal and the name was changed to Skeptical Inquirer.

After leaving CSICOP, Truzzi started another journal, the Zetetic Scholar.[2] He promoted the term "zeteticism" as an alternative to "skepticism," because he thought that the latter term was being usurped by what he termed "pseudoskeptics." A zetetic is a "skeptical seeker." The term's origins lie in the word for the followers of the skeptic Pyrrho in ancient Greece and was used by flat-earthers in the 19th century. Skeptic's Dictionary memorialized Truzzi thus: “Truzzi considered most skeptics to be pseudoskeptics, a term he coined to describe those who assume an occult or paranormal claim is false without bothering to investigate it. A kind way to state these differences might be to say that Marcello belonged to the Pyrrhonian tradition, most of the rest of us belong to the Academic skeptical tradition.”[3]

Truzzi was skeptical of investigators and debunkers who determined the validity of a claim prior to investigation. He accused CSICOP of increasingly unscientific behavior, for which he coined the term pseudoskepticism. Truzzi stated:

They tend to block honest inquiry, in my opinion. Most of them are not agnostic toward claims of the paranormal; they are out to knock them. [...] When an experiment of the paranormal meets their requirements, then they move the goal posts. Then, if the experiment is reputable, they say it's a mere anomaly.[4]

Truzzi held that CSICOP researchers sometimes also put unreasonable limits on the standards for proof regarding the study of anomalies and the paranormal. Martin Gardner writes: "In recent years he (Truzzi) has become a personal friend of Uri Geller; not that he believes Uri has psychic powers, as I understand it, but he admires Uri for having made a fortune by pretending he is not a magician."[5]

Truzzi co-authored a book on psychic detectives entitled The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime. It investigated many psychic detectives and concluded: "[W]e unearthed new evidence supporting both sides in the controversy. We hope to have shown that much of the debate has been extremely simplistic."[6] The book also stated that the evidence didn't meet the burden of proof demanded for such an extraordinary claim.[7]

Although he was very familiar with folie à deux, Truzzi was very confident a shared visual hallucination could not be skeptically examined by one of the participators. Thus he categorized it as an anomaly. In a 1982 interview Truzzi stated that controlled ESP (ganzfeld) experiments have "gotten the right results" maybe 60 percent of the time.[8] This question remains controversial. Truzzi remained an advisor to IRVA, the International Remote Viewing Association, from its founding meeting until his death.[9]

Truzzi died from cancer on February 2, 2003.

I mention Truzzi on my web page on Skeptical Fallacies

The notion that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof was first phrased in those words by Marcello Truzzi. He later came to believe that...

The central problem however lies in the fact that "extraordinary" must be relative to some things "ordinary." and as our theories change, what was once extraordinary may become ordinary (best seen in now accepted quantum effects that earlier were viewed as "impossible"). Many now extraordinary claims may become more acceptable not when they are replicated but when theoretical contexts change to make them more welcome.
Source: "On Some Unfair Practices towards Claims of the Paranormal" by Marcello Truzzi skepticalinvestigations.org

This suggests that what constitutes an "extraordinary" claim is subjective.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander: Heaven is real and consciousness is not produced by the brain.

The neurosurgeon, Dr. Eben Alexander, has a book coming out soon about his near death experience, Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife. The book describes the near death experience Dr. Alexander had while he was hospitalized and in a coma caused by meningitis. Dr. Alexander's near death experience is of particular importance because he was medically monitored during his illness and his brain is known to have been inactive. His near death experience occurred in the absence of any brain function. During the near death experience, he received a message that is important to everyone, and he learned from direct experience about God's love for each of us.

Alexander gave an interview on skeptkio podcast last fall. In that interview he explained why, as a neurosurgeon, because of the way the brain is wired, he is sure that his experience can only be explained if consciousness is independent of the brain. He also explained that biological explanations like abnormal CO2 and oxygen levels or abnormal brain chemicals like DMT or ketamine cannot explain his experience. He says that before his NDE he believed neuroscience could explain how the brain produced consciousness, but after the NDE he understood that "mind and consciousness are independent of the brain". This is extremely significant coming from a neurosurgeon who combines what he knows about neuroscience and what he learned from his own near death experience. Dr. Alexander states, "consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact."

You can read an excerpt from his book at the thedailybeast.com.

Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife
When a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

Dr. Alexander was medically monitored during the time he had his near death experience and his brain is known to have been inactive. His experience occurred in the absence of any brain function. This shows that we survive the death of our bodies.

In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.

...

For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.

...

There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.

...

But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.

During the experience he received a message that is important to everyone:

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

Dr. Alexander's experience renewed his belief in God and he learned from direct experience of God's love for all of us:

In fact, reality is too vast, too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.

The book will be published on October 23.

Here are an mp3 and transcript of an interview with Dr. Eben Alexander from skeptiko.com

In this interview, Alexander explains that his experience could not have occurred if consciousness was produced by the brain because the brain does not have the necessary structure to produce what he experienced.

In fact, one of the hypotheses that I entertained about all this was because the experience that I’ll describe to you seemed very hyper-real and extremely crisp and vivid, much more real and interactive than sitting here and talking with you right now. I mean, it was extraordinary. That is something that is often described in near-death experiences and of course one of my early hypotheses was well, maybe there’s some differential effect against inhibitory neuronal networks that allowed over-expression of excitatory neural networks and gave this illusion of kind of a hyper-real situation.

I can tell you from having lived through it that it was so powerful and so beyond that kind of explanation that I wasn’t very hopeful that that would work out in the end. But I figured I needed to give it a chance and look at the microanatomy in the cortex and the different connections with the thalamus and basal ganglia and see if I could come up with some way that one might have an illusion of hyper-reality.

I can tell you because of the kind of content of the experience and the powerful, overwhelming nature of it and the fact that it was so complex, I think much of what I remembered from that experience, I don’t think my brain and mind could possibly manage that even now.

I mean, the kind of mental function that occurs when you’re in that hyper-real state, the way that information comes in from spiritual beings and kind of the interaction with them is so intense and extraordinary, it’s really inexplicable in earthly terms. But it would basically outrun any of those kind of theories. That was something I was looking for. In fact, I never found an anatomic distribution that would support that over-activity of excitatory pathways.

He explains a little bit about what time is like in the spirit world. They have time but it is different than what we experience.

But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.

Alexander rejects the explanation that NDEs are caused by abnormal CO2 and oxygen levels.

Initially I thought, “Gosh, it was almost too real to be real.” That hyper-reality that people describe, I just wish we could bottle that up and give it to people so they could see what it’s like because it is not something that is going to be explained by these little simplistic kind of talking about CO2 and oxygen levels. That just won’t work. I promise you that won’t work.

He also rejects the explanation that NDEs are caused by chemicals like DMT or ketamine.

I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, ”or“ That sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity, the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not hearing something.

Alexander explains how his belief about the origin of consciousness was changed by his NDE. Before the NDE he believed the brain produced consciousness but after the NDE he knew consciousness was independent of the brain.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting yourself to that reductive materialist view.

He says:

... consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

If you found this article interesting you may also want to read my article about the skeptiko interview of near death experience researcher Melvin Morse.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Filter Model of The Brain is Falsifiable and Scientific

I have updated my web page on Skeptical Fallacies to include the section The Filter Model of The Brain is Falsifiable and Scientific. An explanation of the filter model of the brain can be found here.

A skeptic might say that the filter model of the brain is not scientific because it cannot be falsified. Any change in mental function can be explained by it. If conscious faculties are increased, as occurs during an NDE, it is explained by less filtering, if conscious faculties are decreased, as may occur after a stroke or during sleep, it may be explained by increased filtering. The theory accounts for any possibility and therefore it can't be falsified.

This is a misrepresentation of falsifiability.

For a theory to be scientific it must be supported by evidence. For a theory to be supported by evidence it must pass a test that could demonstrate the theory is false.

If a theory makes predictions and you can design an experiment or make observations to test the correctness of those predictions empirically, then you can test the theory. If the experiments or observations show that the predictions are incorrect, then you have falsified the theory. This is the meaning of falsifiability. If the experiments or observations show that the predictions are correct then the theory has passed the test and can be considered to be supported by evidence and is therefore scientific.

The filter model of the brain makes three correct predictions:

1. The brain might be damaged in a way that is like a clog in the filter which should cause loss of some conscious capability.
   
2. The brain might be damaged in a way that is like a hole punctured in the filter which should result in new or improved capabilities of consciousness.
   
3. If the filter is removed from consciousness, then there should be unfiltered, expanded consciousness.
   

The way to test the first two predictions is to observe the effects of brain damage. If you can find cases where damage to the brain causes loss of function and other cases where damage to the brain causes increased function, then those observations prove the first two predictions are correct. There are some forms of brain damage that do cause loss of function, for example, amnesia or senility in the aged. There are also cases of brain damage where there new or improved capabilities of consciousness are produced, such as ESP or in acquired savant syndrome. The third prediction is proved to be correct by near death experiences where people who come close to death experience leaving their body and experience unfiltered expanded consciousness. The evidence for the second and third predictions is detailed in the previous section.

For a theory to be falsifiable, the theory must make specific predictions that can be tested with empirical observations. The filter model makes specific predictions about what types of effects on consciousness can be produced and those effects can be empirically measured. Brain damage can be detected by various methods such as MRI. Changes in functions of consciousness can be observed. Paralysis from a stroke, or new talents in the case of acquired savant syndrome are easy to observe. The reports of people who have veridical near death experiences are empirical observations made by the experiencers.

The confusion over what an unfalsifiable theory is, is best understood by looking at this excerpt from Science, Pseudo-Science, and Falsifiability by Karl Popper, 1962, which explaines how an unfalsifiable theories is always confirmed:

I may illustrate this by two very different examples of human behaviour: that of a man who pushes a child into the water with the intention of drowning him; and that of a man who sacrifices his life in an attempt to save the child. Each of these two cases can be explained with equal ease in Freudian and Adlerian terms. According to Freud the first man suffered from repression (say, of some component of his Oedipus complex), while the second man had achieved sublimation. According to Adler the first man suffered from feelings of inferiority (producing perhaps the need to prove to himself that he dared to commit some crime), and so did the second man (whose need was to prove to himself that he dared to rescue the child). I could not think of any human behaviour which could not be interpreted in terms of either theory. It was precisely this fact -- that they always fitted, that they were always confirmed -- which in the eyes of their admirers constituted the strongest argument in favour of these theories. It began to dawn on me that this apparent strength was in fact their weakness.

The difference between the filter model of the brain and the psychoanalytic theories in the above excerpt is that the filter model of the brain makes specific predictions about brain damage and its effects that can be empirically observed. In the above excerpt, the description of the Adlerian theory does not involve testing predictions empirically. Drowning and saving are both predicted by feelings of inferiority and there is no mention of any empirical measurement of inferiority, the need to prove oneself or that this need caused the behavior. If one accepts the theory without empirical tests, then any behavior could be explained by inferiority. In the example of the Freudian explanation of the behavior, empirical measurements of the sublimation and repression are not mentioned either. Sublimation and repression are simply assumed as necessary to explain any behavior. However, if there were empirical measurements taken of repression, and sublimation, in real occurrences of behavior, then the Freudian theory could be tested.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Science cannot Explain why a Psi Wheel Turns

This is the fifth post in my series on psi wheels.

In the first post, I discussed how everyone can measure the energy field surrounding their body with a psi wheel and how to use a psi wheel to measure this energy as you bring it into and through your body when you practice spiritual healing. In the second post, I discussed how the phenomenon of the psi wheel shows that the energy in the field surrounding the body is probably the same as the energy that flows through you when you give spiritual healing to another person. In the third post I discussed using qi gong to increase the flow of healing energy (qi) through your body to help develop your abilities as a spiritual healer. In the fourth post, I discussed how to use an Egely wheel (a very sensitive psi wheel manufactured by the Egely Research Company) to demonstrate that healing energy can be stored in inanimate objects.

In this fifth post, I will discuss the scientific research George Egely did that shows a psi wheel does not turn because of any known phenomenon such as heat, air currents, electricity or magnetism. Egely concluded that a psi wheel turns because of a different type of energy he called bioenergy.

George Egely, the inventor of the Egely wheel, worked on problems of energy transfer in nuclear power plants and he earned a Ph.D. in that subject. He later studied the phenomenon that causes the Egely wheel to turn. By conducting many different types of experiments, he ruled out heat, air currents, electricity, magnetism and any other normal explanation for the phenomenon. He found correlations with health and psychological factors which led him to use the term bioenergy to refer to the energy that causes the Egely wheel to rotate. His research on the Egely wheel phenomenon demonstrated the phenomenon cannot be explained by current scientific knowledge. This research is described at the Egely wheel web site in The story of the vitality meter. He also published his research in Experimental Investigation of Biologically Induced Energy Transport Anomalies, KFKI report, 1986-94/K.

The following is a summary of the information in the The Story of the Vitality Meter.

Summary of Experiments and Results

• Glass boxes were used to isolate the experimental system from wind which showed the rotation is not caused by air currents.
  
• Using gloves to thermally insulate the hand from the air, Egely showed that the rotation is not due to heat from the hand.
  
• Metal tanks shaped like a hand and filled with hot water did not cause appreciable rotation. This showed heat does not cause the rotation.
  
• Results from experiments involving an electrical apparatus that used a colored chemical solution to visualize the rotation ruled out wind, heat, electricity or magnetism as a cause of the rotation. These experiments also demonstrated an unknown phenomenon that caused the electrical resistance of the solution to change.
  
• The speed of rotation depended on how tired or fit the individual was. This ruled out heat and air currents because the phenomenon varied with the biological condition of the subject.
  
• Egely found weather fronts or worries reduced rotation. Once storm clouds passed, rotation increased immediately. He believed moods improved when this happened which showed the mind influences the phenomenon.
  
• Egely found ill people did not rotate the wheel well even if they had a fever which showed the rotation is not due to heat from the hands. People who were healthy and vibrant always caused good rotation. This also cannot be explained by heat or air currents.
  
• Egely found correlations with psychological factors such as meditation, scholastic achievement, physical attractiveness, worry, remote influence of one person over another. All these factors rule out normal explanations.
  
• Because health and psychological factors affected the rotation, Egely use the term bioenergy to describe the energy that causes the rotation. Egely believed bioenergy is conducted by all materials and that explained why an Egely wheel will not turn well inside a jar. The jar acts like a Faraday cage.
  

  UPDATE: For ease of reference I have included additional evidence not listed The Story of the Vitality Meter below:
  

  • Dr Parisetti described his experiences with a psi wheel here.
    
    • "Perhaps the warmth from my hand was heating the nearest part of the aluminium, which in turn would result in a tiny uplift air current, enough to make the wheel spin. To test that hypothesis, I dipped a spoon in boiling water to heat it up, placed it besides the wheel and could not detect any movement."
      
    • "...I reflected, air provides very good thermal insulation, and my hand would only be some 15 degrees warmer than the aluminium. So, the heat explanation doesn’t seem to hold up."
      
    • "I then started experimenting with means to block any possible direct influence from my hands to the wheel. I placed a transparent plastic CD jewel box between my right hand and the Egeli Wheel: this made no difference whatsoever - the wheel would still immediately start turning!"
      
    • "I’ve seem movies on the Internet in which people place the Egeli Wheel under a salad bowl, blow on it with a blow drier to show that there is no outside influence, and still, when they place their hand besides it, the wheel start turning."
      
  • It cannot be the hand channeling air flow that causes the wheel to spin because if there were a draft in the room, the wheel would spin when no hand was near it.
    
  • It cannot be heat from the hand causing a convection current with a horizontal component that causes the wheel to spin because if that were the case, the wheel would not be level. The side of the wheel in the rising air would be higher than the opposite side. Particularly with a home made psi-wheel, which is very sensitive to any air flow, you can tell if it is being affected by drafts or not.
    
  • When I place my hand near the edge of a table as if I was turning a psi-wheel but without a psi-wheel near it, and I hold a burning stick of incense below the edge of the table, the smoke rises smoothly without any indications of horizontal air flow. If the hand could produce a convection current with enough of a horizontal component to turn an homemade psi-wheel, it should easily influence the much lighter particles of smoke. I know that slight air currents can influence the smoke from the incense because if I then place an Egely wheel near my hand, its turning creates air currents that do influence the smoke.
    
  • When I place an Egely wheel near a red hot heating element on an electric stove, the Egely wheel barely moves and not in one direction continuously. Similarly, if I place an Egely wheel near a small tub or a latex glove filled with warm water at approximately body temperature, the wheel sometimes moves slowly but not continuously in one direction. When a hand is placed near the Egely wheel, once started, the wheel moves continuously in one direction and much more rapidly.
    
  • If I am sitting at a table turning a psi-wheel, and I move my hand away from the wheel, the wheel stops moving indicating there is no appreciable air flow near it. If a convection current caused by heat from my hand was causing the wheel to turn, surely the convection current from my entire body a few inches away would be much stronger and the wheel should continue to indicate some air flow by some type of movement. If my breath was causing the wheel to turn when my hand was near it, similarly the wheel should continue to indicate some air flow after I move my hand away.
    
  • If you are trying to prove that convection currents due to heat from the hand cause a psi-wheel to turn, it is very easy to fool yourself. This is because heat does cause convection currents that will have a horizontal component. As warm air is rises, air will flow horizontally towards the rising column to replace the rising air. Therefore it is definitely possible to construct a device that uses heat to create a horizontal air flow that can turn an psi-wheel. But the fact that such a device is possible does not prove that a psi-wheel turns when a hand is near it because of a convection current due to heat from the hand. You can blow on a psi-wheel to make it turn, but that does not prove the breath of the experimenter causes it to turn when a hand is placed near it.
    

    Egely made his conclusions that bioenergy moves the wheel partially based on experiments with many individuals. If you want to assert some phenomenon, such as convection currents, cause a psi-wheel to turn, you have to demonstrate that it can make the wheel turn under the same conditions and with the same characteristics (smooth, continuous, rapid turning) that a human hand will turn the wheel. You also have to do it with a the same type of psi-wheel. An experimental apparatus may be able to impart slight motion to an Egely wheel, but can it turn a homemade paper psi-wheel which has much more resistance to turning but which many people are able to turn by placing their hand near it?
    

    You also have to account for differences in the ability of different people to turn the wheel. If you think it is heat from the hand that causes the wheel to turn, you have to show a correlation between hand temperature in different people and rate of turning. A few people are not able to turn a psi-wheel, are their hands always cold? And you have to distinguish between correlation and causation. If you think heat is causing convection currents you have to prove it is the convection currents that are influencing the wheel, for example, by using smoke to visualize the convection currents without the presence of a psi-wheel to provide evidence that there is appreciable air flow moving in the direction and speed necessary to move the psi-wheel.
    

    If you don't do controls with humans, if you don't compare the phenomenon caused by laboratory apparatus to the phenomenon caused by a human, if you don't distinguish between correlation and causation, it is very easy to fool yourself into believing that you have found a physical explanation of the psi-wheel, when all you have done is, for instance, demonstrate the principle of buoyancy 2200 years after Archimedes did.
    

  • I have found that during the hot summer when my hand, the wheel, and the air are all approximately the same temperature, the wheel still turns. This rules out heat and convection currents.
    
  • I put a cotton wash cloth around my hand to provide thermal insulation and the wheel still turned. This rules out heat and convection currents.
    
  • If I use two wheels, one near each hand, they turn slower than one alone. If I use one wheel and place my other hand near a second wheel, the first wheel slows down as the second speeds up. This is not explained by heat, convection currents, or drafts.
    
  • I and many other people have enough power coming from our hands to turn a wheel covered by some type of container. This rules out air currents as an explanation for the rotation.
    
  • I find that I can "magnetize" a plastic jar so that it will turn a wheel without my hand near it. The direction of rotation is always the same depending on which hand was used to magnetize the jar even though the jar is a symmetrical cylinder. This rules out any normal explanation including heat, convection currents, drafts, electricity, and magnetism.
    
  • When turning a home made psi-wheel for several minutes by placing my hand near it, I often feel a snapping sensation in my hand and sometimes I can feel the vane on the wheel as it passes my hand even though it does not touch my hand. Others have also reported the snapping sensation. This is evidence there is an unknown phenomenon occurring that has nothing to do with heat convection.
    

If you want to show a certain phenomenon, such as drafts or heat, can cause a psi-wheel to turn, you should use a certain type of psi-wheel depending on the conditions of your demonstration. If you want to show a certain phenomenon will cause a psi-wheel to turn, you must show that phenomenon can cause a home made psi-wheel made of paper to turn because that is the hardest psi-wheel to turn. If you want to show a psi-wheel will not turn under certain conditions, even with a hand near it, you must show an Egely wheel will not turn in those condition because an Egely wheel is the easiest psi-wheel to turn.

Any theory that tries to explain what causes a psi wheel to turn by means of some ordinary phenomena such as heat, convection, or drafts must also explain all the evidence that shows none of those explanations are possible. Some people will find a condition where the wheel does not turn and proclaim that condition prevents, for example, air currents. This is not proof that air currents cause the wheel to turn. There may be another phenomenon the same conditions inhibits that is the real cause of rotation. Unless they can explain all these forms of evidence that show it is not air currents, they have not proved anything.

Overview of Experiments by George Egely

Egely believes the energy that causes the rotation, which he calls bioenergy, is conducted by all materials. That is why if you cover the Egely wheel with a jar, the jar acts like a Faraday cage, the bioenergy is conducted by the jar, it does not penetrate inside it.

Egely first started experimenting with water in a dish and put small pieces of aluminum foil on the surface of the water. The aluminum would rotate when a hand was placed next to the dish. He tried wearing gloves that would reduce heat transmission from his hand. The aluminum would rotate even if there was no temperature difference between the surface of the glove and the air. This ruled out heat transmission as an explanation of the phenomenon.

In the mid 1980's Egely developed the Egely Wheel and had dozens of friends try his apparatus. Most people were able to rotate both the water apparatus and the Egely Wheel. He found, "The speed of the rotation depended on how tired or fit they were and how much they could or could not concentrate." This shows that the phenomenon is not due to air currents, it varies with the biological condition of the subject.

Egely found the temperature of the hand did not influence the speed of rotation. Then he tried using hand shaped metal tanks and found that putting hot water in them did not cause rotation beyond 10% of what a real hand could cause. This also ruled out heat transfer to explain the phenomenon.

Using a complex electro-chemical apparatus that allowed him to visualize the movement inside the liquid by a change of color, he showed that the phenomenon could not be caused by wind or heat. He also found that during the phenomenon the electrical resistance of the liquid changed. This cannot be explained by any known phenomenon.

Egely used glass boxes to isolate the apparatus from the wind to show that air currents were not the cause.

Egely did experiments with 500 high school students the liquid rotated fast with one third of them. Another one third could rotate the apparatus slowly, and another 1/3 could not rotate the apparatus significantly.

Other experiments showed that a weather front or worries could inhibit rotation in people who would otherwise rotate the system very well. Good weather, and good moods correlated with good rotation. After rain and clouds passes, he says, people cheered up, and the results improved immediately, before any appreciable change in humidity or hand temperature could occur. This showed there was something in the human mind that effected the phenomenon.

Calculations showed that electricity and magnetism could not explain the rotation.

After all these experiments the real nature and cause of the rotation still remained a puzzle, I just could not decide what kind of an energy transfer might be the reason for it. I made calculations, but for the liquid to reach an angular speed of one revolution per minute, which is a good result, it would have to be very salty. The magnetic field would have to be a hundred times stronger than that of the Earth, or the person must have submerged his/her hand in the water, and a direct current of lethal power would have had to flow between his/her fingers. But, none of these four conditions were met during experiments. So, to find the answer to this problem some hypothesis had to be drawn about things unknown so far.

Egely found, "Extrovert, positive thinking, active, leading-type students had much higher vitality levels, and could maintain this level for a longer period than their quiet, restrained, silent, negative thinking, shy classmates. Experience showed the interesting fact that good-looking teenage girls were influenced by their beauty. Probably, they got more encouragement, or positive signs than their less lucky mates, so they had higher scores."

Egely also found, "In a strange way, vitality did not strongly depend on grades. Although students with good grades had vitality values generally above the average and this tended to be even higher if they were playing sports, the most outstanding results were achieved not by the good pupils."

After testing thousands of people and recording written records of about 1100, he found that seriously ill people could not rotate the wheel well, even if they had a fever which shows the phenomenon is not due to heat from the hands.

Healers or successful businessmen would get good rotation. sick people could hardly move the wheel and vibrant healthy people always had good rotation. These observations were consistent over many, many observations and could not be explained by chance.

Other observations included:

I experienced the highest vitality values, above 100%, with students who could not always fit in with the tight school regulations, but showed great interest towards the different forms of meditations and had close relation to their friends, took care of them, and had charisma. If they were a few meters from the one who just measured, the results were definitely better. To tell the truth, they could also make it worse if I asked them to do so. In this case, the vitality value of the one measuring himself/herself decreased to a great extent. To produce this result they did not have to touch the other person, it was enough to use their willpower. This was again an important reason for me to accept the reality of this phenomenon. It showed also that many people have known and all of us used this energy, even without knowing it, for a long time, still it has remained unexplained. We have also tried to see if two, three or more people together could reach a higher score than separately, i.e. if their vitality sums up. To some extent the resulting vitality level was really higher, but not significantly. As if discharged batteries were connected parallel. In some cases two or three people together reached a lower level of vitality than separately, when they did not know or did not like each other. Interpersonal relation, the mere fact of somebody standing beside or behind us, may influence results considerably.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Out-of Body Experiences, Real and Fake. Don't be fooled by how-to books making false claims. Better Ways to Have a Genuine Paranormal Experience.

Six Studies of Out-of-Body Experiences by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D. (PDF HTML) is an interesting paper that describes six studies of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) that Tart conducted himself.

The excerpt below is from the Conclusions section of the paper. It gives a good summary of Tart's findings. He found that an OBE may be one of a variety of experiences. In some OBEs, the mind seems to leave the body. However some OBEs are just illusions. And, in other OBEs it appears that the experience is due to extra sensory perceptions. In these latter type of OBEs the experiencer seems to perceive without using his normal senses, but the mind does not leave the body. What is particularly important in assessing an OBE is whether the experiencer perceives anything that can be verified which he could not perceive with his normal senses. When that type of veridical information is obtained by an experiencer, it suggests the experience is more than an illusion.

The most important point to understand from this paper is that even for people who are experts at having OBEs, OBEs are very rarely veridical and even fewer OBEs are really cases where the mind leaves the body. Tart's findings have implications for people who are interested in trying to learn to have OBEs. Many people buy books and audio CDs that claim to teach how to have an OBE. However, many customers end up feeling cheated because all they experience are a few non-veridical dreams of being out of the body. Understandably, people buy these books because they want to have some type of paranormal experience. I don't mean to discourage people from trying them, they may work for some, but they should have realistic expectation and not be fooled by misleading claims.

My belief, from reading the literature, from personal contacts with other people who have OBEs, and from my own experiences with OBEs, is that spontaneous OBEs, where the OBE occurs without the experiencer trying to have the experience, are the most likely to involve the mind leaving the body and be veridical. The techniques described in books and audio CDs that claim to allow a person to learn to induce an OBE are more likely to produce non-veridical dreams of OBEs. This should not be surprising since most of these techniques involve going into a deeply relaxed state and doing some type of visualization of being out of the body or imagining leaving the body. It seems likely that this could lead to dreams of an OBE if the person drifted off into sleep. Some of these techniques are similar to techniques used for hypnotic induction, and they might induce a form of self-hypnosis. One form of OBEs Tart found to be illusory were OBEs induced by hypnosis.

While I don't endorse any teacher or institution, it is possible that working individually with a teacher or taking a class might produce better results than working alone from a book or CD. Those conditions have been shown to work well for other types of psychic learning. For example, my own experiences learning mediumship occurred in a group class. I also worked individually with a teacher. There is an effect from having a group of people working together that enhances psychic experiences and it is also possible that there may be spiritual entities working with a particular teacher that can help the student. Unfortunately, you can't put those things into a book like an audio CD tucked inside the back cover.

However, there are much better ways to have a genuine paranormal experience than trying to have an OBE and they don't cost money:

• Keep a dream log to identify precognitive dreams.
  
• Turn a psi-wheel using psychokinesis.
  
• Experience psychic perceptions while in the hypnogogic state.
  

Here is the excerpt from the Conclusions of Tart's paper:

I believe that in some OBEs, the mind may, at least partially, really be located elsewhere than the physical body; this may have been the case with Miss Z. At the opposite extreme, as with my virtuoso hypnotic subjects whose experience was vivid and perfectly real to them but whose perception of the target room was only illusory, I believe an OBE can be a simulation of being out of the body, with the mind as much "in" the physical body as it ever is. In between these two extremes, I believe we can have OBEs that are basically a simulation of being out, but which are informed by information gathered by ESP such that the simulation of the OBE location is accurate and veridical. This is a messy situation in some ways, especially because all three of these types of OBEs may seem experientially identical to the person having them, at least at rough levels of description.

Here are some excerpts that from the different studies.

First study:

My participants' descriptions of the target had occasional resemblances to the target materials, but the similarities were much too vague for me to put any reliance upon them.

Second Study:

On the first three laboratory nights Miss Z reported that in spite of occasionally being "out," she had not been able to control her experiences enough to be in position to see the target number (which was different each night). On the fourth night, at 5:57 AM, there was a seven minute period of somewhat ambiguous EEG activity, sometimes looking like stage 1, sometimes like brief wakings. Then Miss Z awakened and called out over the intercom that the target number was 25132, which I wrote on the EEG recording.

...

The number 25132 was indeed the correct target number. I had learned something about designing experiments since my first OBE experiment and precise evaluation was possible here. The odds against guessing a 5-digit number by chance alone are 100,000 to 1, so this was a remarkable event!

Third Study:

Thus we have only weak evidence that Monroe was actually "out" on this occasion, a result he found as unsatisfactory as I did

Fourth Study:

When Monroe finished his brief OBE he got out of bed to telephone me: it was 11:05 PM, our time. Thus he experienced a tug pulling him from his body within one or two minutes of the time we started concentrating. The portion of his account that I have omitted, on the other hand, his description of our home and what my wife and I were doing, was quite inaccurate. He perceived too many people in the room, and perceived my wife and me performing actions that we did not do.

Fifth Study:

Again we have that frustrating pattern of my research with Monroe of no ESP results clear enough to be conclusive, but not results so clearly inaccurate that I would feel comfortable saying nothing at all happened.

Sixth Study:

All the participants reported vivid OBEs that seemed like real experiences to them. They included journeys to places they knew, like downtown Davis, that were vividly experienced, as well as vivid experiences of journeying to the target room. None of their reports of what they saw on the target table bore any clear resemblance to the targets. A formal analysis was not worth the trouble.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Charles T. Tart: Hovering on the Threshold of the Dream World

Here is an article by Charles Tart that describes a technique for maintaining the hypnogogic state. I think it is quite interesting because it seems to corroborate the method of psychic development I have described on my web site.

Lie down comfortably on your back, eyes closed. A quiet, fairly dark room helps. You can let all of your body relax except for one forearm, which is held vertically upright, resting on its elbow. You’ll quickly find tactile vertical as the position in which it takes almost no effort to keep your arm balanced there. The hand can also be kept balanced vertically too, but sometimes I find it easiest to just let my hand fall to some relaxed position. It’s the forearm position that matters.

Now you just calmly observe your mind as you continue to relax. If your forearm starts to tilt to the side, gently bring it back to vertical, to the minimal effort position. As you slide toward sleep, the imagery of the bhavanga, from vague, amorphous shapes and colors to full dreamlets, will manifest.

The skill you eventually learn is to keep a little attention on the forearm, such as by lightly checking on it every few seconds, and when it starts to tilt – this happens as you start sliding too far down into the bhavanga – gently make it balanced again. You now have a biofeedback device, your forearm, that enables you to hover on the threshold, far enough into the bhavanga or hypnagogic state to observe a lot, but which gives you gentle feedback if you sleep too far into the falling asleep zone, and which gives you even stronger feedback – the arm falling and hitting the bed – if you go all the way.

...

I came across this technique while still a teenager, reading old journals on psychical research and parapsychology. I can’t find the exact reference, my journals don’t go back that far, but I think it was a little article titled something like the “Four-eyes Technique” in an issue of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in the early 1900s. The author had figured this balancing technique out and was using it because he thought it would help ESP messages get through when they couldn’t penetrate the everyday noise of his conscious mind.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Convincing Evidence and Moving Goal Posts

I have updated my web page on Skeptical Fallacies
to include several new sections within About Skeptical Thinking:

Evidence Will not Convince a Pseudo-skeptic

There is a fundamental difficulty in convincing people to change their minds by presenting them with evidence. The difficulty is that the level of proof people require for giving up a strongly held belief is much more rigorous than the level of proof they require for holding on to a pre-existing belief. In order for someone to change their mind about a strongly held belief, they require absolute, 100%, ironclad proof and sometimes even that is not sufficient because in order to maintain a strongly held belief in the face of contradictory evidence, people only require a tenuous hypothesis to explain away the evidence. This is human nature. It is the real meaning behind the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". That phrase is not about the scientific method, it is about human psychology. This is why, for a pseudo-skeptic, it is so easy to fall back on the last bastions of skepticism, claiming the researchers are committing fraud, they are incompetent, or they are victims of deception in order to explain the researcher's observations of paranormal phenomena.

Moving the Goal Post

When trying to provide evidence to convince pseudo-skeptics, believers in paranormal phenomena often observe that the skeptics keep moving the goal post. For example, after a parapsychologist improves an experimental design and repeats an experiment in response to a criticism of a skeptic, the skeptic always seems to come up with a new objection. This can be easily understood if one considers why skeptics raise objections to evidence. When skeptics raise objections to evidence, it is not because they would actually believe the evidence if you satisfied their objection. Skeptics raise objections because they don't want the phenomenon to be proven. They raise objections to maintain their disbelief. That is why if you satisfy their objections, they will not change their minds and give up their disbelief, they will just come up with another objection to allow them to maintain their disbelief.

This is why it can be pointless to discuss the evidence with a pseudo-skeptic or to let a pseudo-skeptic dictate what evidence you should obtain. They are not sincerely interested in evidence, they are interested in maintaining their prejudice and they will invent as many new hypothetical problems with the evidence as necessary. Any hypothesis that supports his world view no matter how tenuous will be preferable to a to a pseudo-skeptic than any non materialist explanation no matter how much evidence there is supporting it. Repeated observations and repeatable experiments haven't convinced skeptics. Statements by Nobel prize winning scientists who were convinced by evidence hasn't convinced skeptics. When pushed to the limit, the skeptic always has recourse to the last bastions of skepticism: accusations of fraud, incompetence, and self-delusion.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Magicians cannot reproduce the phenomena of physical mediumship and other paranormal abilities under conditions that psychics produce those phenomena.

I have updated my web page on skeptical fallacies to include the following material in the section Magicians cannot reproduce the phenomena of physical mediumship and other paranormal abilities under conditions that psychics produce those phenomena.:

According to Chapter 8 Scole Experiment proves the afterlife of A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife by Victor Zammit, during the Scole Experiments, "James Webster, a professional stage-magician, ... who has more than fifty years experience in psychic research ... [on] three occasions he attended sittings with the Scole group and published reports. His conclusion was clearly set out in a recent letter to the English newspaper, Psychic World (June 2001):"

I discovered no signs of trickery, and in my opinion such conjuring tricks were not possible, for the type of phenomena witnessed, under the conditions applied….

The following excerpt from the zerdinisworld.com article on the medium Elizabeth Blake states that "Two expert conjurers David P. Abbot and E. A. Parsons" validated the mediumship of Elizabeth Blake.

Two expert conjurers, David P. Abbott of the ASPR and E. A. Parsons, investigated Blake in 1906 and became convinced of the identity of the spirit communicators. Blake used a 2-foot long double trumpet; putting the small end to her ear and the larger one at that of the sitter, it appeared as if the voices came from her ear. If she covered the small end with her palm, the result was the same. The voices grew from whispers to such loudness that occasionally they were heard at a distance of 100 feet.

The zerdinisworld.com article on medium Alec Harris quotes from The Mediumship of Alec Harris By Isa Gray to show that magician A.G. Fletcher-Desborough was unable to explain Harris' phenomena by means of tricks.

A.G. Fletcher-Desborough described his “unique” experience in Liverpool Evening Express.

I examined the cabinet which he used. Having been on the stage as an illusionist and magician, I knew exactly where to look for such things as panel and floor escapes, and ceiling and wall slides.

I was satisfied nothing could make an exit or an entrance in any way. There was no chance for deception."

A short stout man materialised from the cabinet, walked straight to him and mumbled the sitter’s name, Bertie. “It was my father and, in his mumbling way of speaking, gave my family pet name used by my parents. No one but the family knew it.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Can Spirits Interact with the Physical World?

A week or two ago I was involved in an on-line discussion on whether spirits can interact with the physical world. It got quite heated. The moderator had to get involved, and one member decided to leave the forum. The discussion was not about whether consciousness survives death but what type of evidence for the afterlife is genuinely caused by spirits. One member of the fourm did not believe spirits could communicate in language, or appear in human form, or interact with the physical world.

I posted a lot of evidence I think shows that spirits can communicate in language, appear in human form, and interact with the physical world. Since some readers of this blog may find those posts interesting I have included the links to them below:

• Excerpts from my article on Mrs Piper. The article describes how the characteristics of communication varied with the spirit not the medium or the sitter. This is strong evidence that the communication is coming from spirits.
  

• Excerpts from my article on The Icelandic Physical Medium Indridi Indridason where his arm was temporarily amputated during a seance.
  

• I discussed my own experiences learning mediumship at a spiritualist church.
  

• My article on super-psi explains why survival after death is a much better explanation than super-psi for the afterlife phenomena.
  

• A person I know of who at first was frightened when he started to see spirits but eventually became a very good medium.
  

• A boy who saw spirits that I know of from my own contacts among mediums.
  

• Excerpts from A Lawyer Presents the Case for the Afterlife by Victor Zammit. The excerpts indicate that the well respected investigators, Guy Lyon Playfair, William Roll, and Ian Stevenson all believed some poltergeist phenomenon is due to spirits.
  

• One might suppose that when a mediums sees a spirit it is just a mental impression that looks real, a type of hallucination. This might make sense if the spirit is trying to communicate with the medium. However that does not explain why mediums see spirits going about their own business and not attempting to communicate with the medium.
  

• The possibility of spirits interacting in the physical world was said to be unlikely, it would be redundant because the way spirits interact in the physical world is through human bodies. I replied that as incarnated humans we are not aware of our spiritual nature. However, spirits are able to interact with the physical world while remembering they are spirits and retaining their spirit faculties, so it is not redundant.
  

• I made the point that the mediums generally believe they are perceiving spirits. Because mediums live with the phenomenon every day of their lives, over decades, and know intimately all the intricate details of the phenomenon, they are more likely to form a correct interpretation of the phenomenon than someone who is basing his opinion on written second hand accounts.
  

• My post about William Cartheuser that linked to the article on him at zerdinisworld.com. It describes a test conducted in a recording studio under controlled conditions where spirits spoke into microphones 20 feet in the air and spoke at frequencies higher and lower than any human voice could produce.
  

• Excerpts from the zerdinisworld.com article on George Chapman, who was a trance medium who performed psychic surgery.
  

• The point came up that many of the best mediums worked in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I pointed out that there were also extremely good mediums in the relatively recent past:
  
  • George Chapman 1921-2006
    
  • Leslie Flint 1911-1994
    
  • Alec Harris 1897 - 1974
    

• Excerpts demonstrating that the mediumship of the past cannot be disregarded as fraud. There are many cases where conjurers were unable to produce mediumistic phenomena under the conditions in which the medium did and refused challenges to attempt it. Furthermore reputable observers have observed phenomenon under conditions where fraud was impossible.
  

Copyright © 2012, 2014 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

The Double Standard of Proof for Parapsychology

I have updated my web page on Skeptical Misdirection to include more information in the section on The Double Standard.

In addition to a quote from Richard Wiseman saying ESP is proven to scientific standards but the standards for parapsychology should be higher, I have added the examples of Chris French, Ray Hyman and others.

Chris French has also stated he believes that ESP has been proven to scientific standards. However, he does not accept that those results should be accepted by science until the results have been replicated by skeptical scientists. These results have been replicated by parapsychologists. What French is saying is that replications are not valid unless the researcher has a certain philosophical beliefs. That is unheard of in any other branch of science.

...

Skeptic Ray Hyman in his 1995 article Evaluation of Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena admits that the results of remote viewing and Ganzfeld experiments have demonstrated statistically significant effects. However, he implies there could be unknown methodological flaws in the experiments. This demonstrates a double standard because in no other field of science would a positive experimental result be criticized because there might be sources of errors that no one can think of. It is impossible for any scientist to defend his work against that type of criticism.

...

More evidence of the double standard is described by Chris Carter in his article Does Telepathy Conflict with Science?. Carter quotes Donald Hebb admitting there is sufficient evidence to prove ESP but he won't accept it because it conflicts with his "prejudice". Carter also quotes George Price who published an article in the journal Science where he implied that despite the proof, belief in ESP could be rejected because it conflicts with scientific theories. This is equivalent to saying he prefers to ignore empirical evidence when it conflicts with his beliefs.

The full information with references and quotes is here

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.

Evidence That God Exists: People Who Have Near Death Experiences Meet God.

People who have near death experiences often meet God during their experience. This is evidence that God exists. Below is a video from an IANDS conference and several excerpts from near-death.com of people describing their meetings with God. Kevin Williams summarizes near-death experiencer observations about God here

Jessica haynes

In this video from an IANDS conference, Jessica Haynes discusses her near-death experience. She says that she had died and after reviewing her life she wanted to come back and live her life better. Unfortunately, she was dead and she was told, "You can't get back you don't have a body to get back to". But she insisted, repeatedly. So they took her to talk to God who enabled her to come back. She describes her experience of God as, "Pure love.", and "The most loving light you could imagine." He tells her "I am all, I created everything." The part where she describes this is from 10:30 to 15:00.

George Rodonaia

Many people have asked me what I believe in, how my NDE changed my life. All I can say is that I now believe in the God of the universe. Unlike many other people, however, I have never called God the light, because God is beyond our comprehension. God, I believe, is even more than the light, because God is also darkness. God is everything that exists, everything - and that is beyond our ability to comprehend at all. So I don't believe in the God of the Jews, or the Christians, or the Hindus, or in any one religion's idea of what God is or is not. It is all the same God, and that God showed me that the universe in which we live is a beautiful and marvelous mystery that is connected together forever and for always.

Anyone who has had such an experience of God, who has felt such a profound sense of connection with reality, knows that there is only one truly significant work to do in life, and that is love; to love nature, to love people, to love animals, to love creation itself, just because it is. To serve God's creation with a warm and loving hand of generosity and compassion - that is the only meaningful existence.

Linda Stewart

I was home and I wanted nothing more than to remain in the light of God. Christ had delivered me into the light and I stood in the presence of God. I was filled with complete knowing: The light was love and love was God. Waves of consummate love which emanated from the light obliterated every burden I carried and every thought that kept me from knowing God.

Mellen-Thomas Benedict

Then, like a trumpet blast with a shower of spiraling lights, the Great Light spoke, saying, "Remember this and never forget; you save, redeem and heal yourself. You always have. You always will. You were created with the power to do so from before the beginning of the world."

In that instant I realized even more. I realized that WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN SAVED, and we saved ourselves because we were designed to self-correct like the rest of God's universe. This is what the second coming is about.

I thanked the light of God with all my heart. The best thing I could come up with was these simple words of totally appreciation:

Arthur Yensen

If you saw heaven, why didn't you mention God and salvation?

I didn't omit them intentionally. It's only that I didn't see God, Christ, or hear anything about salvation. However, I do consider the Master-Vibration as part of God because it controls the universe and seems to regulate everything except the evil minds of people on Earth.

To understand God, I believe one would have to be almost as great as God is. Or at least be like Christ who was in harmony with God. On the other hand, salvation is simple. All one has to do is to love so unselfishly that his soul-vibrations will rise high enough to fit him into heaven.

Jan Price

The Wise One continued speaking. "Throughout the vast unlimitedness of All That Is, the creative energy - that which is called the Spirit of God - is expressing itself as you, me, and everything else. Wherever we are, the God-source is, and we are always somewhere."

"Sometimes I am in places where God doesn't seem to be, as in the middle of a heart attack," I responded. "Surely God is not there."

"Yes. Wherever we are, the Source, God, is. A heart attack isn't bad. It is just an experience accepted on a certain level of being. We are so unlimited that we can limit, restrict, contract. Such power is awesome, for it is our very nature to create. We are constantly expressing in some way.

...

In the center of the universe I stand encircled by divine being. In this I live and move and have my being. I am in this world, and of it. The world of natural order, ease, and joy. Eternal goodness flowing, doing, being all. There is only joy; waves of love support, sustain. I am in God, not outside.

I am in love, consciously at peace with all there is. In God, I love and move and have my being. In love, I live and move and have my being. In peace, I live and move and have my being. There is nothing else. There is no outer. All is in the circle of God, Love, God Love. GOD LOVE.

The Kingdom of God is within me. Yes. But more important, I am in the Kingdom of God. The Spirit of God is within me, but more important, I am in the Spirit of God. The love of God is within me, but more important, I am in the love of God. All there is is God. I can be nowhere else. I cannot be separate from God.

Laura's NDE (age three and a half)

God in the manifestation of infinite light appeared off to my left, and I was engulfed in a form of all-powerful, all-nourishing love. That divine being appeared as a massive column of golden light, with the suggestion of a human shape inside. I both saw and felt his light, feeling as if I were in a warm bath that completely healed and protected me. I never wanted to leave. No conversation passed between us, but in those infinite moments I acquired the knowledge that allowed me to go back to Earth to complete my life.

Cecil's NDE (age eleven)

Behind me and to the left was a strong light source, very brilliant and filled with love. I knew it was a person. I called it God for lack of a better term. I could not see it; I felt what seemed like a male presence. He communicated to me, not so much in words but telepathically,

Clara's NDE (age ten)

I was taken to a huge iridescent white room and told to sit down on some steps that led up to a large white chair, and wait there for someone who was to talk to me. He came out a door at the other end of the steps, walked to the chair above me, and sat down. He was dressed in a white, long-sleeved, floor-length robe with a wide gold band around the mid-section. He wore sandals. His dark brown hair was shoulder length; he had a long face, broad chin, dark eyes with black around both eyelids, like eyeliner pencil, but it wasn't. His skin was olive colored and his eyes were as liquid love. He communicated by looking at me. No words had to be spoken, as we could hear each other's thoughts. He told me what I had to do in life and had me go to the other side of the room and look down into something like a TV set so I could see my future. What I saw made me very happy. This man, who I believe is Jesus Christ, said that once I woke up in the hospital I would forget what I was supposed to do in life.

"Nothing can happen before its time," he cautioned.

As I was leaving the room he said I must obey his commandments if I wanted to come back.

When I revived, a nurse was sitting beside my bed and she said, "Thank God you finally woke up." I told the doctor that I had watched him work on me and the color of the machine brought into the surgery room. He didn't know what to say.

Copyright © 2012 by ncu9nc All rights reserved. Texts quoted from other sources are Copyright © by their owners.