Parapsychology, Spirituality, and the Battle Against Scientific Materialism — Part 4
This follows on from an introduction, where I outlined the reasons why I think an acceptance of parapsychology is so important in modern times, part 1 where I described my personal experiences of ESP, part 2 where I gave a history of parapsychology research since the 1880s, and part 3 where I discussed the question of why we as adults do not experience ESP more frequently.
I’ll now consider the possibility of ESP in animals. I’ll begin with an anecdote from a book called Incredible Cats by David Greene. I’m including it only because it is so extraordinary and almost unbelievable, even for me. It is of course only an anecdote, doesn’t count as scientific evidence, and I cannot vouch for its authenticity.
Two cats were inseparable companions on a farm. Then the farmer died, and his widow moved. Because the new house was small she could only take one cat and chose the male. The female was given to her sister who lived in Plymouth. About 8 months later the male seemed unusually agitated. The owner was not able to calm him down, and phoned her sister for advice. She was told that the female had disappeared from home that morning. A neighbour claimed to have seen the terrified cat being chased down the street by a gang of youths.
The owner decided to drive over. Although she didn’t intend to take her cat with her, he ran towards the car, so that she changed her mind, and let him get into the car. When they arrived, the cat led the two women through a maze of side streets, until they reached a patch of derelict land, then an underground chamber, where they found a large sack, the neck tightly bound with twine. The female cat was trapped inside.
Somewhat less extraordinary, but nevertheless impressive examples of possible parapsychological powers of cats and dogs, are those who, when separated from their owners, can find their way back to them, whether to their original home or even a new location, over distances of as much as 3,000 miles, with no obvious way of knowing the route.
The controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes that dogs can sense telepathically when their owners are about to start coming home, and has conducted experiments which he believes demonstrates this. Needless to say, there are some unconvinced sceptics.
I’m now going to go off in a different direction, and consider the possibility of what appears to be unconscious telepathy, that something psychic may be going on without the organism itself being aware of it. This seems, for example, to be the case when we consider the behaviour of insects, specifically ants and termites.
The building of nests is the best example. Some require many worker ant lifetimes to complete, and each new addition must somehow be brought into a proper relationship with the previous parts. Yet one colony member can oversee only a minute fraction of the construction work, and cannot envision in its entirety the plan of such a finished product. Such facts led the arch-Darwinian and committed atheist Edward Wilson, who spent his whole life studying ants, to wonder: “How can the workers communicate so effectively over such long periods of time? Also, who has the blueprint of the nest?” I don’t think, given his world-view, that he ever came up with a satisfactory explanation, although he sometimes tried to explain away the problem. The more spiritually oriented biologist Rupert Sheldrake thinks that a group mind is at work, which would suggest some form of telepathy, even if the communication is achieved at the physical level through “the exchange of food, by means of various chemical substances, by touch, and in a variety of other ways”.
Such observations led some early researchers to conclude that some form of telepathy is involved. Thus the eminent zoologist William Morton Wheeler wrote Ants and Some Other Insects: An Inquiry into the Psychic Powers of These Animals, and Eugene Marais wrote The Soul of the White Ant. Rupert Sheldrake describes one of his experiments. An entire termitary was divided into two parts by a large steel plate: “The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on each side of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute”. This leads us back to Edward Wilson’s questions, where is the plan located, and how is it communicated?
Along similar lines the naturalist Edmund Selous, who studied flocks of birds for thirty years, wrote: “I ask how, without some process of thought transference so rapid as to amount practically to simultaneous collective thinking, are these things to be explained?” Also some fish, even if blinded, are “still capable of joining and maintaining their position indefinitely within a school of normal fish”.
In the next article I’ll discuss communication in the world of trees and plants.
====================================
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my profile.
