The Reality of Parapsychology, and Why Attempts to Deny it are not Science — part 2
This is a follow-up to my previous article, which was a rebuttal of one by Jack Vance entitled ‘People Still Believe in Psychic Powers Despite the Evidence’. He was referring to the supposed ‘scientific’ evidence he found in some unnamed books. At the end I said that people believe in psychic powers because they have experienced them. Once you have had a powerful experience of ESP, you are less likely to worry about what skeptical scientists have concluded in laboratories, and what the alleged scientific ‘consensus’ is. That was true of me, and also true of Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, who is the subject of this article.
She opens her book Extraordinary Knowing with a personal anecdote, noting that before this happened she considered herself to be “a skeptical, highly trained scientific professional”. (Jack Vance would have admired her.) Here is her story, highly summarized.
She had bought an extremely valuable harp for her daughter, which was stolen. She says: “For two months we went through every conceivable channel trying to locate it: the police, instrument dealers across the country… And more, but nothing worked”.
A friend said she should consider calling a dowser. In desperation she agrees. She rings the President of the American Society of Dowsers, and asks for help. Over the phone he tells her that it is still in Oakland, where it was stolen. He then said: “Send me a street map of Oakland and I’ll locate that harp for you”. After two days, he tells her the address where the harp is located. After contacting the police, who could not accept her story as grounds for a search warrant, she decided to put up some posters in the locality, offering a reward. Within three days she has the harp back. Her reaction, this changes everything.
That was an example of dowsing, which is often dismissed as “pseudoscience”, i.e. nonsense, by skeptics, thus for them any claimed success would be considered paranormal. For the record, the dowser said that, in order to locate the harp, he entered what we might call an altered state of consciousness.
I don’t know how impressive that story sounds to readers here. It had a profound effect upon Mayer, however, for this incident completely changed her worldview, replacing her ‘scientific’ preconceptions. She then turned her life over to researching parapsychology, which shows how dramatic this incident was for her. In her book she describes her subsequent investigations. She was surprised that so many people wanted to talk, and “how badly people wanted to reintegrate corners of experience they’d walled off from their public lives for fear of being disbelieved”. She was inundated with accounts. The stories were “ones they’d never revealed to another professional associate”, about “knowing things in bizarrely inexplicable ways”.
Mayer was a psychotherapist. She says: ‘There were things my patients had been only half telling me for years, things they viewed as too weird or risky to reveal for fear I wouldn’t believe them or — worse — would think they really were crazy”.
She begins a course, with no voyeurs allowed, a compulsory condition of entry being a written account of an apparently anomalous experience. The college is inundated with applications, with people demanding to be admitted. So perhaps parapsychological phenomena bombard our universe, as claimed by the physicist Fred Alan Wolf.
What are we to make of all this? The suggestion is that there is a vast amount of evidence in peoples’ lives for parapsychology, and yet most people are afraid to talk about this for fear of being thought crazy. This goes to show what a subconscious stranglehold the modern ‘scientific’ worldview has over many people. We can also assume that the accounts of all these weird experiences would be dismissed by skeptical ‘scientists’ because they cannot be studied and replicated in laboratories. Who would we prefer to believe?
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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 lists.
