Paranormal Science: Where Ghosts And Psychics Fit In

One of the truly fascinating things about the Internet and the vast sharing of information that comes with it, is the ability to see how various people imagine science to be. Almost invariably, it’s wrong. Very few people it seems, outside of academia, truly understand what science is or even how it works. And this is important for understanding how science relates to the paranormal.

So here is your ordinary person’s guide to science.

Philosophy of Science

We begin with the philosophy of science. Why? Because science is a branch of philosophy. Before you can do science, you have to first agree on what it is. That’s philosophy. Ultimately, science is an agreement that the study of the natural world requires special rules for evidence. You can trace this all the way back to Ancient Greece and a philosopher named Aristotle.

He recognized that measuring things was the only way to create truly objective knowledge and that reasoning about the physical world must come from real world findings. Up until this time, there were those who believed that all knowledge could be gained through pure reasoning.

Creating scientific categories, such as biology, physics, psychology, parapsychology, zoology and botany, for example, is part of the philosophy of science.

You need philosophy to determine what a scientific theory is. The philosopher Karl Popper suggested that theories needed to be falsifiable to be scientific. That means that if there is no conceivable way to prove the theory wrong, it’s not a scientific theory.

So I say that the moon is made of cheese. We can test that theory by visiting the moon. If I say that the moon is actually a goddess, there is no conceivable way to test for that, so the theory, -whether it is correct or not-, is not scientific.

While there are some issues here, the basic idea is sound. A theory that is incapable of ever being proven wrong isn’t really a theory. (The Multiverse theory falls into this category. It’s forever un-provable.) This concept is important for understanding where science and paranormal science meet, and where they do not.

Science is Not Truth, It’s About What You Can Measure

A very important fact about science is that it is not the arbiter of truth. Science is about what we can measure and our idea about how things work can change with new information. If you can’t measure it, then science has nothing to say on the subject. Consciousness, for example, surely exists, you cannot experience reality without it, but it cannot be directly measured. Since you need consciousness to study consciousness, we can never have a truly objective view of it.

Emotions are not measurable and neither is pain, but no one can argue that they don’t exist. You and I exist mentally as unique humans, but science cannot observe our mental uniqueness directly. We can’t objectively observe inside another person’s mind.

We have to acknowledge that our most fundamental reality is our own experiences (aka “qualia”). These experiences are the only reality we will ever know. It is as close to truth as we will ever come. Science is when we examine those experiences closely, measure them, and form a collective agreement about them.

We have our personal memories and history itself, which we can never revisit and study except through what exists in the present. They affect us in the present and, in some cases, long into the future, yet they are beyond measurement.

My point here is that we’ve been taught to think of science as being synonymous with reality, but it can only describe things that are measurable and there is far more to reality than that even without delving into the paranormal. There is reality that is not measurable, but still exists.

Personal Experience Overrides Science

Science is ultimately just one way to gain knowledge. Personal experience, for example, teaches us far more than we could ever gain through science alone. Personal experience is such a powerful arbiter of truth for us, that it rightly (or wrongly) will override whatever we learn through science. If science says that something doesn’t exist, and we experience it directly, we typically don’t question our personal experience, we toss out the scientific opinion.

It’s important to remember that science is made up of people documenting specific personal experiences in a controlled way according to a particular format and then other people agreeing that their personal experiences doing very similar tasks had much the same results. This is done through experiments, peer review and publishing in scientific journals.

Listen Now

Naturally, some people have experiences that go beyond the norm of what most people experience. The experiences typically are neither measurable and nor replicable, so they fall outside the realm of science. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not real; only that we can’t independently confirm them. Just because you can’t study something scientifically, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. If you don’t understand that distinction, you don’t understand science.

The paranormal falls into a gray area between what’s measurable and what’s not. That’s why it’s referred to as paranormal and not normal. Maybe you can measure it, maybe you can’t.

Now that we’ve gotten past the theory, it’s time to move on to what happens in practice.

The Types of Sciences

Science typically take two forms: investigative, and lab work.

Investigative science typically involves subjects that can’t study as experiments. You can’t bring a volcano into a lab, nor study an indigenous tribe that way. Most anything involving field work, like archaeology, can’t be done as an experiment because the environment in which the phenomena take place either makes that impossible or it is part of the context.

Likewise, you can’t study ghosts, poltergeists and hauntings outside their environment. They are typically tied to a location and can’t be studied and replicated like a lab experiment.

Surveys are investigative science.

And then you lab experiments. This is the image most of us have of science. A typical scenario goes like this: a scientist proposes a project and seeks funding. Once the funding is acquired, a study is performed, the results are written up and it is submitted to a scientific journal that specializes in that subject. Typically two other scientists from the field are requested to review the study, some back and forth dialog happens, corrections are made and if the study passes their review, the journal publishes the study. Voilà, science.

This is what parapsychology is. The paranormal is studied through lab experiments and confirmed through replications. It’s not exciting and the effects are small, but this is where the knowledge base is grounded and legitimacy is created.

But life is rarely that simple and you have to take into account how the real world operates to understand the difference between the idealized version of science and the real deal.

The Political Side

Science, like the rest of the world, follows the money. Most research normally occurs in areas where the most money can be made. Right now, for example, that’s batteries. There is a great deal of money to be made for the team that comes up with the first easily mass-produced, inexpensive, lightweight battery that makes an electric car price competitive with gas — powered vehicles. The promise of profit means that this area of research is mostly investor funded.

Less Funding For Psi and Parapsychology

As you get into more esoteric areas, there is less funding to be had, and most of it comes in the form of grants, funded by governments and if it’s even more esoteric, it generally gets funded by private endowments and grants. Parapsychology is very esoteric with a near zero chance of profits being made. It is also marginalized because of existing prejudices, so grant money is hard to come by.

In academia, where most original research occurs, you have a relatively large group of people trying for a limited pot of money. Because of this, science gets very political. The HIPPO rule is usually in effect, (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), meaning that your status matters more than your idea when you are applying for a grant. The higher the status, the more likely that your request will be granted. The thinking goes that the people who have been the most successful in the past have the best chance of success in the future. This also means that proven ideas that are expanded are far more likely to get funding than original ideas with no background of success.

But that is not the whole story. There is a tug of war between making sure that proven research continues to get funding and allowing novel research to introduce new ideas and concepts.

Nobody Ever Got Famous for a Replication

Reputations are made on successful new research, not replications and discovering dead ends, so you’ll find a whole boatload of new research with supposedly positive results and relatively few replications. This has led to an endless parade of small published studies that are highly regarded, but have never been replicated or whose results could have been random. The worse offenders have been in psychology and medicine, but this has affected other disciplines as well.

There’s nothing nefarious happening here; there is no attempt to deceive, (mostly,) rather, it’s just how the pressure of publish or perish works. An experiment might yield a lot of different data and then the researcher, (with their reputation on the line) in looking through it and trying to find something important, commits a type one error, -they find a positive result where there is really just random noise-. Basically, if you comb through enough data, something is going to achieve significance merely by chance. Peer review doesn’t always catch this kind of problem.

There are other problems that can occur, which I won’t get into, but the message here is clear: don’t believe everything you read about research findings.

Paranormal Research

One of the things I’ve always liked about parapsychology and paranormal research in general is that, because of the negative attitudes toward it and the lack of financial rewards, the field naturally weeds out people who aren’t genuinely curious. It is a field of innovative, independently — minded people who want to put out good research. It’s why parapsychology leads all other sciences by a wide margin in the percentage of double — blinded experiments.

Science isn’t Pure

Science is a messy process filled with human frailty that sometimes reveals truth, but just as often just brings up more questions. If you need to know about the functioning of our natural world, that is literally what science does. But once you move to the larger questions of the nature of our existence, you find yourself interacting with the paranormal. There the rules change and we find ourselves dealing with the line between the measurable and that which will always challenge scientific attempts at understanding.

Embrace science in all its glory, but pay attention to its limitations as well. It is not the final arbiter of our reality.

Better the Devil You Know

One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from the African shamanic culture: “Nature is magic and magic is natural.” I have believed in magic for as long as I can remember, and whiled away many happy childhood hours with my imaginary friends in Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree. When mum made me and my sister some fluffy angel wings to wear, we put our instant flying powers to the test by jumping off dad’s red ladder in the garden. As you do. Undeterred by consistent crash landings, Planet Earth felt like an exciting place to be for an inquisitive and imaginative child - St Peters, Adelaide, South Australia, to be precise.

As I grew older, life began to feel decidedly heavier, and the magic began to fade. The sudden death of my dad in 1980, just weeks after the equally devastating and untimely death of John Lennon, left me with some significant questions about God’s existence. A hefty burden for a 17 year old. By my early twenties, I began to quietly explore the esoteric realms, most of which were mocked, discouraged and demonized. Astrology was for weirdos, spiritualist churches were full of evil occultists and the concept of life after death was deemed nonsensical.

Like most people, I shuddered at the mere mention of the word occult because I equated it with the unpalatable work of the devil, even though I didn’t believe the devil existed. I enjoyed learning about astrology, numerology, runes and other sacred forms of divination but chose to disassociate them from the occult because I didn’t consider them to be evil. However, my idealistic, esoteric world began to transform in the mid-90s when I dipped my toes into the ancient shamanic world of healing and magic which dates back over a hundred thousand years. Even then, I skirted around the edges of the daemonic ‘underworld’, preferring to focus on the healing arts and how to harness the magic of nature. By the mid 2000’s, the universe conspired to connect me to a spiritual medium with whom I fell into a ten year relationship, an invaluable experience that provided deep and often rare insight into the delicate and deeply comforting art of authentic mediumship.

When it was time to part company with the medium and my entire life as I knew it, I also left the spiritual scene behind. With the rise of the internet, I watched the essence of esoteric authenticity and purity become overrun with well marketed wannabe ‘pop-up’ psychics and mediums. This left me feeling frustrated, disillusioned and concerned for vulnerable, grieving souls who were easy prey for the growing community of online shysters looking to make a few bucks from fortune telling and fake mediumship.

Just when I thought I was done with dabbling in the spirit world, along came Susan Filer, a kindred spirit from the UK who hosted an extraordinary spiritual sanctuary and private online group for people interested in learning more about authentic mediumship and all things related to spirit. We exchanged a few private messages about our concerns regarding the invasion of spiritual charlatans and she recommended that I contact Jock Brocas, a spiritual medium, author and educator who was on the same virtual page.

I must confess that my inner scaredy cat recoiled when I learned that Jock also specialized in education about the darker side of the occult and was nearing completion of his latest book Deadly Departed. Soon after that, I was drawn to a Shift Network course about the shamanic healing arts, magic and medicine under the guidance of a highly sought after Peruvian kamasqa curandero (healer), scholar and educator don Oscar Miro-Quesada. Between Brocas, Miro-Quesada and additional studies with author, attorney and leading authority on energy medicine, Deborah King, I safely delved into the daemonic realities of the ‘unseen’ realms and learned to replace fear and avoidance with confidence and understanding of how to navigate such dimensions if necessary.

The DeviI Has His Part To Play

Image: Jeff Shattuck, Pixabay

“The devil ain’t got no power over me. The devil comes, and I shake hands with the devil. The devil has his part to play. Devil’s a good friend, too… because when you don’t know him, that’s the time he can mosh you down.” — Bob Marley

In hindsight, I can now see the unfolding trail of spiritual teachers who helped me prepare for my unexpected journey into the deepest, darkest realms of mass deception in March 2020, when Corona officially landed in Australia. Whilst curating articles for ‘The Book of Comfort: Grief and Loss to Solace and Hope’, an Otherside Press project I had embarked on with Jock Brocas, I began to collaborate on a parallel book project with an inexperienced author whose raw, esoteric and often painful manuscript explored various themes ranging from ancestral healing, growing up in a cult family, recovering from child sex abuse and dealing with dark occult interferences. Most of her occult claims and experiences were completely new to me, and required extensive research to qualify.

As a result, I found myself on a fast tracked learning curve about the reality of generational satanic and Luciferian bloodline families where ritual child abuse, child sacrifice and cannibalism are common place; clandestine, harmful, black magick rituals that are repeatedly inflicted upon humankind by powerful, unelected creatures at the highest levels; the reality of psychopathic addictions to satanic ritual abuse and blood sacrifice of children; a US$150+ billion/year child trafficking, organ and adrenochrome harvesting racket. These hideous crimes were my most gruesome discoveries by far. Nonetheless, I helped the author develop and structure her manuscript into a readable form that an editor may consider working on and was really happy to move on from those darker realms. A job that I estimated would take about 3 months, took 9 months to complete and even then there was more work to do but that was the writer’s job.

Is the Occult Really Such a Dark and Dangerous Place?

Interesting to note that the mainstream online world will still have you believe that the occult is either a dark and dangerous place, dismissed as devilish nonsense or an elitist realm reserved for a select few such as secret societies including the Freemasons (that are not so secret anymore). Here are some examples of standard definitions I found on higher profile websites:

Cambridge Dictionary - (noun) relating to magical powers and activities such as witchcraft and astrology.

Merriam Webster- (noun) matters regarded as involving the action or influence of supernatural or supernormal powers or some secret knowledge of them.

Lexico - Oxford - (noun) Mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena.

Bible Study - Biblically, the occult is any practice that tries to gain supernatural power, abilities, or knowledge apart from the creator God. The Bible is clear regarding what the Eternal thinks about man's foolish attempts to circumvent Him.

Wikipedia: The occult, in the broadest sense, is a category of supernatural beliefs and practices which generally fall outside the scope of religion and science, encompassing such phenomena involving otherworldly agency as mysticism, spirituality, and magic. It can also refer to supernatural ideas like extra-sensory perception and parapsychology.

Online Etymology Dictionary - 1530s, “secret, not divulged,” from French occulte and directly from Latin occultus “hidden, concealed, secret,” past participle of occulere “cover over, conceal, from assimilated form of ob “over” + a verb related to celare “to hide” (from PIE root kel “to cover, conceal, save”). Meaning “not apprehended by the mind, beyond the range of understanding” is from 1530s. The association with the supernatural sciences (magic, alchemy, astrology, etc.) dates from 1630s.

When I broadened my search to some of the more obscure sites offering definitions of the occult, I discovered more resonant results. For example, Unimed Living’s Unimedpedia was a particularly spiritually nourishing find:

"The word ‘occult’ is one of the most sacred words that one can use and know. What it means, what it describes and what it reveals is that which God is; and from there, what forms God’s Science and thus the Science of God Himself." Serge Benhayon, An Open Letter to Humanity

I must confess that when I initially saw the word ‘God’, I flinched just a little and accepted that I had more work to do in relation to esoteric education and making peace within myself. But the more I read, the more I resonated:

"The true meaning of the word ‘occult’ is in complete contrast to the grossly erroneous conception, reference, inference and or direct claim that the word ‘occult’ is in any way associated with evil or witches, warlocks, ‘black magic’ or harm etc. The word ‘occult’ means the culture of God or the way of God. When the true meaning of the word occult is known to many more, and eventually by the majority, it will be found why it is so desirable to have it in its bastardised meaning by those who so desire it to the point of insisting that they are right and that there is no other meaning. For ‘them’, there is much to explain once the true meaning is more widely known … a meaning that unites all by one common truth." Serge Benhayon, Esoteric Teachings & Revelations

The following Unimedpedia passage also bears repeating, as it concisely weaves together the spiritual value of inviting the occult and esoteric into our lives:

“The occult is the entirety of the Whole and the esoteric is the many parts that make up the whole. If the occult is ‘all there is’ and we are separated from this, then by virtue of our withdrawal, we have created the very ‘parts’ that now need to be reconciled with the whole they are now existing a-part from. When one lives esoterically from the impulses of the Soul, the occult will reveal itself in full. It is up to each of us whether we choose to live this way or not and to what degree we will live it.” Unimedpedia

Armed with a new appreciation of why it really is better to know the devil than not, along with the benefits of ‘full spectrum’ occult awareness, I look forward to sharing more thought provoking revelations in a series of forthcoming articles for Paranormal Daily News.

“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince people he didn't exist. The disguises the devil used this time were simple and the people were easily fooled. A suit and tie plus a white lab coat were all that were needed.” Poul Larsen, ColdCast

Image Source: Poul Larsen, ColdCast

The Staring Studies: You Really are Being Watched from Behind

Have you ever had that feeling of being watched? In the late 90s, biologist Rupert Sheldrake searched for a psi experiment that was simple enough to be carried out at high school level. His thinking was that such an experiment could introduce young adults to the concept of psi research and teach them a little science along the way. It would be an easy way to show that psi was real. So the ‘being watched’ experiment was evolved.

The Staring Studies Are Simple

What he came up with was a staring experiment. It’s not only a simple concept, but the execution of the experiment is also straightforward. You have one person designated as the starer and another person designated as the subject who cannot see the starer. The starer then randomly stares or doesn’t stare at the subject and the subject records whether they thought they were being stared at. The subjects are given from 10 to 20 seconds to make up their minds.

If you do this enough, you find that people correctly guess that they are being watched or stared at, at much better than chance levels. In some experiments, it was as much as 10% better, and in an Internet experiment, it was only about 3%. (The advantage of an Internet experiment is that you can do a lot more trials.) It’s not something that people get right all the time, but it is definitely a testable effect.

It’s like that in most psi experiments and why statistics are necessary most of the time to discover an effect. If psychic ability was so easily replicable that we didn’t need statistics, we wouldn’t have the present controversy. Nevertheless, it was a successful experiment by any sane standard.

The Devil is in the Details

Even with a simple experiment like this one, the devil is always in the details. You begin staring studies research by surveying general populations to determine whether it’s even a thing. Sheldrake referred to three different surveys: (Braud, Shafer & Andrews, 1990; Sheldrake, 1994; Cottrell, Winer & Smith, 1996) to show that a large number of people, 70-97% of the population, claim to have experienced psychically knowing that they were being watched or stared at. This alone made it worth checking out.

There are several ways to conduct this experiment, depending on budget. You can do it via CCTV, where the starer does their work via a live feed from the participant. Therefore, you can measure galvanic skin response and do away with participant reporting, or do it on the cheap and have the starer and the participants in the same room and just make sure that the participants keep their backs turned and self report. Try blindfolding the participants, or you can do a combination of the above, depending on how strict you want the experimental controls to be.

It’s useful to do staring studies several different ways, because this tells you if the extra controls are necessary. If, for example, you do one experiment with CCTV and another experiment where people just have their backs turned and the results from the two experiments are similar, then it’s highly likely that the additional step of using CCTV was unnecessary. (That’s what happened, by the way. The CCTV experiments did not have results much different from the less well controlled experiments.)

Controls and Potential Problems

Experimenting with controls is also easy. A group of people have their backs turned and are never stared at. (The controls guess at rates that are strictly at chance levels.) Still, even in something as simple as staring studies there are a number of things to watch out for. Someone may try to peek. Or they might hear something from the starer that cues them. If so, this problem would show up in the control experiments as well, which it didn’t.

Peeking requires a turning of the head. People cannot see directly behind them, even with peripheral vision, so this would be an obvious move that would alert the experimenter to the problem. If you think hearing is the problem, you can also use a video feed and stare from another room.

A more difficult possibility is when feedback is given, participants might pick up on subtle sensory cues and get better at guessing when they’re stared at. Then there is the possibility of outright cheating. (This can be prevented with better controls.) If sensory clues were the problem though, the CCTV experiments would have had different results. This didn’t happen.

There is also the possibility of faulty recording which a problem encountered in all research that relies on humans recording their experiences.

And the last is the experimenter effect. This particular problem is the most interesting thing to come out of the staring studies. You see, because this experiment was so inexpensive, more than one skeptic tried their hand at replication. And a strange phenomenon popped up. They were unsuccessful even when another person reported positive results with the same group. More on this later.

Crossing the “t’s” and Dotting the “i’s”

All of these issues were brought up and dealt with in various papers written on the study. This is typical of parapsychology experiments. Scientists must be extremely thorough because they can and will be criticized for everything, no matter how trivial. Skeptics will breathe fire on them if they butter the wrong side of the toast.

Overall, the experiments were successful. Like most psi experiments, the effect wasn’t particularly large, but thousands of trials demonstrated a very real effect. Sheldrake received more staring studies than the ones he included, but some didn’t get published because they didn’t follow the rules. A rather obscure problem can result from publishing the results of every study submitted. It’s known as the “file drawer effect” (the fancy pants name for this is “selective reporting”).

“File drawer effect” refers to studies that were completed, but never published. If only positive studies are published and studies with no effect are buried, it can skew the results of a meta analysis to a false positive. This was certainly a possibility in a situation like this. Schools which performed the experiment and didn’t get positive results might have failed to submit those studies. If all Sheldrake got back were positive studies, but there were also a bunch of failed studies that never made it to him, then the combined results would not show what really happened.

Sheldrake solved this problem with pre-registration He had an experiment registry and the experiment had to be recorded in it before it started to be included in the overall assessment.

Being Watched and Skeptics

Skeptic Problems Of Being Watched or Stared At

Skeptics did their own experiments, but as usual, even when they got the same result, tried to explain them away: (Wiseman & Smith, 1994, Colwell, Schröder & Sladen, 2000). Wiseman and Smith claimed that the results were due to "the detection and response to structure" present in the randomization. In other words, the subjects were correctly guessing what was coming next because they saw a pattern in the randomization.

What makes this particularly idiotic, in my opinion, is that the particular randomization process used by everyone was one that Wiseman and Smith had themselves suggested. (Counterbalanced randomization: there are the same number of hits on both sides.)

In any case, this complaint was a nonstarter because if it were true, then the subjects would have learned equally well in staring and non - staring trials. This didn’t happen.

There were other cases where skeptics hypothesized alternative explanations, but failed to follow up on them, apparently not caring whether they were right or not, as long as they could find a way to explain away positive results. I don’t know why anyone bothers with these people.

Being Watched - The Experimenter Effect

The experimenter effect was already a known problem in scientific experiments, but this particular staring study highlighted it in a very clear way. When skeptics themselves were the starers, they tended to get chance results. In one case, this occurred even though the skeptic was side by side with a parapsychology researcher, Wiseman & Schlitz (1997). In that case, Wiseman, someone who has a public persona as a psi skeptic and enjoys the spotlight, and Schlitz, an enormously competent psi researcher who has stayed mostly out of the spotlight, could not have been more different in their motivations and intent.

Getting positive results and admitting the reality of psi would have marginalized Wiseman and hurt his public persona. (In 1997, this happened to everyone who took psi research seriously.) Schlitz? Not so much. By staying under the radar and avoiding being in the middle of controversies, she was free to scientifically explore and learn. Hers was a much better psychological position to be in for psi experiments.

If you were aware of this backstory, then the rather dramatic results of the experiment, where Wiseman could not beat chance results at all while Schlitz made it look easy under the same conditions and using the same participants, would be the expected outcome. It also explains why this experiment struggled with replications. It would be difficult to find people quite as different as these two.

The Staring Studies Were Consistent With Other Experiments

There isn’t a lot more to say about the staring studies. It was a simple experiment, the skepticism was weird and unhelpful as usual, and just as importantly, the results of these experiments were consistent with other research.

At the end of the day, the staring experiments are just another replicated experiment confirming the existence of psychic ability. If you need evidence, well then, there it is, along with all the rest. So the question is now answered; can you sense if you are being watched? The answer is yes!

A Tough Subject for Research: Psychic Healing

Decades ago, when I was first seriously exploring the paranormal, psychic healing was the one thing that I was most comfortable with. I could feel it. Touch and energy came naturally to me. But I always had a nagging feeling that I had no idea what I was doing.

Whatever problems that mainstream medicine has, and there are many, there is no arguing that they have data. Lots and lots of data. Medical practices and medicines are extremely well documented, evaluated and improved. As a result, doctors learn what works and what doesn’t and unless they’re dealing with a rare case with very little literature or symptoms that don’t point to anything specific enough to nail down a diagnosis, they have data to back them up.

They also have a huge and useful array of diagnostic tools to do this. For most problems that people bring to them, they know what to do.

Psychic Healing’s Data Problem

In contrast, we know almost nothing about psychic healing. Almost all of the existing studies center around proving its existence. Very few studies examine the phenomena in depth to understand what works and what doesn’t and more importantly, why.

There are also a great number of different psychic healing method and traditions to choose from:

DHI [distant healing intention] techniques are known by many names, including intercessory prayer, spiritual healing, aura healing, energy healing, energy psychology, shamanic healing, nonlocal healing, therapeutic touch (TT), quantum-touch, qigong, reconnective healing, Johrei, and Reiki.4 Each of these methods carries its own idiosyncratic theoretical and cultural forms, and some DHI methods include both distant and proximal (but without direct contact) variations. A common feature shared among DHI techniques is the assumption that distance between the healer and healee is not a limiting factor.5 This “nonlocal” aspect of DHI defies classical physical assumptions and accounts for its controversial status even among alternative biofield therapies.

Distant Healing Intention Therapies: An Overview of the Scientific Evidence Glob Adv Health Med. 2015 Nov; 4(Suppl): 67–71

The Problem of Small Studies

The ideal situation for a study of this kind is to be able to isolate the effect. This is much harder than it might initially seem. Most healing studies tend to be small, which is problematic because people with real health problems, particularly those interested in alternative medicine, will pursue a number of avenues to become healthy again, and psychic healing is just one of them. So did they get better because of the psychic healing, or was it something else that they did?

Normally, in a situation like this, you find the money for large studies so that the larger numbers will dilute the effects of all those individuals doing their own thing. But research into alternative medicine is not well funded and money is hard to come by. So for the most part, studies into psychic healing are sporadic.

A Review of Psychic Healing Meta Analyses

In order to get around this, senior psi researchers Dean Radin, Marilyn Schlitz and one other person gathered together a whole boatload of studies and meta analyses and presented them in a paper. This included studies of prayer and Reiki and other types that didn’t involve proximity and touch.

Here is what they looked at:

• A survey by S. Schmidt et. al, (2004) found 40 studies on remote intention, 4 of which were substandard and dropped. The 36 studies that were included had 1015 test sessions and statistically significant results. In addition, there were 15 studies on remote staring with 379 sessions with similar effect sizes. Interestingly, study quality did not seem to affect the results. There were 12 remote helping studies, 11 of which totaled 576 sessions. Distribution of effect sizes and the effect size itself was similar to other studies.

The conclusion by Schmidt, et. al, was that the differences of these collected experiments combined with their similar outcomes meant that an artifact (problem) in the study design(s) was highly unlikely and if it were there, it would have to be a very simple mistake that all the researchers had made.

• Astin et al. (2000) found 23 experiments with 2774 patients. 13 of those studies (57%) yielded statistically significant healing effects, 9 of them showed no effect and one showed a negative effect. The authors concluded the the effect was strong enough to keep studying.
• Crawford et al, (2003) did a systematic review of 45 lab and 45 clinical studies. They were making a quality assessment, and they concluded that in general, distant healing studies did better in quality reviews.
• There were two systematic reviews by the Cochrane Collaboration (2008,2009): A Reiki review of 24 randomly controlled trials with 1153 participants yielded measurable pain relief, with experienced practitioners getting better results than newbies. A review of 10 randomly controlled prayer studies with 7646 patients found no statistically significant measurable effect.
• Roe, et. al, (2015) looked at 57 studies and found statistically significant effects compared to controls.

Image: Light Field Studios, Canva

Psychic Healing Studies Could Benefit From Standardization

What can be learned from this is that quite a few people have looked into healing studies over the years. One recurring theme that many of the analyses mentioned was that study quality was inconsistent and that a set of standards needed to be developed. The problems included:

Inadequacy of blinding, dropped data, poor outcome measures, lack of statistical power estimations, lack of confidence intervals, and lack of independent replication.

Nevertheless, high quality studies, when combined, showed a statistically significant effect. While less robust studies, particularly those with a lack of blinding, have outcomes that can be explained by poor study design, it’s worth noting that in many cases the results of these studies tended to mirror those of the better studies. That generally means that poor design probably did not affect the outcome.

Now before you all go scoffing at the prayer studies, which tended to show no effect, it’s important to keep in mind that the researchers could not evaluate who was praying, how they prayed and whether some forms of prayer were more effective than others. The lack of success in other words, could potentially be explained as “the wrong people doing it wrong.” Given that other forms of distant healing were successful, this is a distinct possibility.

With such a smorgasbord of studies of varying types and quality, you really can’t learn much about the psychic healing process this way. For that you need a much more consistent and reliable experiment that can be altered to learn more about the process.

The Psychic Healing Study That Changed Everything

There is one healing study with replications that appears to meet this criteria. And unsurprisingly we’ve learned a few things already from this study. Back in 2000, Bill Bengston published results of this study in the Journal for Scientific Exploration. The Effect of the “Laying On of Hands” on Transplanted Breast Cancer in Mice.

This was an A+ study design. The study was done with mice, which eliminated the problem of the placebo effect. The mice were bought from a medical supplier that bred them to have no immunity at all to a type of breast cancer (mammary adenocarcinoma). This disease was 100% fatal to the mice wit,in 2 to 4 weeks. This eliminated questions about how sick the mice were and because the environment of the mice could be controlled, it eliminated questions about whether it was the healing work doing the healing or something else. It was also easy to create a control group and establish that the healing work was the variable.

Using mice removed the problem of blinding because mice are not susceptible to the experimenter effect or the placebo effect (presumably; if the mice have any beliefs, they aren’t sharing them.) It was all amazingly straightforward for a medical study.

Some Surprising Results

Good studies can produce surprising results because when the effect is strong enough, as it was in this case, you can learn something new. The control mice had to be sent to another city to prevent remission of the disease. Having them nearby meant that some of them would go into remission. Awareness of the control mice was apparently enough to heal some of them, but if they were in another city then it was out of sight, out of mind.

One of the things tested by this experiment was whether belief played any role. Skeptics were brought in to participate in doing the healings and if they were trained properly, the healing worked just as well with them as with believers.

The healing work itself was quite reliable. 87.9% of the mice who received healing work went into remission. If the control mice were not sent to another city, their healing rate was 69.2%. For a parapsychology experiment, in fact, for any medical experiment, that’s an incredible success rate.

Not Just a Remission, But a Real Cure

Some mice were injected with the cancer after they recovered to see if they would get it again. This led to yet another discovery: The mice had developed immunity to that cancer. They weren’t just in remission, they were outright cured. If there was a new drug or medical procedure that could cure cancer like this, it would lead the news.

This discovery also tells us that the psychic healing process uses the patient’s body to heal itself. In practical terms, it means that psychic healing is unlikely to work on people with compromised immune systems, such as with chemotherapy or radiation. Anecdotally, Bengston has confirmed this. You have to choose chemo and radiation or alternative methods. They won’t work together.

It’s referred to as energy healing, but no one has ever demonstrated what energy is being transferred or if it’s an energy transfer at all. How this works is still a matter of speculation, but there are some leads.

In a later paper more findings were disclosed:

Because of the unconventional nature of the research, Bengston insisted on independent replication by disinterested researchers in independent labs. As of this writing, more than a dozen healing experiments using the Bengston Energy Healing method on this cancerous mouse model have been conducted in 6 independent labs.6,7

Subsequent to the determination that the healing effect was reliable, secondary correlates involving the effect of distance, dose, and whether healing can be stored were introduced. In brief, healing does not seem to diminish with distance; there is a minimum dose necessary to produce the healing effect; and treated water and cotton seem to be able to reproduce cancer cures without further human intervention (personal communication: William Bengston, PhD, 2015).

Studies of the biological effects of the technique on human healers and healees have been conducted to investigate its effects on brain activity by electroencephalogram (EEG)12 and functional magnetic resonance imaging.13 Those studies indicate reliable physiological changes in both healer and healee. Paired recordings of the healer and subject done both with the subject at a distance and in proximity to the healer showed harmonic frequency coupling across the spectra, followed by between-individual EEG frequency entrainment effects, and then by instantaneous EEG phase locking. These results suggest the presence of a connection between the healer and healee and may thus provide a mechanism for phase coupling.12 This connection seems to be stimulated by the needs of the healee more than the conscious intention of the healer.13

Additional physical correlates to healing using the Bengston method have included anomalous magnetic micropulsations14 in the surrounding space of healing events which may indicate a reduction in entropy when healing occurs. If this is the case, then perhaps it is “information” rather than “energy” that is being transmitted in the healing process. And, if it is indeed information, that would be consistent with the apparent ability to store healing in materials.

Still More Stuff To Be Learned

Again, once you have a reliable, successful study, you can use that study to examine other aspects of the effect. In this case, a preliminary attempt was made to isolate the effect in cotton and demonstrate the effect on lab samples of genes to demonstrate proof of concept. (This did not work well enough to be usable.)

Here’s where things get fascinating. The researchers were able to isolate a small electromagnetic effect from the healers and duplicate it using speakers. The sound was then used on different cells to see if they could get a healing reaction. It did, but it was less than what the healers could accomplish.

The researchers speculated that they hadn’t fully captured the healing effect in the recording. With more experiments and further testing, this may be possible, leading to inexpensive cancer treatments using inaudible magnetic and electromagnetic signals.

That was about three years ago. Like so much research in parapsychology, limited funds and immense resistance from skeptics means that everything happens very slowly. There is a possible breakthrough here, leading to novel methods of curing cancer, but it will take a long time to get anywhere.

Ganzfield Experiment and The Success That Won’t Go Away

Imagine that you’re a scientist and you have an experiment in your field that has been replicated all over the world by over 50 scientists in a 108 different publications, comprised collectively of thousands of trials. It is so dependable that it’s often tweaked in order to understand the phenomenon better.

This experiment demonstrates something very important to your field and probably to other fields of science as well and meets any and all ordinary scientific criteria for success, and yet there is a level of crazy surrounding it that is only rivaled by national politics. You discover that people will outright lie like little children rather than accept the results. Some scientists are so hostile that they write papers attempting to smear the research with badly written and inaccurate critiques.

Imagine that despite your best efforts you cannot get past the hostility, inaccuracies and lies, so you see this magnificent, replicated, and incredibly important experiment languish. Although it is filled with profound scientific implications, it sits there, a testament not to the failure of science, but of humanity.

Ganzfield Experiment In The Hostile World

This is the story of the the Ganzfeld Experiment; the flagship experiment of parapsychology. It has so thoroughly demonstrated the existence of telepathy that among researchers in the field, there no longer exists any doubt. Even hard core skeptics, -those few who have taken the time to actually understand the science- know this and one has even admitted it. It meets any sane standard of scientific evidence, and there’s the gotcha. The standard isn’t sane and indeed, never has been.

Experimental Simplicity

cards used to conduct experiments for extrasensory perception ( ESP)

The experiment itself is pretty straightforward at its core. There is a sender, who sends an image, and a receiver, who receives the image. The experiment is easy to control for cheating because all you need to do is separate the test subjects and design the flow of data so that they can’t interact in any way. Easy peasy.

The receiver must select from four different images and choose the one that the sender was sending. This is called “forced choice.” If the receiver only gets it right 25% of the time, then he/she is just guessing; anything better than that? Then something interesting is happening.

The name “ganzfeld” refers to the fact that the receiver is shielded electromagnetically in a room, can only hear white noise; their vision is reduced to a blur by covering the eyes with the halves of ping pong balls and the lights are dimmed. Their total field (In German this translates to “Ganzfeld”) of sensory input is diminished. Without distractions, the receiver has a much better chance of receiving information telepathically.

This works. Not perfectly, but certainly well enough for an experiment. It’s been done more than enough times by more than enough people to rule out any statistical anomalies. The success rate is typically between 32 and 35%. That’s pretty normal for a successful, statistics based experiment. There have been six different meta analyses from skeptics and researchers alike, all showing positive results. From an objective scientific perspective, this is an ordinary successful scientific experiment.

Who’s Bat Shit Crazy?

But this is parapsychology we’re talking about; a science surrounded by batshit crazy people with advanced degrees and a horde of intellectual wannabe’s desperate to bury and ignore the profound implications that the experiment has for science and reality itself. It’s . . . always like that. People fight change.

Since the inception of the modern version of the experiment, first done in 1974-75, critics have been taking shots at it, trying to discredit it. From the skeptical point of view, psychic ability cannot possibly exist, so something MUST have gone wrong. It’s a poor way to do an evaluation and it has led to some quite ridiculous criticisms.

The main one used these days is what is referred to as “selective reporting” aka the “file drawer effect.” The claim here is that studies which did not show positive results were never published and only positive ones were, skewing the results. This is something that can be claimed without having to produce evidence, which is makes it a favorite argument among skeptics.

Can The Ganzfield Experiment Be Disproved

This doesn’t mean however, that it’s impossible to disprove. You can statistically look at how many unpublished studies it would take to nullify the findings. If that number is unrealistically high, then you can safely dismiss this as a consideration. Long story short: in this tiny scientific field where everyone knows what’s happening, you would have to run ten years worth of experiments non stop and have every single one of them fail and have no one else find out about it, in order for selective reporting to be worthy of consideration. So no, selective reporting is not a problem.

When people have dug up unreported studies in the past to examine how deep the problem goes, what they found was a mixed bag. Some results were null, some were positive, some were negative. The results tended to reflect the results of existing research. This outcome should surprise no one with an actual brain. Only in the fever dreams of skeptics would there be a massive conspiracy to withhold studies and carefully curate positive results.

Meta Analysis

Then there was the 1999 Milton-Wiseman meta analysis that found no effect. Wiseman, a skeptic, made sure to widely publicize that result and because of this, skeptics cite this one as proof that the Ganzfeld is a failure. This is typical of the drama surrounding parapsychology. Failures are widely publicized and positive results buried and ignored.

But do a little research, (getting skeptics to do serious research is like trying to give a cat a bath. They lose their shit fighting against something that’s good for them.), and you’ll find that a mistake was made in calculating the statistics and when corrected, the analysis yielded positive results. Today it is regarded as just another positive meta analysis. There are still skeptics 20 years later who will not admit this.

It gets even more absurd. There have also been arguments that meta analyses may not be useful. They are ready to throw away a tool used by many sciences in order to make this go away.

Try the Ganzfield Bias Test

Try this experiment. There are two encyclopedia articles on this experiment that you can access for free. Compare them. One is from the Society for Psychical Research, and Wikipedia, which you can find here. The SPR article is written by experts in the field. It contains all the relevant criticisms, but it also contains the rebuttals and puts everything in its proper context.

The Wikipedia article, in contrast, is written by skeptics. (They have overwhelmed that platform and dominate all psychic related topics.) People who try to bring balance to those topics are quickly booted off the platform. You can see this in the writing.

What you will see is that the Wikipedia article massively overemphasizes criticism, puts it in everywhere and provides no rebuttal to it, although those rebuttals certainly exist. It cites the 1999 meta analysis and conveniently ignores its correction, while downplaying the other 5 meta analyses. The article is cherry picking the data to create a false impression. It’s quite biased and very amateurish.

The trick to understanding the Ganzfeld Experiment and parapsychology in general is to not let yourself get drowned in the criticism. Science is complicated and if you try hard enough, you can find fault with anything. You have to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The study is in line with other parapsychology experiments and affirms something that many people have experienced. That’s why it’s being studied in the first place. Based on people’s real world experiences and other experiments, telepathy is something that we would expect to find.

Psychic Ability Under The Microscope

There is something about existence of psychic ability though that is deeply unsettling to some people and they will look for any reasons, even imaginary ones, to deny its reality. This is the controversial soup that the Ganzfeld experiments must swim in.

In their mentality, parapsychology’s skeptics are not much different from Young Earther’s, climate deniers, Holocaust deniers and the Stop the Steal crowd. Their compulsive need to deny the existence of psychic ability is not a contribution to society, as they claim, but rather an attempt to relieve their own anxiety.

Once you frame the endless criticism in that light, it makes a lot more sense. The skeptics aren’t convinced that the Ganzfeld is a successful experiment because they are incapable of conceding. If you want to understand the Ganzfeld, you have to see them for what they are: barking dogs on the side of the road. You can listen to the barking if you like, or even bark back at them if you want, but it’s best to just leave them behind.

The Ganzfeld meta analyses:

Honorton (1985); Bem & Honorton (1994); Milton & Wiseman (1999); Storm & Ertel (1999); Bem et al. (2001); Storm et al. (2010)

Other sources:

http://www.skepticalaboutskeptics.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/How-Richard-Wiseman-Nullifies-Positive-Results-by-Chris-Carter.pdf

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/215514293_Extrasensory_Perception_and_Quantum_Models_of_Cognition

The Life of Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley; a man deemed the wickedest man in the world. Crowley was also an influential figure in the Western esoteric traditions. Furthermore, he is not forgotten since his death on December 1, 1947. His legacy lives on.

Aleister Crowley and His Early Life

The occult pioneer was born on October 12, 1875, in Leamington, Spa. He was known as Edward Alexander Crowley until he adopted the Gaelic form of his given name.

Crowley was born from a wealthy family. However, even at a young age, he had been vocal with his criticisms against his parents. He deplored their' fundamentalist Christian Plymouth beliefs, leading him to reject the entirely said faith.

It wasn't until he started his education at Trinity College, a division of the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he pursued his interest in poetry and mountaineering. He then published several of his writings on his passions.

For some biographers, this is when Crowley was allegedly introduced into the British intelligence agency. It was suggested the man that everyone feared had lived as a spy throughout his life.

Crowley's Spiritual Journey

Even though Crowley detested Christianity, which is supported by his several anti-Semitic sentiments. He still considered himself an immensely spiritual and religious person.

In 1898; he was recruited in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. He practiced and applied the ceremonial magic under the care of Allan Bennett and Samuel Lidell MacGregor Mathers.

His interests in mountain pursuits grew. To feed his quest for excellence, he once visited Mexico to mountaineer with a friend known as Oscar Eckenstein. He then travelled to India to study of Buddhism and Hinduism in India.

Biographies of Crowley

In multiple biographies, Crowley was described to have explored the belief systems of Kabbalah, Judeo-Christian, yoga, and Hermeticism. This was despite his critical view on the dominating religion.

Rose Edith Kelly married him in 1904, and they set their honeymoon in Cairo, Egypt. It was in this place that changed Crowley's life forever.

Supernaturally Touched

Crowley claimed that a supernatural entity named "Aiwass" had contacted him and lent him the “Book of the Law”. This was then to be the sacred text of Crowley's established Thelema religion.

It was the start of Æon of Horus, or the "Era of Horus." As the trustee of The Book, Crowley was hailed as the prophet of Thelemites. The era of Osiris, and the Isis, represented the previous ages, where the era of Isis was a period of matriarchy. In contrast, the era of Osiris displayed the power of the patriarchy.

Additionally, Osiris' generation has set a great emphasis on religious sacrifices. Yet, the followers believed that the era of Horus was the time for individualism. This was taken from the Egyptian belief that Horus struck his own, so he could learn and grow.

In Thelema, figures like Hadit, Nuit, and Ra Hoor Kuit are revered as the deities that guide the believers. They are equated to the Egyptian gods and goddess, such as Horus, Osiris, and Isis.

They may be seen as literal beings or archetypes, as long as Crowley's works are viewed canonically. The interpretation of The Book is left to the individual understanding of followers.

Aleister Crowley Created Thelema as the Way of Life

The law of Thelema states that, Thelemites should strive to ascend into a higher state of existence, unite the self to higher powers, and embrace the True Will as their ultimate place and purpose in life.

The religion upholds the beliefs

"Every Man and Woman is a Star" and the "Love is the Law. Law under Will."

The former refers to the perspective that everyone possesses unique abilities, potentials, and talents. Therefore, no one has the right to impede in their search for True Self. On the other hand, the latter indicates that each person is entangled with their True Will using love.

“As someone learns to love. They come to discover that it's founded on unity and understanding and never on coercion or force.”

A Ruthless Legacy on His Wake

In 1920, Crowley finally decided to move to Sicily to build the Abbey of Thelema. The abbey was to serve as the Thelemites' headquarters.

He went beyond his spiritual enlightenment by declaring himself as the Ipssissimus, roughly translated as “beyond the Gods,” in 1921.

After two years, Crowley began engaging with drugs and sexual endeavors. He communed with both men and women, all while bisexuality was considered a taboo subject back then.

Not long after, an Englishman passed away under mysterious circumstances. Furthermore, this followed a ritual to which it was disclosed that he consumed the cat's blood.

To say that the Italian fascist and British press are appalled is an understatement. As a result, the Abbey was shut down. Not only that but Crowley was also expelled from the city, leading the rest of the Thelemites to scatter. Nonetheless, this wasn't the first time that Crowley made a gruesome move.

Boleskine House

Aleister Crowley sowed dread in the Boleskine House as he used it as a secluded area to practice his magic by “The Book of Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage.”

The act prompted the sudden death of the housekeeper's two children. As a consequence, Crowley further bragged that a former drunkard employee, had been under the influence of alcohol and tried to murder the rest of his family.

Even after Crowley lost ownership of the place, the house was still filled with dark energy.

Suicide

In 1965, a suicide incident had taken place when an army major shot himself with a shotgun. Although the next owner; Jimmy Page, rarely spent time in the estate, he undoubtedly heard some odd creaks, ghostly apparitions, and unexplained groans within the house whenever he visits.

Instead of leaving the land to a friend, Jimmy decided to continue owning the property despite the frequent attempts of Page and Aleister Crowley fans to enter the premises.

Later, owners dismissed the notions of witchcraft and hauntings around the house, but a 2015 incident of the house enveloped in fires may have said otherwise.

Evil On the Loose

Crowley was deemed a disgrace, and was in a near-skeletal state due to his heroin addiction, but his followers never left his side. In fact, he fathered a handful of children, where most of them were illegitimate. Even then, Crowley was still considered a remarkable magus and medium.

Tarot and Magick

Aleister designed a new sequence of tarot cards and incorporated them into his 1944 “Book of Thoth” until he marked the end of his life in Hastings in 1947.

He may have been referred to as the wickedest man in the world, but there's no doubt that Crowley would deny this claim. It's worth noting, that after everything that Crowley had put people through, he had complete confidence that his works were good as they opened men to spiritual experiences by abandoning the earthly rules.

In the present day, there are a couple of individuals who still call themselves Thelemites and follow the works of Aleister Crowley. It’s as if he is still here, among us and plying his craft.

The True Nature of Psi Skeptics

Back in 2008 when I first began writing about psychic ability online, I encountered a lot of skepticism which led to arguments about the Million Dollar Challenge for psychics, created and managed by none other than the late stage magician and skeptic, James Randi. This challenge was certainly convincing to skeptics at the time, so I decided to look into it.

I was more than a little surprised at the emptiness of it. It was ridiculously . . . crude. I did a deep dive into the challenge which I wrote up in my book, but at the time it was already clear that the challenge wasn’t science-based and didn’t prove anything. Anyone who claimed that the challenge proved anything was basically advertising that they didn’t know how science worked. (The challenge did not employ repeatable experiments; they weren’t properly documented; they didn’t use established scientific protocol, but made them up as they went along, leading to amateurish testing. It wasn’t designed to prove anything.)

Skeptic Talking Points Instead of Knowledge

The challenge gave people talking points, but little else. Indeed, the skeptics I encountered would go on and on about how Randi used his magician skills to expose the bad psychics and catch them at their tricks. It did not seem to occur to them that even though this was partially true, it only proved that there were frauds in the professional psychic community, which didn’t prove anything about psychic phenomena in general. There was a gap in their logic that they didn’t seem to comprehend and more importantly, it couldn’t be explained to them.

As I learned more and more about parapsychology and what experiments had actually been done, I also conversed with a lot of skeptics along the way. A pattern emerged. Skeptics are almost universally belligerent, condescending and prone to making declarative statements with no nuance or gray areas. A lot of what they say amounts to talking points and nothing more.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

You’ve probably heard this phrase, and it seems ok on the surface, but is it? What makes a claim extraordinary? What counts as extraordinary evidence? This isn’t skepticism so much as it is a vague belief. It’s no more than a rhetorical club to beat people with.

Skeptic Blah!

Skeptic talking points also include: “There is no evidence for psi.” “In the entire history of parapsychology they have never had a successful experiment.” “If psychics existed, one of them would have passed the million dollar challenge” and other nonsense. Any disagreement is met with a demand for proof.

However, very few had enough knowledge to discuss any experiment, let alone discuss it in depth. Those who could talk about the experiments followed a particular path, i.e any source I volunteered was 100% biased and any source they volunteered (usually from a 30 second Internet search) was 100% legitimate. No gray area. Anyone I cited was an idiot, anyone they cited was the authoritative last word. I never heard any subtlety in their thinking at all. For example, in all the years of talking to them, I only ever heard a single skeptic say: “I am not yet convinced by the evidence.” And that was on a forum where the worst of them were consistently kicked off.

Are Skeptics Impartial?

An assumption of skepticism is that both points of view are examined in an even-handed way. That is to say, skepticism is considered to be a position that relies on knowledge and impartial judgment. If either of these are missing, then it’s not really skepticism, it’s something else. The self described skeptics that I have encountered, are usually missing both knowledge and impartial judgment. It’s more zealotry than anything else.

Just to be clear about this, people who actually look into the science of psychic ability find replicated experiments in telepathy, precognition, being stared at, psychokinesis and Reiki, a type of psychic healing. There are also a large number of one-off experiments looking into various interesting areas, that for various reasons couldn’t be easily replicated. (For example, there was a precognition study that examined train crashes in the 50s and a telepathy study with a non verbal autistic child.) In addition there are many investigative reports by scientists that have yielded interesting results that cumulatively provide a form of evidence.

Around half of the world reports having had a psychic experience of some sort and in some countries psychic ability is taken for granted. It isn’t controversial.

For the skeptics to be right, half the world must be fooling itself and all of these thousands of experiments conducted over the years must be faulty in some way. It is an unrealistic, irrational position to take.

Skepticism or Denial?

And this is where we see the true nature of psi (psychic functions) skepticism. Denying the existence of psi takes a certain type of attitude. It requires arrogance because you have to believe that you’re right and other people are crazy or deluded. It requires blindness to other points of view and an ability to explain away inconvenient facts. It requires extremist type logic where you are right and everyone else is wrong. This is usually accompanied by attacking people who disagree with you as idiots.

The thinking that many people follow is that parapsychology has to convince its skeptics in order to be considered legitimate. But this logic automatically grants those skeptics infallible, unquestioned judgment and gives parapsychologists no room to prove that the skeptics are wrong. Indeed, it’s customary for parapsychologists to be forced to confront skeptics at every turn. So instead of explaining their findings and moving the field forward, they have to fight for every fact against people who give them no respect and never concede anything of substance, no matter how strong the evidence. With this set up, doubt is always cast on everything they do and they can never win.

Image: Wyron A - Unsplash

How did the field of parapsychology get into this trap in the first place?

Before I get into the organization that started it all, it’s helpful to know who the skeptics are. With very few exceptions, they are all atheists. Self defined skeptics are a subcategory of anti-theists, aka “New Atheists” who distinguish themselves the following way:

In other words, anti-theists view religion as ignorance and see any individual or institution associated with it as backward and socially detrimental. The Anti-Theist has a clear and – in their view, superior – understanding of the limitations and danger of religions.  They view the logical fallacies of religion as an outdated worldview that is not only detrimental to social cohesion and peace, but also to technological advancement and civilized evolution as a whole.  They are compelled to share their view and want to educate others into their ideological position and attempt to do so when and where the opportunity arises.

You can see that there is a fundamentalist aspect to anti-theism. Self described skeptics are even more radicalized. Skepticism, as practiced, is best described as a fundamentalist version of atheism.

It’s all there if you look for it. Phil Torres, writing for Salon, recently spelled it out in stark language. Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right. In the article he lists a seemingly never ending stream of prominent New Atheists who have landed on the side of the right wing and all its crazy.

I was not surprised. These are the people who coined the term “grief vampire” and accused mediums of preying on the bereaved. There was James Randi who gave out Pigasus awards and insulting nicknames, such as “Gullible Gary” to Prof. Gary Schwartz. They think that they are saving the world from irrational beliefs.

Skeptics Online

The website Skeptical About Skeptics has been documenting what it refers to as “media skeptics” for many years and I documented that kind of behavior back in 2013 in my book: Psi Wars: TED, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet. The language has changed a bit and different social media has arisen, but the song remains the same. There is something wrong with the skeptics.

Which brings us back to the Committee for Scientific Investigation (CSI). Way back in 1976, it was formed at a convention of the American Humanist Association, (Humanist=atheist) and named CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal). (You can find the whole story here.)

The newly formed organization quickly split between those who wanted impartial investigations and those who wanted simply to debunk. The debunkers quickly won and cemented the organization as being forever opposed in every way to the paranormal. The more open minded of the skeptical individuals, including the late Carl Sagan, slowly distanced themselves from the organization.

What exists today is a media organization focused on discrediting the paranormal and parapsychology in particular. If a failed psi research replication shows up in the news, it’s them. If a medium or psychic is discredited in a “study,” it’s them. They accomplish this by using academics to lend credibility to the skeptical message and they have select magazines that they can count on to push the skeptical narrative. (Chris French is a CSI fellow).

Skeptic Competition

They have succeeded for this long by not having any real competition. The paranormal nor the scientific psi community have anything like it to push back against a steady stream of atheist beliefs. By marketing themselves as scientific and reality based and the paranormal and science community around psi as unscientific woomeisters, they’ve gotten the high ground and have become the unquestioned authority.

Skepticism was always overrun with authoritarian types who misunderstood what it was and used the term to gain legitimacy, but in this day and age it’s pretty much synonymous with a radicalized form of atheism pushing their brand of atheistic materialist beliefs. So when you see a skeptic in the news, you’re basically looking at an evangelical atheist trying to convert you to disbelief in the paranormal.

I personally don’t like other people’s beliefs pushed on me disguised as science.