Mediums Rare (15 page)
Authors: Richard Matheson
No neural structure in the brain—or elsewhere in the human organism—has ever been discovered that could provide the large amount of energy required for long-distance transmission of psi symbols.
Despite the continuing disparity of thought between science and parapsychology, progress (albeit halting) is being made.
Pieces of the continuing psychic puzzle are constantly being collected from all directions—and at an increasing rate.
The physical and the behavioral sciences are coming together.
Physics is blending with philosophy.
Biology with religion.
Medicine and engineering with literature and education.
In brief, a massive “cross-fertilization” is taking place all the time.
While it does, parapsychologists continue with a mass of laborious, repetitive testing, always intent on proving what they believe to be the truth of psychic phenomena.
No longer, in fact, do they regard their function as one of proving the occurrence of psi events.
They believe that this has already been accomplished.
What today’s parapsychologists search for is
meaning
.
They know that psi exists.
Now they want to know
why
.
O
n January 7, 1610, Galileo announced that, through his telescope, he’d seen four moons revolving around the planet Jupiter.
Immediately, a pamphlet was distributed by his enemies.
Nonsense
, said the pamphlet. Galileo saw no such thing. What he’d seen were halos; reflections; luminous clouds; in brief, an optical illusion. Worse, a self-delusion.
Accordingly, the Inquisition had its say and Galileo was compelled to recant.
Only in the past few years have they absolved him.
In 1807, Thomas Jefferson dismissed as utterly preposterous the notion that meteors could fall to Earth.
“It is easier” he said, “to believe that these two Yale professors” (who had examined the meteors) “would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.” Earthly things could not fall from heaven.
Those peasants whose cottage roofs had been demolished by these meteors no doubt took a different view.
Of course these peasants were—unfortunately for the progressive course of science—not accredited as were the scientists who, in July of 1790, when a veritable
rain
of meteors fell on France declared it, quote, a physically impossible phenomenon, unquote.
In 1935, F.W. Moulton, one of the world’s foremost authorities of celestial mechanics, did not hesitate to claim that “In all fairness to those, who by training, are not prepared to evaluate the fundamental difficulties of going from the Earth to the Moon, it must be stated that there is not the
slightest
possibility of such a journey.”
We smile at such ignorance. But do we feel uneasy at the same time? How many truths of tomorrow are being attacked as the heresies of today? How many current Galileos will recant their observations? How many current meteoric concepts will be condemned as utterly preposterous?
Especially in the field of ESP.
Unhappily, the answer is self-evident. I have only to quote the scientist—still alive—who declared, of ESP, “This is the kind of thing that I would not believe in even if it existed.”
Knowing this to be the case, it is all the more ironic that the founders of Parapsychology believed—with an almost majestic naïveté—that the scientific community would embrace them as soon as enough experiments had been carefully performed.
Yet here, more than a century later, Parapsychologists are still judged to be the loonies of the technological world because the phenomena they study contradict the “accepted” laws of the universe.
Consider the following quotation made by a well known—I will not identify him—critic of the field.
“In view of the
a priori
evidence against it, we know, in advance, that telepathy cannot occur.”
Quoting further from the same distinguished source, “If the results could have arisen through a trick, the experiment may be considered unsatisfactory proof of ESP
whether or not is finally decided that such a trick was, in fact. used.
”; aghast underlining mine.
It is assumed to be the province of science to investigate nature without prejudice.
Nowhere has this dictum met with less observation than in the field of Parapsychology.
It is a fact that no other accumulation of evidence, attested to by so many people from all walks of life, has ever been rejected.
Unfortunately, Parapsychologists do not, in the eyes of science, quahfy for this largess.
Indeed, Parapsychology has been called the “deviant” science.
Hopefully, recent developments call for a revision of this intransigent attitude.
In scores of university centers and research laboratories, there has been a compilation of experimental findings which can no longer be explained away as artifacts, statistical errors or the results of some bizarre, international conspiracy of fraud and collusion.
There has been a mounting number of observations involving apparent telepathic incidents in the psychotherapeutic world.
Finally, the attitude of modern physics is gradually altering in regard to the concepts of time and space and the heretofore, supposedly immutable laws of cause and effect.
In so-called “legitimate” science, the more that is discovered, the farther the horizon of knowledge recedes, the more underlying assumptions are discarded and replaced.
Conventional reasoning always fails us in the end. As Margaret Mead has stated, “The history of scientific achievement is full of scientists investigating phenomena the establishment did not believe was there.”
Or, to quote the venerable
Encyclopedia Britannica
, “The history of science is partly the history of paradoxes becoming commonplaces and heresies becoming orthodoxies.”
Would that the majority of today’s scientists had, at the very minimum, the attitude of Thomas Edison who, when asked to describe electricity, replied “Don’t know what it is. But it works.”
Sadly, even that is an attitude rare.
Bartlett, Paile E.,
Psi Trek
, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981.
Blundson, Norman,
A Popular Dictionary of Spiritualism
, New York: The Citadel Press, 1961.
Brown, Slater,
The Heyday of Spirtualism
, New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1970.
Carrington, Hereward,
Eusapia Palladino and Her Phenomena
, New York: B.W. Dodge and Company, 1909.
Carrington, Hereward,
The American Séances with Eusapia Palladino
, New York: Garrett Publications, 1954.
Carrington, Hereward,
Personal Experiences in Spiritualism
, London: T. Werner Laurie, Ltd., No date given.
Ehrenwalk, Jan, M.D.,
The ESP Experience
, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1978.
Ford, Arthur,
Nothing So Strange
, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958.
Hintz, Naomi A. & Pratt, J. Gaither, Ph.D.,
The Psychic Realm, What Can You Believe
, New York: Random House, 1975.
Helroyd, Stuart,
Psi and The Consciousness Explosion
, New York: Laplinger Publishing Company, 1977.
Knight, David D., Editor,
The ESP Reader
, New York: Castle Books, Grosset & Dunlap, Inc., 1969.
Lodge, Sir Oliver,
Raymond on Life and Death
, New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916.
Moore, R. Laurence,
In Search of White Crows
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Moss, Dr. Thelma,
The Probability of the Impossible
, Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, Inc., 1974.
Murphy, Gardner,
Challenge of Psychical Research
, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961.
Rogo, D. Scott,
Psychic Breakthroughs Today
, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: The Aquarian Press, 1987.
Somerlott, Robert,
Here, Mr. Splitfoot
, New York: The Viking Press, 1971.
Steinour, Harold,
Exploring the Unseen World
, New York: The Citadel Press, 1959.
Stern, Jess, Edgar Cayce,
The Sleeping Prophet
, New York: Bantam Books, 1967.
Sudre, Rene,
Para-Psychology
, New York: The Citadel Press, 1960.
Tanner, Amy E.,
Studies in Spiritism
, New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1910.
Targ, Russell and Harray, Keithe,
The Mind Race
, New York: Villard Books, 1984.
Tyrrell, G.N.M.,
Science and Psychical Phenomena plus Apparitions
, New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1961.