Supernormal

This afternoon, a book arrived from Amazon – Dean Radin’s Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Abilities.   Rob had ordered the book for my birthday back in June, only to realize it hadn’t been published yet. But it arrived at exactly the right moment.

I’ve been working on a chapter in our new book on psychokinesis and needed some new sources. It turns out that Radin’s book has two chapters on psychokinesis – Psychokinesis in Living Systems and Psychokinesis in Inanimate Systems.

By a living system, Radin is talking about people. This chapter covers phenomena like levitation – particularly among yogis and physical mediums;  consciousness field effect- whether Transcendental Meditation (TM) Sidhi practitioners meditating on peace and nonviolence actually lowers  crime and  violence; intentional influence at a distance; and the love study.  By inanimate systems, Radin is talking about humans interacting with and affecting machines and objects and veers into the movement of objects through nothing more than the power of the mind, the teleportation of objects, random number generators, the hemi-synch experiment (associated with the Monroe Institute).

There’s a lot of great information in these two chapters, but the main drawback comes from what Radin says early on in the book – that anecdotal evidence doesn’t constitute scientific evidence. The only evidence that matters in science is what can be proven in a laboratory. Rob’s response to that?  “Life is the laboratory.”

Many of us have experienced telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and some of us have even experienced psychokinesis – mind-matter interaction.

When testing psychokinesis with inanimate objects, two types of experiments are conducted – micro-PK, where the targets are microscopic (photons, radioactive particles) and macro-PK, where the target is large enough to see with the naked eye.  Spoon-bending is considered a macro-PK. “This phenomenon has  been studied a few times under quasi-controlled circumstances, and in my opinion it seems that something interesting may be going on,” Radin writes.   However, Radin says, since there are many ways  of bending metal with conjuring techniques, the scientific evidence is insufficient. 

 “That said,” he continues,  “if I were forced to decide whether it was possible to bend metal for real, without using blunt force or conjuring methods, then I would say yes, it is possible.” And he says this because not only has he seen it done by ordinary  people, but he himself did it at a spoon-bending party.  He apparently attended this party to observe a woman who claimed to have previously bent the bowl of a soup spoon. He was holding a large, heavy soup spoon and was mimicking this woman’s hand movements so he could get a sense of what she might be doing.

 While watching  the woman, he heard someone shout, “Look what you’ve done!”

 Radin glanced up to see what the commotion was about and it turned out that he was the source of the commotion. “I had somehow bent the bowl of the spoon I was holding about 90 degrees. I immediately checked my fingers to see if I had unconsciously used force, because it would have taken an enormous effort to create that bend and the effect would have left clear indentations on my fingers. There were no signs of force.”

 Someone shouted at him to bend it all the way, so he pinched it with a thumb and forefinger. “After the bowl folded over, it stiffened, and within a few seconds it became as hard as steel.”

 Radin hasn’t been able to repeat what he did. “So I can’t explain how this happened, nor do I present it as evidence for macro-PK. But it did happen.”

 And this is where I have an issue with “scientific evidence.” Radin, a scientist himself, bent a spoon.  But he states he doesn’t present this as evidence for macro-PK. Why not? Why should his personal experience, his personal “evidence,” take a backseat to some lab experiment? “The bottom line about macro –PK is that the jury is still out, We don’t have enough data under sufficiently strict controls to gain much confidence about mind-matter interactions large enough to be seen with the naked eye.”

Toward the end of the book are four or five pages on UFOs and encounters where I felt more hopeful for science generally. A little background.

 In 1957, Carl Jung published Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky and made a convincing  case for UFOs as the unfolding of a modern myth. As Barbara Hannah explained in her biographical memoir, Jung: His Life and Work, Jung wasn’t interested in whether UFOs were real. The fact that people all over the world were seeing round objects in the sky was what intrigued him. “Roundness is the symbol par excellence for the Self, the totality,” Hannah wrote. In other words, these round saucers were symbolic of a merging collective need for wholeness.

In the nearly 60 years since Jung wrote his book on UFOs, crafts of numerous shapes and sizes have been reported, physical evidence has been left behind, and thousands of abductees have come forward with their stories. How is that a myth?

But as Dean Radin pointed out in Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities, “Jung’s use of the term ‘myth’ does not imply that UFO sightings or for that matter encounters with angels, aliens, fairies, spirits, elves or demons are just fantasies. Rather, it suggests that some of these experiences may literally be psychophysical, a blurring of conventional boundaries between objective and subjective realities.”  Or, “mind literally shapes matter, that the imaginal and the real are not as separate as they seem.”