Paranormalia

Islamic stigmata

Paranormalia has been a bit quiet recently, while I'm trying to finish two books, my own and a client's. How these things do gobble up time. Matt Colborn, who has posted a couple of times, doubtless would have done so again but he too is in the middle of a book - on consciousness, as I'm sure he'll tell us about here before long. So: books three, blogs zero.

In the meantime I've been interested in the baby in Dagestan who is apparently running a sort of Koranic slide show on his skin. Ali Yakubov is said to have exhibited the word 'Allah' in Arabic on his chin at a few weeks of age, and subsequently entire Koranic verses have been appearing on various parts of his body, before fading and being replaced with new ones. Initially the parents did not talk about it, but then the phrase, "Show these signs to people" came into view, and now their household is being inundated with pilgrims from all over the region.  Performances are twice weekly, on Mondays and Thursday nights.

There are a few other details. The child is said to have been diagnosed with coronary heart disease and cerebral spastic infantile paralysis at birth, but he recovered suddenly when the scripts started appearing on his body. When this happens, his mother says, he cries, his temperature rises and he seems to be very uncomfortable. The parents themselves are not particularly religious, but the local muftis are all aflutter and maintain the event is a "warning to all Muslims of Russia and Dagestan ... that they should turn to the wisdom of the religion of Allah, repent of their sins, and abandon their discord, conflicts, and the fratricidal confrontation that today shakes the blessed land of Dagestan and the entire Caucasus."

A good sentiment in such a troubled region - but is any of it true? I'm rather allergic to religious 'miracles' - my first reaction was an inward groan and the thought, here we go again (It's all those horrible 'weeping' statues - it just all seems so tacky and sentimental). I'd want to know a great deal more before deciding whether or not it's a hoax.

That said, there are plenty of precedents of this sort of thing in Christianity. Stigmata have been documented frequently enough to be considered a genuine psycho-physiological phenomenon. According to Irreducible Mind hundreds of cases have been reported from the 13th century, in the case of St Francis of Assisi, to the present day, although perhaps only around 50 with adequate testimony. It's usually linked to intense religiosity in young Catholic women suffering from 'hysteria' (whatever that is) - the marks correspond to Christ's wounds on the cross.

Apart from this there are medical cases of patients occasionally exhibiting bruises, blisters and other skin markings that come and go, and correspond to traumas earlier in life, like being beaten, or traumas that are merely imagined but do not actually happen. Ian Stevenson in his book on birthmarks describes the case of an Indian man who, while ill with typhoid fever, 'thought that he had died and that, as he was struggling to return to life, persons in the "other realm" had subdued him by cutting off his legs at the knees. When he recovered, "he was found to have some unusual horizontal scars in the skin across the front of both knees," and the "scars" persisted so that years later [he] was able to photograph them'. (Irr. Mind p. 158)

Emily Williams Kelly, who wrote the foregoing in the chapter on 'psychophysiological influence' in Irreducible Mind, is interested in how ideas in one's head can produce effects in the body. Neuroscience is closing in, as in many things, on the areas of the brain that are involved in triggering specific symptoms of this kind, but as she points out, that doesn't tackle the essential mystery, which is how or where the whole process begins. How do ideas and emotions convert so very directly into physical symptoms?

At least in the cases of female 'hysterics' there is a clear link between the two. But in the case of little Ali, assuming it's genuine - and it strikes me it would be a rather complex hoax, although not necessarily pointless - we are talking about an infant who can have not the smallest notion of anything that is going on - at least on any conventional level. The intelligence behind the phenomenon is literate and knows the scriptures. 

That means we can't address the problem in the same way as we can Christian stigmata; we would have to posit the involvement of some other mind - either living (the parents, a religious relative, a local priest), which would involve mental influence at a distance; or discarnate, which would indicate survival of death; or, as a related alternative that Stevenson might have suggested, the mind of the personality, perhaps a devout religious scholar, who has decided in his next life to bring some of that knowledge with him, and perhaps, as the muftis say, do something to try to counteract the appalling violence in the Caucasus.

Whichever of these we go with involves a jump from something odd, but potentially explicable if neursocience one day cracks the secret of consciousness, to something that is unambiguously paranormal. That's a good argument for not taking it seriously until some sleuth tells us it's the real deal. But if it is real it will be an extraordinary addition to the literature on stigmata.

The Ghost in the Machine - More From 'Irreducible Mind'

I talked about Irreducible Mind here last year, but didn't completely finish reading it before I had to give it back to the library (well, it is 650 pages long). But the SPR have given it to me to review for their Journal, and I am now the proud owner of my very own copy. Yay.

As a result, I'm getting a better grip on the detail of its argument, that physicalist approaches to the mind-brain problem are seriously untenable. Or to put it another way, that it's time to give dualism another look. Those of us who follow psychical research take that for granted, but it's a lot to swallow for the academic psychologists who the book is aimed at. The fact is, mind-body dualism as a philosophical concept is deeply unfashionable; the term 'Cartesian dualism' - that the body is a sort of machine animated by the soul - is a cue for right-thinking scientists to cough and laugh up their sleeves. It's intellectually unrespectable. Not at all the thing. What lingers in the scientific mind is the verdict of the behaviourist Gilbert Ryle, that there is no ghost in the machine.

That was always a big problem for parapsychology. Psychical phenomena seem to demand a dualist approach to mind and brain, but there were no half-way convincing models that it could point to.  When I first got interested in it in the late 1980s the only source that I saw referenced was The Self and Its Brain by Karl Popper and John Eccles, and I got the sense even then that their arguments weren't really seen as overwhelming. (Irreducible Mind spells this out: the phenomena they referred to don't rule out physicalist explanations and they were attacking cognitive approaches that were already obsolete - it didn't help that Eccles's support for dualism was transparently motivated by his Catholic beliefs.)

John Beloff, a philosopher who helped establish the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh argued for radical dualism - as opposed to the non-radical kind argued by John Searle, which sees consciousness as a distinct entity in its own right, but one still wholly dependent on brain processes -  but as far as I'm aware did not attempt to provide any kind of neurophysiological model.

Then in 1990 came the Emperor's New Mind by Roger Penrose, who argued from a mathematician's point of view that the brain could not be the sole origin of mentation, at least as currently conceived by computational theories. Penrose pointed out that computers work by means of algorithms and there are lots of things in maths that can't be calculated that way - we can discover them, and know them to be true, but only by using some non-algorithmic methods of calculation. His idea was that the brain must interact with something external, probably through a process of quantum gravity.

This too was a bit abstract, but Penrose subsequently teamed up with the quantum physicist Stuart Hameroff, who suggested in Shadows of the Mind that the kind of quantum processes Penrose had in mind could be performed by the 'micro-tubules' in the brain cells (there's a good summary of their argument here).

But neither Eccles-Popper nor Penrose-Hameroff related - as far as I'm aware - to abnormal mental phenomena, like stigmata, the placebo effect or savant syndrome, still less to the data of parapsychology such as remote viewing, ganzfeld, apparitional hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, etc -  which are surely the overwhelming empirical reason for taking dualism seriously. In any case, a rival quantum theorist named Max Tegmark popped up and claimed that Hameroff's claim didn't stand up, and that quantum processes could therefore not be implication in consciousness, which made it redundant as far as current neuroscience is concerned.

Personally, I'd always felt drawn to the analogy suggested by Aldous Huxley in the Doors of Perception, echoing the philosophers C.D. Broad and Henri Bergson, of the brain as a 'reducing valve' that filters undifferentiated Consciousness - or Mind at Large, as he called it - and narrows our focus on the business of physical life.

Huxley's insight came from his mescaline trips, which opened up huge, beautiful and potentially terrifying new reality. Much of the mystical content of psychedelic experience overlaps heavily with Eastern mystical philosophy, which itself - according to frequent mention in the Hindu Vedas, the earliest extant religious texts - emerges from the ingestion of soma, apparently some kind of psychedelic plant or fungus.  Mystical experiences can be triggered by stress or the contemplation of great beauty (music, sunsets, nature, etc), while religious experience is sought through fasting, pain, drumming, dancing, etc). At the other end of the spectrum, of course, are the religious delusions of schizophrenics.

Since modern neuroscience is not much interested in any of this, I'm not sure if anyone has seriously tried to explain these images, ideas, hallucinations and visions in terms of the same kind of computational processes that are supposed to account for ordinary day-to-day mentation. I'd love to see someone at least try, but I'm not holding my breath.  A much neater and more logical explanation, surely - if we don't have secularist or philosophical objections - is to view abnormal and psychical mental phenomena as glimpses of something that the brain normally screens out, as its functioning is momentarily compromised. 

Back to Irreducible Mind. The book has several authors, but it seems to be principally Edward F Kelly who is driving the dualism argument forward (he calls it 'non-Cartesian Dualist Interactionist, to distinguish it from the rather crude dualism of Descartes).   Kelly picks up on terms and analogies used by William James, who used the term 'permissive', as illustrated by the trigger of a crossbow that has a releasing function, or 'transmission', as light being refracted through a prism or the air going through an organ pipe. He also refers to Frederic Myers, whose work and thought is the central focus of the whole book. Myers posited a sort of a psychological 'membrane' that controls the passage of psychological elements and processes between the supraliminal and subliminal regions of consciousness. He saw the boundaries as being fluid, or 'permeable', with a constant exchange of material between regions.

Having established that the transmission/filter theory has some kind of pedigree, Kelly shows how it could be made to work, and he too opts for a quantum approach. His preference is for the work of Henry Stapp, a quantum theorist who, he approvingly states, is conservative, orthodox and serious about establishing connections with mainline psychology and neuroscience; he has also tried to improve technically on other theories like those of Eccles and Hameroff. Stapp's big idea is based around the brain process of exocytosis, in which, (pay attention now),

neurotransmitter molecules are released into the synaptic cleft. The release is triggered by arrival of calcium ions at critical sites in the transmitter storage areas, the vesicles. But as these small ions pass through their membrane channels (diameter circa 1 nanometer) their positions becomes nearly fixed; hence, by Heisenberg's uncertainty relation, what happens next must be represented as a cloud of possible trajectories in the vicinity of the vesicle. This injection of a true quantum uncertainty - that is, an uncertainty involving more than incomplete knowledge of classically conceived details - goes on constantly at every one of the trillions of active synapses in the waking human brain, and this by itself is sufficient to establish that the brain is subject to quantum principles.  This necessary entry of quantum uncertainties is also consistent with the findings of dynamic system theorists, who emphasize that in the waking state the brain operates continually on the edge of instability, with small changes in input potentially leading to large changes in overall behaviour. (p. 612).

The usual objection to quantum processes occurring in the brain is that brain processes are far too slow, and that they operate at macro level of bundles of cells, and at body temperature. However Stapp rejects this complaint. He says his proposal is 'entirely consistent with the observed spatial and temporal scales of brain activity in relation to experience and behaviour', and since these are 'saturated with quantum effects' the burden of proof falls on those who deny, not those who affirm the relevance of quantum theory to brain science (Stapp's words, my italics).

Kelly goes on:

The net effect of these quantum-theoretic developments... is to bring consciousness back into both physical science and brain theory at the foundational level. As Stapp... remarks, his model "makes consciousness causally effective, yet it is compatible with all known laws of physics, including the law of conservation of energy." This totally deflates the main arguments... that have routinely been advanced against interactive dualism. Indeed, far from ruling out dualism, as alleged by Dennett and numerous others: "Contemporary physical theory allows, and in its orthodox von Neumann form entails, an interactive dualism."

This is fighting talk. Kelly concedes that a great deal remains to flesh the theory out in psychological and neuroscientific detail. He thinks that the kind of mental phenomena that Stapp uses, as was also the case with Eccles, can be explained in conventional physicalist terms, which rather weakens the model's appeal to psychologists and neuroscientists. But that changes completely once one takes the 'rogue' phenomena described in Irreducible Mind.

Yes indeed. It will be interesting to see how well this model stands up, and whether it fares any better than Penrose-Hameroff's with its microtubules. A lot of the problem with quantum theory is that it's so beyond most of us - and that includes mainstream psychologists - that we are all in the hands of the experts. And it only needs one or two experts in the field to come along and rubbish Stapp, and that's the end of it. The sceptics can simply say that it's been debunked.

What we're up against, not just neuroscience but science generally, is that dualism introduces the idea of some external stuff - mind, soul, whatever - which, we suppose, must have some physical substrate but which we cannot presently trace. It's a serious difficulty too for people who worry about 'mysterian' non-solutions, and can't rid themselves of the feeling that people who support them do so for purely religious reasons, or because they don't like reductionist science. 

But I do feel that this is a big advance in the right direction. Irreducible Mind really is packed with empirical data that enforces the consideration of a dualist model - although interestingly the focus is more on the abnormal rather than the flat-out paranormal - and crucially, it takes the reader right to the end of the process. If it can be shown how dualism as a process might work, that might make it a bit easier for some of the sceptically minded to accept the reality of psi phenomena.

What They Believe

In my last post I quoted from the 2005 Edge book What We Believe But Cannot Prove. I read the stuff on the website at the time, but thought I'd get the book for a holiday read - it's a great way to get a sense of what scientists are thinking in all sorts of fields without having to wade through all the small print.

The book's only about 250 pages long, and I could probably polish it off quite quickly, if I  didn't keep drifting off into a reverie after every three lines. It's all fascinating stuff.  Parapsychology is not mentioned at all, and I suspect that very few of the contributors would admit to the slightest sympathy with its claims. Nevertheless, a lot of them give a sense that the frontiers of science are expanding in ways that it progressively makeless hostile environment.

I thought from time to time over the next few weeks I'd pull out a few statements at random to comment on. It'll be a bit of a hodge-podge, and I won't make any attempt to organise it - it's hot in London and I'm off soon for a beer. 

First some general philosophical comments from familiar figures in the sceptics' camp. Here is psychologist Nicolas Humphrey, author of a somewhat baffling anti-superstition tract called Soul Searching (in the US, Leaps of Faith). Humphrey believes that

human consciousness is a conjuring trick, designed to fool us into thinking we are in the presence of an inexplicable mystery. Who is the conjuror, and what can be the point of such deception? The conjuror is the human mind itself, evolved by natural selection, and the point has been to bolster human self-confidence and self-importance - so as to increase the value we each place on our own and others' lives.

This may be why we find the 'hard problem' of consciousness just so hard, Humphrey thinks. Natural selection has meant it to be hard. 'Mysterian' philosophers who bow down before the apparent miracle and declare it's impossible ever to get the bottom of consciousness are responding 'exactly as natural selection hoped they would - with shock and awe'.

I love this - it's Darwinism gone mad, and oddly reflective of the way some sceptics think.  Observing ourselves, making sense of why we do things, we start to become paranoid, attributing personhood to a concept, and imagining that deception is deliberate. It's not just that nature is hard to understand, it's that it doesn't want us to understand. We are in a battle of wits with Natural Selection.

Richard Dawkins started this all off, but his idea of the 'selfish gene' was just a metaphor -  he didn't actually mean that the gene has feelings. Perhaps Humphrey is being metaphorical too. One hopes so, but...  He's quite interesting on consciousness, but there's sometimes a rather atheistic tone in his writings, as though he is constantly shaking his fist at the Great Designer.

Susan Blackmore asks, is it possible to live happily and morally without believing in free will ? She says recent developments in neuroscience and theories of consciousness are evidence against free will - we just think we have it. So she set out with her Buddhist practice systematically to change the experience and thinks she has succeeded. Now, she says, she has no feeling of acting with free will - decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them.

But then the question arises, will the decisions be morally acceptable ?  Making a leap of faith, she says, she has found that they are.

It seems that when people discard the illusion of an inner self who acts, as many mystics and Buddhist practitioners have done, they generally do behave in ways that we think of as moral or good. So perhaps giving up free will is not as dangerous as it sounds - but this too I cannot prove.

Again, the heroic Darwinian struggle against illusion! It's interesting that in making a systematic effort Blackmore, a convinced atheist, feels she has personally experienced a state that religious folk would recognise  -'letting go and letting God', in Christian parlance, or the New Age 'aligning with the Universe' - and can vouch for the effects they too would claim. 

Not quite sure why the novelist Ian McEwan appears in a scientific forum, but perhaps to make the statement that most scientists think too obvious to be worth making.  

What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death... I suspect that many contributors will take this premise as a given: true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life - a better, more important life - elsewhere. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound.

McEwan has taken to saying this sort of thing quite a lot recently. I've rather given up reading him, but one of his earlier novels, I seem to recall, had a paranormal theme, and I remember thinking here's an intellectual with an open mind. But perhaps not.

I'm curious: does he disbelieve in an afterlife because of the weight of scientific opinion? In that case, would he be prepared to consider some of the claims of psychical research and parapsychology ? What does he think about near-death experiences - wishful thinking illusions ?

Or is his approach mainly humanistic, based on the perception that religion is all evil. And if so, is that really tenable ? Is religion really just about sharia law and suicide bombers, or could it not also motivate much of the decency and philanthrophy that exists in the world ?

Enough philosophy, now for the beer.

Touch Wood

Yesterday's Sunday Times magazine carried an interview of David Petraeus, the American's top commander in Iraq. It appears the general is a bit superstitious, at least in the way that a lot of us are. Things are going OK for the moment, he says, touch wood. He says this three times during the interview, and his staff say he is always looking around for wood to knock on.

I was a bit surprised by this in a military commander. Isn't superstition for wimps, as the guys at CSICOP might say? I can imagine Richard Dawkins wanting to sit him down and say, now David, you do know that there's nothing really out there, don't you. Touching wood isn't really going to protect you from anything, now is it. How could it? Where is the mechanism?

As a rational man Petraeus might agree. After all, it's his choices and actions which are credited with having turned round the situation in Iraq. There's a clear cause-and-effect trail. But it just feels so natural to suppose that some entity called Fortune or Providence also plays a part, especially in war. Misheard orders, failed communications and little accidents can make the difference between safety and tragedy. It's easier to deal with if we imagine there is some agency that governs these things, and that can be appealed to, shifting events in our favour. It's common for a soldier to carry lucky charms  - a cross, a flattened bullet, family letters. Do they work? A survey would surely find that as many dead and injured soldiers carried lucky charms as those that escaped. That's not the point: at least they give a sense of divine protection.

One vaguely supposes that touching wood goes back to days of yore.  Wikipedia says it has do with invoking the protection of the wood sprites. The article sniffily comments that historians can find no mention of it in English before the early nineteenth century, and speculate it comes from a children's game of tag called 'tiggy-touch-wood'. It then rather contradicts itself by listing all the countries round the world who have almost identical expressions: 'toucher du bois', 'auf Holz klopfen', 'koputtaa puuta' (Finnish), 'chtipa xilo' (Greek), 'tahtaya vur' (Turkey), etc. A few prefer iron to wood, and in Sri Lanka they say, 'touch gold'. So it seems to be pretty well ingrained in the human psyche.

I'm a confirmed wood-toucher myself, but not very proud of it. I try to avoid superstitious actions, walking determinedly under ladders, laughing off the black cat, the magpie, the broken mirrors, etc (although I'm a bit wary about Friday the 13th). But if I accidentally say something which, on reflection, I feel may annoy Providence, who I imagine is somewhere out there listening to my conversation, then I move swiftly to placate him/her/it with this little act of obeisance. I try to be discreet, finding wood to tap on surreptitiously, and if there isn't any I scratch my head instead.

Why do I do it? From the earliest age I have often had the sense of being punished for complacency. It has something to do with respect: I have to stay alert for things that can go wrong. If I'm concerned about not being able to find a parking space near my workplace then I'll be gratified to find one within a few minutes. But the day I think, hey relax, it's never been a problem, stop worrying, is the day I'll have to park a mile away and catch a bus.

Here's another example. If I get a new boss - as a freelance writer it would be the editor of one of my main publications - I might think to myself at our first meeting, I like this person, he/she seems really friendly and easy-going. But I should always qualify that by adding that I won't make any pre-judgements, but just wait and see how things pan out. That is always the correct, safe way. The mistake - and I've made it once or twice - is to say, this person's great, I have a really good feeling about it, it's going to be a good relationship. Then, karrang, he/she turns out to be seriously hard work.

The funny thing is, this is absolutely dependable in my life, to the point that I don't really think about it. I have tested it a few times, catching myself in complacency, being aware of the thought, and how it feels, and how I really ought to recall it, but then thinking, no, to hell with it, I'm going to give myself a break from the absurd superstition - and then getting into trouble.

I'd guess this has a lot to do with the way I view the world, and is perhaps one of the reasons why I don't have problems with psi phenomena. A sceptic would doubtless want to argue that I've got it the wrong way round: one is not the cause of the other, but both are symptoms of a congenitally superstitious nature. That's something we can argue about. All I can say is, it's my experience, I've had it repeatedly and analysed it from every angle, and however much I'd like to, I just can't explain it away.

The Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama is in town to meet with Gordon Brown, and the press is delighted with him. Journalists love a leader who has no airs and graces - at a function yesterday they watched fascinated as he fumbled in what the woman at The Times called his 'crimson man bag', which she thought might contain 'something sacred', and eventually produced a 'sweetie to keep him going', he explained, 'as Buddhist monks don't eat dinner'. What the hacks especially liked was his irrepressible light-heartedness.  Every time he answered a question he would giggle, and sometimes even roar with laughter, not because anyone had made a joke but just out of sheer high spirits. This awes them, and they are constantly talking about it.

Well, I have my own idea about this. A few weeks ago (April 8) I mentioned my rediscovery of meditation, which I've practiced off an on for twenty years but without ever really getting into the habit of. I got interested again after reading a book by Mouni Sadhu, a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi, who describes the goal of samadhi. So I've started doing it twice a day, as recommended by my Transcendental Meditation teacher years ago (which incidentally is probably a reason I haven't been able to post as frequently as I'd like).

It's not that I'm particularly interested in developing siddhis, those special powers supposed to come with serious and dedicated practice. I suppose I am attracted by the idea of achieving greater stability and being able to face life's vicissitudes more calmly. But I did start to notice a rather curious effect. It doesn't always happen, but I've come to recognise it and even rather to look forward to it.

What I noticed at first was a sort of relaxing of the face muscles. At first I put this down to a general all-round bodily relaxation. But then I noticed the effect was concentrated in the middle of each cheek - it was as though some alteration was taking place there. I then realised that the corners of my mouth were lifting up, and not in response to any direct input on my part - it was quite involuntary. This went on gradually until I was embarrassed to realize I was wearing a big cheesy grin, at which point my features instantly fell back to their customary seriousness. After a while the same smile stole back, and again without any conscious willing.

This has happened a few times now, and I really can't explain it. It's not an expression of any inward feeling, as far as I can tell. Who knows, perhaps that will come later, and this is the advance indication, so to speak. I hope so.

But it does seem to suggest what can happen with dedicated meditation. At a Buddhist talk recently I noticed how the speaker would every so often suddenly stop talking in mid sentence. I wondered at first if something was wrong, and then realized he was just wheezing with quiet laughter, rocking backwards and forwards, although nothing particularly funny had been said. It was as though it was something he had to stop and do every so often - once the fit was over he carried on. It makes sense to me now that the late Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was known as 'the giggling guru'. Also in TV films I've seen about TM there's an atmosphere of constant gaiety among the practitioners.

As for the Dalai Lama, I read somewhere recently that he spends no fewer than five hours every morning meditating and praying - five hours!  For the leader of a people in exile, and at a time of what for most people would be terrible stress, that's perhaps what he needs to go on seeing the funny side of life.

Book Review: Kelly & Kelly et al, Irreducible Mind

I've been hogging the SPR library's copy of Irreducible Mind, having been too cheap to shell out the fifty-odd quid for it, and now they want it back. Woe. (Sorry if you're one of the people waiting for it.) I can't imagine being without it for long, though, so will doubtless end up buying it, and be glad to have it in my shelves. No question, this is one of the most important publishing events in its field for a long time.

Not, of course, that this will be instantly recognised by the people it is mainly aimed at - mainstream psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers. The book's uncompromising rejection of the reductionist models they take for granted will probably just baffle them, at least at first. I'd be curious to know what sort of reaction they have been giving it in their publications, but I guess it will be a slow burn. No matter; the case it makes is so complete and compelling it must surely sink in eventually.   

The main authors are Edward F. Kelly and Emily Williams Kelly, with contributions by Alan Gauld, Adam Crabtree, Bruce Greyson and Michael Grosso. The book has been out for a while so has had quite a bit of attention (Michael Prescott had a good look at the chapter on NDEs a while ago). But if you're not aware of it yet, it's an update of the ideas of Frederic Myers, one of the SPR's main founders, the first and arguably still the greatest theorist produced by psychical research.

Myers looked closely at unusual mental phenomena - automatic writing, hysteria, mediumship, dreams, hypnotism, genius and mystical experience, and the like - as well as the ostensibly paranormal phenomena collected by the SPR.  He came to a view of the unconscious that contains different centres of consciousness, complete in themselves, but of which we are not aware, and which we often draw on, for instance as a source of creative inspiration.  His big idea was the Subliminal Self, an ultimate 'I' that has roots in a transcendental environment of some sort, with which the conscious part of ourselves is reunited following the death of the body.

Myers's approach was in harmony with the thought of William James, who however did not long survive him. The field was then free for Freud and others to promote a quite different, pathologized view of the unconscious, as a sort of garbage dump of repressed anxieties, a source of tension and potentially of illness and disease. Subsequently the emergence of behaviourism effectively led to consciousness being abolished altogether as a topic for scientific consideration. Essentially Irreducible Mind builds on Myers's and James's pioneering ideas, reinforcing them with new evidence that has accumulated in the past century.

I'm used to thinking of psi as making the current physicalist paradigm untenable. What I hadn't properly appreciated is that there are many other kinds of mental phenomena that do the job just as well, without involving claims of 'spooky action at a distance' which many people find hard even to consider. In fact the book actually contains rather little from the paranormal canon, and it's interesting to see how the argument for an enlarged view of the mind-brain relationship can be largely made without it.

I was especially interested by Emily Williams Kelly's chapter on psychophysiological influence. This assembles data that shows mental ideas, images and conceptions having tangible effects on the organism. Numerous studies show that a person has an increased chance of dying shortly after suffering bereavement, for instance. There are also well documented cases of people being convinced for one reason or another they would die at a certain time, and then doing so, despite being in perfect health. Kelly also cites cases of people's hair going suddenly white from shock, of stigmata and marks on bodies corresponding to suggestion, of yogis buried underground whose hearts flatlined for days and came back to life shortly before being recovered.

The placebo gets attention too, with the growing recognition that mental states somehow trigger a healing mechanism. Kelly cites an extraordinary 1957 study, in which a patient close to death badgered his doctor to be included in a trial of a new medicine.  Within three days his tumours were half their original size and after ten days he was discharged, continuing in good health for two months. But he became ill again after reading press reports that the drug might not be effective after all. His doctor, sensing what was going on, then persuaded him to try a 'new improved version of the drug', which in fact did not exist - he injected him with water. The patient recovered again, with results even more dramatic than before. But after two months he learned from the media that further studies had shown the drug to be quite worthless, and within days he was dead. (p.145).

Interestingly, the science and medical community sometimes resists such claims as fiercely as it does telepathy and psychokinesis. Take hypnosis: this was briefly used in the nineteenth century before the discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic, and it worked. In one case it was used in an operation to remove a massive face tumour, which involved ripping open the patient's face and yanking the tumour through the eye until it burst - through all this, according to the surgeon the patient 'never moved, nor showed any signs of life, except an occasional indistinct moan' (p.189). Yet one doubter absurdly preferred to think that in such cases the patient, having formed a bond with the doctor, 'wants to please him, so bravely tries to inhibit signs of pain.'

Kelly points out that such resistance tends to disappear the moment scientists think they can explain it. Putting something into scientific language - hypothesizing a chain of events among various neural centres, for instance - provides a physicalist framework which superficially makes the claim less threatening. However she also points out that the explanations really don't amount to very much.

The essential problem we are left with is that such phenomena imply a causal direction hard to account for in mechanist terms. It's one thing to conceive of brain chemistry bringing about ideas and images in the mind. But it's something else again if mere ideas or images can set in train vastly complex chains of events within the body. How does a belief that one will overcome one's illness, or an instruction to make this happen, translate into the hugely specific biological steps required to bring that about?

It would be hard to exaggerate either the quality of this book or its importance. I'm struck by the lucidity of the text - as a layman I hardly ever found myself floundering - and an enormous amount of data and argument is deftly handled. Some of it was completely new to me: I had no idea that patients suffering from advanced dementia sometimes become quite lucid in the moments before dying, as is apparently often reported by hospital nurses, and I look forward to seeing published data about this, as it obviously carries important implications.

As well as being astonishingly erudite - the extent of the scientific literature it surveys is truly impressive - it's also a very bold book. It's encouraging to find such a serious and well-supported defence of non-physicalist positions that, baldly stated, inevitably invite derision from the mainstream, but with so much supporting evidence must surely start to be taken seriously.  There's a lot here about the 'filter' theory of the brain proposed by James and Myers - and later also backed by, among others, C.D. Broad, Henri Bergson and Aldous Huxley - which is irresistibly suggested by the action of psychedelics. And I can't recall ever in a science book, and certainly not a recent one, encountering such a clear and forthright argument in support of an essentially dualist view of mind-brain - again, if psychologists want to dismiss it out of hand it has to be asked, what is their explanation for all the evidence marshalled here to support it?

All of this will be immensely valuable to people like me who try to interest people in the claims of parapsychology. Evidence of telepathy and precognition, not to mention the more bizarre paranormal claims from mediumship, poltergeists and the like, are toxic to the conventional view of mind, but they are also hard to accept if you are not used to them. It will be a big help to be able to refer to a similarly enormous body of evidence that does not immediately require such a major emotional adjustment, but which at the end of the day points pretty much in the same direction.

Rational Mysticism ?

Greg at the Daily Grail has an interesting piece relating to sceptics and mysticism (The Mystical Skeptic? May 9). I was going to add a comment, but got a bit carried away, so am posting here instead.

Picking up on Susan Blackmore's recent descriptions on her LSD experiences, Greg points out that other sceptics/atheists have also expressed an interest in mystical experience.  Sam Harris, author of the polemic The End of Faith talks positively about 'rational mysticism', for instance (which in a way is not surprising, as he seemed open-minded in that book about parapsychology, although without going into any detail). He also mentions a book on the subject by John Horgan called Rational Mysticism, and cites Horgan's comment about Blackmore:

Blackmore has had flashes of the mystical self-transcendence referred to in Zen as kensho. In fact, she includes her out-of-body experience back at Oxford among them. She views that experience as a hallucination, but a profoundly meaningful one. She has taken to heart the lesson imparted to her toward the end of her journey, that no matter how much we learn and grow, there is "always something more". As a result of that lesson, she views mystical experiences not as ends in themselves but as way stations on a never-ending journey.

I agree with Greg in wondering whether the term 'rational mysticism' is not an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Eastern religion was one of the reasons I got interested in parapsychology: not having ever had any kind of mystical experience myself, I wondered about the idea that humans can temporarily achieve a state of knowing which utterly convinces them of the existence of God and a reality beyond this one, and the sense that they will continue to be a part of that reality when they are 'dead'. How much importance should one attach to it?

This insight seems to arise from meditative practices or, as described in the Rig Veda, from the effects of soma. So it's clearly related to changes in brain chemistry. Does that make it spurious? In the modern world we can approach these altered states from a secular perspective, as Blackmore clearly does. But if the experience can be subverted by a rational perspective after the event, how powerful could it have been in the first place? We would have to suppose that if all these mystics, meditators and initiates throughout history had read Dennett and Dawkins then they would have come out of their trance and decided that these ineffable and transcendental intimations were simply illusory, even if valuable or beneficial on some lower level (but what exactly ?)

I don't really buy any of this. If you read about mystical experiences of ordinary people - in Raynor Johnson's Watcher on the Hills, or Alister Hardy's The Spiritual Nature of Man, for instance - over and over you get this hugely powerful sense of what one can only term 'enlightenment'. People talk constantly about having had a glimpse of the true nature of reality, that we are all one, that love is the only true universal constant, and so on. They almost all say that they now understand what is meant by the term 'the peace that passeth all understanding'. What you tend not to find is people saying, 'yeah, while it was going on I thought I saw God and heaven, and it was really cool, but now I realise it was just stuff going on in my head, no biggie.'

I suppose a sceptic could argue that researchers and writers select, and that in fact there are grades of experience, from which they choose only the most outstanding or the ones that further their own religious agendas. I haven't actually seen that argument, but that's probably just because sceptics aren't normally at all interested in mystical experience. Yet the overwhelming impression, and one that incidentally is supported by the research on NDEs, which is pretty thorough, is that this is a quite distinct class of psychological event. You either have a transcendental, transformative life-changing experience - or you don't. 

So how is it possible to blur this boundary? I suspect that what's going on here is that semantic confusion which lies at the heart of sceptical discourse, the tendency to elevate weak experiences to the level of the real thing. It's an inability - or unwillingness - to distinguish between different types or levels of experience. I always think that Michael Persinger's work is an example of this: he claims that a lot of mystical and paranormal experiences, including elements of the NDE itself, can be induced by his magnetic helmet, but he doesn't really provide any evidence that they are the same things. The suspicion is that he's comparing apples with pears.

Blackmore's 'out-of-body' incident is another small but relevant example. My sense is that this experience, which occurred in her early twenties after smoking a joint, is pretty central to the subsequent development of her thought. The crux of it was her realization that the details of what she saw while roaming around Oxford 'out of her body' were actually inaccurate. For instance a particular roof, which she had observed as having chimneys and red tiles, did exist, but not as she had perceived it: it was actually green and had no chimneys.  She concluded that she had experienced a psychological construct, an illusion generated by the brain. The implication - and again this is absolutely central to sceptical thought - is that there really are two alternatives to choose from, and a critical, probing intelligence will understand the truth that escapes those who are less discerning.

There really is an issue here, and in fact even OBE adepts have recognised the illusory nature of some of their perceptions. (Interestingly, James Randi describes a rather similar incident in his own experience). Blackmore built on it to develop her psychological theory in Beyond the Body (1982). But while it adds a perplexing layer of complexity to the puzzling business of OBE perception it ought not to invite simplistic either-or interpretations. By the time Blackmore gets round to the near-death experience in Dying to Live ten years later it's become a central dogma - her chapter explaining away the accurate veridical perception reported by some hospital patients is as wonderful a piece of bluff and obfuscation as you will find anywhere.

What's really interesting is that Blackmore seems to be conflating her own hash experience with the full NDE. At the end of the book she says that many people who have had NDEs have come back from their experiences convinced that they have seen the spirit world, that they have grasped their 'higher self' and that they will live after they die. But she has experienced it too, she responds, and come to a different conclusion (p. 259). I found this rather shocking. As far as I can discover what she experienced differs quite markedly from the classic NDE described by Moody, Ring et al - she says nothing about tunnels, deceased relatives, life reviews, beings of light and so on - and it is quite misleading to suggest otherwise.

Finally, it strikes me that Horgan's comment about Blackmore's interest in meditation and mysticism hints at the rather incomplete nature of her experiences. The idea that there is 'always something more', and that mystical experiences are not ends in themselves but 'way stations on a never-ending journey' is an important insight in the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. But has she really arrived at it herself? Or is it something that she is repeating, and that accords with the rather limited nature of her own experience, because she hasn't actually felt that overwhelming transcendence that other people sometimes report?

I don't want to push this too far, because in lots of ways I respect Blackmore's work. We have a common interest in vitally important issues that ought to engage the attention of thinking people far more widely than they do. Also, it's hard to know exactly where she's at without quizzing her directly - who knows, she may really be onto something. But without a good deal more clarity from her I shall be pretty sceptical that she really does have anything original to say about mystical experience, or indeed, more generally, that the idea of rational mysticism means anything at all.

Trip Down Memory Lane

You'd have to be of a certain age to make sense of some of the stuff being written about Albert Hoffman after his passing last week. LSD, which he invented - or accidentally stumbled upon, better said - was a big part of youth culture in the 1960s and early 70s. It has hardly been available for the past thirty years, so I suspect most people wonder what all the fuss was about. But those of us who experimented with it are taking the opportunity to dust down some of our wilder memories.

One is Susan Blackmore, a contemporary of mine at Oxford University in the early 1970s (although I had no interest in parapsychology then, and our paths never crossed). Blackmore has always been very open about her use of cannabis, and it didn't surprise me to find her writing a paean to Hoffman in the Guardian at the weekend. Like many regular users, she says, she used to take acid once or twice a year in her mid twenties - 'quite often enough for a drug that last 8 to 12 hours, has extraordinarily mind-bending effects, and can leave you exhausted and full of amazing lessons that you need time to digest.' That was exactly my view of it - it always astonished me that other people could drop acid as casually as they would roll a joint. I remember one poor soul did it two or three times a week, and got seriously raddled as a result.

Blackmore adds that Hoffman had already had mystical experiences long before he took LSD, and was therefore 'well placed to appreciate the deeper significance of its mind-altering effects'. I wonder what she means by 'deeper significance'. It's always interested me that Blackmore combines an interest in Buddhism - she meditates and follows the practice of mindfulness - with an aggressively materialist view of consciousness that owes more to Richard Dawkins than Stanislaf Grof. As I understand it she belongs naturally to the school of thought that sees in the neurological correlate, that is the fact of altered brain chemistry engendering transcendent experiences, the 'final nail in the coffin of religion' - in fact I seem to remember coming across that dread cliché somewhere in her writings recently. Certainly, she's at pains in Dying to Live to account for the near-death experience in reductive terms, and her attempt there to explain away veridical out-of-body perception is so forced that I have to wonder if deep down she really believes in what she is doing.

If you've never tried acid it's perhaps natural to follow the scientific and secular logic. But my impression is that most people who experience the awesome power of psychedelics really are fundamentally changed by it. They have the insight famously expressed by William James after dosing himself with nitrous oxide that there are other realities, other forms of consciousness besides our daily experience which are potentially at least as significant. That has been my experience: it's a long time since I took acid, and I only ever did it a few times. But ever since, it has provided me with perspectives on life, on consciousness and on reported mystical experience which I'm not sure I could have gained in any other way.

It's tempting to wonder how our society might have developed if it had embraced psychedelics instead of running away from them. Would sceptics be so aggressively dismissive of reported psychic experiences? Could a book like The God Delusion ever have been written if the writer had any direct appreciation of mystical states of mind?  Would thinkers and researchers in consciousness be so totally wedded to the computational theory of mind and brain if they had actually experienced altered states?  The alternative that LSD experience naturally promotes is the 'filter' theory - the idea that the brain acts as a barrier to undifferentiated reality, and can be subverted by certain chemical modifications to allow full contact with it - which Aldous Huxley picked up from Henri Bergson and popularised. As far as I'm aware, it's not seriously discussed in scientific circles, for obvious reasons, but if scientists dropped acid now and then it might at least get an airing.

You might think that Blackmore's example stands in contradiction to such ideas. Here is an open-minded, curious and imaginative thinker, someone willing to experiment with altered states of consciousness that in other people typically encourage a non-materialist interpretation, yet who resists that with the dull, dogmatic inflexibility that characterizes far less adventurous spirits. There may be a good reason for this, and perhaps, to be fair, she explains it somewhere that I have yet to come across. Yet it seems paradoxical, and it leads me to wonder, as I often have before, whether with her strident scepticism it is really herself she is trying to convince.

Mouni Sadhu

I've always been one for trying to learn new skills, wholeheartedly believing the fiction sold by self-help gurus: "You can do anything you set your mind to ... Realize your dreams" ... etc.  Alas, I've learned by experience that actually I can't. I can think and write, and that's about it. Whenever I try to pick up a skill - playing the piano, speaking German, running a business, playing chess, juggling - I may achieve a certain shaky competence before finally grasping, what family and friends beg me to realise, that I'm crap at it, and should give up (actually that was mainly the piano).

One of the things I've tried to learn is meditation, and again, it's not something I got very far with. But in this case it's not because meditating is inherently difficult - I guess just about anyone can do it - but because I was never committed enough to take it the point where there would be tangible results. In fact over the years I forgot why I was doing it, or that it could lead to tangible results at all.

Recently I was clearing out an old bookshelf and I came across a little book called simply Concentration, by Mouni Sadhu (1959). I remember reading it twenty years ago, and that memory stayed with me ever since, together with a slightly guilty feeling of an aspiration never fully realised. I pulled it out recently and re-read it right through. Twice. It's a gem, and it left me feeling inspired.

The book is essentially a graded series of exercises aimed at gaining complete total mastery of the mind. They are meditation techniques, some of which I have seen elsewhere: for instance breathing 'colours' or focusing on the tip of the second hand of a watch, or clock, or the head of a pin. Each exercise is expected to take weeks or months, so this is something that would not expect to take less than, I guess, three years or more.

What I recognised, having remembered from reading the book the first time, was the slightly fierce tone. Sadhu leaves you in no doubt that he wants you to work. He's full of stern exhortations not to waste time pursuing 'egoistic and material aims', and instructions such as 'The beginner is strongly advised Not to Read in Advance any of chapters beyond which he is working' (I disregarded that one, sorry).

This is quite unfashionable now. TM, the system I'm most familiar with, insists that thoughts should not be blocked but simply observed and then allowed to depart. In Sadhu's approach the will is more strongly engaged: we are exhorted to show the mind who's boss. It's the teaching ethic of an earlier age, one that I'm old enough to have experienced and which I confess to being rather nostalgic for. Much of what I learned as a young child was from teachers who insisted I pay attention. 

There's also something rather appealing about the idea that full self-realization can be largely achieved through a handful of rather mundane seeming exercises, pursued with dedication and will. It's not of course the only thing: one has to pursue a spiritual path, but Sadhu rather takes that for granted.  I also like the plain speaking and the refreshing lack of Sanskrit terms and jargon. Sadhu was actually a devotee of Sri Ramana Maharshi, but points out that achieving the power of concentration is as much a part of western religious training as the eastern ones.

At the summit, he says:

You already know of many things which before were for you, as Himalayan peaks would be for an untrained climber from the plains. You can concentrate your attention on anything, under any conditions, without being disturbed, as formerly, by the onslaught of uncontrolled thoughts and emotions. You are really not interested in anything which lies beyond the magic circle of your attention and visualization created by your own will and no longer by something outside yourself.

This doesn't mean 'mental dullness', he insists.

Quite the contrary! The wise man possesses intelligence comparable to that of average people; but he only uses it when needed, and not as an untrained layman does, who thinks ceaselessly all his life and despite possible fame and fortunes, still amounts to nothing at his death. For a spiritually advanced man, thinking becomes something like the trivial functions of the average person such as eating or walking, etc. No reasonable man would fill his life solely with these functions and forget everything else.

A trained person, he goes on, can exclude all thoughts, ideas, words and images from the mind, and can choose or abandon emotions at will. If the exercises work, he says, a question will arise in the mind. (If it does not, the mind has not been properly stilled - go back and repeat the exercises for a few more months/years.) Addressing the question will lead to the summit of Samadhi, resurrection into a new state of consciousness, a precursor to full enlightenment.

I wondered, what sort of person it would be who could reach this peak of awareness, of mental and moral strength. What are the effects? Did Sadhu himself achieve Samadhi? Or was he just talking about it in an aspirational sense?

Perhaps the answer lies in the book itself. Despite, or perhaps because of it's apparently awkward and direct style, it has a curiously seductive power. There is an attractive, passionate urgency in it, utterly missing from modern manuals. I think he must indeed have reached his goal, but rather than rhapsodising about it, he provides a glimpse of its power through his writing. He left me feeling that it is something that even I could reach out for, if I was able to summon the necessary will, and that it would be really something worth having.

As for Sadhu himself, what kind of person was he? I pictured some grizzled Gurdjieff-type figure, but as you can see from the photo he looks like an average guy. He was a Pole, born Mieczyslaw Sudowski, and an electrical mechanic by trade. He fought for the Germans in World War One, lost his wife when the Nazis bombed Warsaw during the 1939 invasion, fought the Germans, was captured and spent time in POW camps in Germany and then Russia before going to live in Brazil, where presumably he started writing. A tough life, and one that must have fuelled a determination to rise above the traumas and tragedies of existence.

I don't know whether I will put Sadhu's exercises into effect or whether I will go back to my TM training. But for sure, meditation is something I'm not going to let slip again, and I thank him for that.

Click on this link for a sample of his writing.

Transcendental Meditation

So, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. You have passsed on. I have to say I had mixed feelings about you. Like lots of people I have used meditation to help raise concentration and deal with stress. I did the TM course thing back in the 1980s, not too costly - around £50, if I remember - and learned to repeat the special Indian mantra that I had to swear never to reveal to anyone else (I think because I wasn't supposed to find out that lots of other people had been given the same one). This rigour wore off long ago, and now I just listen to the clock ticking, or any other rhythmic sound, which works just as well.

But the whole TM thing quickly turned into a cult, with the Maharishi making utterly unrealistic promises about creating a new world order, while accumulating vast sums of money. There were the usual accusations of brainwashing and manipulation. And then that business about flying.  It's not surprising that disgruntled TM students took advantage - twenty years ago in the US, apparently, a certain Robert Kropinski sued for $9 million in punitive damages for the "psychological and emotional devastation" that resulted when he found the TM course he had signed up for had not after all taught him to fly. The judge actually awarded him $140,000 - nice going, Bob!

A shame that something so practical and helpful should be wrapped in nonsensical new agery. It just puts people off.