(This essay was originally given as a sermon at Bell Street Chapel in Providence, Rhode Island December 8th 2024 entitled Psychic Apologist or The Power Remains)
I’d like to speak today about the intersections between religion and science. In particular I’d like to explore the convergence of parapsychology, spirituality, and materialism. Materialism is the dominant paradigm in modern science today. Materialism is an attempt to provide a unified theory of the cosmos in which reality consists and is constructed wholly of matter. Materialism understands the cosmos as a derivative of biology, chemistry, and physics and everything, including consciousness, is a product of the material stuff of the universe, which can be reduced down from galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles.
Within materialism spiritual phenomena such as religious experiences or “supernatural” experiences can all be explained through psychology, sociology, modern medicine, etc. There is no literal such-thing as a human soul nor is there a dualistic nature to reality. Such spiritual concepts are at best simply metaphors for reducible aspects of the mind dictated by the brain, or at worst fits of fanaticism, enthusiasm, or hallucination. Atheism is the logical extension of materialism.
When I was a little boy I bought a copy of You Are Psychic! from Waldenbooks. The author Pete Sanders insisted that I, like everyone else had innate, untapped psychic potential. I was excited to read that according to Sanders I probably had strengths in several categories of psychic skill, whether it was psychic hearing (clairaudience), psychic seeing (clairvoyance) or psychic feeling (intuition). I was tantalized to learn that out of these three categories people typically were likely to be of greater skill in one rather than the others. What kind of psychic was I? As a comic-book fan I was disappointed that the book included no chapter on telekinesis, a psychic power like the Force in Star Wars, or mind flaying which was a skill exhibited by people like Professor X in X-Men, or some of the creatures in my Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manuals. Regardless of these blatant shortcomings I dutifully read the book because I figured I needed to start somewhere. Sander’s work seemed to be the most utilitarian book on the subject available at Waldenbooks in those days and frankly, I felt exhilarated to have it.
After a few introductory chapters of anecdotes relaying some examples of people’s psychic experiences and the author’s optimism about the universality of these powers the book arrives at several how-to chapters. After reading them all I decided that although clairvoyance and psychic intuition seemed like the more intriguing of the three powers psychic hearing, or clairaudience, would probably be the easiest psychic ability to unlock. All you apparently needed to do was meditate in a quiet place and follow some simple visualization instructions that Sanders laid out in the chapter.
I was about eleven or twelve years old and staying at my friend Mike’s house when a good opportunity presented itself to put my research into practice. Mike and his brother were out of the house somewhere while their parents were downstairs in their finished basement watching a movie. Alone upstairs with my You Are Psychic! book I decided to take advantage this un-chaperoned moment and try and flex my psychic powers.
I assumed the lotus position on Mike’s bed after shutting off the lights and closing the curtains. The bedroom was utterly silent. In the instructions on psychic hearing Sanders guides you into a meditative state while focusing your attention on an area of your head around your temples. He instructs you to visualize whirlpools spinning in this area, something like circular staircases descending into your head. The presumption was that if successful the person gifted with even marginal clairaudient ability would be able to hear things unavailable to the cochlea… things that are too far away or simply too quiet to hear naturally.
I did as I was told and after what seemed like a very long time I heard something quite shocking. The voice of an older woman abruptly boomed in my head. I heard quite clearly in a defensive voice this woman ask, “What are you doing here?” I can still remember how odd hearing this question felt because I was hearing it not so much with my ears as with my mind, similar to the way you might hear things in a dream. It was jarring as well because I was suddenly snapped out of the meditative state I was in, as if woken up abruptly. But I had not been asleep. And even more odd was that I knew exactly where the voice had come from. It had come from the television down stairs in the basement where my friend Mike’s parents were watching a movie. I was absolutely sure of it even though I had no audio-positioning information to base it on. I could not hear the television from where I was upstairs in Mike’s room. The sound of the voice had just popped into my mind as if it had come from inside my head.
I jumped up and ran downstairs where the movie Driving Miss Daisy was playing on Mike’s TV. Their basement was like a fallout shelter, down a deep staircase, a place where the kids could stay up late and never disturb the parents upstairs. On the screen the main character, Miss Daisy, was standing at her front door addressing some rather serious looking men who had come to see her.
“Did she just ask those guys ‘what are you doing here’?” I said.
They looked at me with shock.
“Yes,” they said. “How did you know that?”
I said something like: “Oh, I was just practicing psychic hearing in Mike’s bedroom and I heard her speaking inside my head.”
I don’t remember if they said anything to me but I was so excited at my psychic success that I turned and ran upstairs to call my parents. I got my dad on the phone and explained to him what I had done, what had happened. My dad listened patiently, as one might to someone recounting their dreams. This had been a thrilling experience for me but my dad was less than amazed by my psychic powers. I was not getting the validation I was hoping for. My dad certainly did not shut me down or dismiss what I told him, as many people would be eager to do, but my story did not seem to impress him much. I received no encouragement to explore these strange powers more broadly. Instead on the whole I felt a bit exposed by what had happened and although I talked a little about it with my parents and friends nobody seemed particularly curious about it. Nobody wanted to see my You Are Psychic! book or explore their own psychic powers with me. Instead people regarded my story skeptically or with bored disinterest. As I’ve come to learn people typically regard these types of phenomena, even their own genuine psychic experiences, as they do their dreams: with little more than a shrug.
As a child I never attempted to unlock these skills further. I put my book about how to be psychic away. After all, if these powers required disciplined meditation that only allowed me to hear snippets of movies in distance places and offered no advise on how to float a television remote control from across the room or read people’s minds then it wasn’t terribly compelling. It was a typical sour grapes moment. Perhaps these phenomena were just not that interesting after all. This is what I told myself as a kid, and this kind of self-talk coupled with an absence of adult encouragement or guidance put me on a path of self-denial. Years of healthy interest in science and a thorough cynicism towards religion and metaphysics only continued to distance me from psychic phenomena. I eventually came to believe that my own experiences probably were not real at all or if they were had some rational, scientific explanation that would expose them as mere hallucination or pattern making. Because of this denial of my own experiences my imagination, curiosity, and skill regarding psychic phenomena atrophied in my teens. For decades I had dozens, probably hundreds of common, simple psychic experiences that I paid little to no attention to. My own validation of these skills wouldn’t be resuscitated again until my late thirties.
The realm of metaphysics is a broad one. It includes some of these so-called sixth sense phenomena, like clairvoyance, that you’ll find in books like Sander’s. It also includes things like spirit mediums, divination, near death experiences (NDE), inexplicable healings, animal communication, telepathy, astrology, ghost stories and so on. Some metaphysicians are familiar to many of us. Reiki practitioners are quite abundant and acupuncture is widely accepted as a means of productive bodywork. Acupuncture is even covered by some insurance policies making it perhaps as socially accepted as massage therapy or yoga. The traditional explanation for the effectiveness of acupuncture includes the metaphysical presence of channels in the body, known as meridians, where “life force” energy, or qi, is able to travel. Acupuncture supposedly manipulates these channels to benefit the patient. One of the things I appreciate so much about our local community acupuncture clinic is their humility around the mechanics of acupuncture. In their office there was a brochure available with insight into how acupuncture works. In the pamphlet they explain, in paraphrase, “we don’t know!”
This kind of metaphysical epistemological humility is rare and refreshing. If you dip your toe into this ethereal world you will find a wellspring of wild, disjointed, eclectic, conflicted, expansive and extremely confident explanations for the mechanisms of metaphysics. It’s quite interesting how syncretic the explanations can be. For instance I have visited with one psychic on several occasions that comes from an indigenous background. She identifies her practice very much with her ancestral, Native American roots, referring to herself as a multi-generationally reincarnated medicine woman. Never the less you will find her office decorated with multi-cultural metaphysical imagery, both western and eastern. For instance there are portraits of Jesus as well as chakra mandalas on her walls. She consistently refers to western style astrology and uses sound healing videos she pulls up on YouTube. To call her approach, or at least her aesthetic “traditional” sometimes seems like a stretch.
If we can refer to metaphysics as a discipline than we have to say it is an eclectic one. Some of the explanations for, say, divination or near death experiences, rest on assumptions of heavenly realms, in ways that sound quite Christian, while other psychics talk about personal relationships with classical, pagan deities. I know one young pagan, and I do not intend to dismiss or validate her, who has a daily correspondence with Aphrodite. More organized pagan religions, like Wicca for example, draw psychic power from traditional Celtic gods and goddesses while also infusing more ubiquitous western themes such as astrology into their practice. Guardian angels are a consistent theme and “teams” of personal protectors are almost ubiquitous in metaphysical discussions. These teams, often called “light teams”, are composed of different entities, usually divine beings but also can included ancestors from the subject’s past. In one visit with the psychic I mentioned she reportedly witnessed my light team hovering over me while she performed a “reading” or “scan” of me in a meditative state. According to my friend there were eight entities comprising my guiding team.
There is a very compelling, though certainly not ubiquitous metaphysical aesthetic, a “witchy” style that incorporates tarot art and astrology. People who display their interest in metaphysics by wearing Tarot symbols on their t-shirts or pentacle medallions around their necks are easy to spot and there for easy for me to talk to. I have found that if people are open to talking about such topics they soon will be referring to their protecting light team. These guardian angels provide many services, from the mundane to the profound. A light team can help the psychic avoid traffic jams, help make major life decisions and generally keep their charges safe from harm. Demons and ill-intentioned beings, some classical, some indigenous, also exist in this discipline. Some metaphysicians specialize in exorcism. The Native American woman I’ve visited offers demonic exorcisms as part of her general healing practice.
Some of these themes quickly strike the ear as antiquated and religious in nature. Angels and demons are of course found throughout world religions and the history of science has been the hard fought slog of demystifying irrational explanations for perfectly natural phenomena, such as disease or mental illness. Medicine, astronomy, and all liberal efforts have persisted from the Enlightenment to the present in the teeth of religious insistences to thoughtless conservatism and tradition. It’s interesting that many psychics see their gifts through traditional lenses such as Catholicism, traditions in which they were raised, while also adopting some of the more eclectic or “woo-woo” explanations that you find in psychic circles. Some metaphysical terminology is disorientingly modern however. Getting a “download” is a term psychics use to describe receiving information from the astral plane, the ether, or the “matrix”. The sound clip I heard in Mike’s bedroom from Driving Miss Daisy has been described to me as a “download” in as much as I was physically too distant to hear the sound naturally and received the sound by some extra-auditory method, which allowed me to hear it within my mind’s ear.
Coming from a household of agnostics and atheists and being of a rational, scientific bent it would come naturally to me to dismiss any and all of these explanations as utter nonsense. In the past I had never been confronted with anyone with anything close to a balanced, self-critical opinion on the subject. To my young eyes, people who subscribed to psychic phenomena and metaphysics seemed to be at best blinded by enthusiasm and at worst unhinged zealots. The religious overtones just made it easier to dismiss because to me anything associated with any religion was of course completely absurd. My own personal experiences with clairaudience, clairvoyance, and dream messages mattered less and less to me, as if they themselves were dreams or skewed memories, moments of enthusiasm or even hallucinations. By my adulthood I had dismissed Peter Sanders’ thesis of universal, democratic psychic ability and was a convinced atheist and materialist. I would have been very embarrassed if anyone ever suggested that I subscribed to such superstitions.
Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity was attacked by his contemporary, Enlightenment thinkers. In particular those who subscribed to the anti-Aristotelian ideas of Descartes considered Newton’s ideas a betrayal to Enlightenment progress. The Cartesians argued that Newton was just re-presenting old occult ideas about matter affecting matter from a distance. This was the superstitious approach to physics of the ancient Greeks and the modern Christians that said occult powers superseded the laws of nature, that unseen forces controlled our world, unavailable to scrutiny except through revelation. They said gravity was anti-enlightenment thinking, anti-science. Newton responded in his classic rebuttal of epistemological humility saying: “I do not feign a hypothesis.” That is to say ‘I do not know why it is so. I do not know how it has come to be or how it operates and yet I can demonstrate beyond any shadow of doubt that it is so.’ Gravity proved it’s own merits by its unfailing mathematical cogency and joined the ideas and proofs of Kepler and Galileo into a solid, mathematical law. “How can this be?!” demanded the Cartesians to which Newton replied “Look and you will see that it is so.” Just like Galileo before him Newton insisted that Aristotle and Ptolemy, if they had seen his work, would agree with him.
The metaphysical phenomena that I have been describing practiced by modern pagan religions and secular people has not been without scrutiny by science. The problem with modern metaphysics, or parapsychology to be more specific, is that it, like the early modern sciences of Galileo and Newton, does not fit into the worldview of contemporary science. Metaphysics on its face seems to intrinsically imply a kind of dualism, and often explicitly explains itself in terms of spirit, supernatural realms and beings, the afterlife and reincarnation. These types of trite explanations for natural phenomena (and to be clear if clairvoyance or reincarnation happen then they are, just like gravity, natural phenomena) are the antithesis to scientific modeling.
Modern scientists such Dr. Dean Radin, author of the book titled Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe, and Edward and Emily Kelly, authors of Irreducible Mind, lay out in their books research conducted by scientists over the decades proving time and again the statistical reliability of psychic phenomena; that they do in fact exist. There are now academic institutions that include parapsychology sub-departments, such as the University of Virginia’s medical department division of perception. Within this sub-department are scientists such as Dr. Bruce Greyson, Dr. J. Kim Penberthy, and others who study such phenomena as clairvoyance, past life regressions, near death experiences, and telepathy within the context of modern neuroscience. Some parapsychology researchers have worked for the government. The CIA ran a program that came to be known as Stargate, in which clairvoyant abilities were studied for the purpose of espionage and counter-espionage. Dr. Jessica Utts, a statistician from the University of California at Irvine who was also the president of the American Statistical Association is considered one of the most accredited and trustworthy parapsychology researchers. Dr. Utts has worked on the statistical analysis of “psi” or parapsychology for decades. She insists that there is simply no plausible reason to dismiss the existence of psychic phenomena. In fact parapsychology, as she puts it, is much more statistically codified than many other accepted scientific findings. She states:
‘If it were something more mundane we wouldn’t even be having a discussion about whether or not it is real. It would be so automatic because the results are so consistent over time, (by) different laboratories, (using) different methods, and so on. It’s just that people think that it can’t possibly be real because it doesn’t fit with their particular thinking about how the world works. The experiments are done really well. The results are very strong.’
Neuroscientist Dr. Eben Alexander’s book Proof of Heaven recounts his near death experience after an extremely sudden and devastating bought of meningitis. Previous to Dr. Alexander’s NDE he counted himself as squarely in the atheist, materialist camp. However during his NDE he experienced a psychedelic experience of deep and profound clarity that propelled him after his recovery to explore these particular facets of parapsychology, in particular the nature of consciousness. The most compelling thing about Dr. Alexander’s experience is that during the time of his death his brain was so impacted from the meningitis that his doctor’s claimed that he could not have had the experiences he claimed to have had. That is to say that his sick brain was not capable of producing such profound visions. This insight brought Dr. Alexander around to the ideas that the Kelly’s promote in their book Irreducible Mind, essentially that we are more than brains and that consciousness exists outside our brains, persisting after the time of death.
Serious scientists and doctors like Alexander have looked to the world of quantum physics to provide some plausible explanations for these phenomena. The concepts of quantum decay and entanglement are avenues of hypothesis they explore. Funny enough over the last several years I had the opportunity to discuss my own psychic experiences with a PhD student of quantum physics who was volunteering on my farm. I described to him a psychic dream I had of a coworker who, in the dream, was some kind of mushroom expert or enthusiast. I saw her surrounded by large, sprawling tangles of fungal hyphae, large toadstools and clumps of colorful molds. I immediately texted her after I woke up, saying something like:
“Hey, did you become a mushroom expert recently?”
“No,” she said. “I wish I had.”
“Oh,” I said, “I had this dream about you…”
“Well last night I finished this quilt. Let me text you over a picture.”
The picture she sent me was a tapestry of mushrooms of all shapes and sizes and colors.
“Oh,” I said, “that’s it!”
My quantum physicist friend, after I told him this story said:
“Oh, sure. I could see that having something to do with you and Erica’s quanta becoming entangled and then decaying away leaving behind some information of some kind.”
It was, as he admitted, just a guess. But researchers like Eben Alexander are exploring these hypotheses. Although science may be finally “feigning a hypothesis” it may take generations to finally understand the mechanisms of such experiences. Certainly it will require the rewriting of some of our most fundamental understandings of the universe and ourselves. A scientific community dominated by reductionist materialism will need to be questioned to its very core to make honest work of the problems parapsychology poses.
In the fourth century of the Common Era western paganism was on the wane. The new faith of Christianity had slowly infiltrated the communities of the Near East from its humble beginnings in ancient Palestine and now had spread to the very pinnacle of power, the Roman Imperial class. After Constantine the Great’s official conversion to Christianity in the early three hundreds only one succeeding emperor would briefly profess allegiance to the old gods. Christianity would dominate the west from that point in history to the current day.
During this time of profound religious transition early Christian intellectuals, such as Origen, mixed freely with pagan philosophers. A contemporary of Origen and a troubled observer of the changing nature of religion was a Syrian Neo-Platonist named Iamblichus. Iamblichus lamented to his interlocutors that “the problem with you Christians is you rid the world of gods and you make it a lonely place.” Religion in the ancient world was, up until the rise of Christianity, an eclectic process of personal connection with nature and other people, as well as the state. Christianity captured from religion the democratized pagan experience of personal revelatory power and placed it into the hands of the hierarchy of the clerical class. From this point forward it would be the submission to holy texts and to the learned interpreters of those texts that would define a person’s relationship with the divine. Personal holy places, such as family shrines or natural springs, were demoted, desecrated, and denied while family and communal gods were banished, recast as demons. Pagan priests and priestess became witches as authority became centralized and the early-modern world dominated by Christianity began to take shape. Psychic and revelatory powers, such as divination or spirit mediumship, were outlawed, the powers of the gifted denied as superstition.
But the power remains. If what we are coming to understand of the nature of parapsychology and metaphysics is true, i.e. that we are more than just bodies and brains, than we share a connection with not only each other but with all things. Some of the more trite, banal adages like ‘we are all connected’ or ‘love is everything’ may be vindicated as being literally true. This is not connection as a metaphorical conceit that we share priorities and resources but the literal insistence that we are one, that our minds mix within a universal consciousness that binds our individual experience of the world together. More over this extends to this world and the universe around us, that we can feel the literal mixing of our minds within the sentience of tree, of flower, of cat, of home, of land, of sea. Maybe this would be nothing more than a validation of some of our more banal, ethereal moments of lightness or perhaps it would be the foundation of an entire, new, universal ethic.
At it’s heart it demands a rejection of some of our most materialist and western concepts, not least of all the deeply ingrained persistence of Existentialism: that we are separate, distinct, traveling through this world alone and only briefly, headed for the ultimate cataclysm of personal and final death. Within Existentialism poetry and metaphor or scientific realism are our best attempts to connect with reality but are destined to leave us cold, alone, our spiritual cup never quite full. The wine of metaphor cannot fill our glass. If it is true that within a quantum context we are always blending with the world around us then there is some truth, perhaps more for some people than others (or for people who practice their psychic powers by way of instructive books like Sander’s) that when we feel close to rock, pet, mountain, or person that we are literally within them. Cold metaphors of oneness, togetherness, and interconnection can be set aside and with confidence we could say we are one. Perhaps this is so and what a wonderful revelation it would be.
Those of us who have experienced tastes of this “otherness”, these occult forces that draw us to things and bring things to us outside of our “natural” senses are primed to a lesser or greater extent to be open to such explanations. It is beyond seductive for the nature lover to understand a bond with the forest or the mountain or the prairie as a legitimate cohesion, not merely a romantic fancy. As someone who strives everyday to bring myself into greater alignment with the rhythms of nature by way of my eleven-acre farm I feel a lifting vindication at these prospects. For me to say I put my heart and soul into the cabbage and the carrot I grow for my friends and neighbors, and for me to mean it as literal truth provides a sanctuary of warmth that the cold chill of Existentialism cannot cool. And as these plants and animals that call my farm home live and die, perhaps I carry some of their living story woven into my quanta, into the fabric of my mind. So, that when I die their story will be returned to the land and live on in the flakes of granite and humus of my tended soil, an endless turning of material overlaid with a blanket of universal consciousness like ocean water surrounding the vast depths of the sea.
It may seem like I am going too far, lost in the romance of my own revelatory enthusiasm. Yet it is important to remember how decisively personal revelation has been discredited in our society. The universality of psychic potential is something that, perhaps with practice or proper attention, all can experience yet it is something difficult to prove or even convey. I do not know what it means. I do not know how it operates yet I’ve come to believe in the legitimacy of such phenomena and their profound implications for our understanding of nature, life, death, and the afterlife. For what are we to make of such phenomena, of which science is insisting is real and that millions upon millions of people have testified to experiencing for themselves but the simplistic observation: we are never alone, we are never isolated, we are never irreparable, and perhaps we should never fear death for death’s sake.
May it be so.