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Explanations of the Mundane

This is a true story about a non-haunted house that Loyd Auerbach discusses in his Field Investigations class through the Rhine Research Foundation (which I highly recommend).  

Loyd was called in to investigate a home where the residents claimed several anomalous experiences occurred. 

“It was a family of four, and after they moved in they started seeing these shadows out of the corner of their eyes. They would get terrible headaches and feel dizzy in this one particular room. They smelled a noxious odor, and occasionally they’d see bursts of flame that actually left marks on the walls.”

Since the occupants were renting and had a long-term lease, they wanted help either to get out of the lease or to have the homeowner fix these problems. Many people might jump to conclusions of hauntings, apparitions, or even poltergeist phenomena but Loyd prefers to find the truth whether it’s due to mundane causes or not. This is what his field investigation unearthed:

  1. The house was built on a bad foundation causing the angles in the rooms of the home to be off from 90°. This can make a room feel odd and cause doors to open or close on their own.
  2. There were high tension towers very nearby causing a low-frequency hum which can cause anxiety.
  3. The type of insulation in the walls was creating static electricity in the family room where they had many electronic devices creating the ball-shaped energies.
  4. It was built on or near a solid waste dump and the chemical emanations were causing health issues and flames in the family room.

In his Field Investigation class, Loyd discusses the mundane effects that resemble the paranormal. Radios from passing vehicles or a pedestrian on a dog walk talking on a cell phone can sound like disembodied voices. Knocks and groans can be caused by temperature differentials in building materials or from water sluicing through pipes. Hallucinations can be caused, not just by low-frequency sounds, but many types of prescribed medications. Once the mundane answer is eliminated then one may question what is causing the phenomena. Unfortunately, not too many “ghost hunters” are familiar with structural or sound engineering, the electromagnetic spectrum, or the hallucinatory effects of drugs. If you take his course, there are a couple of books he recommends that have really great recommendations for what devices to use and how to use them properly in an investigation.

Because I love a mystery, I would occasionally watch “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files” on T.V. while doing something creative with my hands. It’s a reality show with a team of very young investigators, led by an ex-FBI agent, each having experience with making special effects on film or a passing knowledge of some related skill. Think of it as “Mythbusters” for the paranormal crowd. They would come together in a living room/office environment and discuss some interesting paranormal video that had been submitted or that they had found on YouTube. The idea was to go on location where the video had been shot and determine if they could fake the effect from the video themselves. If so, they debunked the paranormal explanation as a case of mistaken identity. 

It’s frighteningly easy these days to fake a ghost in a picture — there’s even an app for it — but one of the other artifacts frequently mistaken for “ghost orbs” is caused by the relationship between light and the camera lens. Even if you are present in the room and you photograph a dark corner swearing on whatever holy book you hold dear that there was no orb of light there, the camera might just make you a liar, but it isn’t a ghost, it’s just physics. 

The most common mistaken U.F.O. sightings are the stationary formation of red orbs in a dark sky. The first question you should ask is whether you’re near a military base or a location where they perform maneuvers. If so, it’s probably flares. Helicopters and airplanes seen from a particular point of view can fool a viewer as well. Believe it or not, there really is something called swamp gas that can light up a muggy Louisiana roadway. In a “Fact or Faked” episode, it was evident that some weird meteorological phenomenon was behaving like a movie screen between the peaks of two distant mountains showing the rear lights of passing cars instead of the latest blockbuster. My main requirements for calling a U.F.O. is if it defies physics and doesn’t look like a photographic hoax or remnant on a video. 

As William of Occam put it in so many words, given a choice between two explanations of an effect, you choose the simplest, most likely one. That being said, if you eliminate the impossible, that which remains, however implausible, must be true.

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Amazing Randi, Science Progresses One Funeral at a Time

You might have seen an obituary (or dozens) lamenting the loss of a stage magician named the “Amazing Randi”. He died recently at the age of 92 with the “Randi Prize” supposedly unclaimed — I will get into that later in this blog post. Let me introduce you to the Randi world through the eyes of a psychic scientist. He was born in 1928 and had a pretty good career as a stage magician who claimed to see the future by determining the winner of sports games. He lamented that the gullibility of his audience disturbed him to the point that he gave up the future-reading gig and went into escape artistry. According to an article written about Randi, he never got over just how easily people could be duped and made it his life’s work to debunk psychic charlatans. I can wholeheartedly agree that people who scam other people out of their money giving them false hope or comfort should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But Randi did not stop there. He went after highly regarded and respected physicists Puthoff and Targ in his book “Flim Flam” stating that he had a guy on the inside watching their experiments with Ingo Swann. Randi took his scepticism to an all-or-nothing level enticing followers such as Carl Sagan and other scientific illuminaries to open his CSICOP group. He dogged famous spoon-bender Uri Geller claiming that every attempt he made at spoon bending was an illusion, not psychokinesis. This led to very expensive lawsuits that used up much of Randi’s MacArthur funding and caused his removal from CSICOP. Eventually, he offered $1000 to anyone who could prove to him that what they could do was, in fact, due to psychic ability and not some kind of prestidigitation or ledgerdomain. The money values increased to $10,000 and then $1,000,000, known as the “Randi Prize” by popular culture. You will hear skeptics say: “Psychic ability can’t exist because no one won the Randi prize.” Well, that ain’t the whole story.

Randi had been known to say that psychic ability doesn’t exist, therefore, no one could possibly prove to him that effects are due to psychic ability. He claimed that people were either self-deluded or were using illusory skills a la Penn and Teller. Given that extreme bias, he developed requirements that were above and beyond what psychics, even great psychics, were capable of achieving. For example, if a baseball player was playing a game in front of major league scouts and hit a .400 average for the game, it would be considered an amazing achievement. Statistically, that is 400 hits out of 1000 pitches, lower than a 50/50 chance. However, baseball scouts know that a higher hit rate is very, very rare and that the average hit rate hovers around .300. The same is true for psychic ability. After a century of study, a hit-rate of 60% is considered good. Randi wanted 80% or better hit rates for any psychic that attempted his challenge. Even if that psychic was on a roll, Randi was so biased that he would negate any findings. I have also looked at the “Randi Prize” contract and noted that the burden of proof and costs were on the psychic with Randi often the only judge of whether the contestant was successful or not. Regardless of the high and moving goal posts, several psychics did apply to the challenge and wrote about their experiences. Later, the contract would prevent any psychic from claiming success if they were, indeed, successful. He was allowed to lambaste any and all comers. 

Parapsychologists were put in an awful position of trying to show valid science to an increasingly skeptical and derisive crowd. Randi went so far as to insert magicians into ESP studies to show how credulous the researchers were to illusion. On the positive side, the researchers employed magicians to examine their research process to look for any possibility of cheating making their research much tighter and better controlled than other soft sciences. Some current researchers such as Lloyd Auerbach are card-carrying members of Mentalist societies so they know how cold-reading and other skills are employed by magicians. Charlatans were not new to the Psychical society at the turn of the twentieth century. Spiritualism was at an all-time high and people were easy pickings, including scientists. However, rigorous controls were placed to prevent the use of wires and mechanisms when parapsychologists studied the legitimate mediums of the day. Unfortunately, materialist and dogmatic skeptics, like Randi, decided that all of them were fakes and parapsychologists were blind. To this day, the study of anomalous phenomena is derided as a fringe study worthless to any other field. My hope is with this funeral, science progresses.

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I Can’t Even

I haven’t blogged for nearly nine months. I can’t even. Writing a blog about esotericism and the unknown just seems superfluous and unhelpful at this time of pandemic pandemonium. I started wearing an N-95 mask at work in November once I heard about SARS2 coming out of Wuhan China. It’s the peak of the flu season and we’re testing respiratory samples on an open platform generating aerosols because we’ve been told to whip the sample in the eluate. By the end of March, outpatient clinics went to telehealth and we were seeing fewer people at the lab. Our staff went to A and B shifts to protect our health and in response to the lower patient population. I was a C person, a floater that didn’t end up in any of those shifts. I feared for my job so I volunteered to be deployed to cover main hospital duties. I got put on a team to create COVID-19 test kits. 

When you’re dealing with a novel virus, you don’t know much and information is swarming around you like mosquitoes during an Alaska spring. Stuff flying at you with little or no oversight or peer review can be just as dangerous as no information at all. We had to respond fast with what we had. First we knew that viral transport media was being processed in an area of Italy badly affected by the virus, what can we use instead? Phosphate buffer? Saline? Let’s run with that. Thousands of vials of buffer and then thousands more of saline were meticulously pipetted into sterile conical tubes and then placed in biohazard bags with the rapidly dwindling supply of swabs. Turns out, no testing platform has been certified with phosphate buffer so those had to be thrown out. Saline doesn’t have anything to impede the growth of, well, anything so those weren’t very popular either. Finally, we were getting shipments of the precious VTM from other sources and filling our kits with them. Hours of being in repetitive positions that would have made any ergonomics expert cringe left my shoulders, neck and spine in agony by the end of my shift. 

I was then deployed to work early morning drawing patients on the wards so the doctors could have the lab results before morning rounds. I got up at 2:30 in the morning to be on the floors at 4am. I had to walk the gauntlet of nurses asking me “Have you had blah blah blah symptoms? Have you been exposed to anyone with COVID-19?” They take my temperature, make me clean my hands with the rare and precious hand sanitizer, place a colored dot on my work I.D. and then give me a poorly fitting surgical mask a third of which the earloops break but all of them fog my glasses. Only the most ill patients are in the hospital at this time and few of them are easy to get blood from. Some of them cuss me out when I turn on the overhead light so I can see what I’m doing. Most are so kind, but they’re tired, scared and in pain. Some aren’t coherent. It’s the nature of hospital wards, one of the main reasons I quit nursing school…I’m too empathic. I did that gig for four hours, took a breakfast break and then did filled test kits for the remainder of my shift. I went home to sew cloth masks for my family using a dwindling supply of elastic and fabric I had set aside in my workshop for other projects. This went on until mid-May when I was called back to my clinic job as a floater. I was one of the lucky ones able to keep my job and be paid my full time pay, then to return to work full time with a few restrictions. We are all wearing masks, our patients (except for the very young ones) are all wearing masks. We try to stay apart from each other, but human nature being what it is, we struggle with that. We try to keep that mask on all day unless we’re putting something in our mouths. Summer in the South means your face sweats even without a mask on. We try to keep ourselves and our patients as safe as possible which means restricting how many people get to be in the waiting areas. At one of our clinics, we were drawing in the rooms. I got double my steps in during those weeks. I knit ear-savers for those of us who’ve developed pain from having earloops around the backs of our ears. 

Compound all of that with keeping food and toilet paper in a house that for a few months had only two people living in it. College students were being sent home to continue their semesters online. Not only did I have my son at home, but a friend of his from high school with nowhere else to go. New restrictions and recommendations to contend with and worsening infection rates put a cherry on top. I came down with hives. I have never had hives, I don’t recommend them to anyone. 

Then I read stories and hear on the news far worse scenarios then I have had to deal with. Nurses and doctors working long shifts in full isolation PPE. People with no money unable to get food because the food banks are slammed. People dying at home for lack of space in a hospital and people dying in hospitals without a loved one nearby. I feel guilty that I feel stressed out and I’m angry at the lack of leadership from those we voted into office. Too many emotions to write anything coherent. Besides that, what can I write now that is relevant to our current situation? All of us are dealing with this thing in all corners of our planet.

 Now is the time for amazing change because we’ve disrupted our normal, mostly comfortable lives. We are expanding our visions because we have to, we are becoming more empathic to the plights of others, Black Lives Matter movement, though it’s been around for a decade or more, has finally got traction toward social change. Horrible things that disrupt us humans provide the fertile soil of awareness that we don’t have with our heads down and our eyes on the little screens of distraction. I can write about all of that with hope toward a better future for us and the planet.

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“Real Magic” by Dean Radin

Imagine being Hermione Granger, or Harry Potter or even Merlin from King Arthur’s court, now throw all that out of the window, it isn’t like that at all. Humans really don’t have a huge effect on reality, which is good if you think about it. For instance, you wouldn’t want to be turned into a ferret because you mouthed off at the wrong magician. Doing real magic takes a great deal of effort and practice at being brainless. It turns out that our brains tend to interfere with our ‘minds’ which are the conduits to the data stream that gives us magical ability. Most of us wouldn’t be very good at it even if we spent a lot of time meditating while firmly grasping a crystal shard. Just like any other skill, it’s a combination of genes, talent, and practice. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that we do have a measurable effect on our reality, albeit a small one. Experiments done for over a century have shown that intention and attention can somehow manipulate the probabilities to our favor if we spend time dwelling on it. Our ancestors knew this quite well though it freaked out people in positions of power. Nostradamus, the famous precog, hid his ability from the Catholic church which was really quick to toss people like him into a fire or drown them for their own good. Not all psychically skilled people feared for their lives. The Oracle of Delphi was a highly regarded figure in antiquity providing useful information to seekers. Shaman or healers in small communities helped their people find food, avoid danger and healed them of their infirmities. Psychic mediums provided solace to grieving mothers and widows after the Civil War. Remote Viewers sought information about Soviet maneuvers during the Cold War. Police have found missing persons or solved crimes using information gleaned from the psychic realm.

Real magic can be classified into three different aspects: divination, force-of-will, and theurgy which have been reclassified using modern terminology. To divine information is to pull it out of the air so-to-speak which parapsychologists call Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Remote Viewing, Precognition, etcetera (please refer to my posts on each of these subjects). Anyone who reads tea leaves, Tarot cards or palms of hands are also classified as diviners. Theurgy is the utilization of spirit entities for information which includes but is not limited to spiritual mediumship and shamanism. Force-of-will can be classified as psychokinesis which is a big word for manipulating things without physically touching them. New Thought may also fall under this classification because you can manipulate your own fate. 

Much of the book “Real Magic” is filled with experiments that prove that we can manipulate reality and even see probable futures. This throws those who believe in the mechanistic dogma for a loop. According to mainstream science (e.g. classical physicists) magical ability is impossible. Ask a Quantum mechanic and they’ll say they aren’t sure what’s making this car run but they CAN see that causality and time don’t really work the same in the subatomic world as it does in the visible one. Psychologists and Neurobiologists are still holding fast to the belief that the brain creates our self-awareness but cannot find where it is happening. Materialism is hitting a wall so in comes Idealism. Where Materialism sees self-awareness as a manifestation of the brain, Idealism says that self-awareness, or Consciousness, is a fundamental part of reality that sits below physics, chemistry, biology and all that we know of reality. This subatomic realm may not just be a data field but part and parcel of who we are. 

I recommend this book as a primer for those interested in the field of parapsychology and for those whose minds just can’t quite wrap themselves around the concept of psychic ability. It is a comprehensive, comprehensible and at times comical look at supernatural abilities but also a treatise on how parapsychology has been ignored at best and demonized at worst. It argues quite eloquently for the existence of the magical but does not apologize for the century of strict laboratory experimentation on the subject. If you want to learn how to become a wizard, play an online game instead… this is not the book for you.

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Winner of the Rhine Halloween Short Story Contest (YAY!)

The Oxford Constable’s Tale

“I was the first to find the babe,” he said with an Eastend accent. He had hair the color of  burnished sunset, rare in these parts. His green eyes held tears at bay as he blinked them back furiously. His pale hand swiped one that got away down his cheek, “She were just lyin’ there like she were asleep, all curled up. When I tried to rouse her to go ‘ome, she was cold like a side a’ beef. I thought she might ‘ave died from the cold, but she were strangled she was. A little piece of ribbon around her throat tied tight. I wonder if you could find ‘er spirit…let me talk to ‘er to find out who did this to ‘er.”

I looked him up and down for a short while. “You’re a constable then? One of the new ones from the Met?”

“Erm, yeah, that’s me job,” he said. 

“Did you know the babe?” I asked.

“Saw ‘er in passin’,” he replied, “I’ve walked the streets for a few months now. I know some of the faces.”

“I’ve noticed you walking ‘round,” I said. Better to say that then to tell this poor man that I could see his life in my mind running like a stage play. A pretty boring one at that with just work and home and no sweetheart to make things interesting. “I can try to call the child. If she is willing and able, she will speak through me and I will remember nothing she says afterward. Now be silent so I can call her.”

He sat with his hands in his lap, emerald eyes wide and mouth shut. I placed my hands on the table between us with my palms down and I closed my eyes. I’ve been able to speak to the spirits for as long as I can remember. It isn’t hard. Harder it is to keep them at bay then to call them. The trick is to find the one the client wants to talk to. They aren’t mail order types. They’ll come or not in my experience. I am looking for the child this man found I said to the spirits and then waited. One gentle tap on my mind told me a spirit wanted to take control of my body. I entered the trance and let her in. My mind drifted timelessly until I felt her move away. When I awoke, I raised my head and shook myself to get used to my body again. I focused on the young man’s face and saw disappointment there.

“She didn’t help?” I asked.

“Nah, she didn’t see anythin’ worthwhile,” he said, “I thank ya’ for tryin’ though. She told me she were at peace now. At least there’s that I can tell her mother.” 

“At least there’s that,” I said rising from my chair. 

“What do I owe ya’?” he asked.

“Ten pence if you please,” I said.

A few weeks later, I was sitting in my store where I sold talismans and sage when my son showed me the newspaper. I had him read it to me while I worked on tying the sage bundles. 

“Mam, the circus is in town on Saturday, can we go?” he begged.

“Aye, we’ll go but not on the first day. I should see if they have a need for someone with my talents. Is there a request for labor?” I asked. We went on about the circus and other articles of interest when my attention was caught by the photograph on the front page. A fuzzy picture of a child lying on its side, knees brought up to its chest with thin arms wrapped ‘round them. Coppers were kneeling next to it. 

I pointed to it, “What’s that about?”

“Mam, you told me I’m not allowed to read those stories,” he protested. 

“I know, I know. I give you permission this once,” I said. 

He read slowly and with the occasional error about the third child found strangled in the city. 

The newly formed Oxford Constabulary has asked for the assistance of Scotland Yard’s  detectives in finding the fiend responsible for ending the lives of three young children. Parents are strongly encouraged to keep their young ones indoors until the culprit is caught. Anyone with information leading to the capture of the murderer may receive a reward if the information leads to a guilty conviction. 

“That’s enough,” I said to my son, “I don’t want to know any more. But you need to heed the warnings and stay indoors after school now until the man is caught, you hear?”

“Aw, mam, I’m much too big and fast for him,” he argued.

“No. You stay indoors for my sake. Otherwise, you’ll wish he found you if I get my hands on you first!” I swatted his behind for emphasis.

“Ow! I ain’t done nothin’!” he said.

“Just a reminder you heathen. Now if you want to go to the circus, mind your p’s and q’s.”

There are no coincidences. The newspaper article was brought to my attention to prepare me for the constable’s next visit. 

“I had to try again,” he said. His pallid complexion was colored by purple semi-circles under his eyes. His hands shook as he removed his cap. 

“Come in and sit. We’ll see if anything comes of it,” I said, “Can I get you tea?”

“I would be grateful for a cuppa’.”

“Sugar? Milk?”

“Two lumps if ya’ please.”

The tea had the calming effect needed to center myself and the fretting constable. Death did not bother me but a life cut short by heinous means was an altogether different matter. 

“I didn’t find the next two…another girl and a boy, but I knew who they were,” he said, “The grocer just down the street, it was ‘is youngest son, John and the girl belongs to a neighbor two streets over from me flat. She would be playin’ outside on nice days and I would give ‘er sweetmeats while I waited for the omnibus. Like an angel she was.” He cast his eyes downwards staring at his hands squeezing the life out of his cap. 

“I hope we can learn something from the babes if they come to me,” I said, “but it won’t be easy for you to hear constable. Prepare yourself for what evil men can do to another.” I thought him awfully sensitive for a copper. As I opened myself to the ever-present spirits, I asked for the girl and the boy recently slain. Quietly, I waited for the knock on my mental door not hearing the constable across from me shift in his seat. The boy’s spirit came to me and I let him have control for a time.

Once I became aware of my own body, I looked at the constable, “Anything?”

“The murderer talked to the boy,” he said, “but John didn’t recognize ‘is voice. John said the man knew him, though. It weren’t a random thing. Treated him tender-like, even stranglin’ ‘im was gentle, John said. He didn’t want to die, but he wasn’t terribly scared, he just…died. Do you think you could call the little girl next?”

Though I tried for several minutes, the girl did not appear to me, “I’m sorry constable, but she ain’t here, or she ain’t in a talking mood.”

“That’s alright,” he said jamming the cap on his head, “I need to get back to me dad. He’ll be expectin’ supper.” He placed ten pence on the table as he got up to leave. 

I felt a strong desire to hug my son at that very moment. Hug him until I felt he would be safe from evil forever. 

A month passed and two more children found. The city was in a fever-pitch of panic. A crowd had surrounded the city constabulary demanding blood and got some by smacking a poor sargent over the head with a whiskey bottle. A young Oxford University student was suspected for a time, even the grieving grocer was pulled in for questioning. Several arrests later, the city went back to itself but the spirits stayed restless. Their whispers led me to think of the young constable and I knew he would be coming ‘round again.

My son was with me after his schooling was done. I was saying my goodbyes to my last client, a well-dressed highborn lass, when the constable darkened my door. Thinner and older by years though it had only been a month passing, he removed his cap and shook off the rain from his thick coat. 

“I ‘ope you can stay a while longer,” he said, “I’ll pay extra for your time.”

I waved my hand, “I want to do my part.” I said.

He said no more, just took his place at the table while I prepared myself. My son sat in the corner to read his new pulp fiction book, a concession I made for forcing him to stay in the shop instead of out with his friends.

Spirits of the slain children, I ask for your help. I called out to the spirit realm. Their reply was deafening so I raised my mental walls up again. Please be calm, I cannot understand you! Carefully, I lowered my defenses and immediately, a small presence took me over. 

My own spirit was pushed about by the jangling nervous spirits surrounding me and I knew something was terribly wrong. I tried to return to my body but the little boy’s ghost was hanging onto it and moving it all over. I suddenly feared for my own son. Let me back in! I screamed at the child inhabiting my body. He screeched past me as my own spirit slammed into my body which lay on the floor next to the table. When my eyes could focus, I took in two pairs of shoes, one set large, the others were my son’s, only the tips touching the floor. I looked up to see the constable, but not the man I knew, holding my son up by the neck with one hand. I moved faster than I had ever in my life, grabbing my small Derringer pistol from the hidden spot under the table. I screamed to bring the house down, “Let him go, NOW!” 

My son dropped like a heap onto the floor choking, crying, and grasping his neck as he scrambled away from the creature with the constable’s face. The stranger stared at me and then at the gun in my hand.

“The boy’s spirit was so angry with me,” he said, his voice lower and more cultured than before, “The ungrateful little wretch. I am doing them a kindness, can’t they see that?” 

My hands shook as I kept my aim on the stranger in front of me. The childrens’ deaths came clear to my mind as if I had been a spectator to the evil deeds. 

 “Who are you?” I asked.

“An odd question,” he said, his head cocked to one side, “Let’s just say, I’m here to send the poor sods on to a better life.”

I got to my knees still holding the gun on him. I was beginning to shake with fear and anger. He saw my weakness and lunged toward me. I squeezed my eyes closed as I squeezed the trigger falling onto my back. I cracked open one eye. The constable, the one I knew, held one hand to his ear which was gushing blood.

“What’s happenin’? Did you just shoot me?” he asked indicating the spent Derringer in my hand.

At first, I had no idea what to say to him, “You weren’t yourself,” came to me finally. My son crawled to my side and we held each other breathing hard and wondering what would happen next. A banging at my shop door made us all jump.

“Madam Shyla!” a man’s voice yelled, “Oxford Constabulary. Your neighbors heard a gunshot. Do you need assistance?” 

“Yes,” all of us yelled, including the constable.

A few weeks later, my son slammed open the shop door pointing at something in his hand, “There’s a story about us in the newspaper, mam,” He plopped down on the stool behind the counter as I carefully wrapped a parcel in brown paper and string, “Want me to read it to you?”

“If you must,” I said.

Constable Huggins has been remanded to the care of Dr. Eigner of Bedlam hospital in London for the heinous murders of the six children in Oxford. Mr. Huggins claimed innocence despite the testimony of Madam Shyla and her son also of Oxford who claimed he admitted the murders to them, “That’s us mam!” he said excitedly. 

“Go on you,” I said.

Dr. Eigner, using a new technique called hypnosis (my son struggled with the pronunciation), was able to obtain Mr. Huggins’ admission to all six murders. “Mr. Huggins suffered from profound mental trauma as a child causing his personality to schism.” The doctor said, “One personality, the constable, was unaware of the murders while the second one was acting out a mad fantasy.” Dr. Eigner has yet to release Mr. Huggins for trial claiming that his patient is not fit to stand in his own defense.

My son’s eyes shone with excitement, “We’re famous, mam!”

I grabbed him up into my arms, and rubbed the top of his head with my knuckles.

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Book Review: “Chrysalis Crisis: How Life’s Crises Can Lead to Personal and Spiritual Transformation” by Frank Pasciuti

I was asked to write up a blurb for the upcoming Rhine Friday night talks to make it interesting and compelling for people to attend. I did well enough to compel myself to purchase and read the book before the author has even taken to the lectern. Dr. Pasciuti is a Jungian Transpersonal Psychologist who is also a psychic experiencer. His book on personal growth through crises goes beyond the day-to-day issues we all must weather to those of a supernatural (psychic) type. I haven’t read many self-help books nor have I read many psychology texts other than those I was assigned in college (and other programs) so I cannot say for certain that other psychologists have not delved into supernatural subject matter. However,  the predominant philosophy out there is that supernatural events are simply impossible and must be reduced to the workings of the brain. I disagree of course, and my fervent desire in writing for this blog and my series of books about Callie O’Callahan is to teach others that their supernatural experiences do not automatically make them insane. 

The book is written in layers, the first section dealing with topical matters of life and difficulties that we all share with subsequent sections delving deeper into more personal levels of development. The sections regarding spirituality are where the supernatural phenomena are handled quite deftly. In our predominantly Christian materialist society, many psychic phenomena can lead people to a spiritual crisis especially if it happens only once or a very few times. We do not teach people in our Western philosophy how to deal with apparitions, telepathy, psychokinesis or precognition because it isn’t supposed to happen…yet it does happen…to so many people. Dr. Pasciuti handles the psychic subject with care, because this book is for a broad audience, by using personal and client experiences as examples and bringing across the most current hypothesis for psi in his section called “Sit Lightly in the Saddle of Belief”. Instead of beating us up with dogmatic belief systems, he weaves psi experiences in gently and carefully with the other issues that might cause us existential crises.

His client Dawn exemplifies the expansion of human consciousness once the ten key areas of human development have been examined. The author’s experience both with clients and his own path has led him to believe that this is possible for everyone to attain. Besides recognizing the ten key areas, it is important to reveal those aspects we are unaware of called Shadow Areas. Some people may still be dealing with issues from a past life which can be revealed through regression therapy if done properly by a skilled therapist. Time in quiet contemplation, meditation, ascetic practices, breathing exercises or even running or biking for miles can aid in opening up the brain to the mind and the mind to Consciousness.

I am a Taoist by philosophy which means I do not follow any religious belief system. It also means that I do not try to understand God (The Tao is unknowable). Wow does that free up your mind. Anyway, I also view life through Yin and Yang: all things have light and dark, constructive and destructive, positive and negative, the flow of Yin and Yang determine how much of one or the other prevails. A third aspect is Wu Wei or be like water: it flows over or around obstacles and conforms to its environment. I also look at many different philosophies and choose aspects that work for me and throw away the rest. Reaching an enlightened state where the mind touches the Consciousness of which we are all a part is a personal journey that is different for everyone. This book is not a self-help book that will guide you step-by-step through a process, rather, it discusses those areas that can hold us back from our true potential if we do not recognize them and try to balance them.

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Mitch Horowitz: The Miracle Club: How thoughts become reality

When I was growing up, there was a fantastic show on our PBS station called “Connections” by James Burke. He would begin the show with the unlikely connections one thing had with another such as what chimneys had to do with romantic love. He would methodically chain the degrees of separation from the one to the other. This is what Mitch Horowitz has done with “The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality” between the New Age movement and psychic ability. What connects the two is positive intention and how it works is still a matter of conjecture.

J.B. Rhine studied psychic ability, calling it Extrasensory Perception, for decades and wrote about something he called the decline effect. Eventually, those he tested would get pretty bored trying to guess which card was next in the pile causing their once-positive results to fade. It’s like a tired baseball pitcher starting to throw home runs. If the baseball coach knows precisely when to pull the pitcher, they won’t give up a base to the opposition. Knowing when this decline effect occurs can prevent negative data from skewing the positive results the researcher has obtained thus far. Skeptics include the tests where decline effect has occurred to show that there is no statistical effect at all. 

Helmut Schmidt found that his subjects testing for psychokinesis fared much better when he recognized how psychic ability truly manifests in people: “it is neither egalitarian nor available on-demand”. He chose to study subjects who already showed promise in the psychic arena rather than study a pool of unknown subjects who might, once again, skew the results to the negative. Here comes the baseball analogy again: If a beginner picks up a bat, they might hit a nice soft pitch to the infield if they hit the ball at all. Every once in a while, that beginner will get lucky and hit a home run. An aspiring baseball player might spend years of hard work and still not get 200 hits out of a thousand pitched balls. Then there is the one amazing hitter who gets above 400 hits out of a thousand. I promise you those remarkable baseball players have some sort of mental ritual they go through to succeed while they’re at bat.

Schmidt also recognized that even the talented psychic needed to be comfortable in their surroundings to have the greatest psychokinetic outcomes. He would come to their homes with a random number generator and wait until they were “psyched” for the test. He was patient and upbeat with everyone and his results showed positive hits well above the average. Those scientists who attempted to replicate his results fared far worse. Why? They didn’t understand that psychic ability is mercurial and techy. They put subjects in uncomfortable labs and gave them no incentive for success, just a few dollars for participation. That’s like giving every little leaguer a trophy because they showed up to games. 

In “The Miracle Club” Horowitz spends several chapters discussing, in detail, how to reach a desired goal. He explains the methods of Émile Coué (a psychologist who used autosuggestion for psychotherapy), and Neville Goddard (who used autosuggestion to make things happen in his life) which correlate quite nicely with the methods employed by successful psychics. I had participated in an experiment at the Rhine Research Center testing whether a meditative state would increase my psychic ability. We spent a couple of hours a week learning autosuggestion during meditation to obtain a goal (one of our choosing). We were tested in the ganzfeld room before we were taught this method and then again soon thereafter. Up to that point, I had been using a form of Transcendental meditation that I had learned from taking Aikido classes, but this one was more focused and intentional. This type of meditation is shallower and does not involve completely clearing one’s mind of all thoughts, rather it allows to focus on a desired effect in a very relaxed state like when you start to fall asleep (hypnagogic state).

Another method of focused intention is taught by Bill Bengston called Image Cycling. The practitioner chooses twenty goals each with an associated symbol. For instance, if you’d like a particular car, you would write it up in a journal and then picture a steering wheel. The cycling begins slowly at first and then speeds up significantly until you are visualizing all twenty icons in less than a second. Bill claims that this gets the practitioner into a receptive state. His method is currently used as a psychic healing technique; however, those healing practitioners also get something off their list. My friend Susan got the car she wanted and had to replace that desire with another in her journal. Basically, it’s a win/win for both the healing practitioner and the patient.

Positive visualizations require two things. First, the imagined scene needs to be a completed task. For instance, if you want to get a certain number on the dice, you visualize the dice being thrown and ending on that number. If you want that job, you must see the supervisor shaking your hand. It’s not enough just to see these things, you must feel the handshake or hear the sounds of a casino when the dice falls. It’s like a total immersion fantasy that you believe with all your heart will come true. Secondly, the mind needs to be in a receptive state. Goddard and Coué both employed the hypnagogic state to employ their statement of intent. It also works when just waking up, during intentional meditation, or using Bengston’s image cycle.

No one knows how this works, though Horowitz does describe some possible hypotheses in the book, mostly having to do with quantum mechanics. I have a different hypothesis which several physicists (the number continues to grow) like Max Planck also consider as necessary to any physics equation, that of consciousness. If consciousness permeates all things, all things can be manipulated and our reality is not as fixed as we might believe. Back a decade or so ago, I enjoyed playing MMORPGs like Everquest. I had an avatar in the game that I manipulated to do my bidding. The software engineers made that place a reality for my avatar and they manipulated her reality while I took her places I wanted her to go. I think of life on planet Earth as avatars that consciousness inhabits in a reality that it programmed. With practice, we can manipulate that reality just a bit.

Mitch Horowitz and me
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This is an excellent video that describes the difference between a psychic and a medium. It’s important to understand the difference if you are going to choose one or the other for advice.

from Windbridge Institute
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On Alien Visitation

My favorite movie of all time is “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. On the surface, you might claim that that makes me an UFOlogist or heavily into alien visitations. Well, my eleven-year old self was, but then I grew up. “Close Encounters” is really a film about facing the scary unknowns and finding out that they are pretty amazing and magical when you find the courage and tenacity to explore them further. As an eleven-year old growing up in Kansas, I had no idea about alien visitation or what the three levels of alien encounters were. With no internet at the time and well before Mulder and Scully were on the search for the truth, I had to find books on the subject…in the library. The Roswell crash, of course, piqued the interest of those who believed that our federal government had been keeping alien encounters under wraps, but this was the cold war and they could have been keeping a Soviet plane crash quiet.

I was also alive during the first moon walk, the first space shuttle launch (and crash) and the Voyager missions. My generation got to watch astronauts and probes expand us beyond our little rock three spaces from the sun. We learned the extreme difficulties of launching people into the treacherous depths of our solar system to the point that we still haven’t sent humanned missions to Mars, Ganymede or any other suitable location forty years later. Our best and brightest, who lived for space travel, questioned whether aliens would be able, much less willing, to travel to our planet and why. They would have to be so far beyond our meager skills just to leave their own solar system and then travel for decades or centuries just to make it to our neck of the Milky Way (see Kardashev scale). Their reasons to travel here would have to be compelling and a few, just plain scary. To travel this far and not make official contact, not use our planetary resources, not try to supplant the dominant species on the Earth makes no sense. If you research further, you will find there is a progenitor claiming physical evidence of alien abductions, encounters and alien ships, the other UFOlogists are parroting his claims. The physical evidence simply isn’t there.

For a lark, I watched an episode of “New Thinking Allowed” with Joseph Burkes, an Emergency medicine physician who spent his youth as an activist and then later as a close encounter seeker. I was listening half-heartedly hearing much of what I’d heard for decades until the last ten minutes of the show when he made a claim that I hadn’t heard from xenophiles before: we aren’t being visited physically, we are being visited holographically. Dr. Burkes who had written a chapter in the book “Paths to Contact”, is now more of a proponent of psychic rather than physical alien visitation. Here are Dr. Burkes’ comments:

“…Experiencers describe over fifty different phenotypes of so-called ETs. (The term “phenotype” refers to category by appearance.) How is this possible? Where do they all come from?

Is the entire galaxy sending representative to visit us, mostly at night, in our dreams, and in our fantasies? Are there dimensional portals allowing such beings to enter into our reality from other planes of existence? Why is there such a terrible paucity of physical evidence?

We are left with narratives and the rather simple-minded formula that for many goes. “If you remember it then it physically occurred.” Back in 1990 during a series of contact experiences I believe that I was actually shown by an intelligence associated with flying saucers how they create illusion. It was a kind of “show and tell” lesson that one might use to instruct children. Thus, I came up with the Virtual Experience Model. According to this schema the “ETs” can create hologram like displays that we interpret as “craft,” a Virtual Experience of the First Kind (VE-1)

2. According to an account in Dr Karla Turner’s “Masquerade of Angels”, they can create a virtual reality experience that is technologically mediated, a VE-2.

3. And according to Dr. Andrija Pucharich’s experience with Uri Geller in the 1970s the alleged aliens can create in us virtual memories, i.e. impregnated ones that don’t correspond to any physical event, a Virtual Experience of the Third Kind, VE-3.

courtesy of https://cryptozoologycryptids.fandom.com/wiki/Alien

One might ask, “So what if some of these different types of so-called aliens are just illusions? For all we know the assortment of phenotypes are created by some form of intelligent energy. They might be confounding us by produces visual displays that we interpret as physical beings, but in reality, are a kind of “masquerade of aliens.” If this is true then a radical reassessment of the entire field of UFO studies is in order. I imagine the resistance to this iconoclastic model is quite high. With not much success I have been promoting the Virtual Experience Model for nearly 20 years against what passes as “conventional wisdom in the UFO field. Despite my having to go against the current, it is my hope that understanding the mechanisms of contact will allow us to strengthen our investigations into “This Otherness That Experiencers Now Call ET.” This is one of my alternate designation for UFO intelligences.

The use of technologically mediated illusion can explain the confusing picture of close encounters with strikingly different phenotypes. Dozens of beings with radically different appearances might not exist at all, but rather we encounter them in a series of theater of the mind productions. With an ability to create virtual reality, or the technology to implant false memories that many recall as “abductions,” UFO intelligences could make it appear as if the whole galaxy is visiting Earth.”

Since I have been spending much of my free time researching psychic ability in its many and varied forms, this became a light switch moment for me. Apparitions, aliens, discarnates, animal spirits and other forms of communication coming at us when we’re not quite awake or alert may just be from a single universal consciousness. We may be generating a comfortable or desirable visage for the entity most of us long to communicate with. I brought this up at the Rhine’s weekly meeting and there were many nodding heads save one. We have a residential Carl Jung fan who sees these sorts of visions as originating within our own psyches. We can generate a self-inflicted hallucination if we want it badly enough just like the Lost Boys could bring Tinkerbell back by clapping. There are two places where this argument falls apart. First, there are people who have made claims of alien contact who were not actively seeking it, nor were they fans of aliens. Second, shared visions or mass hallucinations if you will, have occurred during Dr. Burke’s alien encounter sessions many, many times. Airplane pilots will agree about a UFO encounter and RADAR will pick up the rapidly moving blips. Sailors on ships will describe an event with incredible agreement, yet no physical proof exists. These people do not want to see anomalous events because their careers might be at risk for making a report to that effect. I doubt that their psyches were primed to see aliens. Mass psychic telepathy seems unrealistic as well. My hypothesis is like Dr. Burkes’ holographic projection that mimics a physical object somewhat like the projections on the holodeck in “Star Trek: Next Generation”. The other encounters during meditation, hypnogogic (just before sleep) or hypnopompic (waking) states, however, may be telepathic communication. Either way, to me this seems to be the most logical hypothesis for alleged alien contact.

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Dowsing or Divining

What is this? The psychic equivalent of getting your friend soaking wet? Well, to dowse or douse (as you can see, the spelling is interchangeable) does mean to dunk something in water or to put out a candle flame. However, in the psychic world, Dowsing is a means to finding what you’re focused on finding. According to Tom Graves who wrote “The Dowser’s Workbook” now called “Discover Dowsing: Understanding and Using the Power of Divining”, dowsing is a way of using your body’s own reflexes to help you interpret the world around you”.

Remote viewing and Dowsing are close siblings of one another but utilize different methods toward the same goal. Remote Viewers might be given a set of coordinates or told to find a person and determine their location. They claim that their conscious awareness travels to the place in question to take a look around. They are able to describe the target location where they sent their awareness once they’ve finished traveling there. Dowsers use special tools but keep their consciousnesses firmly in their heads. They are not able to describe a location but can find whatever they’re looking for such as metal, water or lost objects. They believe the mind is so aware of its environment, that it can subconsciously perform the task that the conscious mind is requesting it to do. The subconscious mind sends messages to a set of muscles, usually in the wrists. The movement in the wrists is too small to see so a special instrument or mechanical amplifier is often used such as a pendulum, Dowsing rod or bobber. Remote Viewing is more like visiting the surface of the moon and taking a look around whereas Dowsing is like successfully finding a needle in a haystack.

Dowsing appears in ancient history, in the Bible, and is used in a lot of cultures. The Oracle of Delphi was said to have used a pendulum to answer questions. John Locke coined the term “Dowsing rod” back in 1650 to describe the forked tool used to find water. It’s probably one of the only widely accepted uses of psychic ability in the world because it has more monetary value compared to Remote Viewing, Clairvoyance or Mediumship. There are several organizations throughout the world where dowsers gather to learn. One such organization helped a UC Berkeley professor find a dowser who was able to locate her daughter’s stolen harp from 2500 miles away! The U.S. government employed many techniques to spy on the former U.S.S.R. during the Cold War era which included psychic spy techniques such as Dowsing and Remote Viewing. Police have also employed dowsers to find missing persons though they may not admit that openly. Geologists may use Dowsers to pinpoint mineral ores or oil underground which is far cheaper than drilling to find the material. However, the most commonly known reason to employ a Dowser is where to dig a well.

In my second book “Calliope O’Callahan and the Dowsers”, Callie learns more about her friend Siobhan’s family who also Dowse. In the first book, Siobhan learns to use a pendulum over a street map to find missing people. Dowsing is not just used to find objects, water or minerals, it was and still is used to answer questions psychically either with a yes/no answer or using an alphabet in a semi-circular pattern to spell out the answer similar to that of a Ouija board.

American Society of Dowsers

Siobhan’s uncle is successful as a forensic accountant by using his Dowsing skills to find irregular expenditures in accounting documents that may be from money laundering schemes. When he doesn’t arrive at the Southern California Dowsing Convention, his family become worried and employ Callie’s aid to help. If you’re interested in learning more about how to Dowse, please look up your local Dowser’s Association.