Conscious Universe: The scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena

Many errors, of a truth, consist merely in the application of the wrong names of things.
—Baruch Spinoza

Since primeval times, people have spoken of strange and sometimes profoundly meaningful personal experiences. Such experiences have been reported by the majority of the world's population and across all cultures. In modern times, they're still reported by most people, including the majority of college professors. These experiences, called "psychic" or psi, suggest the presence of deep, invisible interconnections among people, and between objects and people. The most curious aspect of psi experiences is that they seem to transcend the usual boundaries of time and space.

For over a century, these very same experiences have been systematically dismissed as impossible, or ridiculed as delusionary, by a small group of influential academics and journalists who have assumed that existing scientific theories are inviolate and complete. This has created a paradox. Many people believe in psi because of their experiences, and yet the defenders of the status quo have insisted that this belief is unjustified.

Paradoxes are extremely important because they point out logical contradictions in assumptions. The first cousins of paradoxes are anomalies, those unexplained oddities that crop up now and again in science. Like paradoxes, anomalies are useful for revealing possible gaps in prevailing theories. Sometimes the gaps and contradictions are resolved peacefully and the old theories are shown to accommodate the oddities after all. But that is not always the case, so paradoxes and anomalies are not much liked byscientists who have built their careers on conventional theories. Anomalies present annoying challenges to established ways of thinking, and because theories tend to take on a life of their own, no theory is going to lie down and die without putting up a strenuous fight.

Though anomalies may be seen as nuisances, the history of science shows that each anomaly carries a seed of potential revolution. If the seed can withstand the herbicides of repeated scrutiny, skepticism, and prejudice, it may germinate. It may then provoke a major breakthrough that reshapes the scientific landscape, allowing new technological and sociological concepts to bloom into a fresh vision of "common sense."

A long-held, commonsense assumption is that the worlds of the subjective and the objective are distinct, with absolutely no overlap. Subjective is "here, in the head," and objective is "there, out in the world." Psi phenomena suggest that the strict subjective-objective dichotomy may instead be part of a continuous spectrum, and that the usual assumptions about space and time are probably too restrictive.

The anomalies fall into three general categories: ESP (extrasensory perception), PK (psychokinesis, or mind-matter interaction), and phenomena suggestive of survival after bodily death, including near-death experiences, apparitions, and reincarnation (see the following definitions and figure 1.1). Most scientists who study psi today expect that further research will eventually explain these anomalies in scientific terms. It isn't clear, though, whether they can be fully understood without significant, possibly revolutionary, expansions of the current state of scientific knowledge.

What's in a Name?

In popular usage, psychic phenomena may be defined as follows:

telepathyInformation exchanged between two or more minds, without the use of the ordinary senses.

clairvoyance - Information received from a distance, beyond the reach of the ordinary senses. A French term meaning "clear-seeing." Also called "remote viewing."

psychokinesis - Mental interaction with animate or inanimate matter. Experiments suggest that it is more accurate to think of psychokinesis as information flowing from mind to matter, rather than as the application of mental forces or powers. Also called "mind-matter interaction," "PK," and sometimes, "telekinesis."

precognition - Information perceived about future events, where the information could not be inferred by ordinary means. Variations include "premonition," a foreboding of an unfavorable future event, and "presentiment," a sensing of a future emotion.

ESP - Extrasensory perception, a term popularized by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s. It refers to information perceived by telepathy, clairvoyance, or precognition.

psi - A letter of the Greek alphabet (y) used as a neutral term for all ESP type and psychokinetic phenomena.

Related Phenomena

OBE - Out-of-body experience; an experience of feeling separated from the body. Usually accompanied by visual perceptions reminiscent of clairvoyance.

NDE - Near-death experience; an experience sometimes reported by those who are revived from nearly dying. Often refers to a core experience that includes feelings of peace, OBE, seeing lights, and certain other phenomena. Related to psi primarily through the OBE experience.

reincarnationThe concept of dying and being reborn into a new life. The strongest evidence for this ancient idea comes from children, some of whom recollect verifiable details of previous lives. Related to psi by similarities to clairvoyance and telepathy.

haunting - Recurrent phenomena reported to occur in particular locations, including sightings of apparitions, strange sounds, movement of objects, and other anomalous physical and perceptual effects. Related to psi by similarities to psychokinesis and clairvoyance.

poltergeist - Large-scale psychokinetic phenomena previously attributed to spirits but now associated with a living person, frequently an adolescent. From the German for "noisy spirit."