PSI Annual Journal 2003

I have had a long term interest in the paranormal – in psychic phenomena and ESP – dating back to college days when I read a book by a Christian theosophist named Emmet Fox in which he described out of the body experiences, the after-death state, and the process of reincarnation. This interest remained latent during theological school days except for a book by the physicist and psychic researcher Raynor C. Johnson, The Imprisoned Splendour.

During my early years in the ministry I was a member for a time in the Rosicrucian Order (AMORC) which involved a home study program in mystical and psychic disciplines. I found the Rosicrucian Order too cultic and finally too expensive to suit my tastes, but it helped me realize that mystical and psychic experiences were possible for anyone, not just swamis, gurus and people whacked out on drugs.

While minister in Middleboro, I met an elderly gentleman in the next town, a psychic, who gave me a psychic reading and helped me to find a lost book, describing the place and room and location where it would be when I found it—in the midst of a stack of books on a table near a Dutch-door closet. He was 100% accurate. It was found the next day at a friend's house in precisely the terms he described. A coincidence, you say? Perhaps.

Some 30 or so years ago I was on vacation at our summer cottage on Cape Cod. That night I was slowly drifting off to sleep as my wife was reading in bed next to me. Usually it's the other way around. Suddenly I heard my wife speak to me. Her voice was clear as a bell and it startled me awake. I then said to her, did you just say (whatever it was I just heard) and she replied, "No, but I was thinking it." This experience confirmed for me that telepathy was not just an interesting parapsychological concept with nothing to back it up, but an existential reality grounded in human experience.

My interest in the paranormal found more organized expression in 1969 at a GA program on "UU's Interested in ESP." Out of this program a group was formed that created the UU Psi Symposium the following year. My colleague, Bob Slater, from the UU Church in Greater Lynn, became the Founder and first President of the organization, while I became Editor of the Newsletter and Annual Journal, and went on to serve as President a number of times in the history of the Symposium. The first issue of the Journal came out in 1975. I have edited every issue of the Psi Journal ever since save one.

In one of the early issues of the Psi Journal I referred to the founding of the Psi Symposium as the "UU Response to the New Transcendentalism". By this I meant a renewed interest among UU's and others in intuitive sources of spirituality through meditation, communion with nature, and psychic and mystical experience, similar in some respects to the original New England Transcendentalist movement that so influenced the formation of the UU movement in the 19th century.

The old Transcendentalists published a Journal, called the Dial, edited first by Margaret Fuller and then by Emerson, which lasted all of five years and then died. A few years later Theodore Parker tried to resurrect it under a new title, the Mass. Quarterly Review, which continued another four years. I take some pride in noting that the Psi Symposium Annual Journal and Newsletter has endured for 34 years and is still hanging in there. I have no idea how much longer the Psi Symposium will last, but if it dies tomorrow I have certainly had a good run and an excellent adventure into the psychic and paranormal.

It is interesting to note that when the Psi Symposium applied to the UUA Board in 1970 to become an affiliate organization it was accepted, but not without some disagreement and reluctance on the part of some Board members. Although only one Board member voted against the application a number expressed opposition to the move. "We have enough trouble," said one board member. "It's conceivable that now the voodoo society could ask for affiliate status", said another. "Now we've run the gamut from humanism to ESP." And then, according to the grapevine, someone queried, "What's next, fortune telling by reading the entrails of sheep?" Well, that's not quite what we had in mind.

The purpose of the Psi Symposium as stated in its original charter was "the promotion among Unitarian Universalists and others of interest in and knowledge of any attributes or powers of the human mind or spirit that exceed the scope of the commonly known senses, and the consideration of the implications of such studies for liberal religion." We have since broadened the purpose of the organization to include the study of metaphysics, holistic health and healing, and spiritual growth and wholeness. In other words we are less psychic and more spiritual in our interests, but the latter certainly includes the former, though not necessarily the other way around. It is possible to use the powers of consciousness (five-sensory or extra-sensory) for both good and evil ends. The choice is always ours. You may be more psychically sensitive than your neighbor, but that does not make you any better, morally or spiritually, than anyone else.

In fact one of the things that spiritual teachers often warn against is to become ego-attached or ego-inflated by our presumably extra-sensory psychic gifts. Better to leave them behind than to be captive to their illusory powers. When we truly learn that we are deeply connected to one another not only physically, but also psychically and spiritually, than we will be moved to use our powers of consciousness to help, not to harm, and to heal, rather than to destroy. It is a lesson that apparently takes many lifetimes over many ages. But that is a whole other question.

When I was Editor of the Newsletter during the early years of the organization I received some interesting notes and letters from our readers. Let me cite a few of them:

"I am greatly interested in ESP and its spiritual significance."

"I am delighted that some effort is being made by Unitarians in this field. Their keen minds, good judgment, and organizational ability would be such an asset to this field and would give the church a spurt forward. . . . This is the new frontier."

"If Unitarian Universalists mean what they say about welcoming truth from any variety of sources, then they should be open to the well documented data of ESP. To dismiss all this evidence, as some of our colleagues do, is to show a dogmatism and intolerance foreign to the truly scientific spirit - and certainly not in keeping with the spirit of liberal religion.

"I believe we have a tendency to label psychic phenomena 'supernatural' whereas it is probably perfectly natural if we only understood the spiritual nature of the human and our unique individuality in the universal scheme of life."

I think that last respondent hit the nail on the head. I have always felt that so-called "paranormal" phenomena and experiences are perfectly natural and are clues and signals about how we are connected to one another and to the source of life and the universe. The problem is we have too narrow a view of what we think is possible or normal in the kind of universe we live in.

A couple of months ago one of the major television networks did a program on "Secrets of the Psychics" in which they exposed the trickery and deception used by phony psychics and mediums to hoodwink the public and to make money off of it. The magician James Randi has done similar exposes. I enjoyed the program and appreciated learning how the phony psychics and mediums fool their unwitting subjects. Being an amateur magician myself I appreciated learning some more tricks of the trade.

However, I was bothered by the unspoken assumptions of the program—that since some so-called psychics and mediums are liars and cheats therefore all are, and moreover, all psychic and mystical experience, yours and others, should be suspect from the start. Those are assumptions I am not willing to make. For the fact of the matter is people in all times and places do have psychic and mystical experiences and they simply cannot be reduced to purely wishful thinking and unrealistic self-delusions, or worse, the attempt to manipulate and take advantage of others. Such experiences have to be understood on their own terms.

The great Harvard psychologist, William James, a pioneer in the study of religious and mystical experience, once said that it only takes one white crow to prove that not all crows are black. In other words some psychic and mystical experiences are genuine regardless of how many others may be false or delusional. Moreover, declared James, the deeper levels of human consciousness made manifest in mystical and telepathic states, ''forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality", and that ''no account of the universe in its totality can he final which leaves these other forms of consciousness…disre-garded."

Certainly one of the main purposes of the Psi Symposium from its inception is to take these mystical and paranormal states of consciousness into account as we seek to understand our relationship to God or the universe. This can, of course, be done from both a theistic and non-theistic frame of reference.

One of the difficulties in trying to study psychic and paranormal states of consciousness is that they are primarily spontaneous and experiential in nature and difficult to pin down from a scientific or empirical perspective. Anecdotal evidence does not stand up in a science laboratory. To do so it must be specific, repeatable and measurable. But how do you measure a near-death experience or ask someone to repeat an out-of-body experience on the operating table?

What you can do is collect a record of such reported experiences from many sources and see if there are any common patterns that seem to occur. This is called "the phenomenological method" and what you do is try to draw conclusions from the weight of the phenomena gathered and compared from many persons in different times and places and cultures. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of such cases in the annals and files of the London and American Societies of Psychical Research from more than a century. The same applies to more recent Near-Death studies both here and abroad. The fact that they are anecdotal does not make them false or untrue. It is rather truth that is existential and real to those who experience it.

For the remainder of my talk I would like to share with you some of the anecdotal psychic, spiritual and mystical experiences I have had in conjunction with my interest and involvement with the Psi Symposium and beyond. One of the early members of the Psi Symposium Board was a graduate of a course in Silva Mind Control which in addition to meditation, positive thinking and memory improvement teaches psychic development or what they call Effective Sensory Projection (their term for E.S.P.)

Well, my fellow Psi Board member and friend gave me a demonstration of Effective Sensory Projection, in, of all places, a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C. Seated in a chair, he closed his eyes, went down to his psychic level (as he called it) and asked me for the name, age, sex and address of someone who was ill. I gave him the name of our then 3 month old adopted daughter, Jenny, who at the time was wearing a special brace on her leg for a congenital hip problem.

To my utter amazement, after about a minute, he proceeded to tell me that he detected something unusual about my daughter's upper leg or hip area, but that he was having some difficulty deciphering what it was because of some kind of metal obstruction across her lower body. He had become aware of the metal bar, which held Jenny's brace together and kept her legs in an outstretched position. Though she was some 600 miles away in Norwell, my mind control friend was remarkably accurate in terms of his psychic perception of her physical difficulty. Another coincidence.

Later on I took the mind control course (it was offered free to clergy) and found myself at the end of the course doing psychic readings at a distance similar to my friend in Washington, D.C. I detected a heart ailment in an older woman; a blood condition in a diabetic; and in the last case I did I sensed a tall, long-legged, hunchbacked man, who was unable to stand up straight and who walked stiffly and with a limp. My impression was an exact one. The only thing missing was the nature of his physical ailment: Hodgkin's Disease. More coincidence.

Would you believe that we once had a séance in the First Parish Norwell Meeting House during the early years of my ministry? What happened was this. I invited my friend, the Rev. Gertrude Stevens, a Spiritualist medium and minister from Brockton, to do a program on mediumship for our high school youth group. A few years before Mrs. Stevens had done a similar program for me in the Parsonage living room for adults. The youth group had visited the Spiritualist Church in Brockton in the past, but we had never had a medium do her thing in the church Meeting House which was built in 1830. I was curious to see how Gertrude would react to the ancient setting and atmosphere of this place of worship. Would she tune into or pick up any vibrations from the distant past? I wondered.

When Mrs. Stevens arrived I escorted her into the church to show her the Meeting House before the program was to begin. She walked in and stood in front of the pulpit near the stairs. Right away she reported that immediately upon entering the church the first thing she saw was a coffin on display in front of the pulpit and standing beside it a gentleman in late 19th century Victorian dress. She had picked up the impressions of a funeral held in the church many years ago. She described what the gentleman looked like and the dress styles of the women of that period. The person who had died was a female, someone very close to this man, perhaps his wife or daughter. He himself was an important leader in the church. She wasn't sure of his position, but it was a prominent one. The name of the deceased was "Florence" or something closely resembling that name.

I had no way of checking any of this out at the time. But a couple of days later in the church office, I happened to have a copy of the ministers' record book dating back to 1836 and covering the period to the turn of the century. I told our church secretary what Mrs. Stevens had reported. She was as anxious as I was to see what we could find in the record book that might possibly corroborate a medium's psychic impressions. I opened the book at random and believe it or not the first page I looked upon had the following entry for May 15, 1874: "Funeral of Flora J. oldest daughter of Deacon H.A. Turner, aged 10 years, – a very great loss to the family and also to our Sunday school, in which she was a bright and shining light."

I was astounded, to say the least, as was my church secretary. Just to be sure I went carefully through the rest of the record book. There was no other entry that could remotely resemble the impression of the funeral reported by Mrs. Stevens. Henry A. Turner was indeed a prominent leader in this church for many, many years, a church deacon and Superintendent of the Sunday School for 50 years. His daughter, Flora, though not named "Florence", had a name in close resemblance. Mrs. Stevens was right on target.

How did she do it? Did she hire a detective to research the history of First Parish in Norwell to provide her with some unusual data to impress me and our young people? I hardly think so. She certainly didn't come for the money (we gave her $25 but she never asked for any). And besides, she came under some duress as a favor to me. She was weak from a case of the flu and she had a bad heart to boot. No, Mrs. Stevens was an honest medium, a genuine psychic and clairvoyant, who tuned in, (we don't know exactly how) to the vibrations and residues of the past that cling to our ancient religious Meeting House. Perhaps these words from an African litany are true: "Those who are dead are never gone—they are there in the thickening shadow, they are in the tree that rustles, they are in the hut, they are in the crowd, the dead are not dead."

Such an experience raises a lot of questions. What is time? What is the past? Better yet, where is the past? Is the past truly past, or does the past somehow intersect and continue to manifest itself in the present. If the past is present, what about the future, is it also in some sense present tense? And the human mind, is it a time machine? Can the mind sometimes tune in to "the already has been" and pick up intimations of "the not yet but about to be"? Is the human mind at its depth a singular manifestation of a universal mind or cosmic consciousness, what Emerson called "the Oversoul" and ancient religionists have addressed as God with a thousand divine names? So many questions. Finding the answers will keep us busy from here to eternity, a religious quest that opens out to the infinite dimensions of being itself.

I would like to share with you a second instance of a psychic reading by a British medium, Matthew Smith, who did a program in the Norwell church parish hall some 25 or so years later. I had a private reading with him the next day. Among other things he told me he had a message from a gentleman on the other side who appeared to be my father. The message had to do with a tree, a Japanese red maple, that was growing in the yard outside the window of my study, next to the church sheds. My father wanted me to know that the tree needed some fertilizer to help it grow and advised me to do something about it. I told him I would see to it which I later did.

The question is, why would my father be interested in a tree that was growing outside my study? The answer, unbeknownst to the medium, Matthew Smith, was that the tree had been planted a few years earlier in memory of my father who had died in 1990. He had no way of knowing anything about that tree. There was no marker indicating that it was a memorial planting. There were no written public records anywhere in the church that he could have had access to, nor did he have any opportunity to speak to anybody about me or the church properties. He had never been to the Town of Norwell or to the First Parish Church before.

The other interesting thing about the reading by Matthew Smith was that he said my father was with my brother, his name was William, but that William had never been born on the earth plane because my mother had a miscarriage early in the pregnancy. Nonetheless, he had continued to grow in the spirit world and was now with my father.

When I was a teenager, some four or five years after my parents had divorced, my mother told me that she had to get an abortion a year or so after my sister had been born, and a couple of years before my own birth. The reason was that it was in the worst period of the financial depression in the early 1930's and my parents could not afford another child at that time. So they decided to abort the pregnancy and wait a couple of years when they could afford to support another child, which they did, and I was the result of that postponed pregnancy. Matthew Smith knew nothing about my mother's aborted pregnancy and I had nearly forgotten it myself. But here it was returning to me in the form of a message about my brother, who had never been born, but presumably continued to exist in the spirit world.

Over the years I have sometimes lectured and given demonstrations on the workings of ESP by involving my audience in experiments that demonstrate their own latent ability. Some 20 or so years ago I did an evening program with the high school young people at Star Island. One of the young people, a 15 year old boy, did amazingly well on a series of experiments with some pictures and cards. The strange thing was that while he was in the midst of unveiling an apparent psychic talent, his father, a UU minister, was at that very moment leading a worship service for adults in the Star Island Chapel in which he was castigating supposedly rational UU's for pursuing occult interests in things psychic and nonrational. (My wife later told me about the service.) I was struck by the poetic justice of the synchronicity of the two events. It restored my faith in divine providence.

I once gave an ESP lecture and demonstration for a group of about 35 teachers in Whitman, Mass. who were taking an after school course in the psychology of human nature that was taught by a friend of a friend of mine. He asked me if I would come some afternoon and do something on the subject of ESP and parapsychology.

One experiment involved a test in precognition and clairvoyance. Ten envelopes laid out on a desktop contained each a different postcard. I asked the group to close their eyes and to relax, to picture in their minds whom among them I might select to choose one of the envelopes. (I didn't know who I would pick until the last second), which envelope this person would choose, and what the picture postcard would be when opened. I picked a female teacher who happened to be wearing a lovely green sweater.

Three in the group had predicted I would pick someone wearing green (two of them wrote it down); the regular teacher had predicted I would pick the very person I did, while she herself could get no impression about who in the room I might pick – she thought of everyone but herself. She picked the 6th envelope over from the left (only two guessed correctly, not very impressive). The picture postcard inside was a painting of two love birds face to face perched on a log. No one came very close to picking up any images related to the picture itself.

I was standing near a young male teacher holding the postcard picture forward toward the group. He spoke up and said that he wasn't able to pick up any image in reference to what the picture might be. All he could get was a vague impression of a Chinese painting. I didn't have the foggiest notion what country the painting might be from. I flipped the postcard over to see if there might be any information on the back. The teacher and I were pleasantly surprised, and just a bit startled, to read in fine print three little words – "a Chinese painting." This was the only picture postcard with a Chinese painting on it in a pack of 25 I had brought with me.

A strange coincidence you say? They happen all the time when I do ESP experiments with groups. When do coincidences cease being mere coincidences and begin to indicate something about the reality of the functioning of the human mind and the nature of human consciousness and its capacity to transcend the limits of the physical body and the space-time world itself? Maybe it's time to begin thinking and talking again about what religion has called the "soul". Maybe we're not living bodies with an invisible consciousness (the ghost in the machine) that dies with the body, but living souls in physical expression that transcend the body's demise. That is what I have come to believe out of my own experiences in the paranormal.

In addition to ESP workshops I have led sessions, at various Unitarian Universalist conferences, in the practice of meditation, dream work, creative fantasy, and exploring reincarnation. A number of years ago a quite unusual encounter occurred in regards to my teaching meditation at the Star Island Religious Education Conference. A middle-aged woman came up to me and told me that she had seen and met me before, not physically, but in a recent dream she had before coming to the island.

There were two men in her dream, one a man whom she knew, a former Unitarian minister who taught meditation at a nearby college in New Hampshire, and myself, a practicing Unitarian minister who was teaching meditation at a Star Island R.E. Conference (only she did not know this at the time of her dream). She reported that I looked very much like the former Unitarian minister only he was somewhat taller than me. He had been trying to get her interested in the practice of meditation, but she had been resisting his suggestions. In her dream I was backing him up in the suggestion that meditation would be good for her.

When she saw me at Star Island and found out I was leading a workshop in meditation she was quite surprised and excited by the correspondence with her recent dream. Needless to say, I was too and even felt a bit flattered to think I had so impressed someone even before I met them. I am happy to report that she is now a contented practitioner of meditation and has even procured a specially constructed meditation stool to sit on when she meditates. Dreams have a strange way of coming true.

Dreams are a mysterious phenomenon. They sometimes trigger paranormal experiences of a telepathic, clairvoyant, or precognitive nature. Precognitive dreams of the type cited above sometimes account for the experience of déjà vu, the uncanny feeling that you have been someplace or lived through an experience before and can sense what is going to happen next. The answer is, you have, you dreamed it, only you don't remember, but your unconscious mind knows and feels the correspondence with the actual event when it occurs.

I once had a precognitive dream similar to that of my meditator friend at Star Island. In August, 1976 I dreamed that I was a participant in an interfaith religious dance drama in which various representatives of the world religions were linked arm and arm in a semi-circle, swaying back and forth in rhythmic motion and chanting in unison together. It was very beautiful. The dance chant was led by an archetypal religious figure, dressed in priestly robes, a monk's hat, looking something like an oriental priest with an angelic saintly aura. Everyone swayed together holding a lighted candle. The assembled crowd was deeply moved. There was more to the dream, but this is the pertinent part for my future déjà vu experience, which was to come in the spring of the following year.

The following April I invited a friend to attend an unusual religious event at the Boston Armory. It was called "Cosmic Celebration" and was led by Pir Vilayat Khan, the head of the Sufi Order. The Cosmic Celebration turned out to be a dramatic musical reenactment of the development of the major world religions. Pir Vilayat Khan was strangely like the figure in my dream, priestly garb and all. I told my friend about my dream but said that it was highly unlikely that we, the audience, would become part of an interfaith dance chant. I was wrong. The climax of the Cosmic Celebration came at the end with the performers coming up into the audience and leading us down onto the main floor to join hands and arms in a rhythmic swaying Alleluia chant for the coming of the New Age of religious unity. Dreams do indeed have a strange way of coming true.

I might make mention of a precognitive dream my daughter once had that almost came true. She was about 12 years old at the time. She dreamed that I had played the Mass. lottery numbers game and had won a lot of money. There were four numbers. She could only remember three of them. Just for the fun of it I wrote them down and went and bought a lottery ticket using the three numbers she remembered from her dream and guessed what the fourth might have been. Would you believe that the three numbers from her dream were part of the winning ticket! Unfortunately, the 4th number was wrong and I ended up winning a lot of nothing.

At another Star Island Religious Education conference I led a workshop on Altered States of Consciousness. One afternoon I led the group in a fantasy trip through the universe – taking them up to a point of departure and then letting them finish on their own. Afterward we shared our experiences. Much to my surprise, one woman reported a vivid and deeply moving Platonic vision of the soul of her father who had died some years ago.

Her father's soul appeared to her as a rounded energy field shimmering in a pulsating rainbow of colors. She was moved to tears by the beauty of it. She had felt estranged from her father while he was alive. Her inner spiritual guide told her that her father's soul had never been able to express itself on the physical plane, but now it was enabled to shine forth. The vision was totally unexpected and revealed perhaps a deep unfulfilled longing within her soul for a relationship with her father she never had. She said of her experience that it was deeply religious and truly unforgettable. She would always be grateful for it.

I make no judgement about the reality or fantasy of that woman's experience. It was real for her, I have no doubt. She had touched the circumference of her own spiritual wholeness. I know that I, as the workshop leader, will never forget her experience. It makes me believe, absurd though it may be, that there is a shimmering summer rainbow soul deep within every human being waiting for the chance to shine forth.

A few summers ago I led a workshop on dreams at one of the Life On A Star conferences at Star Island. One evening I walked out to the summer house to watch the sunset with dozens of other Star Island shoalers. Some were gathered down on the rocks toasting marshmallows. Others, like myself, were just standing around watching the sun go down. As it vanished beneath the horizon many spontaneously applauded. I looked up and noticed a kite flying overhead, the string wending its way down to a young boy who was enjoying his connection to the sky.

This triggered a memory of a dream I had the previous June. In the dream I am standing in the back yard of my boyhood home in Springfield, Mass. I look up and see what I at first think is a huge hawk, or ancient bird of prey, sweeping across the sky. I look again and realize it is not a bird, but a gigantic kite or wind sail with a man attached to the top center of the kite, arms spread akimbo like a man on a cross. The kite is a very large rectangular piece of cloth with intricate native designs--South American I think--bright yellow the predominant color, brilliant like the sun.

As the man on the flying cross swoops overhead I can see him clearly. He is very tall, perhaps 7 or 8 feet. He looks Brazilian maybe. I wave and call to him: "Hello, up there!", I cry, "Hello, up there!" I think he sees me, but I'm not sure if he heard me. I begin to wonder if I should be quiet and not draw attention to myself. I have a feeling of caution, even danger, in this potential encounter. The interesting thing about this kite is that it has no string connecting it to the earth.

A month or so later I shared this dream with my dream group at Ferry Beach. One of the women in the group had dark hair and facial features that reminded me of the man in the kite. Here I at last made connection between my dream kite and the earth, and the real world where I live my life. There are no flying crosses at Star Island, just boys flying kites in the sunset, and shoalers hanging lamps on horizontal crosses at evening chapel services. It all connects somehow.

My dream has many levels of meaning—a flying hawk that turns into a kite (a hint of Native American spirituality)—superimposed upon the kite/cross with a man on it (a reminder of Christianity and the crucifixion and a blending of the pagan and the Christian)—in the backyard of my boyhood home (a return to the roots of my soul, it's roots and wings all over again)—"Hello, up there!" versus "I should be quiet" (fear/awe of the transcendent)—and finally a kite with no string attached (a loss of connection between earth and heaven).

These things, I think, are symbolic of spiritual longings and transitions not only in the soul of one man, the former President of the Psi Symposium, but in the World-Soul of the Cosmic Human that seeks for a connection between the lost transcendent (God, the Spiritual, the Holy) and the earth (the material, the practical, the everyday). I like to think of the Psi Symposium as a place and a space where members may make the connection between their spiritual longings and the real world of their lived experience. We want you to have an excellent adventure, to have wings to fly as high as a kite, but we also want you to find the string that makes the connection between the spiritual and the material, the heavens and the earth, the heights and the depths.

Let's go fly a kite. But don't forget to bring along a ball of string with some strong twine that will keep your soaring kite in touch with the earth. If you should happen to see a cosmic man or woman you might call out, "Hello, up there!", or better yet, say nothing at all, just "be still and know that I am and you are."

Emerson indicated that the powers of the soul are divine and that there is no clear demarcation within where God the cause ends and humanity the effect begins. Learning to understand the workings of our own consciousness (normal and paranormal) is the only way we have of understanding in some small measure the universal consciousness of the divine from whence we derive and whither we go in our journey from the temporal to the eternal.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2003