PSI Annual Journal 1998

The findings of parapsychology are worthy of serious consideration. Parapsychology is merely a new word for what used to be called psychical research. It is the study of telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, precognition, psychokinesis and the other forms of extra-sensory perception. I take it that the word parapsychology has been introduced to supplement the connotations of psychical research, because the latter has been associated in the popular mind with the study of abnormal behavior – such as mediumship, trances of the séance room, and so forth, whereas the emphasis of the parapsychologist today is on the more normal behavior of men and women, although it does not exclude any of these other phenomena.

This chapter is based in part on a book published by Dr. J.B. Rhine of Duke University, entitled The New World of the Mind, which appeared a few years ago.

Now the main conclusion to which Dr. Rhine and his associates have come, after several years of experimentation in their laboratory at Duke University, is that there exists an extra-physical element in man that does not seem to be subject to any of the laws already known to govern the physical universe. He calls it the “Psi factor.” It is a short word for psychic capacity. This, of course, is the fundamental postulate in all the major religions of mankind. Professor Rhine is not telling the religious world anything new, for religion has all along stubbornly insisted on the existence of something in man, an agency, if you please, which uses the physical body as an instrument and is not therefore necessarily involved in its dissolution. And religion has asked mankind to accept this largely as a matter of faith and revelation. Now what is new in Professor Rhine’s contention is that he and his associates claim to offer scientific evidence of the existence of the non-physical element in man.

Dr. Rhine claims that the new evidence shows that some people may become aware of events taking place miles away from them. This is called clairvoyance. Also, some people can become aware of events that have not yet taken place. This is called pre-cognition. And some people seem to be able to influence matter without physical contact, as in those dice-throwing tests which they carry on at Duke University. This is called psychokinesis. Dr. Rhine claims that perfectly normal people in good mental health make far better scores in these tests than those who are mentally ill or otherwise abnormal. Over in London University, a distinguished British scientist, Dr. S.G. Soal, in an independent test, confirms in his laboratory in England, the findings of the Rhine experiments, and there have been departments of parapsychology in Vienna, Germany and France, and in other sections of the United States who would say “Amen” to these conclusions.

Now, what of my own attitude toward the Rhine experiments? It is, of course the attitude of a layman, but I have been studying this subject for quite a number of years. I find myself still on the fence, but leaning definitely in the direction of Professor Rhine’s conclusions. I hold that the whole area with which the parapsychologists are dealing is a worthy, important and legitimate field of scientific inquiry. I was started off in this direction by Professor James H. Hyslop of Columbia University. Over forty-five years ago I heard him make a statement in the Ford Hall Forum of Boston that the American and British Societies for Psychical Research had more facts assembled to establish the hypothesis of extra-sensory perception than Darwin and Wallace had when they announced the theory of evolution, and I have been interested ever since in this subject.

The scientific method has made remarkable discoveries in the physical sciences of biology, chemistry, medicine and astronomy. And why? Because the scientific method calls for the facts of life. It takes special pains to examine all the facts and to overlook none of them, if possible, and surely not to discard a single fact just because it does not fit in with the investigators’ preconceptions. I believe that this same method should be applied to what goes on in the less tangible but no less real world of the human mind and emotions. We read a few years ago in the public press about a woman who claimed to awaken at three o’clock in the morning from a nightmare in which she saw her son die in a flaming plane crash. The next day, a reporter telephoned her home to tell her that her son was aboard a plane which had crashed and caught fire in Seattle, but that he had suffered only minor bruises. The woman claimed that she did not know that her son was on the way home. In these words she described the scene of her dream. “I saw a plane leave a big airfield. There were civilians around, but mostly there were soldiers. Then I saw the house right in the way of the plane as it dived and caught on fire. I waited outside the wreck, helplessly waiting while man after man climbed out of the wreckage. Then I saw my own boy. He was burning, his clothes were on fire. He fell down, he did not move. I thought he was dead.” Now, what actually happened was that the boy had been able to put out the fire and survive the ordeal. Was that a mere coincidence? Have we all the facts here? Or was there some causal connection between that woman’s dream and the event that took place? I would like to know, because I have had similar dreams myself.

In 1918 I was on a steamship sailing from France approaching the harbor of New York City. It was about two o’clock in the morning and I had a dream of my younger brother dying. It was so vivid that the dream awoke me and I immediately got up out of my berth and made a note of it in my notebook – the hour and the details of the dream. I had not heard from this younger brother for at least three months during the war. I did not know that he had moved to Concord, New Hampshire. I had no knowledge that he had been attacked by Spanish influenza. So, when I arrived in New York I called up an older brother who came over to see me through the customs, and I told him about my dream. “Oh-h,” he said, “There’s nothing to it. I just heard from him a week ago, nothing is wrong.” But that very afternoon he received a telegram that the younger brother was dying from Spanish influenza and later another telegram at four o’clock that he had died. Was that a mere coincidence, or was there some causal connection? I do not claim to know the answer, but I should like to know. For if it were a coincidence, I could cite at least a dozen remarkable coincidences which have taken place in my own life and that of my immediate family, and not all have been confined to dreams either. Some of them have taken place while awake.

There is the striking example of the distinguished Swedish scientist Emmanuel Swedenborg, who while fully awake, described to guests gathered in his house the course of a fire taking place in a distant city. He tells the course of this fire, how at certain streets (naming the streets) the fire is successfully stopped, and how much damage it has done over the whole of that city. Later on, Swedenborg verified his startling vision. At any rate, he claimed that it was verified in every detail. Verified by whom? By Swedenborg and his friends. Can we accept such testimony? There were no telephones in his day. It was the eighteenth century, no telephones, no telegraphs. How could he have described in detail the process of a fire in that far away place unless telepathy or clairvoyance be a fact? And if a fact, then we have a form of communication that is independent of all known laws governing the customary forms of physical communication. For the intensity of light waves, heat, sound, radio and x-rays decreases directly in proportion to the square of the distance between the source and the point of observation. But in telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, the interposition of distance does not seem to make any difference, and this naturally leads to the conclusion that either there must exist in man something spiritual or if physical, then some form of physical reality that goes beyond what we know.

Now what I want to know is whether this is a fact or a mere speculation. It seems to me that scientist should eventually be able to tell us one way or the other, and come to some general agreement. Furthermore, they should be able to tell us a great deal more than we now know about other aspects of man’s inner being. For example, is there such a thing as free will? Our courts, our laws, our schools, our churches, our social conventions are based on the supposition that all men are accountable for their behavior. If there is no such thing as free will, if a man is but a product of his heredity and environment, then our retributive system of justice is based upon a monstrous superstition and we ought to know about it.

All the religions encourage the practice of prayer. What evidence is there that praying does any good? What sound and tested teaching is there to prepare a man for such a final fact as death? Are there certain kinds of prayer in which we may engage that are scientifically valid and others that are a pure waste of time? We ought to know. We ought to apply the scientific method to these problems. And what evidence is there, for example, of survival after death? Have all the heavens and happy hunting grounds and Valhallas proclaimed by the various religions, not a shred of evidence to support those claims? Or are there substantial facts which a critical mind can examine and come to the conclusion that the hope immortal is still a rational hope?

There are many who hold that there are more substantial grounds for the hope today than at any other time in human history. We possess the findings of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research, which were not available to the ancients. Science today offers no adequate denial of the possibility of immortality and submits facts that may reasonable be interpreted as suggestive of its reality. I am wondering how many professors and scientists, as well as average laymen, have made anything more than a cursory examination of the great mass of evidence which the British and American Societies for Psychical Research have uncovered and brought together – a mass of evidence which when impartially considered, as it so seldom is, confronts us with something of the dilemma that either something of human personality does survive the death of the physical body or that the subconscious mind of man operated in such a far-ranging manner, independent of time and space, as to give rise to the conclusion that it must belong in an altogether different category of being than that of the physical form.

I happen to belong to a group of liberal clergymen including humanists and theists alike, who for some time now have been making a serious study of the findings of the British and American Societies for Psychical Research. This science is also known as Parapsychology and Extra-sensory perception. I have discovered that the reports of these two societies have had a much wider acceptance among the scientists in Great Britain, for example, than they have in this country. But even here, there are professors at Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Clark and several other respectable universities who are making careful experiments in this once disreputable field, under the protection of generous endowments for this specific purpose. And yet this new science is still in its groping stage. In my judgement it has already uncovered enough facts to show that the question of immortality is still an open question, and the hope for it is still a rational one.

I am convinced that what we call human personality is something more than the result of the chemistry of a slowly dying fire. I am convinced that there is a center of awareness in many that survives the coming and going of many bodies, and that this center is an intrinsic part of this universe, as intrinsic as the electron and the dust of constellations. I am convinced that we are only in the early dawn of understanding what its true nature is, or what its final destiny is like. But as some of us grope and make our way in the early dawn, we believe that we discern the image of immortality stamped upon it, an image which will be more clearly revealed when the full noontime of scientific knowledge has come.

Every advance in scientific knowledge made thus far has disclosed not a less wondrous universe but a more wondrous universe than man in his wildest dreams imagined before such advances had been made. And we may well believe that, when the scientific method has been adequately applied to the study of the human personality, the facts uncovered, the truth disclosed, will astound man’s imagination, expand his whole horizon, and exalt his sense of dignity and worth as never before, since he first began to ponder the meaning of life and his own destiny.

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 1998