PSI Annual Journal 2003

The prevailing world-view says we are only complicated machines. True, there is what we call "consciousness", and it annoyingly resists explanation, but this consciousness is like the picture on your TV. It is a play of light and shadow, shaped by impulses coming from somewhere outside. It appears when the switch is on, and vanishes when the switch is off. It has no power of itself, to influence the action it displays.

One may say, "Surely such crude mechanistic notions are long out of date." So they are, but our world is still captive to the mechanistic paradigm. A recent public TV program on the human brain began with a statement by the celebrated scientific writer, Carl Sagan. Said he: "There is a dualism which says that mind and body are two realities but there isn't a smidgen of evidence for it. A plausible theory is that what we call ‘mind' is only the result of the anatomy and physiology of the brain." Sagan fears that to admit mind as a separate reality invites "a loss of nerve, a retreat from knowledge".¹

Yet his dogmatic materialism may be worse: by reducing us to chemistry and circuitry, it provides philosophic justification for the dehumanization of our present world. In economics it allows us to become "economic man", consumers to be manipulated. In industry we shrink to "hands", tenders of machines. The human bond, as Marx noted, is replaced by the "bare cash nexus". In war, which has always changed humans into "the enemy", mechanical technology achieves the ultimate: the bomber never sees his victims; he only pushes a button and reports in bafflegab on "the elimination of resistance".

Even medicine has been mechanized. Illness has been understood as the invasion of the body-machine from outside, by germs or trauma. The remedy is also external: a pill or surgery. Now we are beyond the limits of this approach. The great killers are heart disease, cancer and so on, which are related to stress as well as the environment. Stress is a state of mind.

Nowhere has the denial of responsible inwardness been more devastating than in religion. Western religion "de-sacralized" nature. It put down all religions, such as the Druid or American Indian, which celebrated our continuity with nature. Classic Christianity has been crudely physical and mechanical. It said that only by the intervention of its "wholly other" God could we know life's meaning: commandments carved on stone, God become flesh and made a blood sacrifice for sin physically inherited from Adam; resurrected in the body; Scriptures whose writers were media for inspiration from beyond.

Western religion's attitude toward nature fostered science, and science turned on religion, delighting to prove it "superstition". And so for millions today "God is dead and anything is permissible". Can liberal religion, always naturalistic in its basis, provide a viable alternative for bankrupt revealed religion on the one hand, and materialistic scient-ism on the other?

Sir Alister Hardy is a topflight British zoologist and Unitarian who thinks it can – but only if it pursues Emerson's advice "Acquaint thyself at first hand with deity". Natural theology, says Sir Alister, is now too much a dry rationalism. Further, it has never recovered from the blows dealt by Darwin and Freud to the classic notion of a Great Designer behind nature's Grand Design. Evolution "made that hypothesis unnecessary." The cosmos appeared to be a self-sufficient machine; humans mechanically governed by drives; religion an "illusion".

Hardy would re-establish religion upon psychology, upon direct personal experience. Just as the only really convincing "proof" for Psi is personal experience, so with religion, by which he means our experience of relatedness to some power beyond the self, making for order, righteousness, and a sense on oneness. Hardy himself is a theist but not a supernaturalist, just as he is a scientist but not a materialist. He speaks of "God" but insists that "what we call God is a human experience" of the cosmic order.

Sir Alister has consciously picked up where Starbuck and James left off, because he feels they were quite correct: a naturalistic, scientific-minded religion has to have a database. He has found that people today – whatever their theologies – do have vivid, confirmatory, transforming experiences of being in touch with, or dependent on, a spiritual power, which he contrasts at once with "the quite different notion of a Providence which interferes with the laws of nature." ² His "Religious Experience Research Unit" operating on a shoestring at Manchester College, Oxford, now has many thousands of first-hand accounts. I salute Dr. Hardy for bringing liberal religion back to the first-handedness which was the historical root of its power, but which too many of us avoid, preferring to talk about religion.

In Hardy's book The Biology of God he roots consciousness as far back as does Sagan in The Dragons of Eden. We need not rehearse his development of the thesis that "the experience of what may be called God is a very real and important one…and has also some fundamental biological connections"³ And I can here only point to Hardy's agreement with Ralph Burhoe, a 1980 recipient of the Templeton prize, called "the Nobel Prize in religion." Burhoe, based at Meadville Theological School, has long contended that the element of consciousness, that is, of ethical choice, is an essential component in human evolution.

What pertains to us here is Hardy's contention that "All those psychologists who have pointed to a mental element extending beyond the psysicochemical structure of the brain have been right…James MacDougall, Jung, Sir Cyril Burt and others. We now learn that Freud was prepared to give a place for telepathy in his scheme of things and was only prevented from doing so by…his colleagues."⁴

Thus, Hardy opposes materialism not only on the ground that it makes choice and valuing into illusions, but on the grounds that this "mental element" can be proved to exist, indeed, that it is "as much a part of the wider biology…as are the facts of bio-physics and bio-chemistry (though) so much more difficult to investigate."⁵

Religion, then is a normal, indeed indispensable function of human biology; specifically, of the mind in its aspect of consciousness and maker of choices. Sir Alister Hardy believes that extra-sensory perception is a perfectly normal function of mind. He suggests it be called "para-physical" rather than "supernatural" for reasons that will be obvious to members of the Psi Symposium.

To this point, I have tried to show that Dr. Hardy is a devoted Unitarian, knowledgeable in both religion and life sciences, who has brought both these together in a way that helps us all articulate our own faith, and relate it to practice. It is of major interest, then, that Sir Alister builds parapsychology into the system. I must content myself with a single major point. As he said in his Gifford Lectures:

"If it could be proved beyond doubt that any one of the alleged kinds of extra-sensory perception were a reality, then it would be a serious challenge…" (to the sort of materialism which Sagan so confidently affirms.) It would "…admit the reality of a non-material, spiritual if you like, part of the universe, in which the religious yearnings of man could find a place."

(The Divine Flame, London, Collins 1966, 177)

This quotation doesn't quite do his point justice: it sounds a little as if the "yearning" were the issue. Scientifically, what counts most is that human behavior be adequately explained: and as we have seen, Hardy makes his case that only a "real" mind explains it.

Sir Alister believes that it has been proved beyond doubt that extra-sensory perception is a reality. He rested the case, in The Biology of God, on telepathy (Vasiliev, Krippner, Moss experiments in transfer of suggestion, dream content and emotions). Here, I would put before you some other examples, to establish the fact that you and I, as conscious minds, are "real" – that we interact with and influence the "merely physical" and are not mere reactors under an illusion. In so doing, my argument takes respectful leave of Dr. Hardy.

Let's start with something by now familiar: biofeedback, already widely used in medicine though no one can explain its workings. Biofeedback is simply this: a delicate instrument attached to the body shows us, by a signal, what goes on, notably, what changes take place, in the body. Suppose, for example, it is in the interest of healing to lower the temperature in a finger, or slow one's breath or heartbeat. To the utter contradiction of past ideas about what we can and can't control, patients quickly learn to bring about such changes.

So far, this is remarkable, but still within the frame of conventional metaphysics. But moving a bit farther out, we find patients able, by mental exertion, to heal what medically speaking have been regarded as "impossible" diseases. What is necessary is, that they believe they can do it. As one doctor now an advocate of "holistic" medicine says, "If you can think yourself sick, why can't you think yourself well?" Religious liberals who have dismissed the "miracle cures" of Jesus must reconsider: such cures now appear natural, not miraculous.

Laetrile, just now, is a case in point. People testify that it cured their cancer. If so, how much is due to laetrile as a chemical, and how much to the sufferer's faith that it would help them? Orthodox medicine may dismiss it as a "placebo effect" – but this begs the question: why does any placebo work?

Today the healing arts pay more and more serious attention to the power of mind over matter (psychokinesis). "Holistic medicine" is, alas, becoming a cult. Faith cures are very big on TV. It is clear that healing is taking place from inside, contra the paradigm of mechanistic medicine.

Unfortunately, much of all this is identified with the intervention (again the old paradigm!) of a supernatural divinity. For this reason, Norman Cousins' best-selling book is important: here is a man, given up by conventional medicine, who "laughed his way back to health" without entangling his experience with the old "miracle" explanations.

Yet even Cousins' experience, though with difficulty, can be forced into the matrix of orthodox materialism. Now, having shown how even conventional medicine has extended itself to the limit, let's move beyond that limit.

Bernard Grad, of McGill University is a biochemist. Some years ago he invented a beautiful experiment to test "mental healing". He took two identical, sealed bottles of distilled water. He gave one to a medically certified neurotic to hold for half an hour, and the other to a normal person. In a "double blind" experiment, he then used the waters from the two bottles in several ways. He watered some seeds. He gave it to two samples of mice of identical strains.

You can guess what happened. Seeds watered by the "happy vibes" water thrived; those given "bad vibes" water languished. The mice – who were delicately wounded – drinking the good water healed more quickly than did those who got the bad. And these effects persisted no matter who did the feeding or watering. It persisted when Dr. Grad shipped the water samples to a friend in Western Canada. Something had happened to that water. It could hardly be telepathy. As Grad said, "I doubt the mice would know where that water came from by reading anybody's mind!" This experiment, which has been replicated, cannot be explained by the "laws" of science.

Two well-known psychics, at the time the spacecraft Mariner 10 was approaching the planet Mercury, decided to take their own "trip". They set up a carefully monitored situation. At the identical moment in time they "took off" mentally – one from his New York apartment, the other from his farm in Arkansas. Attendants recorded what they said they saw. Here are facts worth thinking about:

-both men arrived at Mercury instantly. The space probe took ten months.
- both men substantially agreed on what they "saw".
-though prevailing opinion was that Mercury had no atmosphere and no magnetic field, one of the psychics experienced both.
- the psychics' findings were confirmed by the space probe when it passed by the planet a few days afterward.

Things like this quite "blow" the materialist mind-set. Psi is not only a fact, but will force a revision of physics.

Of course, the Newtonian physics is outmoded anyway, as I need not demonstrate to persons even slightly familiar with psychic phenomena. It has been made obsolete by the physicists themselves.

Creating a new paradigm which will include both the physical and the psychic realm does not restore the old "supernatural".

Nor do I think we need expend much energy on trying to reconcile Dr. Hardy with Dr. Sagan. Their confrontation, like so many in the past, will be resolved not by one or the other "winning" but by the creation of a new paradigm, inclusive of both on a higher level.

This "larger thought" will also lift us above the one-story ethics with which so many of us now feel we must live. We know we don't have to have a trans-human realm in order to have morality, since even if we are only complex machines, still, we have to live with one another. We may be fellow passengers on a space ship earth that was created we know not how, is going we know not where, and whose purpose we cannot fathom, if there is one. Nevertheless, we have to be good companions on the voyage. The ex-priest and poet, James Kavanaugh, put the matter as winsomely as any "formerly religious" person can:

Once I believed some grey and giant judge
Kept careful toll of all the deeds of men,
That with some black and lusting kind of pen
He cautiously recorded every petty crime
And most of all –
mine!

Now I know there is not judge with righteous pen
Who bothers keeping track of deeds and time,
For every face records what life has been about
And sculpts a memory with every crack and line
And most of all—
mine!

Yet this is not enough. We have to feel that we and our space ship are part of, on course with, the marvelous and creative forces that brought us into being.

For religious liberals, this feeling has to be grounded in knowledge. Now we have firm, if as yet controversial, knowledge. The mind is more than mechanical, and its extension into the parapsychological "restores the soul" as against the dessicated "psyche" of materialist science.

Our religion, through its many historic rephrasings of doctrine, has always had as its center, the reality and power of the free mind. Its communal bond has been love and compassion – as in all great religions -- and passionate concern for liberating people to the maximum realization of their potential. All this gains new affirmation from the new psychic discoveries. They stay the loss of hope into which so many are falling today, in the face of enormous depersonalized forces that seem beyond our control. "As a man thinketh, so is he", said the Buddha. The key to a human future is our faith in our power to decide who and what we shall be. We have that power.

¹ The Dragons of Eden, p. 237
² The Biology of God, Jonathan Cape, London 1975, 183
³ Ibid, 181
⁴ Op. Cit., 15
⁵ Ibid, 138

PSI Symposium Annual Journal 2003