The Specter of Madness
Much of the work I do in the world revolves around helping to undo the damage of a single word:
“Crazy”.
When clients come to me at first, sharing that they’ve had visions that came true, or communions with otherworldly beings; that they felt they communicated with the tree outside their window or their beloved cat or dog or horse in meaningful ways; that they had nagging premonitions that had no way of coming from their rational mind or linear senses; that they were visited by flashes of light in ways that were ecstatic or terrifying or both…
… there’s that worry. “I don’t want to seem crazy”.
“Am I crazy?”
“Am I evil? Am I cursed? Did I make the bad thing I had a premonition about happen?”
What’s more likely happening is that my clients are experiencing flashes of their psychic gifts, or moments of mystical communion, even perhaps an overwhelming level of psychic openness — but at a stage where these moments are a bit unpredictable; maybe hard to make sense of, and hard to reconcile with their baseline “normal”. Like young children learning to walk, they’re stumbling through this new landscape, and sometimes falling on their butts — this happens to all of us!
Part of what we do together is to get curious and discern what’s truly going on, with an openness to otherworldly explanations as well as psychological and mundane ones. Because getting to the real gold of our unfolding spirituality, of our fully awake psychic gifts, means also developing the wisdom to know when something transcendent is objectively happening, and when we’re dealing with smoke and mirrors instead. Or when we’re experiencing a true physical or psychological imbalance, and how to tell the difference.
But my clients’ worry — which has been my own worry in the past, asking myself where the line lies between being spiritual and being out to lunch — is more than founded. Not the worry that they are mentally ill, but the worry that someone else will think so and openly or covertly hurt them for it. Many of my clients, and many others in my social circles and extended community were punished harshly for speaking about their extrasensory perception, even to the point of being pathologized and medicated for it. Other times, the punishment wasn’t medical, but religious. Either way, “crazy” became a very loaded shorthand and a big, looming barrier to shining a light on their spiritual and psychic channels.
(And hey, since we’re here, actual mental illness and its treatment shouldn’t carry a stigma, nor feel like a punishment — it should be all about care! But for now, we’re just teasing apart something that’s been conflated with mental illness, but isn’t).
Of course, the extreme punishment version isn’t the only version of this story. Much more often, the specter of madness is more insidious; more of an ambient threat that we have a hard time putting our finger on.
Just recently, I experienced an exchange with someone who’d been vigilant about keeping her use of psychic abilities from her therapist, so as not to be pigeon-holed.
She “just wanted to have regular therapy” without her beliefs and psychic practices being singled out as a problem. The situation became desperate for her when a friend started attending the same therapist, and unknowingly let the cat out of the bag that this person believes herself to be psychic. She didn’t end up having an outright confrontation with her therapist, but felt since then that she was being constantly probed to reveal her spiritual beliefs, and lost trust in the therapist as a result. To be fair, this is just one story, and we don’t know the therapist’s side in this specific case, but it illustrates the ultra-common, atmospheric fear that so many experience, that being socially open about our mystical or psychic selves will come with consequences we might not be ready to deal with.
Most people I connect with on these topics are thoughtful, smart and conscientious — countering the stereotype that those of us who “believe in the supernatural” do so because we’re easily fooled or bad at critical thinking. Instead, we value reason intrinsically, and since extrasensory perception doesn’t quite follow the rules of Newtonian physics, it can be inwardly destabilizing to experience, and hard to discuss logically and on shared ground with others.
Simultaneously, as many of these individuals in my immediate community are neurodivergent, we share a history of being othered, and made to feel by our dominant social spheres like something was wrong with us for being different. “Not wanting to be seen as crazy”, then, is a solid defense mechanism that checks at least a couple of boxes: among other things, there’s the aim to feel respected on our own terms for our intellectual competence, and to forestall any further othering or dehumanizing that would come with being seen as weird(er) than we may already feel.
But the issue is much bigger than that, I believe. Lying right next to the individual concerns of sensitive and psychically open individuals about being seen as mentally unstable, or of actually becoming psychotic, is a fierce cultural phenomenon. This is a subliminal, electrified, dire “no trespassing” boundary. I’m referring to the widespread taboo in Western culture against the possibility of the supernatural, the “woo woo taboo”.
Though the taboo on the surface often purports to be about sanity and rationality — about being able to discern when we’re witnessing a departure from a healthy sense of shared reality — when we dig deeper we can see that, at the root, it isn’t actually about that.
At its deepest levels, the woo-woo taboo is about what questions we’re allowed to ask, what possibilities we’re permitted to explore or entertain, what we can consider real — and what’s impossible, and therefore “crazy” to contemplate. It casts a perimeter around the occult, the psychic, the synchronistic, the deeply strange; all phenomena that interconnect but are decidedly not the same, and paints it all with the same brush: “nonsense”.
So, even though it’s paramount for us to understand how outdated and monolithic definitions of mental health and of “what gets to be considered real”— built on deeply flawed (sexist, patriarchal, racist, imperialist) assumptions about human nature and experience — fuel our instinctive fear of the anomalous, the supernatural, the mind-boggling, and the unknown, it’s even more important for us to realize that those assumptions are nestled inside of ontological shackles. We’ll get a bird’s eye view of these shackles shortly, but first, let’s carve out some context to hold it all.
Straddling Two Worlds
If you’ve followed my work for a bit, you’ll know that I believe that psychic abilities are human abilities like any other: all of us can attain some degree of competence with them; whereas perhaps some of us with more affinity than others can go on to perform astonishing feats. This is no different than with how we can all learn a sport, learn to read; to play an instrument or to paint, or anything, really. In fact, I feel these are the literal senses of our soul, and while our physical senses allow us to navigate existing in an earthly body, our psychic senses show us the bigger spiritual, multidimensional context we’re embedded in.
I also hold that our brains, rather than being generators of the phenomena we know as “consciousness”, are instead both receivers and filters of consciousness. This is yet another huge topic of discussion, but my take in a nutshell is that our brains and bodies are akin to radio receivers: they can pick up the signal of our soul, which is nonlocal (not bound by time or space), and localize it inside of time and space.
This, of course, comes with all the joys and struggles of being relatively committed, for the duration of this wild experience of life, to being “you”.
Another way I like to think about it is this: You’ve probably heard of the metaphorical “veil” between our earthly world and the world of spirits. Well, my sense is that our bodies are the veil. This is how I experience it when I move my awareness into the nonlocal: whether that’s doing a reading, working on distance healing, communing with the spirit world. I have also heard the same sentiment echoed by other psychics and experiencers of the supernatural.
Is it a problem that our individualized organism “locks us in” to a singular vantage point?
Some spiritual perspectives argue that we’re meant to “see through the illusion” of the material, and for some of us who are too caught up in the material, this may be the whole of the spiritual path. Yet, I prefer the holistic view that being here in bodies, and having a full experience of Earth Life, is why we incarnate in the first place. So perhaps a more inclusive way of putting it is that we’re here to learn the wacky balancing act that is being both embodied and separate, AND all-connected at a spiritual level. While on Earth, we need to straddle both the paths of living within limitation, and of simultaneously existing in a vast field of soul and spirit, where we are boundless, and in Oneness, able to touch Source, and all times and places simultaneously.
So, when dealing with the spiritual and supernatural, a special kind of literacy is called for. Resolving the stubborn issue of the woo-woo taboo isn’t as simple as overbalancing in the opposite direction, just declaring, “Oh, don’t worry, you’re justpsychic” or “just having a spiritual awakening”, either. Just as there are many ways we collectively deny the existence of realms beyond the material, there seem to be countless ways we can use our belief in the transcendent, otherworldly or spiritual as a way to escape or detach from our shared messy human predicaments.
But unless we know, in a robust and reality-grounded way, what psychic experiences really are, and what true transcendence can look like, we’re going to have a hard time discerning how to navigate experiences at the edges of consensus reality.
Reality checking with an open mind: some tools for the road ahead
I believe the woo-woo taboo is so insidious, so underexamined, yet intensely charged, that it prevents us from learning, discerning, understanding and knowing. Its very psychological and historical charge actually engenders the exact issues it’s meant to forestall. On one hand it can blow fantastical beliefs completely out of proportion, and on the other, breed so-called “skeptics” who are more dogmatic than the Spanish Inquisition.
So, at this point in our journey, let’s get equipped with some tools. The first of these is a more worthwhile definition-of and approach-to skepticism. My favorite definition of skepticism in the context of the paranormal, spiritual or supernatural is simple. Dr. Raymond Moody articulates it as “the intellectual discipline to resist jumping to conclusions” (my paraphrase, direct quote below). Moody was the originator of the term “Near-Death Experience”, or “NDE”, for short, which we now use to describe the range of transcendent phenomena experienced by individuals who have died and been resuscitated. He is one of the pioneering researchers in this field, but he was also a professor of logic and epistemology prior to his NDE work.
In this 2014 interview, Moody summarizes the original definition of skepticism from its roots in Ancient Greek philosophy (at 35:30):
“What the Skeptical Movement was all about — they came in the wake of Aristotle. And Aristotle, of course, taught us a code by which we could reach conclusions. And so after that, what the Skeptics decided is, “well, what if we don’t draw a conclusion?” (…)The Skeptical Method is to ask every question, to really apply reason as stringently as you can, but then, at the essence of being a skeptic, they withhold a conclusion: that is the definition of it. And the reason they did this was two things. Number one, they found, it does really interesting things to your mind, it’s kinda fun; and secondly, that since everybody else is rushing in the same direction to get to the conclusion — but you are avoiding a conclusion, you’re withholding the conclusion —- what that does, in effect, is to open your peripheral vision, and you see side pathways of inquiry that everybody else missed, because they were rushing to get to the conclusion.”
Now, most of us think of a “skeptic” as someone who’s fully opposed to the idea of supernatural phenomena. But if we follow Moody’s lead and think instead of skepticism as the art of continuing to ask questions even when we think we have the answers, I feel we’re in a much more fruitful territory: that of inquiry, curiosity and the openness that allows the pursuit of knowledge to keep ongoingly growing, instead of stagnating.
With this brand of skepticism, we can work with extraordinary phenomena without needing to rush to an Ultimate Cause type of explanation. For example, popular depictions of UFO’s in culture go hand in hand with the narrative that these are extraterrestrial craft. Many people staunchly believe we’re being visited by space aliens. A skeptic in the spirit I’ve just outlined can hold openness to the reality of UFOs (now also known as UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), and openness to the reality of space aliens. We can take in stories, evidence for and against, and generally be in good faith — we have to take something seriously enough to even explore it in the first place — about both possibilities without immediately having to conflate the two.
Next stop on our reality-check toolkit mission is to grab a handy set of buckets — categories we can use to sort out levels of objective reality in the world of the occult and transcendent.
The complicated thing about discernment, when it comes to the woo-taboo and questions of whether our own or someone else’s reality testing is intact, is that there are a lot of possible versions of extraordinary experience, and a myriad ways of explaining said experiences.
For instance, under the umbrella of “woo-woo” we might find lumped together:
People who believe in angels and faeries, or in a race of shadowy reptilians pulling the strings of society. We might find those whose life has been transformed by mystical events such as merging with the Divine; practitioners of magic; those who explore the realms of psychic mediumship, energy healing or “manifestation” (the practice of using intention to aim to influence reality in a preferred way); tarot or clairvoyant readers; astrology afficionados; those who experience prophetic dreams or intuitions; those who have experienced alien abductions, and absolutely everything in between.
Within this mind-boggling variety of experiences that skirt the edges of consensus reality, some of the individuals in question will be otherwise “well-anchored” in it, and be able to make something (personally and socially) meaningful out of their forays into the extraordinary — whereas others might end up disoriented, paranoid and fragmented.
And absolutely everything in between.
Objectivity, then, becomes a marker or reference point for us within this smorgasbord: “do we see evidence that the experience connects not only to the person’s inner world, but to the outer world too, somehow?”
Because, while I champion spiritual exploration, it is only too true, especially at our post-truth historical moment, that all manner of shenanigans abound regarding spiritual, paranormal, psychic and fringe topics.
At times, the urge to be a “seeker”, or to escape a harsh reality, (or both) is exploited by bad actors, fraudsters, and cult leaders. I find this again to be a particular danger for the subset of neurodivergent folks whose inner worlds are larger than life and deeply geared toward and invested in “the ideal”, that which they envision could or should be, versus settling for what is.
Other times, the danger comes from us developing a blinding denial of the third dimensional, common sense world of facts and shared experience. We can imagine this acquired blindness to the “Newtonian-real” as arising from psychological wounding — the kind that feels too hard to face, and leads to avoidance and spiritual bypassing. In either of these cases — or in a mix of both — we are divorced from material cause-and-effect and from the social consensus world. The outcomes range from personal maladjustment, to extreme harm to self and other.
— But, in many cases too, we get in trouble here because of a profound collective need for life to be re-enchanted.
To try to uncomplicate things a little, here are those buckets I promised. They are imperfect, but I hope they’ll help us craft some rules of thumb.
We can say that there are four possibilities when we’re dealing with what might be a supernatural experience:
One, in which something objectively supernatural or paranormal is going on: where there is reasonable evidence that the experiencer in question is having something happen that is not explained by Newtonian physics, and by all possible measures they are otherwise reasonably mentally grounded and well.
We find all manner of positive, uplifting and awe-inspiring experiences here, to be sure. There can be distress too. If there’s distress, it’s directly related to the character of the experience: picture for instance someone whose house has a poltergeist ( a phenomenon in which loud noises are heard, things are thrown around, doors are slammed and more), and which multiple people can witness. Definitely scary and disruptive, and reasonably so. But in this category we could find someone whose psychic senses have suddenly opened, and they’re feeling overwhelmed with information they didn’t necessarily ask for. We’d know if they’re receiving true psychic information if they are able to verify it externally — and hopefully find a class or a mentor who can teach them how to control their newfound gifts.
Bucket number two would be when a person is experiencing the symptoms of (physical and/or mental) illness AND also experiencing something spiritual or supernatural. I hope to explore this in more depth in a dedicated piece on the medical establishment’s fraught relationship with the reality of spiritual phenomena — an extension of today’s exploration. For now, let’s leave it at this: both what we can call “true illness” and “true mystical and/or psychic experiencing” can coexist. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Bucket three is where a person is either experiencing frank mental illness symptoms (or physical illness is impacting their mental functioning), and where any experiences they’re having outside of consensus reality are purely subjective. Oftentimes we’ll be able to tell these because the person’s departure from shared reality is distressing to them and those around them, but pragmatic evidence that something otherworldly might be involved fails to manifest.
And four, in which a person is knowingly or unknowingly misrepresenting spiritual or supernatural experience, knowledge, ability or wisdom, for a secondary purpose. That could be, for example, intentionally committing fraud; or (spiritually) bypassing to avoid a difficult issue in their world; or bolstering their own or others’ belief in their specialness. Misrepresentation and hoax are not necessarily rooted in mental illness, but they add to the collective sense that we should be doubtful, even suspicious of people claiming they have access to something transcendent.
Anatomy of a Taboo
Let’s now get a bird’s eye view of what makes up the woo-woo taboo in our world. I have to tell you, this is a frickin’ hydra. In exploring it, I keep finding more and more heads: more and more contributing factors that mesh together to create the familiar combination of both dismissal and panic of what lies beyond the purely material. Some of this stuff is pretty ugly, read with discretion.
To make these metaphorical heads easier to wrangle, I’ve again decided that buckets are the way to go. I’ve sorted them into three categories:
One, the medical/psychiatric. These are the issues around why and how we — especially at the level of the individual — conflate mental illness with psychic, mystical and highly strange phenomena. One of the legacies of Western psychiatry is a policing of ontology, if you will. It’s been very adept at gatekeeping what gets to be considered both real and normal as far as our thoughts, feelings and perceptions go, but based on metaphysical biases that delete the ontological reality and the intrinsic benefits of (balanced) spiritual and supernatural connection.
Just as one example of this, we’ve all encountered the trope that “if you hear voices that means you’re psychotic”. It’s taken long, long years for psychiatry to actually start changing its assumptions on voice-hearing, rather than immediately assuming pathology (check out, for instance, “The Voices Within” by Charles Fernyhough, whose work reflects that there are many kinds of voice-hearing, and many of them support an individual’s wholeness and well-being. Of course, this can include mediumship and communication with spirit guides.
In equating psychic and spiritual experiences with madness, our medical institutions have fueled the panic that by approaching the edges of the otherworldly we’re going to get into dire and possibly irreversible trouble. Change is afoot in the mental health field, to be sure, though we have much work yet to do.
Two, the sociological: the collective background ideologies that underlie our negative associations with all things “woo-woo”, which include the sneaky dogma of Scientism.
Scientism is a rigid philosophical ideology that’s steeped into the background of our culture, and which mimics science but is, by definition, the opposite of science. Where science is about following a set methodology to discover reproducible data about a phenomenon — and being agnostic about what the data reveal — Scientism holds that what is ontologically, objectively real is only what can be measured scientifically. Exploring this philosophy in depth is beyond the scope of this piece, but for a thought-provoking overview, you can read this essay by Austin Hughes. Let’s recognize, too, that our culture’s reliance on scientism is built on yet another ideology, materialism, which says that all that exists is physical matter. We’ll take a look at materialism separately below.
Scientism also upholds an intellectual hierarchy that we all know and few of us ever think about or question. It puts the “hard sciences” as the pinnacle of human achievement, where the humanities and (gasp!) the arts are seen as lesser, even superfluous ways of knowing.
You can see how many circular logic loops and blind spots this creates! Alone given that scientific research is limited by technology, funding, and human error and bias. Yet this arbitrary pyramid has steeped into our mainstream so much that we’ll very often form an unconscious opinion of our own and others’ worth and social rank based on where we fall in its hierarchy.
This is central to the psychological issue of “being crazy” if you believe in woo-woo stuff, which in this light translates to being unscientific and thus intellectually dismissable. But ultimately, science’s true purpose isn’t to define, curate or gatekeep The RealTM but to study, via empirical evidence, how things work.
One other old dogma that, emphatically, should have died out by now but still lingers in our collective narratives, arises from Enlightenment-Era anthropology. This is Social Evolutionism, a framework which envisioned human cultures as being on a straight line of evolution, where each “stage” of civilization should progress into the next (you can read an overview of this model here).
Conveniently for the people espousing these ideas, Evolutionism painted indigenous tribes as being the “least evolved”. They were in a “primitive” stage, called “savagery”. Agriculturalist traditional cultures would be the next stage of evolution, AKA, “barbarians”. And “civilization”, the peak state of evolution in this model, is exemplified by cultures who have writing systems and whose life-way is centered around cities.
I get the oogies even writing this shit out: I abhor these ideas and their racism, period.
To be clear, anthropologists have long declared these frameworks wrong and defunct, thankfully. But some dregs of Evolutionism remain in our collective unconscious and seem to still hold power in subterranean ways.
For instance, the idea of “the advanced civilization” as a paragon, harkens directly to this ideology. Also, the Evolutionist idea that the spiritual practices of indigenous cultures were supposed to be unevolved, superstitious, foolish and distasteful — the product of allegedly less developed minds— went hand in hand with the claim that a society could regress (“degenerate” is the term E.B. Tylor, a main proponent of Evolutionism, used).
Meaning that if our Euro-American Age of Reason forebears didn’t act to quell all semblance of occult, “superstitious”, spiritual practices in the culture, it would lead to a downfall into a more primitive state. This paranoia went on to further fortify the woo-woo taboo, and even though we know Evolutionism is wrong from head to toe, the fortifications weren’t fully dismantled, remaining in our collective background.
Now, back to those hydra-head buckets. The third category I’ve used to organize my thinking around all this is the spiritual. This is perhaps the weirdest of the categories, and maybe that’s saying a lot. Here we’re dealing with, yes, the ongoing influence of religions which condemn personal experiences of divination, ESP, personal spiritual revelation and other anomalous phenomena—-all the way to spirit possession— as demonic and/or sinful.
But what also belongs here is also an important and little talked about ethical issue: if people can access supernatural powers and non-local abilities, they can also use them to harm. There’s the typical, low-level apprehension that a psychic can ferret out all your secrets just by looking at you (even if we could, most of us have well-cultivated boundaries and better things to do), but it doesn’t end there. The ethical terrain of the supernatural has been understood in every indigenous tradition, where, for instance, guarding from and undoing curses and harmful spells is part of the fabric of culture. In a culture where we’ve lost that competency, it makes sense that we’re deeply avoidant of a possibility we have, now, little immunity against.
Lastly, and strangest of all, are the ways in which some beings of the unseen realms themselves fuel the taboo for their own purposes, such as to prevent humans from interacting with them or meddling in their affairs, or even to “milk” our emotional reactions without us realizing it.
If that’s hard to read, I empathize. I had to witness this first-hand many times, all the while doubting it, before learning to calculate for these denizens of the otherworlds. This may be a humbling animistic perspective, and one that is worthwhile talking about for multiple reasons: it reminds us Westerners that the Cosmos doesn’t revolve around our design for things, and that we live in an ecology where some other-than-human beings are our friends and allies, others are our enemies, and yet others are indifferent or opportunistic. Accepting this possibility means learning to be in right relationship with the web of life beyond the physical.
I dearly want there to be more discussion and education around this big subject, and I want it to be about becoming intentional and savvy in the spiritual relationships we cultivate — and not about fomenting paranoia about “dark forces” or leaning into conspiracy. Most importantly, this inquiry is about looking at what’s behind a mighty, enduring taboo. We’re bound to find some shadows lurking behind it.
Where Scientism and Materialism Meet
Materialism is a philosophical stance on the nature of reality, that holds that physical matter is all there is. As I review the hydra-heads that maintain our cultural taboo around the supernatural, materialism shows up behind many of them, so it deserves a special mention.
Some versions of materialism fully deny the existence of the psyche — let alone any kind of spiritual realm beyond the physical — whereas others assume these other realities exist, but only subordinate to the physical. (This paper takes a comprehensive look at the history and diverse branches of materialism if you’re unfamiliar and would like more context).
Taken to its extremes, this ideology purports that even our very minds are “nothing more than” an accident of brain chemicals, and essentially an ephemeral hallucination. I write it like that because you’ll immediately recognize the condescension we’ve all learned to associate with the stereotype of the high-and-mighty intellectual authority. Scientism, which we covered above, is strongly grounded in this materialist philosophy, and loves to wave away what doesn’t fit into its paradigm in terms of “merely”, “nothing more than”.
In this context, we all know how something like psychic abilities ranks.
“You’re not really having a premonition that then comes to pass. Your brain is merelytricking you to make you believe you intuited something, but this effect is based on nothing more than you unconsciously rewriting the order of events after the fact”.
Most of us would say the above came from the mouth of a skeptic, right? But we’ve now seen that skepticism was not intended to be this way.
Meanwhile, the voice of supposed reason I quoted above is barely masking a deep disgust for that which lies beyond the borders of its reality-box. However much this brand of skepticism purports to be about pure rationality, there’s massive suppressed emotion here. Contempt, perhaps rage, desire to bring the other down a notch. Arrogance. Insecurity. They’re not asking questions, but deciding that the materialist explanation is the right one because they said so — because how can it be otherwise?
Dr. Dean Radin, chief scientist of the Institute for Noetic Sciences, shares a telling story in his 2018 book, “Real Magic”. The book is an exploration of the scientific evidence for magic: the human ability to produce tangible effects in the real world using the power of our minds. But, parallel with the accounts of research experiments and documented extraordinary magical events, there’s another tale that recurs throughout Radin’s recounting, and that’s the meta-issue of how academia and the scientific mainstream can go out of their way to thwart the most serious and rigorous attempts to dig into these topics.
The story begins with Radin and his team being forced to retract a peer-reviewed paper detailing a study they’d done to see how accurately a group of psychic mediums could tell, from a photograph, whether the subject was dead or alive:
“Our study was peer-reviewed and appeared in one of the highest-impact academic psychology journals. Within four months of it being published it had been viewed thousands of times and was rated among the top 5 percent of the millions of papers tracked by a company that measures the scientific impact of journal articles. The journal’s public relations office even featured it on their Facebook account as an item of special interest.
Then, one day we were informed that the article was going to be retracted. This means it would be ceremoniously stricken from the journal’s website and marked forever after with the word ‘retracted,’ in large red letters. This practice ensures that the article is eternally shamed, just like the scarlet A shames its wearer in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. Retraction of a journal article is rare and serious, because it implies that the reported results were found to be fraudulent, seriously mistaken, plagiarized, or unethical.
My colleagues and I were of course alarmed to learn about the retraction. So we immediately asked the editor who informed us about the retraction to tell us what was going on. In cases involving retractions, authors are supposed to be given a chance to correct any misconceptions or mistakes. The editor replied that the article would be retracted whether or not we agreed to it, nor would we be given the opportunity to respond. That was an egregious breach of editorial ethics, so we asked if any concerns about fraud had been raised or if someone had found a methodological problem that we overlooked. The editor replied that it wasn’t about fraud or mistakes. So again we asked why the article was being retracted.
We received no response and the article was retracted. The woo-woo taboo dies hard.”
As if this wasn’t bad enough, however, Radin submitted another paper for review to the same journal only months later, this one a survey of meditators’ reports of psychic experiences. Surprisingly, it was rejected even before it could be reviewed: “The rejection read: ‘The content of this manuscript does not meet the standards of rigor required by the journal to be considered for publication.’ Fortunately, this time the editor provided an explanation of what he meant by ‘standards of rigor.’
In a nutshell, the editor was unhappy because we were too open to the mere possibilitythat the meditators’ experiences might be due to genuine psi. He wanted us to state that the meditators’ experiences were ‘psychological illusions or delusions,’ and not to imply that such experiences might be real. He agreed that it was important in science to be tolerant of phenomena thought to be improbable, but it wasn’t proper to be sympathetic to impossible ideas, like—in his terms—that ‘pigs can fly’ or ‘water can be turned into wine.’
Encountering this sort of prejudice is common in psi research, but we weren’t prepared for his next statement. The editor was so confident in his belief that psi effects are literally impossible that he added: ‘I will do everything in my power to avoid any public research grant money being spent in that direction.’ Then, to add insult to injury, he added that he might reconsider publishing a revised paper, but only if we explicitly denied the possibility that psi exists.”
Radin goes on to draw the obvious parallel with the Inquisition, which also used to force those it deemed heretics to recant their beliefs on pain of death — or at least severe, sometimes lifelong punishment.
The original essence of skepticism, and to my mind the more beneficial version, is much more closely aligned with real science. Skepticism’s aim is seeking solid information rather than jumping to conclusions, and starting out not from a place of blind belief, but being cautious about making absolute claims, yet remaining open-minded. A skeptic lets their views evolve as new information comes to light.
Speaking of brain chemicals, let me be clear that I absolutely embrace the hard sciences as important and deeply useful disciplines, and as ways of knowing. Materialism, too, can work well as a framework: for instance, we know well how our physical health and our chemistry dictates our mental and emotional state. If you’re wondering, just ask your hormones! Or notice how quickly that cup of coffee turns your morning around.
The issue is that the material-only paradigm covers its ears and chants “lalalalalalalala” at the top of its lungs when confronted with compelling evidence that point to the truth and reality of that which isn’t material.
Why even bother with this whole mess
Those who overcome the idea that they might be “crazy” and explore their spirituality anyway, typically just stop bothering with the taboo: we work around it, we ignore it. Overall, I think that’s a perfect response, because why bother with haters? The issue, to me, is one of truly clearing the structural issues underneath the taboo, more at a collective than an individual level. As most of us fail to see through it, to understand the deeply limiting and oppressive beliefs it’s built upon, we remain limited in what areas of study, exploration and development we’re allowed to undertake as a society.
Think of your favorite music. The songs that cheer you up when you’re down, or make you cry when you need an emotional cleanse. Remember the soundtracks to your most beloved movies. How certain tunes remind you of specific eras in your life. How some artists speak directly to your soul. How we’re brought together and transformed by music and generally can’t live without it. Now imagine that we’d decided, as a culture, that music was “bad”, “crazy” and generally off-limits for an upstanding, sane member of society.
How nuts would that be?
What would we be missing out on if music was generally frowned upon? What would such a culture fail to realize about all that music does for us?
To me, this is how our culture looks, as it outcasts the spiritual, mystical and supernatural to the fringes. Collectively, we honestly don’t know what we’re missing — or what would be possible for us with widespread acceptance of these essential facets of life. In my musically-dystopian world, no doubt there’d be musicians — because music is a human birthright. But they’d be the ones made to question their sanity: “what do you mean, you hear ‘melodies’ in your mind? You should get checked by a doctor”.
Back to our own culture, we have here an opportunity to discover and incorporate into our shared worldview the objective dimensions of the spiritual and subtle realms, rather than always shrugging our shoulders and saying “what each of us believes is subjective” . True, there is a deeply subjective aspect to our spiritual and psychic connection — but we’re missing out on the counterpart: an objective, shared reality, a socially-held axis of connection with the Unseen, that a paradigm of understanding and embracing these phenomena at a grounded level could allow.
Moreover, as I hinted at above, I meet a large swath of people who need logic to motivate them, who may be “spiritually curious” but discard their curiosity because in the end culture waves a condescending hand, saying, “all of that woo woo stuff’s been debunked”.
Last but not least, and possibly my biggest motivation to open up this discussion more, has to do with what I believe Spirit is asking for. We’re dealing with phenomena that touch on the very essence of Consciousness. That means our own consciousness, as part of that larger field of capital-C Consciousness, contributes to the architecture of the whole field.
Our attitudes, ideas, feelings and thoughts help co-create the strength of the channels by which Spirit could reach us — or block such assistance through sheer disbelief. In psychical research, this is known as the sheep-goat effect, where “sheep” are those individuals who are open to the supernatural, and “goats” are those who scoff at such beliefs.
Dean Radin, in the same book I quote above, at one point delves into the decades of research experiments on the psychic performance of “sheep” vs “goats”. The results are consistent:
“They concluded that ‘a belief-moderated communications anomaly in the forced-choice ESP domain…has been effectively uninterrupted and consistent for almost 70 years.’ In sum, just as the magical traditions have maintained, belief modulates psi performance. In other words, if you don’t believe in magic, then no magic for you.”
And we could really use all the magic we can get.
