Caught up in my day to day administration of Parapsychology Foundation and my family’s life time fascination with psychic matters, I along with many of you in the same boat, may not have had the time to see the forest for the trees.
Thankfully there are individuals such as Dr. Stanley Krippner, Dr. Charles Tart and Dr. Lawrence LeShan, to name a few, who often make us take pause and think of the bigger picture of these life events with their further reaching meaning for us all rather than a mere preoccupation as to how psi phenomena work– if they work at all.
Fair warning, I have been privileged to personally benefit from many academics and researchers’ wise counsel apart from their copious writings. Psychologist, parapsychologist, author Dr. Lawrence LeShan is very dear to my heart as he worked closely with my grandmother, Eileen J. Garrett. Luckily for me he has known me from adolescence and has seen me through maturity. Many of you are well aware of his seminal tome The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: A General Theory of the Paranormal but I am also a fan of his latest book A New Science of the Paranormal The Promise of Psychical Research.
With his permission taken from A New Science of the Paranormal’s last chapter “What Dare I Hope” the following excerpts speak to me and I believe offer us all food for thought:
“All the human search for understanding and meaning, wrote the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, is contained in four questions:
What can I know?
What ought I do?
What dare I hope?
What is a human being?
As the study of psi becomes a mature science and its existence becomes a part of our cultural world-picture, becomes “common sense,” what can we legitimately expect to happen? What dare I hope for is a time when psi becomes as widely accepted as was the unconscious after Freud, or global warming after enough scientific research had been done on the subject.
Since this is a scientific and sense-oriented culture, we can be sure that it will not change in the face of the new knowledge in the same way that faith-based medieval society would have changed. We will probably not go back to believing in angels and devils and the whims and battles of good and evil forces. We will move toward the relationships of the appearance of psi to feelings, belief systems, relationships and other variables we find in the segment (or segments) of reality that we are studying—the other observables. This is valid, whether or not the segment is quantitative. Consciousness is a nonquantitative segment. You cannot assign meaningful numbers to the intensity of emotions, nor can you quantify the distance between a feeling and a memory…
We will take the data of psychic research on their own terms and see where they lead. Since we are talking about the acceptance of major personal observables that simply do not fit into our usual view of the world, we can expect major changes in the definition of ourselves as humans and of the world we live…
…What can we legitimately expect to happen to us and our society after the existence of large-scale psi events becoming part of the background assumptions in our culture?
- The view of ourselves and others as locked within our own skins, communicating with others only through physical movements of our body, will be loosened
- A new view of ‘What am I?’ and ‘What are other people?’ will become the general cultural concept. This view will be a dual one: seeing ourselves and each other simultaneously as individuals and as part of something larger. This will be close to the concept of most esoteric schools and spiritual development groups: that when I see you as an individual in the foreground, in the background is the view of you as part of something larger (and vice versa).
- This new concept will affect our behavior. Belief systems are true in their effects. Among those effects will be changes in how we treat ourselves, others and the planetary nest in which we live.
- The changes will be large enough and soon enough they that will help move the human race off the Endangered Species List.”
What then in conclusion does LeShan dare hope? In his words again and at a moment in time mired in a world pandemic and global civic unrest I fervently share his wish for “an everyday acceptance of large-scale psi events that will lead to personal and cultural changes that will help us overcome the great problems that now threaten to destroy us—that with the new picture of what a human being is, we can learn how to stop killing each other and poisoning our only planet, our nest and home.”
Do you agree? Please continue to stay safe in contemplation of the above.