ESP of the Commonly Accessible

Most claims of ESP seem to be of this sort. The psychic has access to additional information about something in the physical world that an average person doesn’t. Abilities that fall into this category include aura reading, precognition, psychometry, dowsing, and remote viewing.

This class of ESP is the most easily tested (and the most easily debunked) because a person’s individual senses don’t exist in a bubble, isolated from the others. I can perceive most things with all five of my senses and there’s usually a great deal of information overlap. How do I know an apple is rotten? Well, it will smell rotten. But it will also look wrinkly and blackened, as well as feel soft and mushy. I don’t know what a rotten apple tastes like but I’m sure “rotten” is what you’d conclude if you put it in your mouth. In this example, even though each experience is unique, four of my senses have all given me the same piece of information about an object: rottenness.

If someone has the ability to gain information about an object psychically, shouldn’t he be able to psychically ascertain that the apple is rotten? A person with no sense of smell could tell me the apple is rotten by its appearance. A blind person could tell me it’s rotten by touch. Why couldn’t a psychic do the same when his other five senses are taken away?

Perhaps this test is unfair. I doubt I could recognize the rottenness of an apple using only my ears, so maybe his particular psychic sense is also unsuited to the task. But certainly he could suggest a test that his sense is suited for.

The test that James Randi conducted on an aura reader in the previous post is an excellent example of a test that bridges the senses. A person’s physical location is information that’s available to both physical sight and psychic sight. It’s hard to even conceive of how someone could see an aura but not be able to pinpoint it in space. An aura reader should easily be able to determine the location of a person by the sight of his aura alone. Even the psychic being tested by Randi thought so.

Conclusive demonstrations of such abilities should be simple and straightforward for anyone who possesses them, and yet psychics routinely fail the tests for them — even in cases where passing guarantees them fame and fortune, as well as elevating the global psychic community to new plateaus of public esteem.

Until someone comes forward who can pass even a basic scientific test of his alleged abilities (a very meager demand), claims for this category of ESP have ceased to impress me.

ESP of the Exclusively Accessible

The next category of ESP is the perception of something otherworldly — something the average person has no access to whatsoever. Channeling falls into this category.

How can a channeler verify that the information he’s receiving is coming from a genuine source? Especially if that information pertains to inaccessible things like the metaphysics of the afterlife or the spiritual practices of beings living in another galaxy? The object of perception in this case cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted. How could the average person be convinced that there’s something at work here beyond the psychic’s imagination?

It might seem that this psychic sense exists in a bubble, but it doesn’t. A blind person could carry a paint swatch from the hardware store around with him for a day and ask sighted people at random what color it is. After hearing “blue” over and over again from family, coworkers, and strangers on the street, the reality of vision (if he had any reason to doubt it) would be personally confirmed for him. And at no point in this process would he need to know anything at all about the experience of blue. He has verified that a communally accessible perception called “blue” does exist despite having no grasp of what sensing blue is like.

Channeling works the same way. Even though I can’t experience what the channeler experiences, two channelers could independently receive the same information about this world or the next and I can compare what comes through. Via one medium an entity might introduce himself to me as “Hilarion” and tell me all about a civilization on a planet in the Vela constellation. If a different medium (who had never even met the first) opened with, “Hello again. This is Hilarion. I have more to tell you about the Velans,” I’d have pretty good confirmation that the mediums are perceiving something genuine, even if the sensation itself is inconceivable to me.

I’ve already written about devising tests for channeling and evaluating information from spirit guides, and again I have yet to encounter anyone who can give me verifiable — or at least mutually accessible — information via channeling that he couldn’t have easily acquired more mundanely.

ESP of the Solely Accessible

This category of ESP actually does exist in a bubble, and this is its undoing.

There are people who claim to have a personal connection to some supernatural entity or realm that’s shared by no one else on the planet. For example, through some sort of astral travel or shamanic dreaming a person might make regular visits to some other-dimensional plane where things obey different metaphysical laws and where the inhabitants communicate through a telepathy of raw sensation. He comes back from these trips reporting that these beings have given him insights into consciousness that are so profound that trying to reduce them to crude English would be like trying to push a bowling ball through a funnel.

There’s no way this person can corroborate this experience. Even if he could bring others on the journey, how could we compare descriptions of indescribable experiences? We outsiders have no choice but to trust — simply because he says so — that this experience has some external reality.

This is something I’m not inclined to do, because there’s nothing about his experience that distinguishes it from dream, delusion, or mental illness — even for him. As I’ve said before, experiences don’t necessarily correspond with events.

Does this person use drugs to facilitate his journeys? An experience like this one would sound quite familiar to the average psychonaut, but most psychonauts would agree that the source of the experience is his own brain. Does he use sleep deprivation or sensory deprivation to trigger the experience, akin to a vision quest? Or is he asleep when it happens and he’s having a lucid dream? Could he even suffer from some kind of latent schizophrenia which periodically thrusts him into alien realms?

These are details which are often left out in conversations with psychics who are reporting such experiences. You have to do some extra probing to uncover them. However, even if there’s no obvious hacking of the brain going on, the brain is completely capable of producing profound mystical experiences like this one given the right circumstances. Since our experiences don’t let us in on whether or not they have an external source, I’m not convinced that our subject can intuitively know that the beings he visits are real. Until we’re provided with some sort of evidence it’s prudent to not take on the belief that something special and otherworldly is going on here.

If our subject wants us to accept his claim he has some work to do. His perceptions must first be shown to fall under one of the previous two categories (with further exploration it’s possible for us to discover we were mistaken about this other realm being inaccessible to others), and then it must pass the appropriate tests. Otherwise, there’s very little that we outsiders can actually do with the ineffable, even if we wanted to.

This blog has so far been concerned with perceptions of the first two categories. This makes sense because only the first two categories can be tested, but I feel there’s still much more to be said about the third. A subject for future posts.

The first step in testing this claim is to confirm that the psychic is seeing something at all. We can worry about whether or not his diagnosis is accurate later on.

One might be tempted to do this by gathering a group of psychics and comparing what they describe; if they all independently see a sky blue aura around you, then perhaps we have a real phenomenon on our hands. However this approach isn’t as dependable as we’d like. In observing your face and demeanor they’re each gathering information about you, consciously or subconsciously. If they see that you have a calm, happy attitude and the cultural consensus is that calm, happy people have sky blue auras, then it isn’t unthinkable that their intuitions might be the product of a mundane mental process. We need to come up with a test that isn’t so vulnerable to non-psychic interference.

Such a test was conducted by James Randi during a TV special called Exploring Psychic Powers Live! that aired in 1989. The psychic being tested chose ten people whose auras were clearly visible to her. On stage were ten numbered screens which some of the volunteers were to stand behind. The screens were short enough that the psychic was comfortable a person’s aura could be seen above them, allowing her to identify which screens concealed a person and which didn’t. The volunteers were randomly distributed behind them and the psychic was asked to make her determination. She saw auras over all ten screens, however only four of the screens had a volunteer behind them. Had she been correct the agreed upon number of times (eight out of ten) she would have won a $100,000 prize, but her success rate was no better than predicted by chance.

The most important thing to take away from this experiment is that both the tester and the psychic were in agreement that the test was sound. She didn’t feel that the test was unfair; she simply failed it. You should take the same approach in your own tests. Always make sure that the person being tested is confident he can pass it. Stacking the deck against him in any way would be cheap and dishonest, making the test nothing but a waste of both of your time. The goal is to reveal the truth, not prove a point.

It was also wise of the testers to make sure that the aura was in plain sight. It would be an easy mistake to use a floor to ceiling barrier, assuming that whatever the psychic was perceiving would just pass right through it anyway. This would introduce an opportunity for the subject to cry foul — an unnecessary weakness in the test. It isn’t up to the tester to make decisions about the mechanics of clairvoyance. If the subject argues that something interferes with his abilities you should take his word for it. In fact, you should calibrate your experiment from the beginning by letting the subject watch a volunteer walk behind the screen and ask him, “Can you still see the aura?” Adjust the screen until he does, then proceed with the test.

But what about other aura reading techniques? Auras aren’t always seen; sometimes they’re felt.

A test for the tactile perception of the body’s energy field was brilliantly devised in 1996 by Emily Rosa, then 9 years old, for her 4th grade science project. She tested 21 Therapeutic Touch practitioners by having each one sit at a table and extend his or her hands through a screen. From the other side Emily would hover one of her hands (decided by coin toss) over one of the practitioner’s.

Being accomplished aura-manipulators it should have been trivial for them to pinpoint which of their hands was an inch from Emily’s, but given ten tries each none of the practitioners did better than chance. Two years later Emily became the youngest person ever to publish a paper — “A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch” — in a peer-reviewed medical journal.

We should all aspire to be at least as clever as a 4th grader in our own tests of the paranormal. Hopefully these real world examples give you some ideas to play with. If your subject sees auras when no one is there, and doesn’t when there’s a body right in front of him, then it’s a safe bet that what he’s perceiving was in his head all along. If you ever manage to find someone who can consistently pinpoint an aura where (and only where) an aura should be, I’d be very interested to hear about it. As would Randi and Rosa.

If he could only flip a switch in our brains that activates that stream we’d all have an immediate change of heart. Instantly ESP would be validated and we’d wonder how humanity had been so blind to it all this time. Because he can’t do this, a psychic will often argue that he can only hope to spur people down the path to their own awakening. Neophytes cannot possibly understand these strange new cognitive faculties until they already have them, thus the psychic cannot be expected to prove that he possesses an alternative way of knowing the world. The only proof that we, the uninitiated, will accept is hopelessly bound to criteria borne out of our naivety. Justification for the experience is inextricably embedded within the experience itself, so an attempt to judge the experience before actually having it would be misguided and futile.

Arguments like this one always intrigued me. They lead to an important philosophical question: do we put so much faith in our collective empirical understanding of the world merely because we all happen to have similar perceptual and cognitive faculties?

Imagine a group of individuals who each have access to a unique channel of sensory data: one has only eyes, one has only ears, one has only touch, etc. Would it be so simple for these people (assuming they could even communicate) to justify their impressions of the world to each other? Or a group with unique cognitive strengths: one is a savant in math, one is a savant in music, one is a savant in art, etc. Each would be constantly frustrated by the others’ inability to share in a conception of the world which, to himself, is utterly self-evident.

My alchemist friend Polymathicus often says (paraphrased) that the work of science only does half of the job. In any given experiment there is strict and extensive preparation done on the object being studied. What is neglected is the strict and extensive preparation of the subject doing the studying. I don’t wish to put words in his mouth (and he may correct me), but I believe his point is that revelations in knowledge cannot come to a person not already tuned to perceive them. The breadth and sophistication of one’s worldview must grow in parallel with the volume of new information he gathers, or else that information is largely wasted on him. The paths of subject and object must be synchronous; as one effects development in the object, the object effects development in him.

I wouldn’t personally suggest that science is unaware of this need for the holism of subject and object, as Thomas Kuhn famously made a similar argument, but it’s a wise observation.

This friend directed me to David Lindsay’s alchemy-disguised-as-bad-science-fiction novel A Voyage to Arcturus. In it the main character travels across an alien landscape and with each individual he meets his body is given a new organ — a new perceptual or cognitive faculty — matching that of the giver, usually in place of the organ he previously received. The effects these organs have on him are profound. With each he isn’t merely given access to new sensations; he is literally given a new worldview. Things that once made perfect sense to him become absurd; absurdities come to make perfect sense. Conclusions about the world that were once rock solid are found to be flimsy and hollow in the face of new impressions. And with every metamorphosis, his previous self could never have been convinced of his new revelations because he didn’t yet have access to their justification. Each organ reveals the ultimate truth that shatters all truths that came before — that is until the next organ takes hold.

As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Could we be so intent on exploring every millimeter of the universe through a single set of common lenses that we’re neglecting the vast perceptual frontiers spoken of by prophets and mystics over the centuries? Could there exist a sense so alien to common human experience that we couldn’t possibly conceive of it or identify it until we possessed it ourselves?

Whether something can exist and whether something does exist are two very different discussions. Though I have no reason to doubt that such senses could exist, I’m unconvinced that there are humans endowed with them.

The first source of my doubts is the fact that there’s no known physical mechanism by which we might receive this mysterious sensory data. For vision we have eyes, for hearing we have ears, for taste we have tongues. What is the organ or organs that facilitate ESP? And what sort of stimulus is such an organ being triggered by? What is it pulling out of the ether and how does the ether interact with flesh?

If there are people who are capable of ESP and people who aren’t, then there must be brains out there with different structures than other brains — or at least brains that are doing something that other brains aren’t. But even psi researchers haven’t been able to pinpoint such activity. They’ve retreated to the spookiness of the quantum realm citing things like particle entanglement in their arguments for ESP, which is a red flag for a belief that’s on its way out. The nice thing about genuine, life-affecting phenomena is that you don’t have to dig quite so deeply to find a single bit of solid evidence for them. They tend to make their presence a little more apparent, which is what allows us to notice them in our daily lives in the first place. As a rule, things that are hidden from the most specialized of scientists will probably also be hidden from the average Joe.

Since there’s still a lot we don’t know about the brain and since only a tiny fraction of all the brains in the entire world have ever been directly observed, this is only a secondary criticism. My main criticism of appeals to other ways of knowing could fill a post all its own, so I’ll leave it for the future.

Halfway into the movie Max has been exiled from Bartertown and lies in the surrounding desert on the verge of death, but he’s rescued by a group of children who live in a nearby canyon oasis. They’re the offspring of the survivors of a plane crash. According to the history they retain through ritualized storytelling, a pilot named Captain Walker flew a group of people out of a bombed city to escape the ensuing nuclear winter. It went down in the desert and what was left of the group was forced to make a life in the oasis. After about a decade of building shelters and raising families, the group decided that they needed to find out if there was any human civilization left around them. They put the eldest children in charge and departed with a promise from Captain Walker that someone would return for them. At this point it’s safe to say that no one ever will.  

Left on their own, the children have clung to Walker’s promise with (literally) religious fervor. The community is reminiscent of a cargo cult. The junk from the jet wreckage has been converted into sacred adornments and talismans (the tribe even appears to have a medicine man) and Captain Walker has become a messianic figure to whom they attribute supernatural powers. They wait for him to come lift the downed airplane back into the wind and return them all to “Tomorrow-morrow Land”, a utopia they’ve dreamt up based on the stories they’ve been told about the old world and the photos and artifacts they’ve scrounged. Max bears an uncanny resemblance to Captain Walker so the children are convinced that he’s finally returned and ignore Max’s protests to the contrary.

This scene always strikes a chord with me. There’s some dramatic license being exercised here, but fictional scenarios like this one hold a very valuable insight. It’s easy to see primitive tribal cultures that are steeped in magic and superstition as quaint, naive, misguided, or delusional. Even for Max the tribe comes off a bit crazy at first, and for someone accustomed to the apocalypse that’s saying a lot. We take completely for granted the fact that we each hold thousands of lifetimes of accumulated knowledge in our heads. We live in an age where we’re assaulted with more information in a day than a member of an ancient isolated community could encounter in an entire year. We just can’t see ourselves reflected in this strange ancestral condition; we find all this stuff anachronistic and irrelevant to life in the present.

But what’s so crucial to remember is that this condition is the default state of a human being. This is you, me, or anyone else had we not been born into intellectual privilege. These children have modern genes and modern blood, but having grown up isolated from the global environment and lacking schooling beyond the stories their parents raised them on, humanity’s fundamental nature has been laid bare. Magical thinking, imbuing coincidence with meaning, creating sacred myths and rituals, perceiving supernatural connections — this is not merely anomalous behavior. This is the cognitive path of least resistance for any Homo sapiens.

We were all on this path until we were graciously shown a higher one. It’s only through education and intellectual self-discipline that we rise above it and become our modern selves. 

Many, however, don’t aspire to rise very far. Others are born into circumstances where intellectual resources are sparse. Today’s society is replete with examples of people still living at this primeval level. Because we’ve created an environment in which knowledge is unavoidable, few can entirely succumb to this condition, but vestiges of it are continually surfacing in people’s daily lives.

A ballplayer refuses to wash his lucky pair of socks. A grieving husband makes monthly visits to his wife’s grave to tell her about his life since. A hotel skips the 13th when numbering its floors. A churchgoer draws the sign of the cross on her chest in the face of tragedy. A truck driver sees the same digits repeated on three separate license plates and decides to play the lotto with them. A fisherman sets sail on Saturday instead of Friday to help ensure his safe return.

This is all just the practice of magic in a modern form. The behaviors and rituals are different but the psychological inclination is the same. And what makes the old magic inferior to ours? What distinguishes the ballplayer’s socks from a fetish or charm? Or the sign of the cross from an incantation? Or the reading of license plates from divination?

Is our modern mysticism really that much different from the belief that a man can send a crippled jet back into the sky?

This is why I can’t be too hard on the average occultist or religionist. I can’t get as angry about their frequently negative influence on society as many skeptics do, because you can only get so upset with something for obeying its own nature. Even the staunchest of rationalists can lapse back to his ancient roots when met with enough terror or hardship. We’re all walking on a wire that threatens to toss us into barbarity without warning.

Being rational animals we’re torn between two modalities. The path of rationality is difficult; the animal path is easy. And until the end of time the vast majority of human beings will take the easy road. This will never, ever change. One who hopes for a world of perfect sanity is setting himself up for disappointment.

So since mysticism isn’t going anywhere, my advice is to gain enough distance from it all to be able to respond to it with academic fascination rather than arrogant indignation. To observe the traces of our ancestry influencing every aspect of modern society — emerging from simple roots into very complex and unpredictable patterns — is a truly amazing thing. Stepping back far enough to see your own magic in the same light as the alien magic of ancient cultures gives you a better glimpse of the grand cognitive tapestry you’re a part of, and the inborn impetus to deceive yourself loses a little more of its hold over you.

Before I close I do want to be clear on this: I’m not arguing that the customs of cultures that our society deems primitive are juvenile or useless. Every culture has within it a unique intellectual DNA and the preservation of this ethnodiversity is paramount. Each peers at the cosmos and the human condition through its own lens, and one of the worst things we can do to ourselves as a species is to reduce the number of those lenses down to one. Monoculture is death, and we’re headed toward it full tilt.

But as I’ll explore in future posts, when plumbing the depths of your own consciousness (which is what magic is truly about) you can choose to come to conclusions about the internal world or you can choose to come to conclusions about the external world based on what you uncover. The former I find to be a valuable, noble endeavor; the latter, a very problematic one. And it’s with the latter that this blog is chiefly concerned.

The honest reaction would be to admit one’s own ignorance — to oneself as well as others. It’s perfectly ok to say, “I really don’t know either way. I’ll think about it, do some research, and get back to you.” But somehow it just feels better to have an opinion, any opinion, no matter how unfounded, than to have none. In absence of knowledge and evidence our brains will even go so far as to manufacture the experience of certainty to tide us over.

You can blame our evolution for this compulsion to believe. If a member of your clan gets eaten by a bear, you’re going to form a belief that bears are dangerous. But do you really know anything concrete about the next bear that crosses your path? Maybe bears are gentle, but the first one you saw happened to be rabid and crazed. Maybe there’s another animal that looks very much like a bear but has no interest in you as dinner (e.g. a panda). Maybe bears are avatars of the gods who dole out rewards or punishment based on a person’s character — the tribe member was just an evil person and deserved his fate.

Even though any of these things could be true, this wait-and-see mentality would have put you in an early grave. Those who jumped to conclusions about bears and who were overcautious were more likely to survive encounters with them.

Observe your average neighborhood bird or squirrel. They’re scared of everything. A noise or movement too close will send them in a mad dash even if the source is harmless or benevolent. And this strategy has served them extremely well over the millennia despite how many meals it’s cost them. The odds remain in their favor because the penalty for being wrong is far greater than the reward for being right.

It’s a very strange quirk of evolution that those who perceive reality most accurately are often at a disadvantage. Clear-sightedness and survival have surprisingly little to do with each other. As intelligent as we are it’s natural to assume that our window to the world is spotless, but the truth is that a dash of delusion is not only useful but necessary for a sentient species to come this far. In light of this, many of humanity’s problems suddenly make more sense.

In civilized society we need to temper our inclination to believe or disbelieve by reflex because it often does more harm than good. We need to cultivate a tolerance for uncertainty.

This is accomplished by recognizing that the belief dilemma offers a third choice which is frequently more appropriate: no belief at all.

There isn’t a belief in history that has influenced humanity more than belief or disbelief in a deity, so I’ll use it as an example to illustrate what I mean. The term “atheist” can have a number meanings, but in the minds of the general public to be atheist is to have a disbelief in God — in other words, to believe that a deity does not exist. This particular flavor of atheism (sometimes referred to as “strong atheism”) comes under attack for being an untenable position because proving a negative is so problematic, especially when dealing with universals. I could verify that there are currently no elephants in my bedroom easily enough, but to verify that a deity doesn’t exist anywhere within or outside of the universe simply isn’t possible. One would have to be extremely exact about the definitions of “deity” and “exist” to even hope to pull it off. Sometimes disbelief in the supernatural is as fundamentally flawed as belief in it, as it turns out.

And this is where the null belief comes in. What belief and disbelief have in common is that they are both positive positions; each position says something about the universe. Disbelief is just belief of a different sort. “God exists” and “God doesn’t exist” are both statements that need to be justified by the claimant. But the null position requires no defense. To have no belief is to refrain from embracing a claim in the first place. It’s the position of having no position.

Someone with a null belief about God (the term “agnostic” sometimes fits the bill) remains in the state he was in before the notion of a deity ever entered his mind. He isn’t “on the fence” because that arbitrarily presupposes that there are only two choices to consider and that those two choices have a roughly equal chance of being true. He is simply open to evidence of God (or Samulayo, or Lei Gong, or Gnowee, or Ba’al, or Sedna, or an entity not yet conceived of) and lives in comfortable uncertainty about the subject until evidence shows up, if ever. To form any kind of belief in the meantime, including disbelief, is just unnecessary.

Skeptics sometimes seem uncomfortable with the null position, even though it’s the most honest (and the most scientifically sound) position to hold when faced with arguments for the paranormal. For many, to reserve judgement about a claim that they think is most likely bogus just feels too passive, wishy-washy, and soft. They fear that it ultimately encourages the people who are intent on deceiving themselves and others — that it gives those people an inch from which they will surely take a mile. So they resort to the sort of kneejerk disbelief that garners skeptics their reputation as curmudgeonly naysayers.

I disagree with this attitude, and I think it arises in part from the biological urge to pick a side. Lacking belief doesn’t require you to be the least bit soft on disseminators of bunk. As I’ve said before, you can reveal errors in someone’s chain of reasoning without ever making claims about the truth of his conclusions. If you stick to his ideas rather than the reality those ideas describe then you’re free of the burden of providing evidence to the contrary, which, in the case of ideas lacking evidence either way, you just won’t have. You’re merely pointing out the fact that he lacks it too.

It also doesn’t leave you more susceptible to falling prey to a baseless claim, as some skeptics might suggest. Being open but unconvinced isn’t wishy-washy. With every claim I’m presented with I can keep replying indefinitely, “Show me why I should believe this.” If the evidence is solid and the argument follows, I’ll become convinced; if not, I won’t. Starting from a position of disbelief won’t change that. If anything, disbelief without reason acts as a cognitive barrier. It makes it harder to accept a genuine claim that may come along because I’ll already have a subtle bias against it.

By jumping from a null position to disbelief about a claim that I’ve seen collapse under scrutiny a hundred times (assuming it lacks evidence to the contrary) I gain nothing except relief from the itch in my brain that compels me to make a choice. But belief and disbelief aren’t dichotomous opposites. There is only belief and null belief. Convinced and unconvinced.

With every sasquatch sighting that turns out to be a hoax, we don’t gain certainty that sasquatches don’t exist. But it doesn’t matter. Someone who has no belief about sasquatches lives effectively the same life as someone who’s convinced that they don’t exist. Neither will believe in sasquatches until he sees one, but the former has a position that’s more intellectually honest and more easily defended.

It’s a tragedy that the English language is so ambiguous on this matter. When I say, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” what do I mean? Do I disbelieve? Or lack belief?

Try in the future — at least in your own mind — to respond instead with, “I have no belief about that,” and see how it feels. In my case it alleviated a nagging epistemological tension that I hadn’t been able to shake otherwise.

If you ever manage to get used to it, uncertainty is an excellent place to be.

In any case, we as meager human beings don’t have ultimate power over our existence. But we have some, believers in the weak Law of Attraction argue. The question is, how much? Where do the boundaries lie?

To address this question, we must first ask two others.

Does the Law of Attraction necessitate a breach in the laws of physics as we currently understand them?

Take the classic example of the billiard table. You hit the cue ball with X amount of power at an angle of Y and it comes to rest in position Z. The laws of motion dictate that if you could hit the ball from the exact same place in the exact same way under the exact same conditions (yes, possible only on paper) it would come to rest exactly where it did before, and it would happen every time.

Now add intention to the equation. According to the Law of Attraction it’s possible for someone with unwavering confidence to sink a ball while someone with a self-defeating attitude just bounces it off the corner, even if the two shots they take are physically identical. After all, if a person’s mental state has influenced the way he physically hit the ball then there’s no need to appeal to mysticism in the first place; it’s just simple psychology at work. But believers argue that there’s more going on — that the intention itself has power. And if through intention alone we can cause a ball to come to rest where it wouldn’t have otherwise, could we say that the laws of motion have been violated?

It appears the answer to the question is yes. Even if the difference is measured in nanometers, one can’t break the laws of physics a little bit any more than a woman can be a little bit pregnant. They either hold up or they don’t. That’s what makes them laws.

There’s no substantial difference between making a better pool shot and attracting a new car. Outside of the “laboratory conditions” of our billiard table we’d have a million new steps and variables to keep track of, creating an environment thick with ambiguity in which a shaky belief is able to survive and flourish. But in each scenario, reality was moving in one direction and through mere intention (versus intention leading to action) it was steered into another.

The average believer in the Law of Attraction would respond to all this with: “What’s the big deal? Our current understanding of the universe is laughable. The laws of physics are incomplete and will undoubtedly be amended many, many times in the future. That our laws don’t encompass the Law of Attraction just illustrates society’s current level of ignorance.” Which is absolutely correct (well, except for that last bit) and it leads us to the next question.

If the Law of Attraction violates known physical laws, is it a big deal?

The thing about our current understanding of the laws of physics is that our vast technological infrastructure depends on that understanding reflecting reality. It couldn’t function otherwise.

For example, computer CPUs are now hitting the market with transistors that are only 45 nanometers thick. Every reduction in transistor size is a milestone, because at this scale you start running into strange quantum effects like electrons jumping from one transistor to another. There’s concern that CPU design will have to be drastically rethought once we hit the lower limit. The precision that this sort of engineering requires is mind-blowing. Overclockers (people who force their CPUs to run at speeds higher than what they’re rated for) know that any slight change in the conditions in which a CPU operates can trigger it to fail. At best, the computer will reboot itself at random; at worst, the CPU will burn out and fill the room with a lovely ozone smell.

We’re surrounded by other devices that are just as delicate. Your car relies on fuel and air behaving exactly as expected when subjected to a certain amount of pressure, and this success must be repeated thousands of times per minute. A tiny quartz resonator in your watch vibrates 32,768 times per second, allowing it to stay accurate for a year or more without adjustment depending on its quality. The average computer monitor repeatedly redraws a screen consisting of about a million tiny squares of color 60 to 90 times per second.

If the “intentional noise” that we all produce (according to the weak law) can cause little breaches here and there in the known laws of physics, shouldn’t we see things failing left and right? All of the precision machinery in the world has been designed taking the fixed nature of the laws of physics completely for granted. There are no protections or fail-safes whatsoever in place; today’s machines are utterly vulnerable to any sort of intentional interference, were it to exist. And with precision machinery even the slightest effect is enough to cause a visible disruption. In just the examples I’ve given you see millions of opportunities for failure every single day.

In a universe that includes the Law of Attraction we would have discovered long ago that any advanced technology would be useless without some sort of intentional shielding, just as so many devices require electrical or temperature shielding today. And how do you design such shielding when it’s just as vulnerable to a breach in the laws that govern it as is the object you’re trying to protect? This problem would only get worse with exponential population growth. Imagine how much intentional pollution almost seven billion human beings must generate.

NASA spends millions of dollars a pop to send probes millions of kilometers through space to arrive at exactly the right destination at exactly the right time. These journeys take years, and every single second is a chance for the trajectory to be thrown off by how someone feels about the project. Cause the probe to drift just slightly in another direction early in the trip and you may have ruined the whole mission. Probes that can steer themselves don’t have much fuel onboard for corrections; probes that can’t are screwed. In a world where we have so much physical influence (even just accidental), how could such a fragile endeavor ever be a success? How could we possibly defend it from ourselves?

As you keep asking yourself questions like these, eventually every known law gets crossed off the list of potential co-conspirators in attraction. It becomes clear that the Law of Attraction isn’t “a law just like gravity” — at least not at the Newtonian level. There’s just no room for its effects. For every physical law we know of there’s a machine out there that relies on its unwavering permanence. And these machines continue to work like clockwork, regardless of how we feel about or around them.

As usual I probably seem like I’m overthinking this, but I’m trying to make clear what a person demands of the universe when he supports even the weak law. To claim that “the Law of Attraction just works somehow” isn’t enough. It’s a big picture conclusion that ignores the dire small picture consequences.

Adherents typically solve these problems for themselves by appealing to quantum mysticism. They argue that the scope of our influence is at the quantum level rather than the Newtonian level. Somehow our intentions influence quantum probabilities, somehow causing the wave function to collapse in a configuration complementary to our intentions, somehow leading to a better likelihood of that new car appearing in our lives. Ambiguity galore.

New Age authors (the guiltiest perhaps being Deepak Chopra) have jumped onto this bandwagon in droves, and in thinking they have any business teaching quantum physics have done the public a great disservice. As scientists have repeatedly tried to explain, the bizarre quantum realm that they’re slowly coming to understand isn’t the reality that New Agers say is being uncovered. It just isn’t. The whole New Age conception of the quantum realm was borne from misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and massaging of findings to make them appear to conform to already held beliefs. And now that this mistaken view of quantum physics is rooted in people’s brains it’s going to be very hard to unroot because the true reality is so difficult to process. You can’t simply correct a person on what physicists have really discovered because it would take years of higher learning in the subject to start to grasp it.

But now I’m repeating criticisms that have been made about the Law of Attraction for years, so I think I’ll wrap things up.

There is a much, much simpler explanation for why the Law of Attraction is so incredibly convincing — one that when you finally digest it makes you wonder how you could have ever been so oblivious to it before. I hope to get to it in the near future.

In my experience the Law of Attraction comes in two flavors which I’ve started mentally referring to as the strong Law of Attraction and the weak Law of Attraction.

Adherents of the strong law claim that we’re gods who don’t know that we’re gods. We have unlimited power fettered by very limited understanding. Nothing stands in the way of having everything we could ever want, instantly and effortlessly, except our own minds. The universe never fails to give us exactly what we wish for at every moment, so our wishes must be the failing point.

Someone wanting to fly would only have to believe wholeheartedly that he could. Most people are convinced that human flight is impossible (or at least have deep-seated, unconquered doubts about it) and that belief produces our inability to fly. The double-edge of unlimited power is that you have unlimited ability to limit yourself — a god who believes he’s a man can only be a man until he believes something else. Every doubt and anxiety and fear is as much of a reality-shaper as every desire. It’s not a problem of not getting what you wish for; it’s a problem of an undisciplined mind consciously or unconsciously polluting and sabotaging every wish you make.

A few exemplary individuals in history (religious icons, many of them) have fully realized their divinity and taken the reins. They’ve ceased their self-defeat and mastered their personal power, rendering all things possible.

This is the strong law in a nutshell, and though you might think it’s just an extreme interpretation I’ve found it to be surprisingly common. As I recall this picture isn’t painted explicitly in The Secret, but they sure do seem to be trying to plant the seed.

The strong law borders on solipsism and shares its many flaws. What makes it especially unconvincing for me is that it seems to render human discovery impossible.

There was a point in history (more distant than most people think) when the world was assumed by all to be flat. The notion of the world as a free-floating orb never entered the minds of our earliest ancestors. Why would it? What reason would they have had to question something so transparent to the senses? Doubting the world’s flatness would be like doubting a heavy thing’s heaviness or a red thing’s redness — a philosophical exercise that cavemen didn’t have the leisure for.

So in a world filled with god-men who were in harmonious agreement that the world was flat, why didn’t the world resolve to actual flatness? They weren’t aware that the world could be anything but flat. There was no doubt, no fear, no confusion. For the Law of Attraction, there’s no better condition than single-mindedness of this magnitude. And yet roundness (something no one was desiring, at least until someone started to wonder what held everything up) is what we eventually found, in spite of all this.

What went wrong? To individuals with ultimate power, the difference between manifesting a flat Earth and a new car is trivial. How could a universally-held belief ever be proven false in a framework where belief governs reality?

And how in this framework could we make discoveries for which we have no expectations whatsoever? Since the Earth became round we’ve stumbled upon germs, quasars, tectonic plates, radios waves, quantum entanglement, dinosaurs, etc. Usually scientists see things coming, but certainly at least one world-changing thing has been discovered in the past for which there was no precedent and came as a complete surprise. What, if not human intention, conjured these things into existence?

Clearly this power of ours must be limited. In order for the Law of Attraction to be compatible with an objective, independent, pre-human reality (which our ability to discover things entirely new to us is an indicator of) there must be physical laws which remain untouched by it. Our creative influence must have boundaries.

Where the boundaries are drawn is the problem of the weak Law of Attraction, which is the subject of the next post.

One of the reasons for this is the route a person often takes when formulating a belief for which evidence is lacking. He’s already started on a backward path by deciding to believe something before the truth of it is sufficiently demonstrated, and he has to continue backwards when he tries to force the belief to fit into his understanding of the rest of the world. It’s a top-down approach — starting with the conclusion and seeking evidence that supports it. To believe it, ambiguities and elaborate excuses are needed to substitute for the undergirding that evidence normally provides.

This approach allows a lot of errors, contradictions, and gaping holes to go completely overlooked by the believer. His imagination is given a very tiny yard to play in. Because he’s already assumed that the phenomenon in question is true and that the world we live in today is the result of it being true, countless possible consequences of his belief that may very well invalidate it go unconsidered. His chain of reasoning can only arrive at the world as it is, when the belief may demand a different world entirely.

The popular description of God is an excellent example of a belief that suffers from backwards thinking. People start with a human being as their template (it being the only model of sentience they’re familiar with) and grant it superhuman knowledge, abilities, and influence. They ascribe emotions to it out of reflex, but why should a being lacking brain chemistry have anything like emotions in the first place? They say it exists outside of time and space, and yet they assume that it acts, communicates, thinks, creates — all necessarily temporal if not also spatial behaviors. Rather than envisioning true, alien divinity, they’ve merely dressed a man up as a god. The top-down approach has failed to reveal the extent to which this picture misses the mark because no other god but a conscious, personal, human-esque god was a viable endpoint.

Spinoza’s Ethics is one of my favorite works of philosophy because in it Spinoza begins with the universally accepted assumptions about God and meticulously carries the reader through to their logical consequences. He creates a deity from the ground up based on the qualities everyone says a deity should exhibit — infinitude, perfection, causelessness — and discovers that the result doesn’t resemble anyone’s conception of God much at all.

I recommend doing the very same. Forget about what the world looks like today. Start with a blank slate. Build the world from scratch as if the paranormal claim you’re evaluating had been true from the very beginning of time. What sort of society would it lead to? How would history have unfolded? Where would we all be today?

Constructing a completely accurate picture would be impossible, but you’ll find that problems with a claim — problems the top-down approach never would have led you to — will become obvious very early in the process. If the claim isn’t backed by reality, you’ll probably find that the world you fashion and the world we live in are two very different places.

Let’s try a quick exercise with one of the oldest paranormal claims in the book: the ability to see into the future.

Someone who could predict the future in an unambiguous, statistically significant, actionable way (which is the only kind of prescience that matters, really) shouldn’t find it too hard to verify his ability. He doesn’t have to be right all the time; he merely has to be on par with a financial analyst or a meteorologist. His tendency to yield accurate information much more often than not would give him all the validity he’d need.

So what would a world containing such people look like? Assuming they were rare, they’d be some of the most highly paid consultants around. They’d be hired by major corporations to get a peek at the nation-sweeping must-have products of tomorrow (especially those developed by their competitors). Insurance companies would use them to determine the approximate risk of major natural disasters in any given year and adjust their premiums accordingly. Disaster relief organizations would make additional preparations based on psychic forecasts just as they would in anticipation of hurricane seasons. World governments would be engaged in psychic arms races, clamoring over each other to gather the best of the best for remote reconnaissance. The entire political landscape would change with every politician carrying an oracle in his pocket. Decades of research (for which there would be an avalanche of funding) might even lead the scientific community to identify the precise mechanism by which foreknowledge is possible and replicate it technologically, giving the gift of prescience to all.

Our preliminary draft does contrast a bit with today’s world already. And we’re barely scratching the surface. Going all the way back to the dawn of civilization, you might find that the world should have taken a different course entirely. And this is without even touching on the harder problems of future sight, like determinism vs. free will, temporal paradoxes, etc.

Now let’s try another exercise. Let’s envision a world where the ability to predict the future doesn’t exist and never did. What would the world look like if fortune telling was all in our heads?

Well, it would look a lot like our world, actually. There’s nothing about a total absence of prescience that I can think of that would steer human society off of the course it’s already taken. The most glaring discrepancy might be the fact that people believe in it at all. Could a world devoid of psychic foresight produce such widespread belief in it in the first place? Could there be so much smoke without fire?

My first instinct might be to say no, but then I’m reminded of all the other things that millions of people have been dead wrong about like geocentrism, Martian canals, homeopathy, Zeus, and creationism. Poorly founded belief is neither rare nor difficult to sustain.

This experiment isn’t really a claim-buster all by itself since it leaves the door wide open for bias and wishful thinking; it’s just another handy tool for our toolboxes.

Reading science fiction, especially hard science fiction, is a good way to condition your brain to take a bottom-up approach to paranormal claims. Science fiction writers tackle a very similar problem: as the human race gains new capabilities, what sort of world can we expect to be ushered into? And these authors have to live up to standards of rigor and accuracy which are frankly nonexistent in the New Age section. Exposure to world-building of this caliber will make the holes in backward chains of reasoning stand out for you that much more.

However the idiom has a slightly different meaning for me. During the years I spent involved in New Age culture I picked up on an attitude that disturbed me a little more every year. The people I observed seemed to believe that as long as there were good intentions behind every action they took, they could do no harm.

This is ludicrous of course. I can attest to the emotional and financial harm I suffered at their hands, and I’m certainly not alone. Every day people are making life decisions spurred by the advice of self-deluded psychics, passing up needed medical attention for long-debunked alternative remedies, and tossing huge amounts of money down the drain chasing promises of ultimate power over one’s own deficient universe.

What makes these things especially frightening to me is that they so often lack any malice behind them.

The New Agers I’ve known have been some of the most caring and compassionate people I’ve ever met. Their hearts genuinely ached for the suffering endured by humankind. They exerted more energy in a day toward creating a more peaceful world than most people do in a month.

And yet most of them would fleece a person without hesitation. They had no qualms about charging one, two, three hundred dollars an hour to perform questionable spiritual services that they had no evidence for the efficacy for — over and above what the power of suggestion will yield. Seminars on the various “healing” techniques that one can become certified in (whatever that means) can easily cost you a thousand or more, and often these techniques are grounded not in empirical data but in the originator’s feelings and intuitions, pulled out of thin air.

I witnessed little or no concern from these folks that they were deceiving people or ripping them off. Somehow they just thought themselves immune to the possibility.

This contradiction of intention and action is something I’ve always had a dark fascination with. As the famous Steven Weinburg quote concludes, “…for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” This is just as true of alternative belief systems.

It’s interesting how people rationalize this sort of behavior, if at all.

Some of them see your money as God-given. They provide a godly service, and as a reward (or in “creative partnership”) God arranges for money to flow to them through you. The money becomes a divine endorsement for their legitimacy, so there’s no question of whether or not they deserve it; the more money they get out of you the better. If God grants them wealth it must mean they’ve done a lot of good for the world. Maybe if you were in a close partnership with God, you’d be wealthy too?

Some consider themselves humble messengers. They admittedly can’t prove that the knowledge they have to offer comes from ESP or cosmic intelligences, but they feel that they’ve been tasked to share it so they distribute it on a seemingly innocent “take it or leave it” basis. If you get something out of it, great, but if not that’s fine too. This approach doesn’t bother me if they don’t also present themselves as psychics and charge for their services. They want to be recognized as legitimate and compensated accordingly, but want to be exempt from the burden of validating their authenticity to earn that recognition. It’s a common cop out — when they’re right, they’re psychic; when they’re wrong, they’re just normal folk who make mistakes like you and me. To be fair, no one can perform perfectly in any job, but I have yet to find a psychic who’s correct to even a statistically interesting degree — though I found many who would happily accept my money.

And many are just naive. They’re taught something by someone who’s developed an air of authority and take it immediately as truth. They’re the blind that the blind are leading. They pay the hundreds of dollars an hour to learn a new skill and are assured that they too can make that kind of income teaching others. They eagerly set up their own little businesses, totally oblivious to the fact that they’re just new links in a chain of fraud.

It’s not a difficult line to cross. There was a point where I was on the verge of becoming an unwitting swindler myself. Thankfully I never quite had enough confidence in anything I learned to feel comfortable charging for it.

No one really thinks of himself as the villain; he is merely trying to better his universe with every choice he makes. Human history is brimming with atrocities that were conducted explicitly (and misguidedly) for the greater good. The agents of those atrocities were, in their own minds, well-meaning, and damage was inflicted on the world regardless.

Clearly it takes more than referencing one’s own intentions to determine whether or not an action will be harmful. “The road to Hell,” from my perspective, is the path of carnage one often leaves behind when he lets his intentions be his only compass. There’s no place in Heaven, allegorically speaking, for a good person with a legacy of destructive deeds.

We need not only to act, but to ensure that the results of our actions compliment our intentions. Kindliness and goodwill must be accompanied by this deep concern for ultimate outcomes. Otherwise it’s all for nothing.

If you’re a teacher of supernatural/spiritual beliefs and practices it’s extremely important that you keep asking yourself whether you truly offer something of substance. If you don’t, you’ll have to live with people like me floating in your wake who are justified in feeling deceived, manipulated, and stolen from. And your benevolence, though admirable, won’t make those wounds heal any faster.

Since a person is more inclined to trust and value the opinions of a spirit guide and consequently be more willing to make life decisions based on its advice, exposing a false guide is especially important.

Testing channeling and testing spirit guides go hand in hand. You need to establish that your channel is indeed authentic before the words of a spirit guide can hold any cosmic weight (and if you find such a channel let me know). But even if you already trust your channel and don’t feel compelled to go through the process of validating it, I implore you to take these simple steps with your guides just to see what sorts of results you get. Your findings, positive or negative, can only carry you closer to the truth.

A spirit guide knows you very well. Some of them have more insight into your inner and outer lives than any embodied person could. There are only so many questions you can ask an unfamiliar entity that you can reasonably expect it to know the answers to, but with a spirit guide you have a goldmine of testing opportunities.

One approach is to ask it for details about your day to day life. Think of it as just another person who spends a lot of time with you. Like an embodied person it has its own life and isn’t always present, so a question like “what was I doing at exactly 2:48pm last Tuesday?” wouldn’t be fair. Remember, we want to design a test that’s almost impossible for a made-up entity to pass, and almost impossible for the genuine article to fail.

Ideally you don’t want to make the answer to your question guessable. “Did I have waffles or cereal for breakfast this morning?” gives a fraudulent medium a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer. These odds are far too generous. Leave the question open-ended. Ask the entity for a description of a recent scene of its choice and see what it comes up with. Be very wary of a vague, ambiguous response, and try not to let yourself shrug and decide “well, that’s close enough” because you want so much for the guide to be real. There’s no reason the answer couldn’t be just as specific and accurate as one your mother or your best friend would give.

I checked in on you while you were at the grocery store yesterday. You were upset about your breakup with Allison and I came to provide emotional support. You were mumbling bitterly to yourself about her not returning the DVDs you loaned her. You walked past that ice cream your grandmother used to give you (against your mother’s wishes) to make you feel better. I nudged it into your awareness hoping you would put it in your cart, and you did…

A little snapshot of one minute of your week that the medium wasn’t around to see is all it would take. I would find the above extremely compelling if the medium didn’t know any of these details about my life. And it’s not a lot to ask for if the universe is as the medium says it is; it’s downright trivial.

If the medium claims that you can contact your guide telepathically (as is commonly believed) you don’t even have to go this far. You can simply send a message to the guide on the spot and ask it to repeat it through the medium. Telepathy may not be as precise as verbal communication, so you could even cut the guide a little slack here. If you pick a message that’s completely random and off topic and the medium still gets the gist of it, that’s an interesting piece of evidence. Make sure the medium can pass the test more than once.

In my own experience with spirit guide communication, I’ve had two reasons to be very suspicious. The first was that every time the medium channeled a guide for me, it was an entity I was being introduced to for the first time. Other people in the group I practiced with who had known the medium for years got messages constantly from guides they were familiar with. Because the group spent so much time discussing these messages between channelings, the medium came to learn the names of all these different guides without having to receive them psychically upon making contact. As an ongoing experiment I made it a point never to remind the medium of the names of my guides if I could help it. When messages came to me I didn’t want him to be able to just pull a name from his own memory.

As a result I ended up collecting a large number of one-shots who I never heard from again. Sometimes even a guide with a very important, long-term role would be replaced by a brand new guide a few months later, as if the medium had forgotten he had already filled that slot in my entourage. Unfortunately I wasn’t as gung-ho about testing mediums in those days so I didn’t delve deeper into this disparity, but it’s something to watch for.

The second thing that always nagged at me was the fact that I would never get messages from a guide I was familiar with through two separate mediums. Your guides are your guides; it shouldn’t matter which medium they speak through any more than it should matter whether a friend emails you or calls you. Alarm bells should be going off in your head if you’re maintaining a different circle of guides for every medium you work with, especially if those guides have overlapping roles.

I’ve only witnessed guides speaking to someone through a second medium on one occasion: during the Spiritualist workshop. And, surprise surprise, the names of those guides had been revealed to the Spiritualists at the message service the day before. I withheld the names of my guides and I was contacted by strangers yet again.

To hear a spirit guide start a conversation through one medium and finish it through another — without those mediums ever coming into contact with each other — could make for spectacular validation of the existence of these beings. And it should be a ridiculously easy feat. For a person who regularly interacts with a lot of mediums, this should happen on its own without encouragement.

If the mediums and the entities are genuine, why wouldn’t it?

If you’re currently under the counsel of the disembodied and are as frustrated as I was, this is an illuminating question to ask yourself.

There’s no question as to whether or not I had this experience. No one is in any position to argue that I’m mistaken about my experiences; in this matter I’m the final authority (whether my memory of them is still accurate or not). Experiences don’t require analysis or verification — you simply have them.

Experiences, however, are not necessarily coupled to events. It can’t be argued that I didn’t experience flying through space, but it can be argued very easily that this experience didn’t correspond to an actual, physical occurrence. Sure, many of my neurons were firing much as they would’ve if I’d really been spacebound, but it never happened in any way that someone else could have observed. What distinguishes an event is that it’s accessible to all, and in most discussions about experiences its their underlying events that are really being talked about.

In ancient times, there was little or no distinction between experiences and events. It was just assumed that an experience was the result of something that actually happened because the experience said so. It’s perfectly natural to trust experience since it’s through experience that we come to knowledge about events in the world, but it isn’t infallible by any stretch. Ancient people weren’t aware to what extent our experiences lie to us. They didn’t realize that our perceptual faculties, wonderful as they are, often deliver incomplete or false information. They didn’t know that we internally model the outside world instead of interacting with it directly. Except for scattered philosophers well ahead of the curve, people took everything pretty much at face value. If they experienced it, it happened, and it didn’t occur to them that it could be otherwise.

Unfortunately, with all the knowledge about brains and sensory organs we’ve collected since, much of today’s world still lives this way. A person worked up into a frenzy and flying high on endorphins in the midst of an exuberant televangelist’s sermon insists that the feeling is the result of a connection to a deity. A yogi feels a rush of warmth through his body during a workout and believes that some sort of intangible life force is actively being replenished within him. A ghost hunter, spurred by anticipation and adrenaline, feels an invisible presence when he walks into an old house. Someone suffering from sleep paralysis or night terrors makes claims of alien visitation or abduction. If they experienced it, it happened.

But we now understand that there’s a chemical component to experiences like these that needs to be examined. Supernatural or paranormal events are being assumed from the content of these experiences, but the chemistry tells a different and often much simpler story.

Glitches of perception are commonplace. They happen every day. Just last week I thought I spilled a few drops of juice and instantly a spot on the top of my bare foot felt cold. I knelt down to clean it up and found that I hadn’t spilled any at all. I expected an experience and my brain produced it, independent of an event. Try keeping a tally one day of how many times you feel or perceive something that turns out to be an illusion (even something insignificant) and the result might surprise you. In matters both cosmic and mundane, disparity between reality and perception is a regular occurrence.

Eventless experiences can also be generated artificially. Electrical stimulation has been used to elicit the experience of being detached from the body. Magnetic stimulation can create a sense of communion with the divine. And an assortment of substances can be bought from unsavory characters that will induce these experiences chemically.

What does this say about those times when a transcendent experience happens all by itself? Is there an external event to attribute it to? Or is it just another misfire on the part of marvelous but buggy cognitive machinery? It’s a very important question for us to consider.

When dealing with the supernatural, you should keep all of this in mind. Feelings, sensations, and impressions aren’t always the result of some external influence. The content of an experience doesn’t always correlate with the physical trigger for it. An experience may be extremely convincing, but it’s the job of experience to be convincing, and you have no defense besides your rationality when it tries to lead you astray. And it undoubtedly will.

I’d recommend reading up on neurotheology to find out about other discoveries made in this vein. The better you understand your own electrochemical workings, the better prepared you are to approach the great unknown.

For starters, the burden of proof lies squarely on this person’s shoulders. You aren’t on the defensive here; it isn’t your responsibility to disprove that there are unicorns on Tau Ceti. His attempts to slowly shift the burden onto you — a tactic that people making claims they can’t support often fall back on — shouldn’t be yielded to. When considering all the random, nonsensical statements you could possibly pull out of thin air right now, like “Genghis Khan was a Martian,” it becomes obvious that statements aren’t automatically true until proven false. Unless he can demonstrate to you why you should become a believer, the conversation is over before it began.

But let’s ignore the burden of proof for a minute and pretend that you now have a genuine dilemma: to believe or not to believe.

Fortunately, you don’t have to know a single thing about Tau Ceti or about unicorns to decide whether or not his claim has merit. Expertise in astronomy and unicorn physiology aren’t required, and arguing about them is actually the long road toward making your determination. All you have to do is analyze his chain of reasoning.

“So you’ve traveled to Tau Ceti before?” you might ask him. It’s a valid question; no one would be more justified in making this claim (especially so confidently) than someone who’s been there. Unsurprisingly, he replies that he hasn’t.

“Then you’ve read the reports of xenobiologists who’ve returned from an expedition there?” Admittedly I haven’t browsed the latest biology journals, but it’s probably safe to say his answer to this will also be, “No.”

“Then you’ve been observing the surface of the planet by telescope?” Since astronomers haven’t even been able to discern whether Tau Ceti has planets, again, a “no” is the likely response.

As you keep drilling down to uncover his reasoning for this belief, you may find that it isn’t at all compelling. Maybe he stumbled onto a website where “secrets NASA has been hiding are revealed!” Maybe he had a psychic vision of life under Tau Ceti. Maybe he was just told it was true by someone he trusted. The point is, if his chain of reasoning turns out to be inadequate then you know it would be inappropriate to adopt his belief without more evidence. You don’t have to counter his argument with facts about Tau Ceti and unicorns because his argument is insubstantial in the first place.

On pages 171-3 of a book that everyone interested in the supernatural should read right away, The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan does a much better job of describing such a scenario than I. An excerpt can also be found online: The Dragon in My Garage.

The line that stands out for me is: “Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?” In other words, of what value is a completely arbitrary belief? What distinguishes having a belief that possesses no real content from having no belief at all?

The average day-to-day claim you’ll hear in New Age circles won’t be quite so outlandish as these two, but it can be addressed the same way. This approach helps you quickly weed out the claims that have little to no basis — if their proponents don’t even know why they believe them, why should you join in?

We may be astonished someday to discover that there are unicorns on Tau Ceti and dragons in our garages. My goal here isn’t to assert that there aren’t; technically this claim would be equally baseless. But without evidence or reasoning, we do ourselves a great disservice to adopt any belief whatsoever about these things — even if they ultimately do exist, as counterintuitive as that might sometimes seem.

It’s been disturbing to me how few people I’ve encountered who found these questions pertinent.

The truth is, I am a big picture person. But you have to test the big picture with the small.

I never read the book nor cared much to, but the movie Sphere had a moment that perfectly illustrates the power of the small picture. If you’re bothered by having a movie from 1998 spoiled for you, now’s the time to stop reading.

The military discovers what appears to be a spaceship abandoned at the bottom of the ocean. It’s covered by centuries of coral growth, so it’s assumed that the ship is of alien origin because no human invention of the 17th century could possibly have been so advanced.

The people involved in this endeavor have been operating single-mindedly for weeks under this assumption until a team finally manages to explore its insides, and someone makes a discovery. Within one of the corridors is a container labeled on top with the words: “TRASH/BASURA”

A trash can — an object so commonplace and insignificant — has instantly transformed everything around it. The big picture is demolished by a minor, easily-neglected detail, forcing everyone to start almost from scratch. Now we’re dealing with a time machine.

I’m not saying that they were wrong in having a working assumption, but you can see that they would have been radically misled if they hadn’t investigated the mystery further. To form an accurate picture, an understanding spanning multiple levels was needed.

There’s a reason they say that the devil is in the details. The lurking minutiae that can potentially collapse a supernatural claim are very easily concealed behind abstraction and handwaving (often intentionally). The New Age section of your local bookstore is filled with shaky, sloppily constructed ideas that in their avoidance of the small picture have seduced millions, including me in years past. But when you start to inspect these ideas more closely, the cracks and holes in their foundations jump into view. As Bertrand Russel said, “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

No false claim can be entirely internally consistent; it’s just too much for a human brain to maintain. Only a claim backed by reality can hope to eventually have an answer to every niggling question. Thus, a rigorous attention to detail gives you an immediate advantage in evaluating a supernatural claim about the world, because a genuine claim is innately better able to hold up to scrutiny than a false claim. You just have to do the scrutinizing.

The big picture is unquestionably important, but a big picture that’s on the verge of falling apart — no matter how pretty a picture it is — is of little use in the end. Only after delving deeply into the particulars do you find out whether the claim as a whole is really worth your time. This is where claims that are fraudulent, delusional, or just poorly researched are made or broken.

The small picture without the big picture lacks context and meaning. The big picture without the small is tenuous and superficial.

It’s best to devote time to both before letting a new idea influence your view of the cosmos.

Unfortunately our beliefs only start out that way. As time goes by, many of our beliefs end up floating free of support unbeknownst to us. The reasoning changes out from under the belief or it’s forgotten entirely, but the belief still persists. Like the coyote in the cartoons we find ourselves mentally wandering right off a ledge and not falling until we finally look down.

A little algebra is the best way I can think of to illustrate this subtle and sneaky process.

Say you have the following equation needing a solution:

X + Y = Z

And it’s provided for you that X is 36 and Y is 64:

36 + 64 = Z

A quick calculation will reveal that Z is equal to 100. Problem solved.

36 + 64 = 100

Now suppose you find out you were mistaken about X and Y. You were given bad information about their values and must revisit the problem. So you insert the symbols X and Y back into the equation and are left with this:

X + Y = 100

There’s something wrong with this picture. X and Y added together may indeed total 100; we have no reason to doubt this possibility. A lot of numbers add up to 100 and this equation could still be perfectly accurate. But, not knowing X and Y, is it appropriate to have any preconception whatsoever about the value of Z? Or do we need to put the symbol Z back in its place and approach the equation from the very beginning, as if we had never solved it in the past?

The answer of course is that we have to start fresh. The mistake in reasoning is obvious when presented as a simple math problem. But when it comes to real life, everyday conclusion-making, we commit this error all the time.

For example, years ago I was interested in magnet therapy, which has become one of many billion dollar pseudoscientific New Age industries. You can find any number of explanations by proponents for why magnet therapy works, but the explanation that snared me had something to do with magnetic fields interacting with the iron in the blood and forcing the capillaries to gradually organize themselves into more efficient matrices or configurations, leading to better blood flow and thus better health all around. If you haven’t done any study on the matter it sounds vaguely plausible. It has the illusion of scientific authority which makes so many therapies in this vein financially successful.

I learned later that the iron in the body isn’t ferromagnetic — that is, it will be unaffected by magnetic fields, at least in any way that matters in this context. The truth of this becomes blatantly obvious when you consider an MRI exam. The magnetic fields an MRI scanner produces are stronger than any magnet used in magnet therapy by many, many magnitudes. To undergo an MRI you must be screened for anything metallic beforehand because it becomes a projectile when the machine is turned on. If the iron in the body could be at all affected by these therapeutic magnets, an MRI scan would be horrifically fatal.

So for a (mercifully) short time I was actually left with the belief that magnetic therapy works, but not for the reasons I first thought. But why did I retain this conclusion when the solution to my equation depended entirely on the truth of this particular variable? If I’d been presented with the MRI argument at the same time as the magnetic therapy argument, would I ever have had any reason to believe in magnetic therapy in the first place? Why did knowledge of the absence of ferromagnetism not instantly nullify my conclusion upon discovering it?

Our faulty human brains are the answer, and once again it’s something we have to stay vigilant about.

The brain is very susceptible to retaining unsupported beliefs out of habit. Deep cognitive grooves are cut by long-held beliefs that can’t always be filled in overnight. The mere lifespan of the belief has a way of masquerading as additional confirmation and support, in our perception. We can go on for years believing something one day simply because we believed it the day before, and for no other reason.

One of the best ways I can think of to test whether the chain leading to a belief is intact is to forget I believe it. Any given belief should be rediscoverable; if I woke up with with amnesia tomorrow I could still be led back to the belief in a natural, open-ended manner. If I had to learn math all over again I would find that, given X is 36 and Y is 64, Z would still equal 100.

If you discover a new fact that may alter a belief you have about the world, try rebuilding your belief from scratch. Recompile it, so to speak. See where the links in the chain lead. Ask yourself, “Given my current understanding of the world, is this the belief I would come to today if pondering it for the first time?” If your belief is solid and in line with your understanding, you’ll be led to the same place you were before. New information isn’t a threat to a solid belief, and if the belief isn’t solid, what good is it to you?

“What do I believe today?” is the question to ask yourself. Maybe the answer will match what you believed yesterday and maybe it won’t. If you’re genuinely interested in truth, either outcome is a step in a clearer direction.

For this sample test, we’ll assume that the entity doing the talking is located in the room and can independently perceive its audience (rather than seeing and hearing what the medium sees and hears). I believe this has been the case with every channeling I’ve attended, but the mechanics of mediumship will vary and you may encounter different scenarios.

First we need to establish that the information we’re receiving is really coming from an unseen entity and not from the medium himself. The value or prescience of this information isn’t important yet; we need to evaluate the channel itself before we start worrying about what comes through it. The degree of honesty and authority an entity demonstrates on a given subject is a judgment you’ll have to make over time, just as it is with any embodied person you meet.

You can devise a basic test for this one pretty easily. The entity can presumably wander the room, so all you have to do is ask it a question about something the medium can’t see. Write a message on a piece of paper obscured from view, making sure to check for reflective surfaces and the eyes of possible accomplices to keep things clean. If the entity can recite that message through the medium, then you have something impressive on your hands.

A long, unguessable message easily meets our criteria for weeding out false positives; now we have false negatives to deal with. If the test fails you’re just going to hear excuses for it, and if you inadvertently stack the deck against the entity they may be justified, so it’s important to ask the entity the following questions beforehand to prevent ambiguity:

1. Are you willing to participate in a quick test to confirm your presence?
2. Can you see the surface of the paper I’m about to write on?
3. Can you read aloud a message written in English?

If you receive something other than a solid “yes” to any of these questions, ask the medium if it would be possible to speak to another entity. Keep doing this with new entities until one comes along who’s eager to play the game, otherwise you probably won’t get anywhere. Trying to force a test will just work against you.

If the entity answers the first question affirmatively but has trouble with the others (e.g. it only sees through the medium’s eyes, or it doesn’t independently understand English and the medium’s brain somehow acts as a translator) then you at least have the opportunity to come up with a new test that’s more suitable.

And if you have the means, here’s a more complicated and potentially more interesting option. Seat the medium in a soundproof booth and sit outside the booth asking the entity questions. The entity should have no trouble hearing you — assuming the medium’s ears aren’t involved in the process — by situating itself outside the booth next to you. Record both sides of the conversation and play them back together. Do you get a coherent dialog as a result?

If the medium isn’t interested in participating in even a simple test, you have to start asking yourself if he has something to hide, or if he just doesn’t appreciate the need for an investigative approach. I’m not really sure which is worse, and you may be better off working with someone else either way. If the entity declines to cooperate and instead asks that you just have faith, well, the notion of faith in spiritual matters is, in my opinion, just a frighteningly effective tool for preserving the ambiguity needed to keep people believing in silly things (usually for someone else’s benefit). If the entity needs you to take a message to heart then granting you confirmation is the easiest and most effective way to make that happen. In a sane world, they would all be jumping at the chance. It just makes sense. Resort to faith at your own peril.

I should add that these tests don’t immediately confirm the presence of an entity. They only confirm that the medium can access information beyond the reach of his senses. The first test could conceivably be passed by a remote viewer, for instance. However, with more experience and more tests I think a separate entity would quickly become the simplest explanation. I’d devote more attention to this caveat but I don’t think you’ll find someone that tests this positively anyway. If you do, let me know.

Alert readers have probably asked themselves how a disembodied, immaterial being can be sensitive to material objects or even have a location in the first place. What exactly is it seeing and hearing with, and how could light and acoustics possibly be involved? And what does it mean to be somewhere in space and yet not occupy it? I’ve only come across a few unsatisfying answers from believers, and those are a subject for the future.

There are those who use their desires as an epistemological compass; whichever idea about the universe sounds the most appealing is deemed to be the most accurate. They judge the quality and validity of tests against their beliefs by whether or not the results give them the answers they want to hear. New information is evaluated on the basis of its alignment with the reality they favor rather than on its inherent strength or merit.

You’ve probably guessed that I don’t think such people really have much interest in truth, as vehemently as they claim to. What they’re after rather is one very specific and exclusive truth, and if it doesn’t hold up they’ll bolster it as needed.

But we can’t be too hard on them. I do this, you do this, and everyone else does this. The question is, how bad do we let ourselves get about it?

This is one of many cases where our neurology is working against us and a measure of self-discipline is required. Cognitive bias is an adversary that we never rid ourselves of. I know of no way to subdue it completely and still possess a human brain, but, life does get easier when we begin to gain some control over it.

The second approach — the appropriate approach — to truth seeking is to not care in the least what the answers to your questions will be. All possible realities should remain equally acceptable to you.

We’re eternal souls created by a divine intelligence? Great. We’re deterministic automata that will one day be reduced to fertilizer? Great. We’re self-aware nodes in a colossal computer simulation? Great. The universe is just the dream of a sleeping dragon and we’ll all blink out of existence when he wakes? Great. All great.

How you feel about any one of these realities should have nothing to do with your willingness to accept it as true, if that happens to be what all the evidence eventually points to. The moment you favor one over the other, you awaken that bias. You start to slip into the trap of overvaluing the information you like and undervaluing the information you don’t, and that’s a very bad place to be.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds. At first, it feels wrong to stop caring. A voice in the back of your head keeps saying, “If you stop caring, you’ll believe anything! You’ll be lead astray!” But you find that it’s the exact opposite that happens. You discover the beauty and purity of a bottom-up approach to knowledge rather than top-down. You allow your experiments to do what they were always meant to do: reveal, not confirm. You let conclusions naturally and neutrally form from evidence rather than looking for evidence that supports the most seductive conclusions. You stop putting the cart before the horse.

And it should be clear that desire adds no productive value to the acquisition of truth. Using an example above, if it’s true that I don’t have a soul, would my desire to have one influence its presence or lack thereof? Will I gain any extra eternalness by believing in it over someone who doesn’t? Desire can lead me to a belief that’s more comforting or uplifting, and if I was satisfied with false beliefs that would be fine. But to someone who sees veracity as worthwhile in its own right, desire seems to just create more problems than it solves and should probably be put aside in this endeavor.

In the future, try paying attention to how you come to your own beliefs while keeping these two approaches in mind. Be aware of how you assimilate new information that caters to your beliefs and desires versus information that doesn’t. Do you jump to conclusions before the evidence leads you there because the conclusions are indicative of a universe you prefer to live in? Do you dismiss evidence against your conclusions because you want to hold on to the universe they grant you? If so, what do you really gain from this?

You’ll be surprised how often you catch yourself doing it if you really watch for it.

Truth is discovered, not preordained.

I don’t have any more important message to convey with this blog than that one.

I’ll risk people skipping over it because I think this event deserves to have a detailed chronicle available online for anyone who might be considering going to it, or for anyone who’s doing a background check on the mediums that host it.

I recently attended a “Physical Phenomena Weekend” at the Roanoke Metaphysical Chapel to do a little research. The people in charge of the event, F. Reed Brown, Mike Perry, and Sandra Tedora, consider themselves to be among the carriers of the torch of the olden day Spiritualists, practicing and teaching various forms of mediumship through classes and workshops.

The weekend was devoted to demonstrating physical mediumship in particular, which is the discipline of evoking tangible, objectively-perceivable phenomena in the material world, such as the moving and levitating of objects, spirit manifestation, apports, etc. They explained that this is done using a substance called ectoplasm that we all have in our bodies (some more than others). This substance is somehow paradoxically physical and accessible to spirits. It is the ectoplasm that is manipulated by them, which indirectly generates the physical effects we were told we might observe.

Ectoplasm, they claimed, is highly photophobic. Even the light from a watch or a cell phone will send it forcibly back into the body of the medium and/or the other participants, causing injury or even death. Human touch when not anticipated can have the same effect. They told stories of mediums of yesteryear who fell victim to séances gone wrong due to negligence of this sort.

The protocol of this particular group was to engage in physical mediumship in almost total darkness. The windows were covered over and the doors were locked to prevent accidental intrusion. A single dimmable red light (much like those used when developing film) stood between us and blindness. Observers were instructed not to touch anything they saw and to stay away from the medium, who was sitting in a chair inside the cabinet, which was a six cubic foot metal frame with black curtains covering all four sides located at the end of the room. Assistants were stationed to the left and right of the cabinet to guard the medium, just in case.

The role of the observers was simply to add “energy” to the ritual. We were asked frequently to sing songs, give an om, or merely project positive thoughts or feelings onto the circle.

The two showcase events (the ones they charged extra for) are the only ones I’m going to recount in this exposition, as they were by far the most elaborate and the most representative of what these people are capable of. The first was a card writing circle, conducted by Sandra Tedora, and the second was a spirit guide communication circle, conducted by F. Reed Brown.

Card Writing

We were to expect in this first event, according to Sandra, to receive a card with a precipitated message from one or more entities in spirit. The term precipitation refers to the telekinetic, ectoplasmic transfer of physical pigment onto a surface to create an image. The spirit “paints” with it, so to speak.

We entered to find stacks of plain white index cards on a table in the center of the room. A woman and her daughter had been asked to look through the cards to confirm that they were indeed blank. The main lights were turned off and the red light turned on. The cards were passed around the circle, about ten to a person, and we were asked to hold them to our hearts to “magnetize” them. Presumably one of the cards a person held would return to him. While she had us sing a song in the darkness to energize the room, I took a pen from my pocket and covertly drew a line along the edge of my stack. Since there were about 20 personalized drawings to be done in very little time in a dark room that no one enters or leaves, receiving an illustrated card with one of my marks would be a very difficult thing to find a mundane explanation for.

Sandra walked around the room with a box to collect the cards in, and when she finished she dumped handfuls of markers and colored pencils into it and closed it up. The box was given to the same mother-daughter pair to hold during the precipitation process. The box didn’t leave their laps until the end.

She then went to her seat in front of the cabinet (the protection of which was not required for this ritual) and dropped into trance. She began speaking in a cutesy infantile voice as the spirit guide who was to perform the feat. Naturally, extracting and drawing with aerosolized marker ink takes a while, so a few other entities were given time to come through one by one while she worked. Sandra’s intonation changed drastically with each. She spoke to me as an erudite old New Englander gentleman named “Dr. Kent” who gave me advice so vague that I can’t remember it now.

When the entity reported that the cards were finished Sandra came out of trance and the main lights were turned back on. About fifteen minutes had passed. The mother-daughter pair were asked to open the box and begin passing cards around. Each card had the initials of the intended receiver written on it. According to the daughter, the box had been very active while the medium was channeling. She felt both movement and warmth inside. Unfortunately I wasn’t close enough to tell if it made any noise.

My card was a very amateurly drawn image of a hillside at sunset with the words, “Just beyond the Horizon lies your dreams!” The names “Dr. Kent” and “Red Cloud” were written there as well.

I quickly noticed three things.

First of all, it had no mark from my pen.

Second, the handwriting matched that on the card of the person sitting next to me, and looked very much like the handwriting on all of the cards framed in their bookstore from previous events.

Third, it was clearly not precipitated. Precipitated drawings — authenticity aside — are historically reported to look rather logically like airbrushings. Some have even said that the drawing surface itself becomes deeply permeated with coloration. On my card, however, every colored pencil line was broken by the texture of the paper. This broken pattern (which anyone who has ever drawn on paper in his life is familiar with) shouldn’t emerge through precipitation unless the intent was to perfectly simulate a picture drawn the conventional pencil-to-paper way, which seems to me like an incredibly counter-productive waste of time. Why create an image that looks specifically commonplace and unremarkable? Especially as a demonstration? In the corner you can even see that the pencil was down to the nub and the wood base was making contact with the card; in place of coloration there are faint gouges from the wood that become apparent when you hold the paper up to the light at a certain angle. I feel silly describing in detail what amounts to “a hand definitely drew this” but I need to be thorough.

I made sure to get a handful of cards from the box to help the medium check that no drawings were going to be thrown out by accident. I found a blank card with my pen mark, which isn’t an indicator of much, but it’s worth mentioning. When I handed the unused cards back to her I got a chance to look down into the box. I saw nothing but the deep pile of pencils and markers.

I left the circle and compared my card to the bookstore cards. The handwriting was exactly the same. If a single entity did create all of these cards, it isn’t outlandish for them to all exhibit the same handwriting — in a weird way it’s to be expected if you forget for a moment that she doesn’t have hands. But it was clear enough to me that someone at the church had drawn them in advance. I just needed proof of it.

I was sitting in my room moments later when proof serendipitously showed up. On the desk my roommate had left a note written to him by the manager at the church, Diane, indicating the time and location of a psychic reading he had scheduled.

The note matched my card unmistakably. So you don’t have to take my word for it, here are a few of the things that stood out:

The curves above the baseline are very angular with flat bottoms. Both jut out in the southwest direction.

The same precise attention is given to this shape.

Shoulders, in letters that have them, point narrowly to the northeast and rise well above the stem.

The eye is very narrow, sometimes disappearing, and the body points almost north.

The shoulder sometimes ends in a tiny loop around the stem rather than bouncing off of it (a little more obvious in the larger images).

Some people have specific letters (in this case the letter ‘n’) that they will routinely half-write, leaving the letter unreadable by itself.

There are many unique ways to draw any given letter, so letters that clearly don’t match can sometimes be more informative than letters that do, and I didn’t see any such letters. There were many line-for-line matches in the bookstore cards; unfortunately there was no way to get a sample.

I let a few other event goers in on what I’d discovered, but unsurprisingly they just shrugged it off. There’s rarely much interest in incriminating evidence in environments like this.

The box was originally taken around the room for collection with only the red light for illumination, and it was being held by the medium in a way that prevented someone from looking into it easily. If the prepared cards were already in the box from the beginning they would have easily gone unnoticed. The blank cards were used as misdirection.

I can only speculate on the source of the activity felt within it by the daughter. I wish it had been handed to me instead. A false bottom concealing a device underneath it would be plausible. Somehow chicanery seems more likely to me than a real entity rummaging around as a fake ritual took place around it.

Guide Communication

We took our seats for the second event and Reed Brown gave us an introductory lecture where we learned much of what I discussed at the beginning of this writing. Surprisingly he also spoke at length about mediumistic fraudulence — such as the use of cold reading — warning us to be wary and reminding us that true mediumship takes years of patience and devotion that not everyone is cut out for. He also talked about how long it took him to believe for himself that these phenomena are genuine, and about some of the measures he took over the years toward getting verification. I briefly found myself wondering if he could be different from all the frauds out there, which of course was the intended effect.

Following the lecture Reed directed the circle’s attention to a long metal cone left standing on the center table. It was a trumpet, a prop made famous by the early Spiritualists, used both for object levitation and for amplifying direct voice phenomena. He told us that he didn’t know if we were going to see anything happen that night or not, but he wanted to have a trumpet on hand just in case.

He then stepped into the cabinet and pulled the curtains closed. Sandra and Mike sat on either side to assist. We were instructed to sing to help Reed drop into trance. He soon began speaking in a comically squeaky, hyperactive voice. This was the entity, one of his spirit guides, who was to cue each person in the circle to receive a short message from the deceased or from a guide. As he went around the room each person would say, “I (name) give my love and light to the spirit manifestation.” The circle would respond with an om and an entity would begin speaking.

In most cases people seemed to recognize the entity by the name it introduced itself with. Family and friends often came through. Some of the recipients got very emotional. I wish I knew more about the relationships between these people and the mediums. I do know some of them have been attending the church for years, and that the mediums are already familiar with their family histories. Others, like me, had no prior contact with them. This whole portion of the event is beyond my ability to assess. I can say that the entities who spoke to me, Dr. Kent and Red Cloud, were entities I had never heard of before that night, and their advice to me was again highly one-size-fits-all. Each entity spoke at a different volume and with a different voice, except for the many Indian guides who all seemed to blend together. I was mildly impressed that Reed spoke as Dr. Kent using the same subtle accent used by Sandra.

When everyone had been attended to, the mood of the séance changed. The entity told us that our conditions were indeed suitable for creating a physical manifestation. A nervous excitement around the circle was becoming palpable. Some but not all of the remaining light streaming into the room was taken care of when the entity complained that there was too much, and the red light was lowered. We were asked to sing again to provide the energy needed, and toward the end of the song something finally appeared.

I should point out that I had made sure to get the best seat in the house, so I was only about five feet away from the cabinet. I could hear and localize the sounds coming from within the cabinet very well. The myriad of entities that came through all spoke from the same height — the height of the medium’s head when sitting in the chair. Just after mention of manifestation, I heard the medium’s chair creak and his ankles crack. His voice moved upward and forward. He was quite obviously standing. Leading up to the appearance itself, the direction and location of his voice became erratic. He was moving around and turning his head. He was preparing the next trick.

I should also mention that my night vision is topnotch. It’s a tricky thing to quantify, but I’m often surprised to catch people cautiously stumbling around in levels of darkness in which I can walk with total confidence. I can only take this séance as further evidence, because if the circle had seen what I saw they never would have reacted as they did.

My eyes had adjusted well enough that even the dimmed red light was enough to give me a clear view of what was going on at the entrance to the cabinet. Hidden from most of the circle by the center table, a clumsily placed leg with white fabric pressed against it momentarily parted the very bottom of the curtain and withdrew, and knowing what was about to happen I was struck with disbelief. After everything he had said about fraudulent mediums, I was genuinely shocked that Reed had the audacity to go all the way with this event. What followed was truly shameless.

The cabinet clearly — to my eyes — produced a hand with the white material draped over it. The curtain below the arm was being pinched closed from inside. Reed wiggled and swayed the cloth back and forth and Sandra said with mock surprise, “Look! It’s the spirit! Can you see the spirit?” and sounds of shock and excitement erupted from the circle. Jaws were hanging open. Some people had jumped to their feet. I mentally flashed to an image of children enthralled by a puppet show.

The hand quickly retreated back into the cabinet, and Sandra and Mike were asked to pick up the trumpet on the table, which hadn’t moved at all up to now. They each took one end and began to make a show of it twitching and jumping in their hands. They dropped it and picked it back up again. Everyone ooh’d and ahh’d. I’ll admit that I’m fuzzy on the details of this part. Shock had been replaced by disgust and I was cradling my head in my hand.

Once the activity had settled down Reed was ready to come out of trance. The circle sang another song to help him return. I didn’t pretend to join along — the time I would spend interacting with the mediums had officially ended. They opened the curtain and Reed, in his seat again, feigned being drained and oblivious. He groggily asked if anything had happened. After a time he cautiously pulled himself to his feet.

I noticed for the first time that he was conveniently dressed all in black.

Despite my disgruntlement I found myself appreciating just how much mileage they could get from such a simple and sloppily performed trick. No wonder it had to be so incredibly dark. A brief glimpse of a meager piece of cloth was just enough to trigger all those brains in the room to fill in all those hopeful details.

Closing Thoughts

The night prior to these séances, the mediums had held a “message service” where we each filled out a small piece of paper listing the names of the deceased or disembodied that we wished to contact with a question that we wanted them to answer. The mediums then gave quick readings using these cards. We didn’t see them look at the cards before destroying them — Mike even blindfolded himself on his turn at the podium. But these people are clearly not adverse to deceit, so it’s likely that they took advantage of the information we provided. For all I know the cards they were destroying were blank and the ones we filled out were being filed away for future use. Unfortunately I have no idea if anyone was spoken to by a familiar entity who was both unknown to the mediums and unrepresented on those cards. I can vouch that I listed no one on my card, and no entity I’ve ever heard of came through to me that weekend.

The following day I mulled over how these people have gotten away with this for so long. It didn’t shock me that they were fraudulent; frauds are not a rarity. But these people have a large camp, a large flock, and actually teach regular classes on mediumship — something they haven’t accomplished themselves, it would seem. Why risk this livelihood so carelessly with transparent, third-rate magic tricks? Why such lazy subterfuge?

I quickly realized this was a stupid question. They’ve been doing this a long time. It’s been demonstrated to them over and over that they don’t have to be vigilant. Most of the work will be done for them by the nature of the average human psyche. As long as there are people eager to believe something every church is guaranteed devoted followers, no matter how obvious the holes in its performances. As every con artist alive has discovered, credulity is an infinitely available and infinitely profitable resource.

For anyone who doesn’t know how this is done, I’ll reveal it ahead of time. The cane is attached to a platform on the ground that’s hidden under the carpet. At the top of the cane is another platform, hidden by his pants, which he’s sitting on. You can even see it bending under his weight in this photo.

The ideal test for a paranormal claim like this is about as obvious as it gets, which is why I’m using it as our first example. With other claims it can get much murkier.

For someone who’s truly floating, letting go of the cane should be the easiest thing in the world to do. If after dropping it he drifts down slowly or even comes crashing to the ground (revealing that there was no platform), an inexplicable marvel has been confirmed.

And for someone who’s faking it, tossing the cane aside should be the hardest thing in the world to do. There’d have to be more to the cane than meets the eye which dropping it (if possible) would expose.

A good illusionist will have a few tests that he’ll volunteer. For example, he might “prove” that he’s floating by making a show of taking his hand off the cane — mustering up enough focus, steadying the cane against his thigh, timidly letting go, and then grabbing it again as soon as the strain becomes too great. All misdirection of course. There’s nothing wrong with being suspicious of tests that have been prepared for you in advance.

My advice is not to settle for ambiguity and not to accept mysterious excuses. Go straight to the heart of it. Just make him drop the damn cane. It really can be that simple.

There’s no reason why someone who is both genuine and who wants you to know that he’s genuine wouldn’t graciously comply.

If he can’t do that for you, move on to the next claim. It’s safe to say that there are vastly more charlatans in the world than authentic mystics who behave like charlatans. Your time is better spent on someone else.

The desire to test is often misinterpreted as an attack. It’s seen as equivalent to the statement, “I don’t believe you.” But in my opinion you honor something immensely by testing it. You give it the chance to reveal its full glory to you and the rest of the world. You imbue it with the strength and weight it deserves. A well-designed test is never a threat to something that’s true, only to something that’s false.

By testing a claim — especially a claim of your own — you can only come to a better and more authentic understanding of it. This is only a problem when you’re more interested in what you want to be true than in what is true. If it’s the latter you value, testing is always a win-win.

I’ve often had people try to sell me on an idea, and after talking to them I discover that they haven’t really tested the idea at all. They simply trusted the source of it, or liked the sound of it, and that was enough for them. If that’s really all they want it’s not my place to criticize, but I eagerly await the day when I come upon a claim that has already been tested more thoroughly by the bearer of it than I would have done myself. Then I know I’m dealing with someone serious.

Test, test, test. It’s ok. Really. This is what science is all about.

I’ve tried to come up with various tests that will most effectively prevent ambiguous results. Ambiguity can create just enough mystery to lure people into believing things which they would have otherwise been unimpressed by. It leaves gaps for people to hide in who are still clinging to shaky ideologies. It’s where wishful thinking flourishes.

There are ambiguities that we’ll never be relieved of, but some are surprisingly easy to wipe out with a little worthwhile effort. Let’s focus for now on the easy stuff.

You can make some excellent progress by sticking to this simple principle:

Every test should be as easy as possible for a genuine participant to pass, and as hard as possible for a fraudulent participant to pass, simultaneously.

Say you’re confronted by a blind person who claims that he can see. How could you test his claim quickly and easily in a way that would remove ambiguity?

You could try asking him what color the sky is. Our guiding principle shows us, however, that this is a pretty useless test. It is indeed easy for a sighted person to pass, but it’s also easy for a blind person to pass. A blind person has probably learned that if the sun is beating down on him, blue is a very good guess. If not, it might be better to go with white. If tested at night, he knows he should answer black. There’s huge potential here for a false positive.

So instead you try asking him how many fingers you’re holding up. This is still extremely easy for a sighted person, but there’s only a 10% chance of a false positive. Or a 9% chance if you’re clever enough to consider not holding up any fingers at all.

We can still do much better. We want the chance of a false positive or a false negative to be astronomically low — effectively zero, in other words.

You might consider writing a word on a piece of paper and asking him to read it aloud. A false positive is now incredibly unlikely, but what about a false negative? Could the person be able to see, but unable to read? Could he be dyslexic and have trouble with certain words? Do you have really sloppy handwriting? There isn’t that much danger of a false negative here, but if you can improve the test even further it’s worth doing.

You could return to the finger counting game, but instead of counting them once, you make him count them ten separate times. Now the odds are even greater against a false positive than in the word test (one in 26 billion), and you won’t find many sighted people out there who can’t count to ten.

And none of these tests take more than a minute to do.

We could improve on them further; I just want to give you the gist of the process.

By following this principle you manage to weed out a great deal of the ambiguity that will haunt you later, while keeping things very easy for the person being tested so he has little reason to object. The attitude is more likely to be, “That’s all I have to do? Piece of cake!” rather than, “Why are you bothering me with all this?” You don’t want to chase away the people who actually have something to show you, if you can help it.

The process isn’t rigorous or scientific, but done well it can give you a solid idea of someone’s true abilities in a very short period of time. When the truth of someone’s claim could alter your whole understanding of the very universe — as most supernatural claims would — it seems crazy not to take these very simple steps on a regular basis.

In the future I’ll try to give examples of tests that I think work well for specific claims that I’ve run into. The first is coming up next.

This isn’t at all the case. I would love nothing more than to come upon a claim whose truth could be demonstrated clearly to me without needing to draw its persuasive power from my own biases and wishful thinking.

I just… haven’t. And it took a while to admit that to myself.

There’s an atheist website out there called “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” which points out that people make numerous, daily claims of God miraculously curing them of diseases like cancer (which sometimes goes into remission on its own), whereas there are never claims for miraculous recoveries of lost limbs (which never regenerate on their own).

The argument being made is that if all the illnesses being spontaneously cured in the world have in common the ability to heal without outside assistance, maybe there’s no reason to assume a deity is involved in the first place. God should find one miracle no more challenging than the other, and it’s doubtful that he just has less love for amputees.

I’ve gone through a similar dilemma. I’ve never seen or experienced a phenomenon that forced me to resort to the supernatural to find an explanation for it. Nor was it all that difficult to stumble upon some mundane explanations that worked just fine once I gave the phenomenon some serious thought and research. And the psychics and mediums I’ve met — being hypothetically genuine — shouldn’t have had any trouble providing something much more convincing. Having the abilities they claimed to have, a mind-blowing demonstration shouldn’t have been any more challenging for them than a mundane one. And if they had the intention of convincing me, why would they pick the mundane one?

The problem isn’t that I’m not open. The problem is that every claim I’ve come across requires me to turn a blind eye (or two) to become a believer. And I just can’t do that, nor should I have to. The great thing about truth is that it remains true when both eyes are open.

In any case, I’d like to offer an invitation to anyone out there with a psychic ability or access to some phenomenon to share it with me here. I sincerely do want to know what you’re capable of or what you’ve discovered. If there’s something out there for which blindness isn’t necessary, I’d love to know about it.

The ultimate purpose of this blog is to shed more light on the supernatural. Whatever that light reveals — positive or negative — is valuable and relevant. I’m not closed to the possibility that the positive is out there, but if I’ve only come across the negative and the neutral so far, then that’s what I must report.

If you have something that you’re sure will send me in a new direction, you’re more than welcome to contribute.

I just can’t promise belief in it. Without good reason, anyway.

It’s often said that a human being has dual channels that his understanding of the world comes through: the head and the heart. Some areas of life fall cleanly in the domain of one or the other, while other areas are warred over — sometimes causing unbearable inner turmoil. We’re told that we need to gradually learn which side of us should make which decisions and eventually a steady truce will form.

I think everyone would agree that this model is just an easy way of talking about something extremely complex, and the simplification comes at the cost of lost information, so we can’t take it too seriously.

There are eastern and esoteric belief systems which take the model a few steps further. They posit separate bodies that together compose a human being, such as the mental, emotional, and causal bodies beyond the physical. Good health in one of these bodies and bad health in another can cause a person to become unbalanced and skew his perceptions. For example an experience might be stripped of its true emotional or spiritual value because the mental body is too dominant and it muscles the experience into its own domain. This is something I’ve been accused of more than once.

I haven’t personally found the body model to be convincing at all. To me the model reeks of ancient people trying admirably to explain the oddities of human consciousness, but falling far short without the understanding of neurology that we’ve achieved in the last century. If you do some reading in ancient western philosophy you find similar theories that have become obsolete. The mind and the soul were for a time the exact same thing because the mind was too intangible to be anything but supernatural. Now the physical roots of the mind that neuroscience shows us are so hard to deny that most people would say the mind must be distinct from the soul, if they believe the soul exists at all.

In any case, I’ve found that logic is applied very easily in domains that people have tried to convince me logic has no place in, and I’ve found that you can often point out that people are indeed using logic on occasions when they’re convinced that they aren’t. I just wasn’t hitting this insurmountable boundary they spoke of.

I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that some forms of basic logic (pattern-recognition, association, categorization, etc.) are done preemptively — and often sloppily — by the brain without our conscious awareness. Those hidden processes inject an element of mystery that definitely arouses magical suspicions. I’ve spent years succumbing to them.

Further confusion, sadly, comes from many people defining logic as “stuff that sounds think-y.”

I didn’t want to dismiss the idea that there are other faculties, however, because I’d had many experiences in meditation where I felt detached from logic completely. I’m very aware of the problems that arise with using logic to justify the reliability of logic (or to justify the unreliability of logic), so if there were times where an alternative was more appropriate I sincerely wanted to know about it.

So I asked myself exactly where the boundaries of logic were drawn. I figured if I kept asking, “Can I use logic to assess this?” and ventured further and further with every affirmative, I’d finally push logic to its limit and discover what was on the other side.

Philosophers have already done this extensively and written volumes on it. But I was curious if I could find a boundary simple enough that anyone could understand it as easily as the head/heart model, unrigorous as it might be.

A few months ago it popped into my head. It was simple algebra.

We’ll represent any given experience as:

X

X is difficult to talk about because it’s pre-verbal. X is the experience in its direct, isolated, self-contained form. It’s the quale of it. When you stand facing a blank white wall, X is the whiteness you experience. When you hear the wind blow, X is the perception of the sound. When you touch a hot stove, X is the raw sensation.

Abstraction is, in my opinion, where logic enters the picture:

X = Y

Once we apply equivalence to any given experience, logic is at work. The experience of the white wall itself (X) is absolutely free of logic. It’s that place I visited during meditation. It’s a state of pure unabstracted being. But once I conclude from that experience that I’m currently facing a surface, and that surface is reflecting every wavelength of visible light, and I have eyes and a brain to receive and interpret that light, I’ve made a judgment about the experience (X = Y). When I conclude that the sound is made by moving air, along with making conclusions about what air is and what movement is and what I am in relation to it all, I’m using logic. Even when I label the burn from the hot stove as a bad feeling, I could argue that a degree of logic is at work. This is one of those cases where the brain is doing most of the work for me unconsciously; it’s piggybacking the unpleasant flavor of the experience onto the sensation before it reaches consciousness, because reasoning about it consciously would be way too slow to prevent damage to my hand.

So, in a simplistic way I think we’ve uncovered the boundary. It’s the appearance of the equal sign — the cognitive addition of information not actually embedded within a sensation itself. But the place beyond the boundary is a place we spend only an instant in for each experience we have.

This is clearly a very different picture than the one painted for me earlier where long, involved stretches of our lives are lived in logic-proof places — like being in love and communing with the divine. Of course I’d never advocate reducing these experiences down to nothing but cold logic, but to believe that logic isn’t even present in them is something you do at your own peril.

While I don’t disagree at all with this response, I think the word “evidence” can be problematic. It’s technically the right word to use, but in common language it conjures up images of CSI investigators and people in white lab coats. The word has physical, material connotations, so it immediately triggers protest from someone with a metaphysical stance. The true definition of the word accommodates both physical and rational convincers, and it’s perfectly appropriate to come to a belief through reason alone; many argue this is the only way one comes to a belief.

So what these people are asking for is simply a reason to believe.

This isn’t a lot to ask. In fact, this is demanded by me, you, and everyone else when introduced to a new idea.

Try as I might, I can’t think of a single occasion where something is ever believed without reason. The process of adopting the belief may happen so quickly and automatically that the reason for it never bubbles up into conscious awareness, or the belief may have a vast web of reasons behind it and a single one can’t be pinpointed. But a reason is always present. The birth of a belief always occurs on the effect side of the equation rather than the cause. It comes from somewhere; it’s a result.

So until someone shows otherwise, I feel comfortable making the following statement:

1. No one ever believes something without a reason.

The quality of a reason can vary a great deal. I can believe something because it has overwhelming evidence supporting it and zero evidence against it. I can believe something because it makes me feel good. I can believe something because my friend’s sister’s coworker remembers reading about it in the paper a few years ago. Good or bad, valid or invalid, these are all reasons to believe.

In other words:

2. Some reasons to believe something are better than others.

The truth of these two statements seems self-evident to me, or nearly so. They may come across as so elementary and obvious that they aren’t worth mentioning, but it’s when these things are forgotten that the trouble starts, and they’re forgotten often.

When you’re no longer aware of your reasons for a particular belief, that belief is at risk of turning into dogma. A belief you know the reasons for can be changed suddenly in the face of new and contradictory reasons. It remains open to future development or dissolution, as any belief should be. But a belief that you believe without knowing or remembering why can appear (falsely) to have an existence external to you. It can become something that you feel you can’t help but believe; believing it is outside of your control.

I can remember a lot of conversations I’ve had in the past about personal beliefs where this “reason-blindness” presented itself. My beliefs would be criticized for owing their existence to reason, because any one of the reasons in the chain could be weaker than I realized and would break under the stress of future information. I had no problem with this criticism because that’s exactly how belief should work. To me belief is merely a step beyond speculation. All beliefs are subject to change.

What was odd was that the arguers were apparently unaware that their own beliefs suffered the same affliction mine did. They often seemed to be genuinely ignorant of what happened in those moments between having the lack of the belief and having the belief. Not remembering their reasoning, the belief floated free of any sort of undergirding or support in their minds, which was ultimately what gave the belief its power. They were tricked into thinking that because of this independence the belief somehow transcended reason. Its own buoyancy would protect it from the danger of ever being cut down. It had become untouchable.

If it’s true that no one ever believes something without a reason, then we’ve identified an intellectual trap. Losing sight of their own reasoning rendered the foundations of their beliefs invisible and consequently frozen in time — in other words, dogmatic.

My point here is, if you have a belief that’s without reason, how do you even know you believe it? Again, it’s a simple notion, but often forgotten.

In my opinion, this is the boiled-down definition of a skeptic. Any human being (by default) needs a reason to believe something. A skeptic needs a good reason to believe something.

Which leads me to my third statement which is much harder to demonstrate the truth of and I’ll only be able to scratch the surface of it in future entries:

3. The quality of any given reason to believe something can be evaluated to a sufficient degree.

This is really the point where knowledge comes into the discussion. Belief graduates to knowledge when the reasons supporting it are sufficiently (a relative term) robust. Some would argue that all knowledge is really belief masquerading as something more concrete. Whether or not this is the case is the problem being tackled in the field of epistemology, and greater strides have been made in this effort than most people realize. I don’t claim to have a wholesale answer to this problem, but I can’t recommend doing some epistemology research highly enough. There are many resources out there relevant specifically to the contemporary forms of occultism, and I’ll post what I’ve found in time.

For hundreds of millennia, humans walked the earth knowing nothing about the outer frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio noise from the sun and the stars flitted all around us — passing through our very bodies — and we were not only unaware, we were unaware we were unaware. No obvious mysteries were produced by their existence. They were answers to questions that hadn’t yet been born. It wasn’t until the 19th century (seconds ago in human time) that radio waves were discovered and explained, and today they’re used ubiquitously. We can hardly imagine a world without them.

This is just one example of many. It’s safe to assume that there exist other life-changing, society-changing aspects of the physical world that are operating right here, right now, without leaving a single recognizable trace and without being found in a single theoretical framework. Until human understanding rises to a sufficient level, we’ll remain absolutely oblivious to them.

And there are the things that humans could never come to understand.

An ant colony functions as a single, purposeful entity, yet no individual ant has any awareness whatsoever of what it’s a part of, nor could it hope to. The ant simply doesn’t have the perceptual faculties for it. It’s a machine that adheres to a simple program, and when a thousand other ants are present these combined behaviors result in a whole that’s much smarter than the sum of its parts.

A human being is both an individual and a collection of individuals. Our cells are organisms that have become so specialized that most of them cannot live outside their special niches within the body. They’ve given up their obsolete autonomy, but are they really that different from bacteria and protozoa and diatoms? We are — quite literally — hives. Again, each type of cell has a set of rules to follow, and out of this incredible synergy, I emerge. This entry was written by none other than my billions of neurons, but any one of those neurons would need to have a few billion neurons of its own to begin to fathom the meaning.

From this you can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole that we ourselves comprise. I am a we, but are we also an I? Are we the equivalent of ants or neurons blindly orchestrating some cosmic endeavor that lies far, far outside our perceivable, conceivable realm? It’s a beautiful idea, but it’s unfortunately of little use. It isn’t necessarily true, and if it is true we’ll never find out.

It’s these questions — of the things we don’t know and of the things we can’t fully know — that led me to occultism. I thought reports of psychic and paranormal phenomena were the smoke from the fire of this mysterious side of existence that I hoped to understand. I bought into the idea that there were mystics and gurus who could help me to finally lift the veil. I was convinced that the secret knowledge was out there waiting to be claimed if I just did enough digging in the right places.

I’m not saying that mystics and gurus have nothing valuable to offer, but there is a problem with my early reverence of them that I originally failed to see.

Consider someone living in the days long before radio; we’ll call him Ogg. Ogg tells the rest of his tribe that he thinks there are invisible energies all around us. They aren’t magical, they can be understood, and one day people will use them to send messages to each other through the air. You won’t be able to see or hear the messages or even be aware of them at all without the help of special devices. People hundreds of miles away from each other will be able to have a conversation as if they were in the same room.

This is a very alien notion in Ogg’s time, and though he’s absolutely right, the rest of the tribe doesn’t believe a word of it.

The question is, should they?

It’s important to ascertain just how Ogg came to this conclusion. He has no technology sensitive to radio waves that could accidentally reveal their existence. He has no theoretical understanding of light which could lead him to believe there might be wavelengths of it outside the visible spectrum. He’s stretching well outside his empirical range, so to speak. Without a trace of evidence and without being fed this information by someone much more knowledgeable Ogg can only ultimately arrive at this conclusion by, well, guessing. This time, Ogg got lucky.

An arrival at a truth doesn’t necessarily validate the methodology through which that truth was attained. Even though Ogg was right, would it have been prudent for his tribe members to believe him? Suppose his neighbor comes up with a prediction that we know will be blatantly false. Without the glimpse into the future that we enjoy, what separates Ogg’s prediction from his neighbor’s? Why should the tribe listen to one and not the other? The often confusing answer is: it shouldn’t. The two predictions are actually on equal footing.

Likewise, imagine one neuron explaining to another neuron what a human being is. Should this “expert” neuron be taken seriously? Or could its description only be hopelessly and comically naive?

When evaluating teachers of the occult, or of any religion or philosophy, it’s very important to keep this all in mind. No matter how intelligent and knowledgeable they sound we know two things about them from the start: 1) they have only so many tools at their disposal to acquire this knowledge empirically, and 2) they are as seriously handicapped by their human form as we are. They may indeed be wise, but be very careful not to attribute superhuman awareness to them, especially right off the bat.

The next time someone shares a seductive new model of reality with you, remember that without solid evidence and without a solid rational basis, you may very well be listening to Ogg’s neighbor, rather than Ogg. And the next time someone tries to tell you how the cosmos really works, picture your neurons having a conversation about you. In my early New Age days I was too eager and hopeful to take these important evaluative steps. I was blinded by the burning desire to finally find the truth, so I believed my teachers had it because I wanted them to have it, not because they demonstrated it unequivocally. To my credit I can at least say that this happened less and less as years went by.

I hinted earlier that it was possible Ogg was relaying a truth rather than discovering it. After all, for anything in the universe that’s understandable there could exist a consciousness that understands it. There are many tribal people in the world today that have a basic understanding of how a radio works, but they didn’t come to that knowledge through their own efforts; they were taught by visiting anthropologists. Could Ogg have been told about radio waves by an entity more technologically advanced than the people populating the planet at the time, thus making his prediction viable? This is a common response in New Age circles to this sort of argument, and we’ll explore it in future entries.

For years I researched the supernatural and the paranormal. I tried my hand at tarot, automatic writing, reiki, astral projection, channeling, telekinesis, clairvoyance, animal communication, creative manifestation, and more. I sought information and instruction from more psychics than I can count. I spent thousands of dollars on books, classes, expos, seminars, and was even enrolled in an esoterically-oriented “Ph.D.” program before I realized the people running the school wouldn’t recognize a scholarly work if it bit them.

Some of these missteps are things I’m not especially proud of, but in a very roundabout way they helped to finally put me on a path of reason, and gave me the experiences one needs to truly see the necessity of a rigorous philosophical approach. Nothing reveals the power of faulty thinking more clearly than being a longtime casualty of it.

I do wish that I had found this path earlier, but looking back on my life I see that I had very few introductions to it. I had no critical thinking education whatsoever before college. My bachelor’s was in art, and, though many of the world’s most brilliant minds have been artists, the subject doesn’t require the reasoning abilities that disciplines like science and math do. Until I officially became a philosophy student, my only real exposure to critical thinking, sadly, came by my own independent study.

The rampant disinterest in such a fundamentally important skill throughout our society is very troubling to me. I felt compelled to contribute something, however small, in making its value known to the world. Intelligence alone won’t protect a person from seductive but ultimately baseless ideas as well as one might think. Sometimes it even makes him more vulnerable.

I fear that I’ll be primarily preaching to the choir with this blog, but I’m sure there must be people out there like me that just can’t shake their buried suspicions about what they’re being shown and taught. People who are tired of the obfuscation and the disappointment that one constantly endures when immersed in that world. My goal is to develop this blog into, simply, the resource that I wish I’d had all along. If you’re on the same path I was headed down, I hope that my collection of findings can save you some future grief.