Post by auntym on May 26, 2014 12:18:34 GMT -6
www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140523-seeing-into-the-future-why-we-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-discount-psychic-phenomena.ece
Why we shouldn’t be so quick to discount psychic phenomena
by Jeffrey J. Kripal
a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston
Published: 23 May 2014
Consider two impossible tales.
Scene 1. Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he relates the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were in port in St. Louis, the writer had a dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this — it was only a dream.”
Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him an overdose of opium for the pain. Normally the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised $60 to put Henry in a metal one. Henry was wearing one of Twain’s suits he had borrowed without Twain’s knowledge. And as Twain stood at the casket, an elderly lady laid on his breast a large bouquet of white roses, with a red rose in the middle.
Who would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it as a series of coincidences?
Twain could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they worked. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.”
He offered the essay to the North American Review on the condition that it be published anonymously. The magazine refused to do so. Finally, Twain published the article in Harper’s, in two installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript With a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).
Mental telegraphy. The technological metaphor points to Twain’s conviction that such events were connected to the acts of reading and writing. Indeed, he suspected that whatever processes this mental telegraphy involved had some relationship to the sources of his literary powers. The “manuscript with a history” of the first essay’s title refers to a detailed plotline for a story about some Nevada silver mines that one day came blazing into his mind. Twain came to believe that he had received this idea from a friend 3,000 miles away through mental telegraphy.
Scene 2. The American forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio’s book Beyond Knowing is filled with extraordinary stories of impossible things that routinely happen around death. Here is one such tale.
It began one night when Amatuzio encountered a troubled hospital chaplain, who asked her if she knew how they had found the body of a young man recently killed in a car accident. Amatuzio replied that her records showed that the Coon Rapids Police Department had recovered the body in a frozen creek bed at 4:45 a.m.
“No,” the man replied. “Do you know how they really found him?” The chaplain then explained how he had spoken with the dead man’s wife, who related a vivid dream she’d had that night of her husband standing next to her bed, apologizing and explaining that he had been in a car accident, and that his car was in a ditch where it could not be seen from the road. She awoke immediately, at 4:20, and called the police to tell them that her husband had been in a car accident not far from their home and that his car was in a ravine that could not be seen from the road. They recovered the body 20 minutes later.
Most scholars have no idea what to do with such poignant, powerful stories, other than to dismiss them with lazy words like anecdote or coincidence. Or perhaps we could study their textual histories and show that they are not as straightforward as they seem. That would be a relief.
As with the heads of Hercules’ Lernaean Hydra, with every story we so decapitate, three more, 3,000 more appear. We are swimming in a sea of such stories, if only we could recognize our situation. We do not know how many such stories there might be, much less what they might mean. We do not know because we have never really tried to find out. Why, after all, would we study something that does not exist? “Water?” the fish asks. “What’s water?”
It is worse than that, though. It is not just that we are told that such things, which happen all the time, cannot happen at all. It is that there are subtle, and not so subtle, punishments in place for those who take such events seriously — that is, for those who let the Hydra stand. These events violate something basic about our worldview and our established ways of knowing. That is why Amatuzio titled her book Beyond Knowing.
I have recounted two fairly straightforward, empirical cases, but the records are filled with more difficult, that is, more symbolic or outright mythical accounts whose strangeness would boggle even the most generous minds.
The early Victorian researchers had it right: They called dreams like these “veridical hallucinations,” or hallucinations corresponding to real events.
We are not very good at such paradoxical ways of thinking today. We tend to think of the imagined as imaginary. But something else is shining through, at least in these extreme cases. Somehow Twain’s dreaming imagination knew that his brother would be dead in a few weeks — it even knew what kind of bouquet would sit on his brother’s breathless chest. Similarly, the wife’s dream-vision knew that her husband had just been killed and where his body lay. In those events, words like imagined and real, subject and object, mental and material cease to have much meaning. And yet such words name the most basic structures of our knowing.
Or not knowing.
Both stories are about a kind of traumatic transcendence, a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering. Even these most basic “categories of the understanding,” as Immanuel Kant called them, surrender their reign before the needs of the human heart. Much as Kant argued, these appear to be our own cognitive filters, not some perfect reflection of what is really there, or, dare I add, of what we are really capable.
CONTINUE READING: www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140523-seeing-into-the-future-why-we-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-discount-psychic-phenomena.ece
Why we shouldn’t be so quick to discount psychic phenomena
by Jeffrey J. Kripal
a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston
Published: 23 May 2014
Consider two impossible tales.
Scene 1. Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he relates the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were in port in St. Louis, the writer had a dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this — it was only a dream.”
Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him an overdose of opium for the pain. Normally the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised $60 to put Henry in a metal one. Henry was wearing one of Twain’s suits he had borrowed without Twain’s knowledge. And as Twain stood at the casket, an elderly lady laid on his breast a large bouquet of white roses, with a red rose in the middle.
Who would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it as a series of coincidences?
Twain could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they worked. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.”
He offered the essay to the North American Review on the condition that it be published anonymously. The magazine refused to do so. Finally, Twain published the article in Harper’s, in two installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript With a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).
Mental telegraphy. The technological metaphor points to Twain’s conviction that such events were connected to the acts of reading and writing. Indeed, he suspected that whatever processes this mental telegraphy involved had some relationship to the sources of his literary powers. The “manuscript with a history” of the first essay’s title refers to a detailed plotline for a story about some Nevada silver mines that one day came blazing into his mind. Twain came to believe that he had received this idea from a friend 3,000 miles away through mental telegraphy.
Scene 2. The American forensic pathologist Janis Amatuzio’s book Beyond Knowing is filled with extraordinary stories of impossible things that routinely happen around death. Here is one such tale.
It began one night when Amatuzio encountered a troubled hospital chaplain, who asked her if she knew how they had found the body of a young man recently killed in a car accident. Amatuzio replied that her records showed that the Coon Rapids Police Department had recovered the body in a frozen creek bed at 4:45 a.m.
“No,” the man replied. “Do you know how they really found him?” The chaplain then explained how he had spoken with the dead man’s wife, who related a vivid dream she’d had that night of her husband standing next to her bed, apologizing and explaining that he had been in a car accident, and that his car was in a ditch where it could not be seen from the road. She awoke immediately, at 4:20, and called the police to tell them that her husband had been in a car accident not far from their home and that his car was in a ravine that could not be seen from the road. They recovered the body 20 minutes later.
Most scholars have no idea what to do with such poignant, powerful stories, other than to dismiss them with lazy words like anecdote or coincidence. Or perhaps we could study their textual histories and show that they are not as straightforward as they seem. That would be a relief.
As with the heads of Hercules’ Lernaean Hydra, with every story we so decapitate, three more, 3,000 more appear. We are swimming in a sea of such stories, if only we could recognize our situation. We do not know how many such stories there might be, much less what they might mean. We do not know because we have never really tried to find out. Why, after all, would we study something that does not exist? “Water?” the fish asks. “What’s water?”
It is worse than that, though. It is not just that we are told that such things, which happen all the time, cannot happen at all. It is that there are subtle, and not so subtle, punishments in place for those who take such events seriously — that is, for those who let the Hydra stand. These events violate something basic about our worldview and our established ways of knowing. That is why Amatuzio titled her book Beyond Knowing.
I have recounted two fairly straightforward, empirical cases, but the records are filled with more difficult, that is, more symbolic or outright mythical accounts whose strangeness would boggle even the most generous minds.
The early Victorian researchers had it right: They called dreams like these “veridical hallucinations,” or hallucinations corresponding to real events.
We are not very good at such paradoxical ways of thinking today. We tend to think of the imagined as imaginary. But something else is shining through, at least in these extreme cases. Somehow Twain’s dreaming imagination knew that his brother would be dead in a few weeks — it even knew what kind of bouquet would sit on his brother’s breathless chest. Similarly, the wife’s dream-vision knew that her husband had just been killed and where his body lay. In those events, words like imagined and real, subject and object, mental and material cease to have much meaning. And yet such words name the most basic structures of our knowing.
Or not knowing.
Both stories are about a kind of traumatic transcendence, a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering. Even these most basic “categories of the understanding,” as Immanuel Kant called them, surrender their reign before the needs of the human heart. Much as Kant argued, these appear to be our own cognitive filters, not some perfect reflection of what is really there, or, dare I add, of what we are really capable.
CONTINUE READING: www.dallasnews.com/opinion/sunday-commentary/20140523-seeing-into-the-future-why-we-shouldnt-be-so-quick-to-discount-psychic-phenomena.ece