Fringe-ology (35 page)

His dream mirrored the classic peak meditative experience, which he described as “the total absence of any sense of self, and a sudden, joyful connection to everyone and everything.”

Over time, said LaBerge, he had come to see the dream as, perhaps, a “metaphor for what happens when we die. When the drop of water, as it were, realizes its true identity as part of the ocean.”

At another juncture, LaBerge sat by quietly as his assistant and friend, Keelin, shared an incredible story about healing herself in a lucid dream. She was struggling, in real life, with excessive menstrual bleeding. Her doctor was advising her to have a hysterectomy. Your
uterus
is tilted, she was told. But after this diagnosis, Keelin habitually misspoke, telling her friends: “My
universe
is tilted.”

She didn't want to have a hysterectomy, but she feared she would have no choice. And she was reaching the stage at which circumstances would force a decision. Then she had a lucid dream in which she was able to reach directly inside her body and heal herself. It was an energizing dream that made her feel as if she had personally done everything she could to avoid the hysterectomy. But the crazy thing was, after the dream, her excessive bleeding stopped. Immediately. And it never came back.

As she put it to me, “That's not science, I understand, but—”

Yes, but . . . what shall we do?

I mean, we live in a world where we
have
to define this sort of thing, don't we, as nonsense or reality? If an event like this isn't science, shouldn't it be disregarded entirely?

The answer LaBerge's entire career suggests is, in a word,
no.
We don't have to make the choice that popular culture gives us; we don't have to choose one and dispense with the other. This is not a world of binary opposites. We just live that way. We could, in fact, choose to believe what Keelin's experience is telling us: that there is more to this world than we know. And then, it seems, the most rational response might be to
explore
it—to see if the events she described could really be so.

The problem is, in this culture, when a claim carries the whiff of hoo ha, too much of the intelligentsia goes running for the hills. And on the opposite pole, when a scientific finding seems to undercut our spiritual belief, we dismiss it—that is, if we even bother to read it. “We live in a world in which there are a lot of extremes offered,” LaBerge said, summing up the current culture wars. “The view of many modern neuroscientists is that the subjective experience of consciousness, is what they call an epiphenomenon, or product, of brain function, and therefore scientifically unimportant. But then I've also met Tibetan Buddhists who think the brain's only function is to keep our ears apart.”

We all laughed. But LaBerge kept going.

“I recommend,” he said, “
balance
in these matters.”

The thing is, balance can be so hard to come by.

To the media, balance is best maintained by gathering the most extreme combatants, wielding the most far-flung opinions, to debate. The result, nearly always, is a shrill argument in which the truth seems to lie, tantalizing and undiscovered, somewhere between two self-serving accounts. And among the most strident of believers and atheists, there is no balance at all—only right and wrong, the heretics and the saved, the intelligent and the foolish.

LaBerge captured this dynamic most thoroughly, inadvertently, with the aid of a prop.

Standing up from his chair in the front of the room, he retrieved a mask bearing the face of the devil: big fat tongue, blood red skin, menacing expression—the whole deal. LaBerge held it to himself tightly and smiled. This tableau was already dreamlike, the barefoot scientist and the devil, but he was just getting started.

He told us the story of one of his own dreams, in which he confronted an ogre. He was lucid, and he knew the creature could not harm him. But still, he backed away. The beast was smelly, so rank he could barely go near it.

From where
, he wondered,
in the recesses of my own self, did this awful creature emerge?

This question was the source of his curiosity, the thought that enabled him to get past his own reluctance and advance toward the ogre. The smell, at first, was still overpowering. But he forced himself up closer to the animal. And he resolved to accept this ogre, to accept its ugliness and its odor as part of himself. And magically, as in the way of dreams, the ogre simply
melted into him
. LaBerge awoke then and felt—great.

“Dreams are often about this sense of feeling fragmented,” LaBerge said, “about taking the parts of ourselves we consciously hide and integrating them. Such dreams are about acceptance.”

In this dream, the things LaBerge hides had manifested in the noxious form of an ogre. I was surprised when LaBerge, as he finished this story, suddenly shifted his gaze toward me. But then he explained how his dream revealed the substance of my own dream, in which I dropped through a series of Monopoly boards on my way to hell.

The holes I passed through, he said, those symbolized the concept of wholeness, of integration. And as for HELL, the word that stood between the little man on my last board and the wholeness waiting for him in the center? “If you take this interpretation,” said LaBerge, “hell is this sensation of not feeling integrated; hell is this sense of not feeling whole.”

In this view, the act at the end, of
accepting
my foundation, was like LaBerge absorbing his ogre. No wonder, when I did it, I felt plugged back in.

A lot became clear to me then. Because LaBerge's dream analysis does a pretty neat job, not only of explaining one function of dreaming as a tool for psychological healing, but also as a metaphor, explaining our society's current relationship to the paranormal.

We are not integrated. We are carved into tribes, believers and unbelievers. And as a society, I think, we will persist in a kind of hell—a hell of separateness—if we do not understand what it is we've done to each other.

The saved and the damned.

Muslims and infidels.

Brights and dulls.

The rationalists and materialists, lined up against the dark forces of “superstition.”

And where do these divisions get us? No closer to one another, certainly, and no closer to any real answers.

Instead, we demonize each other, putting the equivalent of devil masks on our foes. But in the case of science and spirituality, these seeming opposites might yet converge. We can even
see
them come together, in Andrew Newberg or Stephen LaBerge—two researchers who used the tools of modern science to verify the experiences mystics had been reporting for millennia. And in each case what they found as a guiding principle was not division—but
connection
.

The question is whether or not we're prepared to accept these findings, to accept a world in which religion and science don't have to clutch at each other's throats. The question is whether or not we're prepared to accept a world in which science and spirituality really do serve each other.

The Big Ghost, of course, hovering at the back of this entire discussion, is God. Human beings are always fighting about which version of God to worship, or whether any God exists at all. But it seems to me we are only likely to find answers about the nature of the universe, or the possibility of a creator,
if we look
. And we can't do that in any meaningful way if our only commitment is to the answers we've presupposed.

At this book's outset, I mentioned the noted atheist Sam Harris, whose words I find instructive here, as they speak to the kind of opportunity we now hold, in the advancement of science, and the contribution it can make to human spirituality.

“For millennia,” writes Harris, “contemplatives have known that ordinary people can divest themselves of the feeling that they call ‘I' and thereby relinquish the sense that they are separate from the rest of the universe. This phenomenon, which has been reported by practitioners in many spiritual traditions, is supported by a wealth of evidence—neuroscientific, philosophical, and introspective. Such experiences are ‘spiritual' or ‘mystical,' for want of better words, in that they are relatively rare (unnecessarily so), significant (in that they uncover genuine facts about the world), and personally transformative. They also reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the rest of the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity. . . . A truly rational approach to this dimension of our lives would allow us to explore the heights of our subjectivity with an open mind, while shedding the provincialism and dogmatism of our religious traditions in favor of free and rigorous inquiry.”

I'd add to this that such an approach is only possible if the materialists among us let go of their own dogma, too, and stop snickering at the paranormal, stop snickering at the possibility that God, or something like Him, might crop up in this search. I realize how difficult it is to make these kinds of shifts—for Pat Robertson to start thinking of his Bible as a collection of books in need of further editing. Or for Richard Dawkins to act on his intellectual understanding—that science might one day yield up evidence of all he can't believe. For some, these shifts may prove too great. But the opportunity lies before us just the same. The war is over, if we want it, and what we get in return is each other. What we get in return is the thrill of a “free and rigorous” inquiry into the true nature of reality—and what it means to be human.

When my time in Hawaii was over, and LaBerge's final lecture ended, the devil mask lay out in full view, for everyone to see—and a party started. The workshop participants slowly passed around beer and wine. And I ultimately joined them. But before I did, I walked outside, over the grass and into the dark.

The night sky at Kalani was forever painted with stars—magisterial and immense—and I lingered there for a time. And, I must confess, I thought about the Family Ghost.

That strange family story, which had come to be a mark of embarrassment for me in some circles, had set me on this search. But standing there, seeing every distant point of light look so incredibly near, I realized that I no longer cared if I had been set on this course by a fateful spirit—or faulty plumbing. Because down through the millennia, from the first time one of our ancestors started looking for answers in the movement of the stars, or the cracks in a turtle's shell, whatever it is that we call paranormal, whatever it is that so confounds us—real or imagined, measurable or not—isn't banging on the roof and walls, trying to get in. Whatever has been making all this noise, is already here. And as I'd learned from my own search, there are ways we can access all this for ourselves—to uncover whatever truths we might find, to enjoy whatever peace we can attain.

I sat in the grass for a while, watching the stars, and enjoyed my own private celebration. Then I went upstairs, to the party that had been going on without me.

A note from the author:
Sources are listed in order of appearance within each chapter. In instances where the source is found online, I listed the most recent date that I accessed the site in question. Personal interviews conducted by the author are simply listed as “interview.”

INTRODUCTION

Richard Dawkins, “Time to Stand Up,”
A Devil's Chaplain,
(Mariner Books, 2003): 156–161.

Interview, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, with Jeffrey Goldberg, accessed October 24, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/08/hitchens-talks-to-goldberg-about-cancer-and-god/61072/

Rodney King, May 1, 1992, accessed October 24, 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgiR04ey7-M

Author's note:
The Lou Gentile material comes from reporting I did in June–July 2006.

“Ghost Sightings Highest in 25 years,” no author given,
Telegraph,
April 26, 2010, accessed October 25, 2010, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7631387/Ghost-sightings-highest-in-25-years.html

Michael Sheridan, “Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower Covered Up UFO Sighting in England, Letter Claims,”
New York Daily News
, August 5, 2010, accessed October 25, 2010, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/08/05/2010–08–05_winston_churchill_dwight_d_eisenhower_covered_up_ufo_sighting_in_england_letter_.html

Nigel Watson, “ ‘UFO Hacker' Tells What He Found,”
Wired
, June 21, 2006, accessed August 6, 2010, http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2006/06/71182

Joy Basi, “Taxi Drivers and Ghost,”
Solomon Times
, October 14, 2008.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/supernatural

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paranormal

http://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/paranormal

http://unabridged.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/unabridged?va=paranormal&x=15&y=4

Irving Kirsch, “Specifying Nonspecifics: Psychological Mechanisms of Placebo Effects,” in
The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration
(Harvard Univ. Press, 1997): 166–80.

Margaret Kemeny et al., “Placebo Response in Asthma: A Robust and Objective Phenomenon,”
Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology
119, no. 6 (June 2007): 1375–81.

Steve Silberman, “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why,”
Wired
, August 24, 2009, accessed October 25, 2010, http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17–09/ff_placebo_effect

Robert Carroll, “hypnosis,”
The Skeptic's Dictionary
, accessed October 25, 2010, http://www.skepdic.com/hypnosis.html

Laurence Armand French, “The False Memory Syndrome: Clinical/Legal Issues for the Prosecution,”
Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology
11, no. 2 (1996): 38–41. (For anyone who is interested, this French article is a brief, solid, and far more balanced primer than
The Skeptic's Dictionary
on the difficulties in assessing recovered memories.)

A. M. Cyna, “Hypnosis for Pain Relief in Labour and Childbirth: A Systematic Review,
”
British
Journal of Anaesthesia
93, no. 4 (2004): 505–11.

Steven Gurgevich, “Clinical Hypnosis and Surgery,”
Alternative Medicine Alert
6, no. 10 (October 2003): 109–20.

Guy H. Montgomery et al.,
“
The Effectiveness of Adjunctive Hypnosis with Surgical Patients: A Meta-Analysis,”
Anesthesia and Analgesia
94, no. 6 (June 2002): 1639–45.

Jeff Hughes, “Occultism and the Atom: The Curious Story of Isotopes,”
Physics World
(September 2003): 31–35.

David Millett, “Hans Berger: From Psychic Energy to the EEG,”
Perspectives in Biology and Medicine
44, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 522–42.

I recommend a couple of articles I found on the incredible skepticism leveled at the inventions of the lightbulb and the airplane—both of which in their day were treated almost as harshly as paranormal claims.

A. Gelyi, “A Short History of Incandescence Lamps,”
Telegraphic Journal and Electrical Review
(February 14, 1885): 139–40.

Simon Newcomb, “Is the Airship Coming?”
McClure's
17, no. 5 (September 1901): 432–35.

Plato,
The Republic
, ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 2005): 297–326.

Ward Hill Lamon,
Recollections of Abraham Lincoln
, 1847–1865, ed. Dorothy Lamon Teillard (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1911): 114–18.

Author's note:
For a skeptical take on Lincoln's seeing it coming, see Joe Nickell, “Paranormal Lincoln,”
Skeptical Inquirer
23, no. 3 (May/June 1999), accessed August 7, 2010, http://www.csicop.org/si/show/paranormal_lincoln/

Colin Ross et al., “Paranormal Experiences in the General Population,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
180, no. 11 (1992): 357–61.

Angela Joiner, “Possible UFO Sighting,”
Stephenville Empire-Tribune
, January 10, 2008, p. 1.

Skip Hollandsworth, “The Searcher,”
Texas Monthly
(April 2008), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.texasmonthly.com/preview/2008–04–01/letterfromstephenville

John Horgan,
The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
(Broadway Books, 1997).

“What Is the Universe Made Of?”
Universe 101, Our Universe
, NASA web site, accessed October 26, 2010, http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_matter.html

Avshalom Elitzur, ed.,
Quo Vadis Quantum Mechanics
(Springer, 2005): 73–82.

Karl Pribram,
Languages of the Brain
(Brooks/Cole, 1977).

Author's note:
Pribram has focused on the hologram as an explanation for human consciousness, particularly memory storage.

David Bohm,
Wholeness and the Implicate Order
(Routledge Classics, 1980).

Albert Einstein, personal letter, quoted by Freeman Dyson in
Disturbing the Universe
(Basic Books, 1981), 187–93.

Brian Greene,
Fabric of the Cosmos
(Vintage, 2004), 127–42.

Zeeya Merali, “Back from the Future,”
Discover
, accessed October 26, 2010, http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future

For further reading: A full selection of Tollaksen's work is available online, accessed September 1, 2010, http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+tollaksen/0/1/0/all/0/1

Author's note:
The following selection of articles and book references is intended to provide readers with a fairly comprehensive overview of the roles the amygdala and other brain structures play in the automatic processing of information and also in the construction and defense of our beliefs. I incorporated interview material with Dr. Andrew Newberg (covered in chapter 7).

M. P. Ewbank, “The Interaction Between Gaze and Facial Expression in the Amygdala and Extended Amygdala Is Modulated by Anxiety,”
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
(July 7, 2010), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/
P.M.
C2906373/

H. J. van Marle et al., “Enhanced Resting-State Connectivity of Amygdala in the Immediate Aftermath of Acute Psychological Stress,”
Neuroimage
53, no. 1 (October 2010): 348–54.

L. M. Shin, “The Neurocircuitry of Fear, Stress, and Anxiety Disorders,”
Neuropsychopharmacology
35, no. 1 (January 2010): 169–91.

M. Browning et al., “The Modification of Attentional Bias to Emotional Information: A Review of the Techniques, Mechanisms, and Relevance to Emotional Disorders,”
Cognitive Affective Behavioral Neuroscience
10, no. 1 (2010): 8–20.

T. Lidaka, “Forming a Negative Impression of Another Person Correlates with Activation in Medial Prefrontal Cortex and Amygdala,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
(August. 6, 2010): DOI: 10.1093/scan/nsq0722010.

S. Wiethoff, “Response and Habituation of the Amygdala During Processing of Emotional Prosody,”
Neuroreport
20, no. 15 (October 7, 2009): 1356–60.

D. Wildgruber et al., “Cerebral Processing of Linguistic and Emotional Prosody: fMRI Studies,”
Progress in Brain Research
156 (2006): 249–68.

A. Marchewka et al., “Grey-Matter Differences Related to True and False Recognition of Emotionally Charged Stimuli—A Voxel Based Morphometry Study,”
Neurobiology of Learning and Memory
92, no. 1 (July 2009): 99–105.

A. J. Calder et al., “Neuropsychology of Fear and Loathing,”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience
2 (May 2001): 352–63.

N. O. Rule et al., “Voting Behavior Is Reflected in Amygdala Response Across Cultures,”
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
5, nos. 2–3 (June 2010): 349–55.

J. B. Freeman et al., “The Neural Origins of Superficial and Individuated Judgments About Ingroup and Outgroup Members,”
Human Brain Mapping
31, no. 1 (January 2010): 150–59.

M. Deppe et al., “Evidence for a Neural Correlate of a Framing Effect: Bias-Specific Activity in the Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex During Credibility Judgments,”
Brain Research Bulletin
67, no. 5 (November 15, 2005): 413–21.

C. M. Funk et al., “The Functional Brain Architecture of Human Morality,”
Current Opinion in Neurobiology
, 19, no. 6 (2009): 678–81.

H. Takahashi et al., “Neural Correlates of Human Virtue Judgment,”
Cerebral Cortex
18, no. 8 (August 2008): 1886–91.

L. Young et al., “Investigating Emotion in Moral Cognition: A Review of Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging and Neuropsychology,”
British Medical Bulletin
84 (2007): 69–79.

J. B. Peterson et al., “Complexity Management Theory: Motivation for Ideological Rigidity and Social Conflict,”
Cortex
38, no. 3 (June 2002): 429–58.

C. K. De Dreu et al., “Mental Set and Creative Thought in Social Conflict: Threat Rigidity Versus Motivated Focus,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
95, no. 3 (September 2008): 648–61.

T. A. Hare et al., “Contributions of Amygdala and Striatal Activity in Emotion Regulation,”
Biological Psychiatry
57, no. 6 (March 15, 2005): 624–32.

David H. Zald et al., “The Human Amygdala and the Emotional Evaluation of Sensory Stimuli,”
Brain Research Reviews
41, no. 1 (January 2003): 88–123.

W. C. Drevets, “Reciprocal Suppression of Regional Cerebral Blood Flow During Emotional Versus Higher Cognitive Processes: Implications for Interactions Between Emotion and Cognition,”
Cognition and Emotion
12 (1998): 353–85.

Alok Jha, “Where Belief Is Born,”
Guardian,
June 30, 2005, accessed http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/jun/30/psychology.neuroscience

Kathleen Taylor,
The Science of Thought Control
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), 127–45.

These last two books are excellent primers:

Milton Rokeach,
The Open and Closed Mind
(Basic Books, 1960).

Charles Hampden-Turner,
Maps of the Mind
(Collier, 1982).

The Impact of Emotion in the American Public's Assessments of and Reactions to Terrorism,
research brief published by the Institute for Homeland Security Solutions, June 2010, accessed October 26, 2010, https://www.ihssnc.org/portals/0/ . . . /IHSS_Research%20Brief_Singer.pdf

Ara Norenzayan et al., “Mortality Salience and Religion: Divergent Effects on the Defense of Cultural Worldviews for the Religious and the Non-Religious,”
European Journal of Social Psychology
39 (2009): 101–13.

Jean Faber, “Information Processing in Brain Microtubules,” presented at Quantum Mind Conference (2003), accessed October 26, 2010, qubit.lncc.br/files/jfaber_InfProc.MT.pdf

Shi Chunhua, “Quantum Information Processing in the Wall of Cytoskeletal Microtubules,”
Journal of Biological Physics
32, no. 5 (November 2006): 413–20.

T. J. Craddock, “Information Processing Mechanisms in Microtubules at Physiological Temperature: Model Predictions for Experimental Tests,”
Biosystems
97, no. 1 (July 2009): 28–34.

Karl Pribram,
Rethinking Neural Networks
(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993): 216, 324–26.

T. J. Kaptchuk et al., “Components of Placebo Effect: Randomized Controlled Trial in Patients with Irritable Bowel Syndrome,”
British Medical Journal
336 (2008): 999–1003.

Thomas Kuhn,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
3rd ed. (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
Author's note:
Seminal and eminently readable.

Tener Edis, “Quantum Magic,”
Secular Outpost,
accessed October 26, 2010, http://secularoutpost.infidels.org/2007/11/quantum-magic.html

Michel Shermer, “Quantum Quackery,”
Scientific American
(January 2005), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=quantum-quackery

Mark Buchanan, “Do Birds See with Quantum Eyes?”
New Scientist
(May 2008), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19826544.000-do-birds-see-with-quantum-eyes.html

“Quantum Biology Has Come In from the Cold,” editorial,
New Scientist
(February 2010), accessed October 26, 2010, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527462.500-quantum-biology-has-come-in-from-the-cold.html

Gregory S. Engel et al., “Evidence for Wavelike Energy Transfer Through Quantum Coherence in Photosynthetic Systems,”
Nature
446 (April 12, 2007): 782–86.