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According to materialists, science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry.
And anything that cannot be thus explained can be dismissed as illusory.
Educated in this tradition, I adopted the standard dismissive attitude when the subject of telepathy came up in the laboratory tearoom one day.
I was gently taken to task by Sir Rudolph Peters, one of the doyens of British biochemistry. He was a kindly man with twinkly eyes and more curiosity than most people half his age.
He told me of an ophthalmologist friend who had a severely disabled and mentally r.etarded young boy as a patient.
Although he was almost blind, he seemed able to read the letters on the optician’s chart very well, but only when his mother was looking at them.
The only explanation appeared to be some form of telepathic communication between the two, and in 1968 Sir Rudolph conducted an experiment in which the boy correctly guessed many of the written numbers or words shown to his mother, even though they were sitting on either side of a screen which prevented him from picking up any visual or auditory cues.
Sir Rudolph concluded that this telepathy had developed to an unusual degree because of the boy’s extreme needs and his mother’s desire to help him.
But, as I discovered, even laboratory experiments involving strangers had produced results which, if less marked, were still compelling.
For example, the years between 1880 and 1939 saw something of a boom in early psychical research, with the publication of more than 186 studies involving trials in which subjects guessed which randomly selected cards a ‘sender’ was looking at.
When the four million individual results were combined in a statistical procedure called meta-analysis, the overall results were hugely significant because they were considerably more accurate than would have been expected from random chance.
Later experiments during the Seventies involved subjects sleeping in a soundproofed laboratory while a ‘sender’ in another room, and in some cases another building, opened a sealed package containing a randomly selected picture and concentrated on it, trying to influence the subject’s dream.
Sometimes the thought transference was very clear: one subject described having dreamed about buying tickets for a prize fight while the sender was looking at a picture of a boxing match.
Occasionally, it was more symbolic, as when the subject dreamed of a dead rat in a cigar box while the sender was looking at a picture of a dead gangster in a coffin. But in 450 such trials the overall results were very significantly above the chance level.
My research has included more than 4,000 cases of psychic phenomena. Many, like Mona Miller’s near-miss in the Blitz, involve mothers.
Hundreds told me that during the months they were breastfeeding, they’d know when their baby needed them, even from miles away, because they began secreting br.east milk.
With the help of a midwife, I studied nine nursing mothers in North London during a two-month period, and found that their unexpected ‘let-downs’ of milk when they were separated from their babies very often coincided with their infants experiencing distress.
The odds against this occurring by chance as often as it did were a billion to one, and this telepathic connection makes good evolutionary sense.
Mothers who could tell at a distance when their babies were unhappy would tend to have babies that survived better than those of insensitive mothers.
Such connections often seem to continue even when the children have grown up, with many stories on my database concerning mothers who had an urge to get in touch with their children when they could not have known by any conventional means that they were in trouble.
Many would do so by telephone, the method of communication most commonly mentioned in reports of telepathic experiences in general.
Many people told me they had thought of someone for no apparent reason, and then that person rang in a way that seemed uncanny. Or they knew who was calling when the phone rang, even before they picked up the receiver.
I designed an experiment to test this, a simplified version of which you can try through my website.
This involved asking subjects for the names and phone numbers of four friends or family members before placing them alone in a room with a landline telephone with no caller ID.
I then selected one of the four callers at random and asked them to phone the subject, who had to say who was on the line before answering.
By guessing at random, subjects would have been right about one time in four, or 25 per cent.
In fact, the average hit rate was 45 per cent, very significantly above the level of chance, and these results have been replicated independently at universities in Germany and Holland.
In attempting to explain such phenomena, we need to look far beyond the traditional scientific view that everything is essentially material or physical, including the human mind.
. . . . . Full monty: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083279/Psychic-powers-How-thought-premonitions-telepathy-common-think.html#ixzz1il1wfNAa  |
