“A lady once asked me whether I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity: No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.” (1)

© Mike Jay

This exchange, recorded by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1809, was more than just a chance for a pleasing riposte: it demarcated a subject that had haunted the poet since childhood and to which he would return regularly in both his public and private writings. Typically, the definitive tome that he promised never materialised; yet over many years, in fragments and the occasional sustained burst, Coleridge evolved a psychology of ghosts, visions and apparitions that was more ambitious than any previously attempted. His interest was not in proving that the supernatural was ‘real’; rather, he believed that the rational investigation of miraculous events functioned, among other things, as ‘a weapon against superstition’. But he was equally unsatisfied with the debunking spirit that saw all spectral experiences as no more than the errors and weaknesses of the gullible. For him, supernatural-seeming events proved much more: they held the key to understanding the deep mysteries of the imagination, and the powers of the mind to shape reality itself.

His response to the unnamed lady, later published in his journal The Friend, had first appeared in a notebook entry dated precisely to midnight on Sunday 12 May 1805. On this occasion he had been dozing at a table in the vast library-cum-saloon of the Treasury in Valeta, Malta, when he had opened his eyes to see a man who wasn’t there.

Coleridge had exiled himself to Malta the previous year to break the spell of his opium addiction and failed marriage, and his grand surroundings mirrored the fact that, for the only time in his life, he was holding down a steady and important job: public secretary to the Governor of the island, writing strategic reports on the Mediterranean for the British navy. As usual he had passed a sociable evening among diplomats and civil servants, the last of whom, another secretary named Mr. Dennison, had bid him goodnight ten minutes previously. Coleridge had meant to retire too, but instead had nodded off. When he opened his eyes, he saw Mr. Dennison still sitting across the table from him.

His eyes closed once more, puzzlement mingling with sleep, and when he opened them again he realised that he was in the presence of a waking vision. The Mr. Dennison he had just seen, he now realised, had been a wraith-like illusion, a head and shoulders suspended in mid-air like the grin of the Cheshire cat. The one he saw now was a fully-formed simulacrum; yet, as he roused himself to observe it, he became aware that it was somehow less substantial than the man himself. It had a wispy quality, as if seen through thin smoke, or ‘like a face in a clear stream’ (2). As he focused more clearly, the table before it and the library shelves behind became more solidly real, yet the figure maintained a ‘sort of distinct shape and colour’ that gave it a feeling of an illusion superimposed by some kind of optical trickery against its surroundings.

Coleridge reached for his notebook and, ‘not three minutes having intervened’, began to scribble furiously, attempting to record every detail of the apparition while it was still fresh in his mind. As he did so, he began to notice shapes in front of him that were suggestive of the now-vanished illusion. Before him on the table, in the sight-line where the spectral Mr. Dennison had materialised, was a glass flask of port covered in leather; it still had an oddly human shape, and he ‘clearly detected that this high-shouldered hypochondrical bottle-man had a great share in producing the effect’. The chair opposite him, too, was uphosltered in leather, with metal studs around its edges that caught the light, picking out another suggestively human shape that framed that of the bottle. As he focused on these details, the illusion began to reform faintly, though this time ‘I snapped the spell before it had assumed a recognisable form’.

But there was more to this business than mere tricks of light, shade and perspective: Coleridge was keenly aware that a psychological component was also in play. This had been no terrifying spectre or vengeful ghost; it had held no more for him than a kind of curiosity and aesthetic fascination. This was surely a product of his own state of mind as he had observed it: he had been ‘pleased with it as a philosophical case’ rather than frightened by it. How differently might the illusion have developed if the hairs on his neck had decided to rise in involuntary dread? And yet, as he considered his state of mind, it occurred to him that ‘the state of the brain and nerves after distress and agitation’ might have played its part, too. Coleridge rarely had to search far to identify a source of nervous malaise, and the evening of 12 May 1805 was no exception: only the previous day he had been badly shaken when three stray dogs had gone for him in the streets of Valeta, one of them sinking its teeth into his left calf. Might his curiously placid vision have been a mental trick triggered by a temporarily forgotten nervous stress, but enacted when he happened to be in a state of contemplative tranquillity?

The causes and components of the vision, then, could be sought equally in the external stage-settings and in the inner theatre of the observer’s mind. But Coleridge omits another possibility, one which many modern commentators would argue was the most salient of all: opium. Coleridge had not yet reached the point in his life where his narcotic habit was widely known, and it was only when he was posthumously outed by his protégé and fellow-addict Thomas de Quincey that his reputation, and myth, would become inseparable from the drug. But his heavy use of Kendal’s Black Drop, his favoured, super-strength laudanum tincture, had begun in the Lake District in the winter of 1801, and his attempt to shake free of it in the Mediterranean sunshine had been at best a mixed success. The voyage had begun well, with stimulating views and sea air distracting him from his medication, but storms, sea-sickness and his cramped cabin had eventually shredded his nerves and reduced him to almost constant dosing: he had felt himself becoming the nightmare-haunted walking corpse of his signature work thus far, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (3). Arriving in Malta, the change of scene and exotic landscapes had spurred him on to a healthy regime of country walks and clean living; but over the winter he had relapsed once more, alternating days of brisk diplomatic business with nights of furtive indulgence in spirits, narcotics and lurid, luxurious dreams. As he nodded off at the library table at midnight, there is every likelihood that he was dosed to the gills.

Still, the spectral vision of Mr. Dennison before Coleridge’s waking eyes is not entirely typical of opium’s effects, which tend towards dreamy interior reveries rather than the hallucinatory extrusions into waking reality that are more readily achieved by other psychoactive substances. The drug’s psychic hallmarks for Coleridge at this point, to judge by many harrowing notebook entries, were the nightmares that regularly woke him up screaming, sweating and gasping for breath, with skin-crawling recollections of being pursued, buried alive, mutilated or infected with hideous diseases. He did not associate these with his opium use, and in fact tended to increase his dose when they occurred in the hope of a sounder sleep; the side-effect of opium that he consciously dreaded most was constipation, with its wrenching gut spasms and the accompanying agony and shame of the only effective remedy, the enema. Yet his periods of exceptionally high opium dosage did produce crawling visual effects at the periphery of his vision: in the latter stages of the voyage to Malta he records faces leering at him from the cloths in his cabin, and flapping sails appearing to him as fish gasping and floundering on the deck. Opium may not be adequate as the sole explanation of Coleridge’s vision, but it should probably have been included in his otherwise exhaustive list.

The notebook entry that began in the throes of a vision concluded with a resolution: he would make a similar record whenever such events occurred in the future. ‘Often and often I have had similar experiences’ he wrote, ‘and therefore resolved to write down the particulars whenever any new instance should occur’. He also began to investigate accounts of miracles and other supernatural experiences that he felt might be analogous to his own, and to develop a theory that might account for them.

Then as now, there were essentially two schools of thought, to neither of which he could entirely subscribe. The first was a religious faith that asserted that miracles were the work of God, who permitted the laws of nature to be overridden in special circumstances to contribute to His greater glory. This was a view that had been delicately teased apart by Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume, whose essay On Miracles (4) had argued that since miracles were by definition impossible, there could never be any such thing as sufficient evidence for them. Coleridge had also read the German philosophers such as G.E.Lessing who had gone further, dissecting the transmission of miracles from unknowable first-person testimonies via a process of Chinese whispers to suitably pious and inspirational narratives (5).

Although never without religious convictions, Coleridge had always taken the rationalists’ side against belief in miracles, which represented for him the irrational and obscurantist aspects of a faith that needed to justify its authority to the modern age in rational terms. Yet his debunking zeal was tempered by his voracious curiosity about visionary experience, and perhaps even by a little envy of those who had achieved immortality by bringing their visions into the world. He agreed with the critics who argued that the mystics had mistaken their inner worlds for external divinities, but he did not want to rid the world of miracles: rather, he was searching for ways to include miracles in a novel understanding of it.

For this reason, he was equally dissatisfied with the rational alternative to religious faith. This was the theory, developed by philosophers such as John Locke, that miracles and supernatural experiences were simply errors of cognition, perceptions that had been wrongly associated in the mind and coloured by memories, fables and fancies. For Coleridge this theory gave too little credit to the mind, and too much to a mundane conception of reality. He wanted an explanation that did more than dismiss such experiences as perceptual illusions: one that could explore, as he had with his vision of Mr. Dennison, the active role played by the imagination in their creation. He proceeded, as he often did, to coin a new term to describe such experiences: ‘supersensual’ (6), a rendering perhaps of the German word űbersinnlich, developed by the mystic Jacob Boehme and included by Goethe in his Faust.

‘Supernatural’ was a term that made grand and unjustifiable claims – that we know the laws of nature fully, and that we know the experiences that we designate as miracles and apparitions to be outside their frame. ‘Supersensual’, by contrast, only asserts that these experiences break our laws of perception and consensus reality, without making any judgement about their ultimate status. Some of Coleridge’s similar coinages, such as ‘psychosomatic’, have entered the language and are still with us; ‘supersensual’ is one that has not, but perhaps deserves to have done.

Four years after his notebook entry in Malta, Coleridge made his most sustained attempt to describe this new territory, in a pair of conjoined essays. The first trained his psychological lens on one of the most famous ‘supernatural’ events in the Christian canon; the second, in a classic Coleridgean trajectory, brought the subject back to himself, and his fine-grained self-observation.

The first essay was entitled Luther’s Visions in the Warteburg, and examined in detail one of the founding myths of Protestantism: that Martin Luther, imprisoned in the Warteburg castle in 1521, had been visited by the Devil while translating the New Testament into German, and had banished him by throwing his inkstand at him. Coleridge himself had visited the castle, towering on its cliff above the town of Eisenach, and had been shown the incorruptible black spot where Luther’s ink had hit the wall, and where ‘the said marvellous blot bids defiance to all the toils of the scrubbing brush, and is to remain a sign for ever’ (7). Coleridge was prepared to leave to the reader’s judgement ‘whether the great man did ever throw his inkstand at his Satanic Majesty’; he proposed instead to anatomise Luther’s visions in same way that he had his own.

He began, as his self-investigations so often began, in the stomach. Luther was not starving in a dungeon; on the contrary, he was ‘treated with every kindness’, including a much richer diet than he was accustomed to, which ‘had begun to undermine his former unusually strong health’. He recorded ‘many and most distressing effects of indigestion’, with which Coleridge was quick to identify – ‘the common effect of deranged digestion in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense thinkers’ – and to extrapolate from Luther’s unaccustomed luxury to an explanation for him being ‘plagued with temptations both from the flesh and the devil’. The nervous effects of his indigestion would have been most pronounced, as Coleridge’s own were, in his ‘unconscious half-sleeps, or rather those rapid alterations of the sleeping with the half-waking state, which is the true witching time’ – or, in a more expressive phrase, ‘the fruitful matrix of ghosts’. In these Luther might, as the author had done in the saloon in Valeta, ‘have had a full view of the room in which he was sitting’, with walls, floor, writing-table, pen, paper and inkstand all clearly perceived, and ‘at the same time a brain-image of the devil, vivid enough to have acquired apparent outness’, superimposed upon the background, its subtly shifting tones and contours suggesting perhaps, to Luther, not illusion but supernatural origin.

This explanation lacks the multifactoral subtlety of Coleridge’s dissection of his own visions, and it seems that some of his readers may have commented as much, as he followed it up with a second piece, apologising that ‘the theory of Luther’s apparitions [was] stated perhaps too briefly in the preceding essay’ – and adding, with a parodic touch of self-pity, that ‘I will endeavour to make my ghost theory more clear to those of my readers, who are fortunate enough to find it obscure in consequence of their own good health and unshattered nerves’. This is the cue for an exquisite description of an optical effect that he used to observe regularly as the winter dusk descended on his study in Keswick, and the fire in his hearth, reflected in his window, began to superimpose itself on the darkening lake and valley outside. The fire emerged as daylight faded, suspended in the distant landscape; as darkness came on, it seemed to grow closer and more dominant, until the arival of night, when ‘the window became a perfect looking-glass; save only that my books on the side shelves of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with stars’. Here was an optical mechanism for ‘the phantom from Luther’s brain’ that might have played into the fruitful matrix of ghosts: the inkstand might, like the port decanter in Malta, have been a hitherto unnoticed foreground detail that nevertheless had ‘a considerable influence in the production of the fiend, and of the hostile act by which his obtrusive visit was repelled’.

To this optical effect must, as ever, be added the state of mind of the observer, and the human readiness to craft meaning from the random. ‘If we are in anxious expectation’, for example, ‘the babbling of a brook will appear to be the voice of a friend, for whom we are waiting, calling out our own names’. These are not simply mechanical errors of perception. They are the products of our minds, which are always working subconsciously to shape the reality around us; supersensual visions are the moments when we catch them up to their constant but otherwise unnoticed tricks. By such increments Coleridge works his way towards the beginnings of a unified theory, the ‘great law of the imagination’, that ‘a likeness in part tends to become a likeness of the whole’: the brain is always busy recognising, replicating, expanding, extemporising and filling in the gaps. Under the right circumstances, humble decanters and inkstands can morph into human or demonic entities, at which point they may do anything that such entities might be expected to do: walk, speak, wear evening dress or waggle their pointed tails. Visions are no aberration, but an insight into the ways in which our minds are constantly extrapolating, stitching together a plausible reality from whatever fragments are to hand, in a restless search for patterns that fit the established pigeon-holes of memory and belief.

There is much more that follows from this – nothing less than a new psychology – but, having tantalised himself and the reader, Coleridge announces reluctantly that he is unable to do it justice. ‘I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject of dreams, visions, ghosts and witchcraft’, he insists, and ‘I have indeed a memorandum-book filled with records of these phaenomena, many of them interesting as facts and data for psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of perception and its dependence on memory and the imagination’. But the death of his collaborator on these theories, the gifted and tragic pottery heir Tom Wedgwood (8), makes it too painful to pursue – or, perhaps, Coleridge is aware that his insights amount to no more than flashes and fragments that he can stitch together with greater or lesser conviction in his own head, but which he fears will unravel if he attempts to order them and bring them to the page.

Yet if Coleridge abandoned his direct assault on ghosts and visions, his researches nevertheless fed into the restless stream of his theories of the imagination, and particularly its implications for poetry, literature and drama. ‘In certain sorts of dreams’ he noted, ‘the dullest wight becomes a Shakespeare’: but how can these supersensual effects, created so richly and seamlessly by the mind, be replicated by the writer? He continued to develop the idea that the imagination was not merely a mechanical process, but an organic one, where thoughts and ideas were diffused, recombined and recreated; his favoured analogy became that of a plant, something that develops from a small seed into something far greater than the sum of its parts, transcending the energies that produced it and evolving its own inner life (9).

These investigations led him to one of his most enduring coinages, the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, or ‘suspended state’, that poetry or drama must evoke to allow the reader or viewer to believe in characters and scenes that are ‘supernatural, or at least romantic’ (10). This is an effect that is achieved by a mixture of external scene-setting and careful, often subconscious priming of the audience’s expectations and imaginations: these conditions, like those that precede waking visions, combine to make the observer receptive to supersensual effects that spill out of reality’s habitual confines. Coleridge’s ‘great law of the imagination’ was never codified, but neither was it entirely abandoned: it was merely folded into his literary theories, where it vegetated, hybridised and absorbed new sustenance. It emerged as ‘willing suspension of disbelief’: the subliminal compact between subject and object that allows the observer to engage their own imagination, to finesse a middle ground between scepticism and belief, and thus to transform illusion into reality – whether reading Kubla Khan, watching Hamlet, or calmly observing the apparition of a Mr. Dennison across a library table.

—

This piece first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement (2006)

RELATED BOOK: The Atmosphere of Heaven

—

Footnotes:
(1) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, Vol.1, Essay III (1809)
(2) for this and following quotations: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, Vol.II, entry 2583 (ed. Kathleen Coburn, Routledge 2002)
(3) see Alethea Hayter, A Voyage in Vain: Coleridge’s Journey to Malta in 1804 (Faber & Faber 1973)
(4) David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
(5) G.E.Lessing, Űber den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft (1777)
(6) see Coleridge, Notebooks, Vol. III, 3911
(7) for this and following quotations, Coleridge, The Friend, Vol.I, Essays II and III (1809)
(8) Tom Wedgwood’s writings on the psychology of perception are held in the archives of Keele University; a selection was published as The Value of a Maimed Life: Extracts from the Notes of Thomas Wedgwood (ed. Margaret Olivia Tremayne, W.Daniel 1912)
(9) see M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford University Press 1953)
(10) Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Vol II (Rest Fenner 1817)

Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for the living and the dead–reinforces the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. Not only do traditions throughout the world share a belief that prayers may in some way help (or invoke help from) deceased ancestors, many cultures throughout history have believed that prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living.

Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 30, Summer 1994 page 4-9

If prayer affects things in the physical world, its effects should be measurable, and scienceshould be able to investigate it. There is a very scattered literature on this, but when you bring it all together as Larry Dossey has done in his recent book, Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), you see there is quite a large number of interesting experiments with challenging results. Out of 131 controlled experiments on prayer-based healing, more than half showed statistically significant benefits. One of the best known is a double blind study of 393 patients in the coronary unit at San Francisco General Hospital. In this experiment, 192 patients, chosen at random, were prayed for by home prayer groups, the others were not. The prayed-for patients recovered better than the controls, and fewer died.  In order to make sense of these data on the efficacy of prayer, science will have to change its underlying assumptions about the nature of causality. Currently, the standard view is still purely mechanistic–notwithstanding all the recent talk about chaos and complexity theory. When applied to the life sciences, chaos and complexity theory–even with the help of highly sophisticated computer modeling–still explain the world in terms of mechanical causes involving known physical and chemical processes.

The data from empirical studies of prayer, as well as from the large literature reporting psi research in telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, seriously challenge the mechanistic view. Some other causal agent besides the mechanics of electrochemical interactions is required to make sense of the observed phenomena.

Holistic thinkers generally divide into two main categories. The majority want to have holism on the cheap. They want a holism which doesn’t conflict with science as we know it. Instead of exploring the possibility of new causal factors, they prefer to explain holism in terms of complexity and self-organization of conventional mechanical forces, modeled with sophisticated mathematics and the latest computer techniques. Nothing essentially different from physical and chemical interactions is considered to account for the properties of living systems.

The other group of holists, a minority among which I include myself and Larry Dossey, think that there is more to it than just what we know about chemistry and physics and clever mathematical models. My view is that there are other causal factors in nature, processes that make actual differences–causes in nature which bring about new kinds of effects that we have to take into account in order to understand our experience and the world. These new causal factors are involved in things like paranormal phenomena, prayer and healing.

The whole thrust of my morphic resonance theory is to say there is more to nature than just the standard forces in physics. And what’s more these other agents are at the very heart of the way things are organized in chemistry, in life, and in consciousness.

Prayer and Mental Fields

How might prayer fit in with the scientific view of things? I shall focus on two broad categories of prayer: petitionary and intercessory. In petitionary prayer we ask for something for ourselves; in intercessory prayer we pray to a higher power for the benefit of other people (either living or dead).

In praying for other people and for ourselves we ask a higher power to bring about a particular result. For me, this is what distinguishes prayer from positive thinking. Positive thinking involves nothing more than one’s own mind, one’s own desires and wishes, but petitionary and intercessory prayer are put in the context of a higher power. For this reason positive thinking does not fit into the category of prayer–even though it is often confused with it.

Whether petitionary or intercessory, prayer clearly poses a challenge to the mechanistic view of the world. According to this view, there is no way that thoughts going on in your head, which at most create small electrochemical disturbances barely detectable a few inches from your head even by highly sensitive apparatus, could affect someone or something at a remote distance.

If you were practicing positive thinking or some of the more specifically directed forms of petitionary prayer, you could resort to explanations in terms of telepathy, or if it were a prayer affecting physical objects, you might say it was psychokinesis. But such explanations serve only to replace one set of explanations which lie outside the scope of modern mechanistic science with another set. There is nothing in mechanistic science that could allow mere thoughts inside my mind, whether cast in the form of prayer or as positive thinking, to affect things at a distance. It just can’t happen.

The key to understanding prayer as a scientific phenomenon requires, in my view, getting away from the idea of the mind as somehow inside the brain. If we think our minds are confined to our brains–the standard view–then since what goes on in our brain occurs in the privacy and isolation of our own skull it can’t affect anyone else. However, I see minds being field-like in nature (part of my general view of morphic fields), and I see mental fields as the basis for habitual patterns of thought. Mental fields go beyond, through, and interface with the electromagnetic patterns in the brain. In this way mental fields can affect our bodies through our brains. However, they are much more extensive than our brains, reaching out to great distances in some cases.

As soon as we have the idea that the mind can be extended through these mental fields, and over large distances, we have a medium of connection through which the power of prayer could work. We are no longer dealing with a purely mechanical system in the brain, with absolutely no way of connecting the brain and the observed effect–for if that were the case the phenomenon of effective prayer would have to be dismissed as delusion or coincidence. With a mental field, however, we have a medium for a whole series of connections between us and the people, animals and places we know and care about–with the rest of the world, in fact. When we pray, those extended mental fields would be the context in which prayer could work non-locally.

Non-Localized Mind

Clearly, this does not amount to a fully articulated scientific theory of prayer; it is highly speculative. But, I believe, it is also very clear that we need to have a much broader view of how the mind is extended beyond the brain. We need a theory of what I call the “extended mind” as opposed to the conventional scientific view of the “contracted mind” holed up inside the skull. This view of a contracted mind came from Descartes in the seventeenth century. It is a model of consciousness which separates our minds from the whole world around us into a small region in the brain–a model of the mind which plainly contradicts direct experience. For example, when you see this page in front of you, you experience it as being outside you, not inside your brain. To say that this and all your other perceptions are located in your brain is a theory, not an experience.

It is important, however, not to envisage the extended mind as some amorphous field, a kind of undifferentiated Universal Mind. I don’t think we should make a large leap from the concept of a contracted mind to a boundless universal mind. Such a jump isn’t helpful scientifically. My idea of morphic fields is that even though they are extended and non-local in their effects, they are still part of our individual and collective mind, but not to be equated with some ultimate Universal Mind. The morphic fields are not God. They are non-local in the sense that they can spread out over immense distances (as, for instance, gravitational fields do), so that if I were praying about somebody in Australia from my home in London the morphic field would carry the information and the prayer could work. But my mental field wouldn’t usually spread out to Mars, for example, because there is nothing connecting me to someone on that planet. If someone I knew had traveled there on a spaceship, then there would be a link. For morphic fields to have a mental connection I believe there has to be something that links you to the other person. Even if you have never met the other person, I believe just knowing their name or something about them seems to be enough to establish a connection, though this connection is likely to be weaker than that between people who know each other well.

You could picture it something like this: When two people come into contact and establish some mental connection (perhaps experienced as affection, love, even hate) their morphic fields in effect become part of a larger, inclusive field. Then, if they separate from each other it is as if their particular portions of the morphic field are stretched elastically, so that there remains a “mental tension” or link between them. There has to be something like this that relates the two people.

Nested Sets of Morphic Fields

Morphic fields are organized in nested hierarchies (see below) . For example, there are morphic fields surrounding the atoms in our bodies, which are within the higher level morphic fields of molecules, organelles, cells, organs and limbs, all of which exist within the morphic field associated with the entire body. The body field, in turn, would be within the field of relationships that constitute a family, within a larger social group. Societies, in turn, are embedded within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the planetary system, “Gaia”. And by extrapolation, we could extend the series of nested morphic fields until we reach out beyond planetary, solar system and galactic limits to encompass the entire universe.

Even Einstein’s space-time field of gravitation is a universal, cosmic field holding everything together and linking the entire universe, in fact, making it a uni-verse. It does the same thing as the World Soul or Anima Mundi of neo-Platonic philosophy. It embraces the whole cosmos. There are levels upon levels of morphic fields within fields, within which we are embedded. Human life is embedded in vastly larger fields of organization. To what degree they are conscious still remains in the realm of speculation. But I would assume that higher-level fields are not less, and probably more, conscious than we are. I would think they are more conscious than we are not simply because they are larger in size, but because they are more inclusive, contain more complexity, and encompass more possibilities.

I think that is one way of interpreting traditional doctrines about super-human intelligences, or cosmic intelligences, usually thought of in Christianity as the hierarchy of the angels. The word “angel” normally conveys the image of a good-looking youth with wings; but that’s simply a pictorial representation. The traditional doctrine behind that image, however, is of a super- human intelligence. And if the solar system and galaxy have intelligence, then one might be an angel and the other an archangel. In some traditional Christian doctrines there are, for instance, nine hierarchies of angels or levels of intelligence. And I would see these as equivalent to intelligences, minds or organizing fields at different levels of complexity. The galactic angels, for instance, would embrace or include those of solar systems, which in turn would include those of planets.

This is a description of a cosmos which has intelligence at every level, not a view that sees consciousness as something that emerged from unconscious matter. Conscious intelligence was there to start with. The place to look for it is not going to be in atoms or quanta (although there may be some kind of consciousness there), but in solar systems and galaxies and in the whole cosmos. There may be all these different levels of imagination, intelligence, and mind throughout the whole of the cosmic organization. All traditional doctrines that I know of have recognized something of that kind.

Notes & References

1. For an extended discussion of these theories, see R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The

Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Tarcher, 1981), and The Presence of the Past: Morphic

Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Vintage, 1988).

Opening Up To The Numinous

As a scientist I wasn’t always interested in prayer. In fact, in earlier days I believed it was all

nonsense. I was an atheist; God had no room in my scientific education. After graduating from

Cambridge, I thought I had outgrown childish belief structures like religion, and that rational

science was the way forward. I had a typical secular-humanist atheistic worldview for a long

time, well into my thirties. And this, of course, is the worldview that most of my scientific

colleagues still have. They regard religion as a relic from a superstitious age. In that context,

prayer is completely meaningless, except insofar as people believe in it they may derive some

psychological benefit–a kind of “placebo effect”.

Then in 1968 I visited India, and all the materialist assumptions I took for granted just didn’t

seem to work any more. What struck me most was the experience of being immersed in a

culture that worked in an entirely different way to what I had been accustomed. In this exotic

culture, the idea of what we might call “other realms”–the supernatural or spiritual–was simply

taken for granted by practically everybody. There was a palpable sense of another dimension

to life, everywhere you looked, and everywhere you went.

As an atheist, of course, my initial reaction was to think they were deluded in their beliefs. Yet

on the other hand, these beliefs produced a fascinating culture. Even people living in the

extremes of poverty seemed to have more joy in their lives than most people I knew who lived

in the lap of plenty. I was touched deeply by the natural human warmth, and the quality of the

people and of their way of life. According to the materialist beliefs I had, poverty equaled

misery; wealth and good medical attention meant, if not happiness, then at least a much

better quality of life. In India I saw it wasn’t as simple as that. The people there were poor

beyond the comprehension of most Westerners, yet everywhere they walked about with the

most radiant smiles. Walk along a street in London, Paris or New York and you see mostly

harried, worried faces. That difference impressed me very deeply.

The contrast between the sense of inner joy and peace I experienced all around me in India

compared with the tense way of life in the West was so striking that I decided to investigate

meditation. For about four years I did various forms of Hindu practice. This didn’t conflict with

my scientific attitude because meditation didn’t challenge my whole scientific worldview. On

the contrary, I could approach my study of meditation in a truly scientific spirit. Its appeal is

that you do it and see if it works. It’s empirical. You sit, you calm your breath and you observe

what happens. I started with Transcendental Meditation which sounded scientific in that it was

supposed to lower lactose levels in the blood, have beneficial effects on the circulation, and

calm brain activity. I found that meditation did indeed work. I experienced within myself that

calm I was seeing all around me in India.

As a scientist I wasn’t troubled. I could understand meditation by explaining to myself that it

wasn’t opening me up to other realms of consciousness, but that it was simply changing the

physiological state of my brain. To say that breathing in a particular way and doing a particular

kind of mental activity could affect my mental and physical state did not challenge my

worldview.

Nevertheless, although I could follow Hindu practices, India was such a completely different

civilization and culture that there was no way I’d ever be an Indian. I began to have a sense

that I would need to recover my own tradition if I were to share in the deep perceptions and

peace that I saw in the people around me.

Furthermore, after living there a while, I also saw the shadow side of the Hindu tradition,

which I hadn’t seen in my earlier brief visit. There is a fatalistic lack of concern for other

people that was alien to me. That view was at variance with my more optimistic, progressivist

Christian culture.

In India I came face to face with the realization that rooted in the Christian tradition is the

sense that you can, and should, help other people; we can aim for some better state of affairs

on Earth, for the whole of society. When I talked with my Indian friends and colleagues, it

became very clear that I had this view deep within me. I realized that this sense didn’t come

from Hindu philosophy, nor from my atheistic outlook. Instead, I saw it came from a deeply

embedded Christian view of the world that I carried with me unwittingly. In fact, I realized this

partly because in conversation with my Indian friends they would frequently point out that so

much of what I was expressing was a Christian view. The repeated revelation of this, even to

an avowed atheist, was difficult to ignore.

I spent some time living in Father Bede Griffith’s ashram, and I found that coming back to a

Christian path made sense to me. I began praying and discovered that it was more helpful to

me than meditating. I would say that meditation involves a kind of separation between the

practice and the rest of one’s life; it is going into another space altogether. You could say that

contemplative prayer would have the same effect. But for me, ordinary petitionary and

intercessory prayer, such as the “Lord’s Prayer”, links the events of my daily life directly with

my practice. I pray about what I’ve done that day and what’s coming up the next day. It’s a

matter of bringing the very fabric of one’s life–relationships, work, and personal concerns–into

the context of the spiritual life.

How Do Mental Fields Work?

My hypothesis of morphic resonance and morphic fields has grown out of the notion in

developmental biology of “morphogenic fields”. This idea dates back to the 1920s in the work

of biologists A. Gurwitsch and Paul Weiss. In modern developmental biology these fields are

usually regarded as heuristic devices, or as mathematical abstractions with no causal effect. By

contrast, I interpret them to be causal fields with an inherent memory given by morphic

resonance; in other words I regard them as one kind of morphic field. Other kinds of morphic

fields include behavioral fields, responsible for coordinating instinctive or learned behavior,

mental fields, responsible for organizing mental activity, and social fields, responsible for

organizing social groups.

If fields are the medium of mind then what you have in the brain is an interface between one

kind of field and another kind of field. All organization in the body has morphic fields

underlying it. Morphic fields in the brain interact with electromagnetic (EM) fields in the brain.

However, the nature of this interaction is indirect. Rather than morphic fields working directly

through the electromagnetic field, they interact through both affecting the same thing–in this

case, physical activity within the brain.

I am not saying that there is a linear-type causal relationship between brain-electromagnetic-

morphic fields. I regard mental fields as one kind of morphic field that affects the brain,

shaping its activity, and this affects the EM field associated with the brain.

Here you’ve got fields acting on fields: morphic fields surrounding all the cells, tissues and

organs of the body, as well as in molecules and cell membranes, and indeed in quantum-

matter fields. This is contrasted with the more usual view of the spirit-matter dichotomy–

where mechanical matter and ineffable spirit interact in some kind of quasi-miraculous way. If

you say that the spirit acts on the EM field, you’ve got a problem of miraculous intervention.

On the other hand, if everything in nature is organized by fields, and if mental fields are a

more subtle kind of field, you’ve got no sharp dichotomy–you’ve got fields acting through fields

at all levels of reality. So the mind-body problem ceases to be a sharp dichotomy.

By Ray Tallis, for NewScientist

This was well captured in a 2009 article in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Harold Pashler from the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues, that argued: “…these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained.”

Believers will counter that this is irrelevant: as our means of capturing and analysing neural activity become more powerful, so we will be able to make more precise correlations between the quantity,
pattern and location of neural activity and aspects of consciousness.

This may well happen, but my argument is not about technical, probably temporary, limitations. It is about the deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that if you can correlate neural activity with consciousness, then you have demonstrated they are one and the same thing, and that a physical science such as neurophysiology is able to show what consciousness truly is.

Many neurosceptics have argued that neural activity is nothing like experience, and that the least one might expect if A and B are the same is that they be indistinguishable from each other. Countering
that objection by claiming that, say, activity in the occipital cortex and the sensation of light are two aspects of the same thing does not hold up because the existence of “aspects” depends on the prior existence of consciousness and cannot be used to explain the relationship between neural activity and consciousness.

This disposes of the famous claim by John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley: that neural activity and conscious experience stand in the same relationship as
molecules of H2O to water, with its properties of wetness, coldness, shininess and so on. The analogy fails as the level at which water can be seen as molecules, on the one hand, and as wet, shiny, cold stuff on the other, are intended to correspond to different “levels” at which we are conscious of it. But the existence of levels of experience or of description presupposes consciousness. Water does not intrinsically have these levels.

We cannot therefore conclude that when we see what seem to be neural correlates of consciousness that we are seeing consciousness itself. While neural activity of a certain kind is a necessary condition for every manifestation of consciousness, from the lightest sensation to the most exquisitely constructed sense of self, it is neither a sufficient condition of it, nor, still less, is it identical with
it. If it were identical, then we would be left with the insuperable problem of explaining how intracranial nerve impulses, which are material events, could “reach out” to extracranial objects in order to be “of” or “about” them. Straightforward physical causation explains how light from an object brings about events in the occipital cortex. No such explanation is available as to how those
neural events are “about” the physical object. Biophysical science explains how the light gets in but not how the gaze looks out.

Many features of ordinary consciousness also resist neurological explanation. Take the unity of consciousness. I can relate things I experience at a given time (the pressure of the seat on my bottom,
the sound of traffic, my thoughts) to one another as elements of a single moment. Researchers have attempted to explain this unity, invoking quantum coherence (the cytoskeletal micro-tubules of Stuart
Hameroff at the University of Arizona, and Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford), electromagnetic fields (Johnjoe McFadden, University of Surrey), or rhythmic discharges in the brain (the late Francis Crick).

These fail because they assume that an objective unity or uniformity of nerve impulses would be subjectively available, which, of course, it won’t be. Even less would this explain the unification of
entities that are, at the same time, experienced as distinct. My sensory field is a many-layered whole that also maintains its multiplicity. There is nothing in the convergence or coherence of neural pathways that gives us this “merging without mushing”, this ability to see things as both whole and separate.

And there is an insuperable problem with a sense of past and future. Take memory. It is typically seen as being “stored” as the effects of experience which leave enduring changes in, for example, the
properties of synapses and consequently in circuitry in the nervous system. But when I “remember”, I explicitly reach out of the present to something that is explicitly past. A synapse, being a physical
structure, does not have anything other than its present state. It does not, as you and I do, reach temporally upstream from the effects of experience to the experience that brought about the effects. In other words, the sense of the past cannot exist in a physical system. This is consistent with the fact that the physics of time does not allow for tenses: Einstein called the distinction between past, present and future a “stubbornly persistent illusion”.

There are also problems with notions of the self, with the initiation of action, and with free will. Some neurophilosophers deal with these by denying their existence, but an account of consciousness that cannot find a basis for voluntary activity or the sense of self should conclude not that these things are unreal but that neuroscience provides at the very least an incomplete explanation of consciousness.

I believe there is a fundamental, but not obvious, reason why that explanation will always remain incomplete – or unrealisable. This concerns the disjunction between the objects of science and the
contents of consciousness. Science begins when we escape our subjective, first-person experiences into objective measurement, and reach towards a vantage point the philosopher Thomas Nagel called
“the view from nowhere”. You think the table over there is large, I may think it is small. We measure it and find that it is 0.66 metres square. We now characterise the table in a way that is less beholden to personal experience.

Thus measurement takes us further from experience and the phenomena of subjective consciousness to a realm where things are described in abstract but quantitative terms. To do its work, physical science has to discard “secondary qualities”, such as colour, warmth or cold, taste – in short, the basic contents of consciousness. For the physicist then, light is not in itself bright or colourful, it is a
mixture of vibrations in an electromagnetic field of different frequencies. The material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically. In short, physical science is about the marginalisation, or even the disappearance, of phenomenal appearance/qualia, the redness of red wine or the smell of a smelly dog.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is all about phenomenal appearances/qualia. As science moves from appearances/qualia and toward quantities that do not themselves have the kinds of manifestation that make up our experiences, an account of consciousness in terms of nerve impulses must be a contradiction in terms. There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.

Material objects require consciousness in order to “appear”. Then their “appearings” will depend on the viewpoint of the conscious observer. This must not be taken to imply that there are no constraints on the appearance of objects once they are objects of consciousness.

Our failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity inside the brain inside the skull is not due to technical limitations which can be overcome. It is due to the self-contradictory nature of the task, of which the failure to explain “aboutness”, the unity and multiplicity of our awareness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions, the construction of self are just symptoms. We cannot explain “appearings” using an objective approach that has set aside appearings as unreal and which seeks a reality in mass/energy that neither appears in itself nor has the means to make other items appear. The brain, seen as a physical object, no more has a world of things appearing to it than does any other physical object.

Profile

Ray Tallis trained as a doctor, ultimately becoming professor of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester, UK, where he oversaw a major neuroscience project. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a writer on areas ranging from consciousness to medical ethics

By Dr. David Luke & Dr. Stanley Kripner

With the aid of mescaline Aldous Huxley came face to face with such a mystical experience, even though the Oxford Theologian R.C. Zaehner (1957) denigrated his experience of “nature mysticism” as somehow inferior to the “genuine” theistic mystical experience. Yet the irony remains that the very split from Nature that some Christian theologians claim occurred in the Garden of Eden may lie at the heart of many people’s current sense of separateness from their ecology. Whereas, under specificircumstances of substance, set, and setting, psychedelics are capable of augmenting such a reunion. Despite Zaehner’s derisions, Huxley (1954) reportedly witnessed this reunion through his experimental uses of mescaline: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation – the miracle, moment by moment of naked existent.”

Is it this naked existence that reconnects the natural environment to the mental capacities of those psychedelically-inspired experients? This type of experience forges a way of thought that is filled with ethical, ecological implications, and which is reflected in the work of shamas, alchemists, and other practitioners who respected nature. The patriarch of psychedelia, Albert Hofmann, demonstrated this by reporting that a mystical
experience he had had when he was young prefigured his discovery of LSD. He stated that “…my mystical nature experience of nature as a child…was absolutely lik an LSD-experience…. I believe I was in some fashion born to that.”

Read the full article by clicking on the link below:

Species Connectedness

by David Chalmers

From an objective viewpoint, the brain is relatively comprehensible. When you look at this page, there is a whir of processing: photons strike your retina, electrical signals are passed up your optic nerve and between different areas of your brain, and eventually you might respond with a smile, a perplexed frown or a remark. But there is also a subjective aspect. When you look at the page, you are conscious of it, directly experiencing the images and words as part of your private, mental life. You have vivid impressions of the colors and shapes of the images. At the same time, you may be feeling some emotions and forming some thoughts. Together such experiences make up consciousness: the subjective, inner life of the mind.

For many years, consciousness was shunned by researchers studying the brain and the mind. The prevailing view was that science, which depends on objectivity, could not accommodate something as subjective as consciousness. The behaviorist movement in psychology, dominant earlier in this century, concentrated on external behavior and disallowed any talk of internal mental processes. Later, the rise of cognitive science focused attention on processes inside the head. Still, consciousness remained off-limits, fit only for late-night discussion over drinks.

Over the past several years, however, an increasing number of neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers have been rejecting the idea that consciousness cannot be studied and are attempting to
delve into its secrets. As might be expected of a field so new, there is a tangle of diverse and conflicting theories, often using basic concepts in incompatible ways. To help unsnarl the tangle, philosophical
reasoning is vital.

The myriad views within the field range from reductionist theories, according to which consciousness can be explained by the standard methods of neuroscience and psychology, to the position of the so-called mysterians, who say we will never understand consciousness at all. I believe that on close analysis both of these views can be seen to be mistaken and that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

To read the full essay click on the link below:

The Consciousness Puzzle

David John Chalmers (born 20 April 1966) is an Australian philosopher specializing in the area of Philosophy of Mind. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Consciousness at the Australian National University.

By Serena Roney-Dougal, Psi Research Centre, Britain

For the past six years I have been working in India, initially at the world’s first Yoga University (Bihar Yoga Bharati) in Swami Satyananda’s ashram  in Bihar, and then with Tibetan Buddhists at various monasteries in India. It has been an amazing experience, not least because the Indian ashram students showed me very clearly that my knowledge about mind and consciousness was severely limited by the Western approach. I therefore started to make a study of the Yogic and Buddhist philosophies of mind and consciousness and what follows is where I’ve got to so far, aware that I am still in primary school as far as these ideas are concerned, but feeling that my simple understanding of these complex concepts just might be helpful to others in the West who may be interested in learning about this viewpoint. The Yogic and Buddhist conception of consciousness is a top-down approach similar in some ways with the Neoplatonic philosophy found in the Western Mystery tradition, and also having links with traditional Western animist philosophy. They also are profoundly similar to the Holographic Universe philosophy that I have mentioned as being the best understanding for how psi works that I have come across so far.

1. The Vedic and Buddhist Concept of Ground

Consciousness (Alaya Vijnana)

In the beginning…..

According to Vedic and Buddhist teachings, consciousness is sort of the equivalent of the Big Bang or God.  This is not at all like the God of the West, but rather, as Swami Satyananda (2000) says: “By God (Ishwara) we mean . . . a superior spiritual consciousness.” I call this Big C to distinguish it from our personal consciousness. This Consciousness is infinite, eternal – that is without beginning or end – “Consciousness is.” Eternity is a concept we are still having trouble with in the West. I recently learned that it was the Buddhists who first conceptualised eternity and it was only in the Middle Ages that it came to the West – which is an astounding thought. So for us it is really a relatively recent concept and may be that is why we have such trouble grasping it. The West needs to come to grips with the concept of eternity and stop thinking that the universe begins and ends – either taking on Fred Hoyle’s steady state universe ideas, or that this particular universe has arisen out of the ending of a previous one and will itself eventually end, and another forms in the eternal cosmic dance. I like to visualise the Western concept of the Universe, with a beginning and end, as a straight line. Eternity is a circle – everywhere is the beginning, everywhere is the middle, everywhere is the end; in other words there is no beginning, middle or end.

The Buddhist conception, as stated by the Third Karmapa, is: “Both faculties and objects arise from the mind. The manifestation of sensory objects and faculties is dependent upon an element that has been present throughout beginingless time.” (Thrangu, 2001, p.34) In other words, everything, the whole manifest universe, arises from mind. There is here a problem of translation, in this quote the word ‘mind’ is being used in the same way as Big C from the Yogis. I shall use the word Consciousness with a Big C to denote the eternal ground of all being. This is the same teaching as Advaita Vedanta, and turns our Western story of how the world began on its head from: “In the beginning there was a Bang,” the Bang became light which became matter which formed galaxies, stars, planets and ultimately life, and consciousness is just emerging out of matter (the brain) now – to: “In the infinite eternity Consciousness is” and out of Consciousness matter is formed; Consciousness is the ultimate ground of all being.

Prof. Harishankar Singh, a Vedic philosopher from Varansi, when discussing these ideas with me, made an interesting remark that the purpose of Consciousness is to provide us with our ethics, our morality for life, our knowledge of good and evil, our highest purpose. Thus Consciousness is both the ground of all being and the highest spiritual aspiration or, as Wilber (2001) describes it, the ground out of which the Great Nest of Being manifests. Morality and ethics of humans are very, very different from those of animals – and this is one mark of the difference in quality of consciousness. As Tibetan Buddhists put it – we have a precious human life which makes it possible for us to attain enlightenment.

Mind, Awareness and Consciousness

Vedic philosophy states that the qualities, or functions, of consciousness are knowledge, will and activity, of which thinking is one activity. In the Vedic and Buddhist frameworks there is a clear distinction between mind and consciousness. Separating thinking out is something that I have found to be of central importance in grasping this other view of consciousness. Thought is related to mind and mind is connected to the senses. Consciousness is something much bigger!  Consciousness itself is not a quality, it is reality in all its different forms. Swami Satyananda (2000, p.19) says: “The mind cannot be the source of consciousness because it too can be perceived as an object. The mind does not illuminate itself.” When you practice some forms of meditation such as Buddhist mindfulness, or Mahamudra, or the Yogic Antar Mouna, you watch the mind, watch the thoughts as they appear and disappear, you ‘rest in the awareness.’ Yogis and Buddhists conceive of mind as an organ which processes the senses, and is the means by which thought is created. “Consciousness when measured, limited, in space and time, then form and qualities appear – then it becomes chitta (mind).” Swami Satyananda defines yoga as a method, “by which consciousness is disconnected from the entanglement with mind and the manifested world.” (2000, p.18) This is true too of meditation.

In the Baghavad Gita this conception is pictured as a chariot driven by five horses. The horses are the senses and the mind is the rein leading from the horses to a driver, who is awareness or the intellect (buddhi). The overall direction to the chariot is however given by the passenger (personal atman, the soul) who instructs the driver. We can see here that in this conception mind is very limited; and I find it very helpful to use the word mind with this definition as it is helping me to get greater clarity. The problem in the West is that these words are used in so many different ways and we never quite know in what way the person is using them! This problem is compounded when translations are made of Sanskrit or Buddhist texts. The Vedic conception is very similar to the Buddhist (Thrangu, 2001), which talks of 8 consciousnesses: the five sense consciousnesses, the 6^th is the mind sense consciousness, the 7^th the immediate (or afflicted) consciousness, and the 8^th the ground consciousness.⁶ The sense of self or ego, continuity of mind, is considered to be linked with the 7^th consciousness, which is called buddhi (awareness or intellect) by the Yogis. This also is where actual perception is located because it is the link with our memory and conceptualisation, both of which are needed for us to be able to perceive something for what it is, rather than just a meaningless shape, taste, etc. And what in yogic terms is called the soul seems to be conceptually linked with the 8^th consciousness, though Buddhists do not use the term soul. Beyond this, out of which everything arises is Big C, naked awareness, Ultimate Mind – there are so many terms used for this. The Buddhists also have the philosophy that these 8 consciousnesses transform into wisdom as we reach enlightenment. This I like! The ultimate magic!

Do you have soul?

Vedic philosophy states that there are five primary levels which manifest out of the eternal Consciousness at different evolved states, which they call Soul, or universal Atman. I am just beginning to grapple with this concept of soul and what it means. I always saw soul as the essence of the person, connected with but different from the personality; something which is recognizable, unique in the new born babe and which is still there when the person dies, albeit changed by their life experience. In the Vedic view:

The soul of matter is the unconscious state of pure Consciousness;

the soul of plants is the subconscious state of pure Consciousness;

the soul of animals is the conscious state of pure Consciousness;

the soul of humans is the self-conscious state of pure Consciousness; this self-consciousness means we can choose good and bad, leading to ethics, morality and the possibility of enlightenment.

In the Buddhist view there are other levels beyond the human, the various levels of different devas and gods, some of which relate to the Western concept of the fair folk.

Thus there is Consciousness, with a capital C, which is the whole universe, and this manifests in us as our soul. From the Holographic Universe perspective, as I’m a part of the whole (from my perspective) and the whole is in every part, this is what is being described here in terms of soul and consciousness. This big C in the Buddhist terminology is known as sunyatta (emptiness). According to Tai Situ-pa Rinpoche (1996), sunyatta is not nothing – it is the whole universe including the formless whole behind this manifest reality since none of it has ultimate entity, everything is impermanent coming and going like a river where the water is always different but the river stays – which I think is related to Bohm’s idea of the implicate order, out of which this see-touch reality unfolds. Tai Situpa says that emptiness is where everything has limitless possibilities and potential; there is nothing which is not the manifestation of everything, that is more than manifestation of everything, that is less than manifestation of everything; which once again takes us back to the Holographic Universe ideas.

What I really like about these Yogic and Buddhist concepts is that thinking-mind, awareness and consciousness are clearly separate faculties. Mind is the tool by which we become aware of the senses and is the creator of thoughts. And every meditator knows the difference between the thinking process and awareness, the witness which watches the mind. Consciousness is still not a totally clear concept because it is so multifaceted, but separating thinking-mind and awareness out as two distinct processes, and having a top-down approach to the Universe with consciousness present at all levels makes good sense to me. I am, however, unsure of the definition of the use of words such as sub- and un-conscious in the Vedic usage, particularly with regard to their concept of Atman, i.e., exactly what is meant by matter being the unconscious aspect of Consciousness? However, I am aware of the tangible presence of the stones at Stonehenge and Callanish and Avebury – these stones definitely have a consciousness of sorts – perhaps this is what is meant. And see the power of stone as used in religions, eg. The Kabbah in Mecca, and king-making, e.g. the Stone of Destiny in Westminster. Further discussion with Vedic philosophers is required here!

Parapsychology and the Vedas

Theoretically this philosophy gives a solid underpinning for an understanding of psi phenomena. Psi is the direct transfer of information without the medium of the senses, more connected with awareness (buddhi) rather than thought (chitta, mind). In fact psi research suggests that thoughts get in the way of psi awareness. With the Vedic philosophy, that consciousness underpins all reality, I am beginning to understand that the active psychic processes, such as psychokinesis or psychic healing, are the motor organs of the Self-consciousness (soul). The receptive psychic processes such as telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition are the sensory organs of soul. Thus psi can be understood as the active and receptive aspects of the soul level of our being. Interestingly, the dictionary definition of the word ‘psyche’ has ‘soul’ as one of its meanings. At the psychic level we experience consciousness, at the very least awareness, rather than thinking mind, potential omniscience and omnipotence considered as attributes of the divine, and called the siddhis in yogic philosophy. It then manifests via the normal mental modes, some people becoming aware of psychic impressions through imagery, some through feelings, some intuition, etc.

As I discuss in my writings on the Holographic Universe (Roney-Dougal, 1991), in parapsychology recent theorising (Radin (1997, 2006); Jahn & Dunne (1988) has related the functioning of psi to quantum reality.  The Vedic and Buddhist philosophy of consciousness is totally in line with this conception of consciousness being integrated with matter, as seen in such quantum paradoxes as Schrödinger’s Cat and non-locality (quantum entanglement). Quantum entanglement (also known Bell’s theorem, or the EPR paradox) says that information exists and passes between connected quantum particles instantaneously, i.e. outside of time and space, as does psi. Schrödinger’s Cat paradox gives rise to the observer effect, which says that consciousness is central for material reality to take the particular form it does, as we get in psychokinesis, e.g., psychic healing occurring in accordance with the wishes of the healer. Both of these quantum principles, which have been experimentally verified, are in accord with parapsychological data. As Swami Satyananda (2000, p.19) puts it: matter is the “gross form and manifestation of mind. . . the material world that we see around us is really an expression of the more subtle mental aspects of existence.”  I could copy this quote several times over with sayings from various quantum physicists, as Wilber does in his book “Quantum Questions” Wilber (1984). (Yet again there is a confusion of terms. I think that the words “mind” and “mental” in the quote should really be consciousness.) At the quantum level, matter is localized energy; matter takes both wave (energy) and particle (matter) forms. E = mc²

2. The Shaivite Tantric Concept.

Tantric philosophy recognises 4 levels of consciousness (see figure 1), which are both the manifestation and evolution of the Universe and the individual. Each of these levels are subdivided into 4 making a total of 16.  Tantra states that our purpose is to become aware at each of these levels, so that we realise the ultimate state (supra-consciousness), which is one with eternal Consciousness.

Swami Satyananda (2000) has written a commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga sutras called “Four Chapters on Freedom,” in which he describes the four primary states of consciousness as follows:

1. Conscious mind: sthula (gross dimension [of the Universe]); jagrat (waking state [of the mind]) – surface thought and perception of the outside world.

2. Subconscious mind: sukshma (subtle dimension [of the Universe]); swapna (dream state [of the mind]) – individual memory and samskaras (mental tendencies).

3. Unconscious mind: karana (causal dimension [of the Universe]); sushupna [also known as nidra][1](deep sleep state [of the mind]); collective samskaras and memory.

These realms contain the instinctive, intellectual, psychic and intuitive aspects [of the mind]. (Satyananda, 2000, p.19)

And 4: Turiya which is where consciousness goes beyond mind. Turiya means “simultaneous awareness of all three states” which takes us closer to the state of enlightenment. (Niranjanananda, 2002, p.25) These can be pictured as follows in Figure 1 (Adapted from Yogakanti, 1999):

Figure 1: The 4 Major Tantric States of Consciousness

Lakshman Jee (1988) describes these states as follows:

Jagrat is “when the individual . . . . loses consciousness of one’s subjectivity and becomes one with the objective world.” This is our normal state of consciousness. Most of us are totally unaware most of the time. We are totally caught up with living: working, reading a book, chatting with friends, doing the washing up, etc. Most of us don’t watch ourselves, don’t watch what we are saying, feeling, being, doing, thinking. In terms of the Universe manifestation this is gross matter. And matter has evolved in this universe from Big Bang through to all the different elements, planets, rocks, etc. In fact, through our agency, it is still evolving in the form of plastics, computers, technology, pharmaceuticals, etc.

Swapna is our dreaming state of consciousness, which includes day dreaming, “lost in thought” as we say. Once again we lose awareness and get totally caught up in our thoughts, dreams, daydreams, etc. The aim of meditation is to enable us to remain aware even when dreaming. In Tibetan Buddhism one of the teachings is dream Yoga, which is one of the six Yogas of Naropa, and is where you learn lucid dreaming. The ultimate aim is that when you die you can go through the bardos (the intermediate state between this life and the next) with full awareness. This is considered to be a dream-like state of consciousness. In terms of Universal manifestation this is the life-energy level.

Sushupna, or nidra, is the causal dimension, the all-knowing. In our normal state, the common understanding of nidra is of deep sleep, an unconscious state. With increased awareness one can actually become aware in this state of consciousness. Thus it is said that the night of the layman is the day of the yogi. This state of consciousness is the absence of senses and thinking mind Yogakanti (1999), termed the 7^th Consciousness by in Buddhism, equivalent to the soul level of the Vedic system. In the Universe manifestation it is the Akashic, mental level.

Turiya is the state of total equilibrium between individual manifest consciousness and cosmic Consciousness. It is not an interactive state though full of wisdom there is absence of dualistic knowledge. There is total disassociation from the seeds of gross, subtle or causal dimensions Yogakanti (1999). In Buddhism this state is called ‘naked awareness.’

My understanding of these states is that enlightenment is becoming aware in states of consciousness in which we are normally unaware, including the dream state and the ‘beyond thought’ state. Awareness is the key concept.

Tantra and Parapsychology

According to Patanjali’s sutras and Buddhist teachings, as we develop our awareness at these different levels of consciousness so we become aware at a psychic level. In the 1970s a theoretical framework for parapsychology, known as the psi-conducive model, was developed from Patanjali’s yoga sutras (Braud, 1978; Honorton, 1981). This led to an ongoing programme of states of consciousness research which has borne rich fruit. I have been using this model as a theoretical basis for research in India, working initially with swamis in an ashram and later with  Tibetan Buddhist monks in monasteries, who have done up to 40 years meditation. The findings are still very preliminary but are suggestive that meditation does enhance psi awareness.

Figure 2: Correlation of Psi Score with Years of Meditation Practice.

As can be seen in Figure 2, those monks with the most years of meditation practice show far higher psi scores. For the first 10 – 15 years the scattering of psi scores is like you get with people who have not had any mental training, then after about 10 – 15 years it all starts to go more positive and get stronger. The magnitude of the correlation between psi score and years of meditation, found in Tibetan study 1 (0.524), was nearly the same (0.49) in study 2, and is similar to that between Yoga and psi (0.57). Combining the monks’ scores from both the Tibetan studies gives a correlation of (0.73), which is shown in the graph here (Roney-Dougal & Solfvin, (2008). This research is now being continued at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in Britain, and it will be interesting to see whether Westerners show a similar pattern. In meditation it seems that we are making the shift from unconscious competence (the natural psychic) through conscious incompetence, which is where all the psi-missing manifests showing our blocks and defences occurs, through to conscious competence as we become more and more aware. Tibetans recognize two sorts of clairvoyance: the spontaneous, natural psychic which they consider to be unreliable, and the highly trained lama, who they consider to be 100% reliable. We seem to be beginning to see this here. They also state that years of practice are needed, and this is showing up too.

For me, the central message from the Yogic Tantric teachings is that increasing awareness of those aspects of our consciousness of which we are normally unconscious, dream and pure awareness states, are in fact those states of consciousness which are related both to psi functioning and the samadhi states of meditation. This tallies with the Buddhist teachings about meditation, and with the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious as that aspect of consciousness outside of space and time which is the domain of the psychic.

3. The Union of Energy and Consciousness

In the West we normally think of energy, such as a light or electricity, as a non-conscious force that interacts with matter. In the Vedic philosophy, energy has  its own form of  consciousness,  e.g., the consciousness of light is illumination. In the Tantric philosophy the manifestation of consciousness into the different dimensions of the Universe occurs through energy – or vibration (spanda). Once manifested this tehn evolves towards transcendence. This could possibly be a spiritual philosophical link with M-theory Carr (2008), whereas Quantum theory is the Western philosophical equivalent of the Vedic and Buddhist philosophies. Turiya is the subtlest level and the end dimension of manifestation is the lowest gross level of jagrat, which is the material universe. This is the complete opposite of the Western beliefs about the origins of the Universe.

The subtle energy aspect of life within the body, which I have researched at the theoretical level for many years now, is the Yogic and Buddhist Tantric concept of prana, which flows in the body through the nadis, which are energy (termed wind by Tibetans) channels in the human body. There are 72,000 nadis of which the three primary nadis, sushumna, ida and pingala, run up the centre of, and on either side of, the spinal column. Where these energy channels intersect, the chakras are located. I have discussed the chakras, and particularly ajna chakra, the third eye, from a physiological viewpoint earlier because that has helped me to get a handle on them, but the basic concept of the chakras is as the energy aspect of the body linking body with consciousness – the body consciousness energy. I think that the Tantric concept of the way the Universe works as the mingling of Consciousness with Energy, manifesting from subtler levels to the gross level of matter, which then evolves back to the subtler levels of consciousness is as good an understanding as I’ve come across yet. The subtle energy aspect of the body seems to be the halfway house between consciousness and the material world. In trying to get some understanding of how mind connects with matter this seems to go some way to a reasonable understanding, particularly with quantum philosophies bringing the two together so clearly now.

Both Yogic and Buddhist tantric teachings use prana, the nadis and chakras for meditation practices and they are considered to be the most powerful way of shifting our awareness out of this see-touch reality into Big C.

Compassion – the bodhisattva principle

What the Buddhist teachings have, that for me is their most important contribution, is the Bodhisattva principle: that we are aiming for enlightenment for the good of all beings; the altruistic approach. This is of course part and parcel of the Holographic universe philosophy. If the whole is in every part, then every thought word and action of every part affects the whole. So everything I think or do affects everything else which automatically affects me. This gives an understanding of karma which goes beyond the rather mechanistic view that most people have. We are all interconnected, the Universe is an indivisible whole, and compassion, love, is the juice that fuels the evolving principle. The more compassion and love I generate the better for all including myself. Thus, ultimately the psychic level of being is not the overt clairvoyance of a medium or fortune teller, but that sensitivity which is involved in making the choice which takes you in the best direction for the benefit of all people, that oils the wheels of life, that is part of wisdom, the wise decision, the best thing to do for all concerned. It is also that sensitivity, that awareness, that is linked with empathy, where you feel from the other person’s perspective, say the right thing, do the best for them, which is part of compassion. So we are looking at the subtle level of the development of wisdom and compassion. Can’t be bad really!

This is as far as I have reached  – who knows where I go to next.

References

Braud, W.G. 1978). Psi-conducive conditions: Explorations and interpretations. In Shapin, B. and Coly, L. (eds.), Psi and States of Awareness, New York, USA: Parapsychology  Foundation, pp. 1 – 41.

Harris Walker, E. (1977). Comparison of Some Theoretical Predictions of Schmidt’s Mathematical Theory and Walker’s Quantum Mechanical Theory of Psi, The Journal of Research in Psi Phenomena, 2 (1), 54-70.

Honorton, C. (1981). Psi, Internal Attention States and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, In B. Shapin & L. Coly (eds.), Concepts and Theories of Parapsychology, New York, USA: Parapsychology Foundation, pp. 55 – 68.

Jahn, R.G. and Dunne, B.J. (1988). Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, Orlando, USA: Harcourt Brace.

Lakshman Jee, Sw.  (1988). Kashmir Shaivism: The Secret Supreme, Delhi, India: Sri Satguru Publications, pp. 71-85.

Niranjanananda Saraswati, Sw. (1993/2002). Yoga Darshan: Vision of the Yoga Upanishads, Munger, India: Yoga Publications Trust.

Radin, D. (1997). The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena. New York, USA: Harper Edge.

——-(2006). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality. New York, USA: Simon & Schuster.

Roney-Dougal, S.M. and Solfvin, J. (2008). Exploring the relationship between two Tibetan meditation techniques, the Stroop Effect and precognition, Proceedings of the 51st Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association, Winchester, Britain, pp.187-203.

Satyananda, Saraswati, Swami (1976/2000). Four Chapters on Freedom, Munger, India: Yoga Publications Trust.

Thrangu Rinpoche, Khenchen (trans Roberts, P.) (2001). Transcending Ego: Distinguishing Consciousness from Wisdom. A treatise of the Third Karmapa, Boulder, USA: Namo Buddha Pub.

Tai Situ-pa Rinpoche (1996). Prajnaparamita: Tape 1,  Kagyu Samye Ling, Britian: Rokpa Trust.

Wilber, K. (ed.) (1984). Quantum Questions, Boston, USA: Shambhala.

——-(2001). A Theory of Everything, Bath, Britain: Gateway Books.

Yogakanati Saraswati, Sw.  (1999). The Advayatarakopanishad, Unpub. MA Dissertation thesis in Yoga Philosophy, Bhagalpur Uni., Bihar, India, pp.38-50.

Brainwavers, we want to hear about any telepathic or related phenomena you have experienced. Or do you think the whole idea is a bunch of nonsense based on ignorance and superstition?

Read the rest of renowned researcher and author Stephan Schwartz’s article by clicking on the link below

Shift10_S_Schwartz_InfiniteArticle(2)

(This article is taken from: http://www.chem.yale.edu/~chem125/125/history99/8Occult/OccultAtoms.html)

Close examination of the work of the Occult Chemists sheds light on one corner of the intellectual scene a century ago. In some ways the story is amusing, but amid the hoopla of the millennium, it can also provide science students at all levels an important lesson on the nature of scientific proof and the place of authority in science. It might help their teachers consider what lessons are most important to convey through a science curriculum.

Note: Internal links, such as the references in bold square brackets (see [1] above), provide information from within this page and are fast. External links that take you to other pages, and will require more time to return if your line is slow, are indicated by this font.

The Occult Chemists

Charles Webster Leadbeater, 1847-1932, a renegade Anglican clergyman, is shown left in later life as Presiding Bishop of the Liberal Catholic Church, a church with six bishops for fewer than 1000 members [W p. 271, N2 p. 311]. He was the first to see atoms and continued this line of research intermittently over a period of 38 years.

Under Leadbeater’s coaching Mrs. Annie Besant, 1847-1933, acquired the same skill. She is pictured above in 1897 [W fronticepiece] as a leader of the Theosophical Society. She was also an influential advocate of Indian – and Irish – Home Rule following her successive careers as an Anglican clergyman’s wife, an atheist, a birth-control advocate, a university chemistry student, an executive of the socialist Fabian Society, and a radical labor organizer. George Bernard Shaw called her “the greatest orator in England and possibly in Europe.” She would be Leadbeater’s loyal companion on and off for the rest of her long life. Her life was fantastically colorful and in many ways influential. For example, when 24-year-old Gandhi set up his law office in South Africa in 1893, he hung her portrait on the wall. In 1901 she personally initiated into Theosophy 12-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru, would be independent India’s first prime minister (1947-64). In 1917 she founded the Indian Boy Scouts and enlisted as scout master young V.K. Krishna Menon, India’s U.N. Ambassador and Minister of Defense 40 years later. In 1917, after a 3-month internment by the colonial government for advocating Home Rule, she was elected president of the Indian National Congress. On her death the Bombay Stock Exchange remained closed all day, and schools and streets in major Indian cities were renamed in her honor. A portion of her ashes, mingled with those of Leadbeater, rest in the Garden of Remembrance at the International Headquarters of the Theosophical Society in Adyar, India.[N1 pp. 225, 388; N2 pp. 76, 255-273, 454-455] Her name is pronounced Bess’nt and rhymes with pleasant. [N1 p. 20])

Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, 1877?-1953, Leadbeater’s young Singhalese companion since 1889 (shown above right in later life) attended these scientific sessions with his white kitten, Ji [W p. 314, N1 p. 327, N2 pp. 47,49]. Although he could not himself see atoms, “Raja” took verbatim notes of the accounts of Leadbeater and Besant, and prepared diagrams for the publications. As described below, he was also charged with counting anu and dividing by 18. [OC3 pp. 3,6] Bertram Keightley, a lawyer in his mid-30s who was general secretary of the Indian Section of the Theosophical Society, was present as a supernumerary.[W p. 305, N2 p. 49]

As Mrs. Besant would write 14 years later in Occult Chemistry, a series of Clairvoyant Observations on the Chemical Elements (1909):

The method of examination employed was that of clairvoyance; there were only two observers – Mr. Leadbeater and myself – and it is very desirable that our results should be tested by others who can use the same extension of physical sight. The researches being carried on upon the physical plane – the forms examined being gaseous and etheric only – a very slight intensification of ordinary vision is all that is necessary, and many should, therefore, be able to test our observations. They cannot be regarded as established, by the outside world, until others have corroborated them; and we put them forward in the hope of stimulating work along this line, and of thus bringing to science, when its instruments fail it, the old, old instrument of enlarged human vision.We then took various substances – common salt, etc. … fragments of metals, as iron, tin, zinc, silver, gold … pieces of ore, mineral waters, etc., etc., and, for the rarest substances, Mr. Leadbeater visited a mineralogical museum, a few miles off. In all, 57 chemical elements were examined, out of the 78 recognised by modern chemistry. [OC1 p. 2]

The latter paragraph refers to a second phase of experimentation that took place near Dresden in 1907. [OC3 p. 3]

Because gold proved to challenging for early observation, only hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen were reported in the first publication “Occult Chemistry”, an article in the Theosophical magazine Lucifer for November, 1895 [reprinted in OC1 pp. xi-xix]. It is notable that this same month marked Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays, the tool that would make atoms visible to conventional science. Subsequent observations of all the elements, and then some, would be serialized in The Theosophist and collected in three editions of Occult Chemistry (1909, 1919, 1951).

Columns of the 1895 figure (right) show successive dissection and magnification of Hydrogen (left column), Oxygen (center column), and Nitrogen (right column) from the gaseous state of the entire atom (at the bottom) rising through three intermediate “etherial” levels to a common particle (at the top). “The ultimate physical atom is marked a, and is drawn only once, although it is the same throughout.” [OC1 p. xiii] Later the Occult Chemists would identify this ultimate particle with “anu”, the term for the indivisible elementary particle of matter in Jain metaphysics.[1b] The plural of anu is also anu [OC3 p. 4]. It is not to be confused with the atomic mass unit (amu) of conventional science. As indicated in the lower right corner of the top frames, H contains in all 18 anu, O contains 290 anu, and N contains 261 anu. They noted the analogy between the anu and “protyle” which had entered Prout’s theory of the elements in 1815 and was being reconsidered by Crookes and others in the late 19th Century. [OC1 p. xii] Prout had thought that all atoms were composed of hydrogen atoms [P3,B6 pp. 82-108]. In 1902 Crookes suggested the ultimate particle might be the electron, discovered by Thomson in 1897 [C3,B6 p. 195]. Having seen the anu directly, the Occult Chemists did not join Crookes, their consultant in many scientific matters, in identifying the electron with the fundamental “protyle”. [OC3 pp. 2,6] Although the Occult Chemists took the name of the anu from ancient Indian metaphysics, they apparently took its form from an American source less than 20 years old.

The form of the anu is strongly reminiscent of the drawing of the atom concocted by Edwin D. Babbitt in 1878 to explain bonding, heat, electricity, light, color, friction, psychic power, and nearly everything else in his 290-page work: The Principles of LIGHT AND COLOR: including among other things the Harmonic Laws of the Universe, the Etherio-Atomic Philosophy of Force, Chromo Chemistry, Chromo Thera- peutics, and the General Phil- osophy of the Fine Forces, Together with numer- ous Discoveries and Practical Appli- cations.(New York, Babbitt & Co., 1878).

Edwin D. Babbitt, 1828-1905

Some of the nutty ideas of Babbitt and the Occult Chemists are traceable to naive perceptions of conventional contemporary science.

For example in the 1860s Lord Kelvin had been suggesting that an atom could be understood as a “vortex” in the “ether”.[T] Of course Babbitt’s “spirillae” are reminiscent of the windings of electromagnetic coils, and his “torrents” look like Faraday’s lines of force.

Having “seen” atoms, Besant and Leadbeater were in a position to confirm that “A fairly accurate drawing is given in Babbitt’s Principles of Light and Colour, p. 102″ [the above figure], but they went on to claim:

The illustrations there given of atomic combination are entirely wrong and misleading, but if the stovepipe run through the centre of the single atom be removed, the picture may be taken as correct, and will give some idea of the complexity of this fundamental unit of the physical universe. [This is somewhat confusing because Babbitt was drawing the atom, while at high astral resolution they were seeing anu within the atom] [OC1 p. xiv]

Besant and Leadbeater added a “twist” to Babbitt’s atom by publishing pictures of mirror-image (enantiomeric) “Male” and “Female” (or “positive” and “negative”) anu in 1909. [OC1 p. 5]

Mrs. Besant had been intensively involved with chemistry during the period 1878-1883, when, in her early thirties, she was one of the first female students and assistants in London University. At this time van't Hoff’s recent proposal of mirror-image carbon compounds was a topic of intense discussion. [N1 pp. 176-182]

In another leap of imagination the Occult Chemists claimed that the mirror-image anu :

are alike in everything save the direction of their whorls and of the force which pours through them. In the one case force pours in from the ‘outside,’ from the fourth-dimensional space, and passing through the atom, pours into the physical world. In the second, it pours in from the physical world, and out through the atom into the ‘outside’ again, i.e., vanishes from the physical world. [OC1, 5]

The visual appeal of the Babbitt-Besant-Leadbeater atom-anu has given it a measure of permanence. It has cropped up recently not only in many a fringe science web page (for example one where it is called the “Compton Radius Vortex”), but also in a series of publications where it is proposed as the structure for subquarks.[P2]

In addition to 20 schematic diagrams prepared by “Raja”, Besant and Leadbeater’s 1909 book included more realistic drawings of individual atoms prepared by “two Theosophical artists, Herr Hecker and Mrs. Kirby”. [OC2 p. 18] Below is shown sodium, which contains 418 anu as dots within “bodies” within “funnels”, “globes”, and a “connecting rod”. [OC2 p. 18] To the right are shown (1) iron – 1008 anu, (2) lithium – 127 anu, (3) helium – 72 anu, and (4) neon – 360 anu. [OC2 p. 30]

Like conventional chemists, the Occult Chemists studied molecules as well as atoms. Like them, they were eager to understand bonding in the aromatic hydrocarbons. Thus in 1924 Jinarajadasa asked, Of the four valencies [of carbon], three are satisfied, one by Hydrogen, and two by two Carbons. But what has happened to the fourth valency? [J3 p. 55] They also built physical models, such as the model of benzene (right) constructed at Adyar in 1924. Like the conventional chemists, they had reservations about their models. As Jinarajadasa warned, We must remember that no models can even adequately represent the reality, since first the distances between ultimate physical atoms and between groups of them and their relative sizes cannot be correctly represented in any model, and secondly each funnel which looks solid is not solid at all but only a whirlpool of force created by the ultimate atoms as they revolve. [J p. 56]

There is circumstantial evidence that Jinarajadasa still maintained some sort of touch with recent mainstream chemical research near the end of his life. In 1952 he mailed an unsolicited copy of his new third edition of Occult Chemistry from Madras to the home of Professor J. D. Roberts of M.I.T. The book arrived without a word of explanation, but the reason it was directed to Roberts may be that the previous year he had proposed unusual cation structures, like “nortricyclonium” (right), and coined the word “nonclassical” to describe them. [R2]

Now at the close of the 20th Century, as at the close of the 19th, popular culture is awash in the paranormal. What of today’s conscientious but naive chemistry student, who is being taught on the basis of the authority of a text or a lecturer, rather than on the basis of direct evaluation of experimental evidence? To this student the clairvoyant atomic pictures of Besant and Leadbeater may seem as plausible as the atomic orbital diagrams of a conventional chemistry text. Why not? In truth they are equally far-fetched, in the sense that most textbooks neither discuss orbitals realistically nor support them with physical (or theoretical) evidence.

It is not trivial to supply simple, direct evidence to prove that a 3d-orbital is any more realistic than Besant and Leadbeater’s Figure 4 for the neon atom, which it somewhat resembles. Some models from conventional science, such as Kelvin’s vortex atom of 1867 [T], or G.N. Lewis’s cubic octet atom of 1902 [L1], or current string theory [1c], might seem no more firmly rooted in experiment or confirmed theory than the atoms of Babbitt and the Occult Chemists. How is the student to learn how to distinguish the work of responsible scientists from that of crackpots and charlatans? This is arguably the most important lesson that most students should learn from the study of science.

The ultimate test of an experiment is its repeatability, and that of a theory is its power of prediction. [2a] An active human mind cannot resist making observations and seeking to relate them. Life is full of enough coincidences to suggest all sorts of subtle relationships. Such delightful connections are a principal source of the charm and kooky verisimilitude that characterize the novels of writers like Kurt Vonnegut. But connections among past observations are not in themselves science. They become science by being carried into the future through repetition of observations, especially by disinterested or even hostile observers, and through testing of theoretical predictions with new observations under altered conditions [2b]. A theory is scientifically validated not when some of its predictions are borne out, but when All of them prove true. An indispensable element in the development of a scientific theory is its refinement on the basis of well-chosen, critical tests until the All condition seems to be satisfied. All can be a very large number, so most theories remain only provisionally verified, but they gain acceptance and stature in proportion to the number and variety of their predictions that have been confirmed [2c]. Of course confirming a prediction that is vague, ambiguous, routine, or trivial does not count for much, nor can a theory be refuted by unreliable experimentation. There are myriad examples where careless or naive experiments have given incorrect results, or where insufficient allowance has been made for experimental error. Becoming a mature scientist involves developing good taste about the levels of reliability of individual theories and experiments. Often in paranormal “science” predictions that have been confirmed are found to have been ambiguous, and unambiguous predictions have remained untested or have been ignored when the test has failed.

No one else has reported successfully repeating the clairvoyant atomic observations of Besant and Leadbeater. Despite Besant’s assertion that “many should … be able to test our observations”, even Jinarajadasa, who collaborated on this research for 38 years, claimed only to be a recorder and supplier of samples, never an observer. On the contrary, atomic structures determined and confirmed by conventional science look nothing like what the Occult Chemists claimed to see.

The Occult Chemists did make unambiguous predictions of previously undiscovered elements. Occultum, at. wt. 3; Metargon, 42; Kalon, 169.66, and Meta-Kalon, 172) have not been verified by experiment, despite Crookes’s suggestion that “their work would be useful at least in suggesting to scientists the kind of elements they might still discover in the as yet unfinished periodic table.” [N2 p. 52] [3] Supporters have claimed unimpeachable proof of the reliability of the Occult Chemists from the fact that, before isotopes had been reported by conventional chemists, they reported Meta-Neon, 22.33, the second most abundant isotope of Neon.[P2c p. 14][3a] But the All condition is hardly satisfied, because the two Xenons they reported are the least abundant of the 7 natural Xenon isotopes between masses 128 and 136. Although their Meta-Krypton, 83.66, is the most abundant of the 5 natural Krypton isotopes between 80 and 86, their original Krypton, 81.3, does not exist.

As science Occult Chemistry fails both crucial tests.

Crackpots or Charlatans?

In the introduction to Occult Chemistry (1909) Mrs. Besant modestly wrote:

An observer’s duty is to state clearly his observations; it is for others to judge of their value, and to decide whether they indicate lines of research that may be profitably followed up by scientists. [OC1 p. 1]

Experimental x-ray diffraction and spectroscopy, and quantum mechanical calculations which have been amply justified by cross checking with a great variety of experimental techniques, have yielded a consistent picture of the atom that is completely different from that of the Occult Chemists. Near the end Jinarajadasa was backing and filling in his argument that the physicists’ pictures might have been distorted by the electric and magnetic fields of their experiments. In his view “the occult investigators and the physicists are working from two sides of a great [mountain] range”, still he felt “sure that some day in the future they will meet.”[OC3 p. 6] Though a true believer can never be converted, it is long since clear to any fair-minded observer that conventional and occult chemistry will never meet, because Besant and Leadbeater were totally wrong. They were plainly not seeing atoms.[1c]

However deluded they may have been, one can ask whether they were faithful in truthfully reporting what they thought they saw. Were they innocent, earnest crackpots or cynical mountebanks?

Chemist Anthony Butler has given a charitable interpretation of the motivation of Besant, Leadbeater and Jinarajadasa,

With their fanciful descriptions, did they set out to deceive a gullible public? I think this is unlikely and quite out of character for Annie and her companions. She may have been wayward and impetuous but never dishonest.The explanation must be one of collective self-deception. In a state of semitrance, the normal inhibitory processes in the brain were modified and a suggestion of one of the group, probably based on scientific knowledge, was taken up and embroidered by others. Without the scientific knowledge we have today to act as a check, the process could continue with greater and greater flights of fancy. [B7 p. 42]

Many of his contemporary Theosophists did not view Leadbeater so charitably:

[When a former Theosophist] “looked at the collection of books Leadbeater had in his personal library, he said to himself, ‘He has read all the ancient histories of practically every civilization in the world. No wonder he could fit Krishnamurti’s past lives into these histories.’ That confirmed his scepticism about Leadbeater’s powers of clairvoyance”. [K, Chapter 3]Further skepticism about Leadbeater’s character is evident in documents from the notorious Leadbeater Affair of 1906-1908, the same period when he was observing atoms and preparing the first edition of Occult Chemistry for publication.[3b]

Unknowingly the Occult Chemists left quantitative evidence suggesting that, from the beginning, at least Leadbeater or Jinarajadasa, and perhaps Besant or all three, cynically intended to deceive.

Quantitative Evidence of Skulduggery

Already in 1895, when they had counted 18 anu in Hydrogen, 290 in Oxygen, and 261 in Nitrogen, the Occult Chemists were aware that division by 18, to give 1 for Hydrogen, would give 16.11 and 14.5 for Oxygen and Nitrogen, respectively. They noted:

The respective numbers of ultimate atoms contained in a chemical atom of these two bodies are thus seen to closely correspond with their accepted weight numbers. [OC1 p. xvii; Modern chemical values are 15.88 and 14.01, respectively]

As they added more and more elements to their collection, the correspondence between 1/18th of the number of anu and the atomic weights of orthodox chemistry persisted. Within the set of 57 elements reported in 1909 the root-mean-square (rms) deviation between the clairvoyant values and the 1905 “International List” of orthodox chemistry is only 0.8 amu (atomic mass unit), or 14 anu. The rms deviation from more accurate modern atomic weights is larger, 1.0 amu, suggesting that the observers may have been aiming to match a somewhat dated list.

It is difficult to know what list they may have been consulting. Presumably some of their “observations” were made before the 1905 International List was available to them. The Occult Chemists point out, with a devastating naiveté that is almost charming in view of their obvious dry-labbing:

These [1905 chemical] weights differ from those hitherto accepted, and are generally lighter than those given in earlier textbooks. It is interesting to note that our counting endorses the earlier numbers, for the most part, and we must wait to see if later observations will endorse the last results of orthodox chemistry, or confirm ours. [OC1 p. 4]

A critic might see this as an attempt to regain composure after having gone on the record prematurely with values chosen to match the outmoded data. Not surprisingly, later observations have “endorsed the last results of orthodox chemistry”, with an rms deviation of 0.9 amu from the 1905 List, vs. 1.0 from the Occult Chemists’ values.

Someone might try to defend the honesty of the Occult Chemists by proposing the following scenario:

Believers in the paranormal are not accustomed to the necessity of satisfying the All condition. They would likely be satisfied with verification of a few among a host of predictions.Even in conventional science it is well known that one can achieve impressive agreement between two long lists of unrelated numbers (for example a set of observable frequencies in a complex infrared spectrum and a longer list of possible frequencies calculated by a naive computer program). The method is simply to arrange the two sets in decreasing order in adjacent columns and associate nearest neighbors between the columns, attributing gross discrepancies and the excess of calculated peaks to unobservability of some experimental peaks.

Thus the Occult Chemists might be excused for conceiving a random set of atomic pictures and associating them with elements known to chemistry on the basis of their effective atomic weights (number of anu / 18). They might well have been innocent in discarding, as too misty, a subset of their pictures that did not agree with known atomic weights.[4]

Their own accounts undercut the suggestion that the Occult Chemists innocently associated each chemical element with the nearest weight in a random series of observations. Although they often claimed to see atoms in the absence of a physical sample, even more often they expressly chose samples containing the atoms they wished to add to their list. For example, they regularly used pure metals supplied by Crookes. In 1907 Jinarajadasa took Leadbeater to the Dresden Museum to glance at specific mineral samples containing unobserved elements, so that he could form mental pictures which subsequently “he was able at leisure to evoke by clairvoyance”.[OC3 p. 3]

To dispose definitively of the exculpatory scenario proposed above, one may compare their reported atomic weights not with the 1905 International List that they presented in their publications, but with weights from “earlier textbooks” they might have consulted in Dresden when Leadbeater was making his observations. For the elements Phosphorus through Zinc the following graph compares the atomic weights “observed” by Leadbeater and Besant (shown as open diamonds) with three atomic weight scales from conventional chemistry. The upper triangles show the International List of 1905, quoted in Occult Chemistry [OC1 p. 3]. The lower open triangles come from a table in Lothar Meyer’s 1884 text [M3 p. 140]. The lower filled triangles come from another of Meyer’s tables, where some values were rounded to integers. [M3 p. 191]

Obviously Leadbeater’s diamonds are far from randomly distributed with respect to any of the three chemical atomic weight scales. They agree suspiciously well with the textbook values that Meyer rounded (lower filled triangles). For 10 of the 15 elements the agreement with Meyer’s rounded values is exact. A search through other contemporary chemistry textbooks might well turn up a table which agrees even more closely with the findings of the Occult Chemists (for example one with a weight for cobalt that differs from that for nickel).

One can assess this nonrandomness statistically. The range from 30 to 65 amu spans 35 amu or 35 x 18 = 630 anu. Within this range there are 15 elements in Meyer’s list. Thus the chance of randomly choosing a number of anu that corresponds exactly to the atomic weight of one of these elements is 15 / 630 = 0.0238. In making 15 such guesses the expectation value of the number of exact hits is 15 x 0.0238 = 0.36. One would have to guess 1 / 0.0238 = 42 times to expect to get even one exact hit. The Occult Chemists reported 10 hits! To expect 10 hits they would have had to guess 420 times and discard 405 as unreliable. Even the most naive observer would consider failure to report this many discards to be grossly dishonest, so one can safely dismiss the excuse of innocent guessing.

One can extend the statistical analysis by noting that the standard deviation, sigma, for the number of hits is given by

sigma = (Probability of hit * Probability of miss * Number of guesses)^1/2

Let us very generously suppose that the Occult Chemists might innocently have discarded 3/4 of their observations without thinking to mention that they had done so. There would then have been 60 guesses to identify 15 elements within this interval, so that

sigma = (0.0238 * 0.9762 * 60)^1/2 = 1.18

The number of hits reported (10) exceeds the number expected (60 x 0.0238 = 1.43) by 8.57 / 1.18 = 7.26 standard deviations. The random chance of having 10 hits in 60 tries is less than 1 in 10,000,000,000,000 (ten trillion). The obvious conclusion, with a degree of confidence tantamount to certainty, is that consciously or subconsciously at least some of the Occult Chemists tailored the number of anu they “observed” to 18 times the atomic weight in the textbook they consulted. Manufacturing the data did not require difficult mathematics, but, especially for the complicated atoms, it is not plausible that it could have been carried out subconsciously.[4b] It thus seems certain that at least some of the Occult Chemists must have been cynically intending to deceive when in their joint publication they wrote,

“it was impossible for us to know how the various numbers would result on addition, multiplication and division, and the exciting moment came when we waited to see if our results endorsed or approached any accepted weight.”[OC2 p. 19]

Who Did It?

Bishop Leadbeater was often accused of fraud, [5] and he was the first and most productive observer of atoms. Before each session it would not have been difficult for him to devise and memorize structures with the appropriate number of anu for the elements he would be “seeing”. It might be significant that when he was shown mineral samples in the Dresden Museum in 1907, he decided to store the images mentally for subsequent analysis. Perhaps some of these elements took him by surprise, and it would obviously take time to formulate a structure with the right number of anu. If Leadbeater made a mistake, his protegé Jinarajadasa (M.A. Cantab.), as the recorder charged with counting anu and dividing by 18, would have been in a position to make adjustments [OC3 pp. 3,6]. Though Leadbeater could have cheated alone, it is certainly possible that teacher and protegé connived during the experiments.

What of Mrs. Besant? Even though three failures to pass the London University examination in practical chemistry ten years earlier had kept her from receiving the B.Sc. degree [6], Annie Besant was clearly the scientific brains of the Occult Chemistry operation. She was probably correct in attributing her failure in the exams to the fact that “there was one examiner in the University who told her beforehand that however brilliantly she might do the papers which were set, he would not pass her, because he had a strong antipathy towards her atheism and to certain of her activities for the masses, which he considered immoral”[N1 p. 182] [7]. Indeed in 1880 she had taken top honors in scientific subjects in the South Kensington Branch of the University, where she had a very close involvement with her unscrupulous [8] chemistry instructor, Dr. Edward Bibbins Aveling.[N1 pp. 173-177] It is not obvious whether Mrs. Besant would prefer to be remembered with respect to her role in Occult Chemistry as a cynical deceiver or an innocent dupe. Although she was a courageous pioneering feminist, her biographer wrote, “she was extremely susceptible to outside personal influences, particularly of a masculine nature”. [N2 pp. 11, 461-4] [9]

E. B. Aveling (1851-1898)

Mrs. Besant wrote the beginning of Occult Chemistry in the first person, but she devoted little of her time to this activity and might be reluctant to share the blame with her collaborators. Indeed, for the 3rd edition Jinarajadasa inverted the order of posthumous authors to give Leadbeater top billing. In addition to a backbreaking schedule of public lecturing in various languages on four continents, Mrs. Besant bore numerous organizational responsibilities, and carried out an herculean writing program. Occult Chemistry was one of her 26 collaborative titles, besides more that 370 sole-author books and pamphlets, and innumerable articles [W p. 351, N2 p. 460] [10]. At various times she edited 12 different periodicals. She produced at least 6 English translations, including one of a 359-page German text. During a lecture tour to Australia in 1895, the same year as the initial atomic observations, she translated the Bhagavad Gita from Sanskrit, a language she had studied for less than two years. [11]

Although Bishop Leadbeater’s behavior made him controversial within the Theosophical Society, he remains an honored figure (Western visitors to International Headquarters are still housed in the Leadbeater Chambers). Annie Besant reigned as the Society’s President for 35 years until her death in 1933, and Jinarajadasa in turn served as President from 1945 until his own death in 1953. [N2 pp. 456-7] In view of the Theosophists’ motto (right) and their avowed objective of encouraging the study of science, they might have hoped for better from their leaders. In the unauthorized 274-page biography Mrs. Annie Besant, a Modern Prophet, lapsed Theosophist Theodore Besterman wrote, the various episodes in the picaresque romance of Theosophy are often so plainly ludicrous that long before one comes to the climax one finds it hardly possible to summon up any moral indignation at the spectacle of such wholesale folly and deception. [B5 p. 234]

Lessons

From beginning to end Occult Chemistry is a tale of deception and gullibility, so in most ways it is not particularly edifying. Still, it provides some worthwhile lessons.

Recognizing the prevalence in the late 19th century of ideas like Babbitt’s and the Occult Chemists’ makes one more sympathetic toward Hermann Kolbe and more understanding of his scathing and misguided criticism (1877) of structural organic chemistry in general and of young van’t Hoff’s ideas in particular.

More importantly, Occult Chemistry provides an object lesson in the necessity of treating surprising reports with healthy skepticism. Most scientists, like other humans, tend to assume the good faith, if not always the good sense, of those who report new phenomena. Students must be aware that reporters can be dishonest like Leadbeater, as well as misled or deceived by Nature, or their fellows, as were Crookes, Lodge, and perhaps Besant. While there may be parts of the human experience where there is no substitute for faith, understanding our physical world is not one of them. Repetition of experiment, formulation and testing of unambiguous predictions, and honest analysis of probabilities are better guides in scientific matters.

Annie Besant’s career in chemistry certainly reinforces Pope’s admonition that “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Fondness for the vocabulary and glitz of science without an understanding of its experimental basis is a recipe for disaster.

The current popularity of the paranormal does not speak well for our system of science education. Too many citizens fail to appreciate standard science and how overwhelmingly the balance of experimental evidence has tilted in its favor over the past two centuries.

The Occult Chemists have not been alone in asserting scientific concepts on the basis of authority, rather than testing clearly formulated theories on the basis of experimental evidence. Science students at all levels should be encouraged to ask “How do you know?” and to insist on sensible answers. Too often curricular demands to cover a large body of material are used to excuse shoddy logic and intellectual sleight-of-hand. Time must be made available to provide students sufficient detail to illustrate the logic and power of real science in carefully chosen cases. Only then can they be captivated by genuine science and empowered to recognize and avoid bad science and “paranormal” nonsense.

The Wheel of Life

By far the most valuable single source on Mrs. Besant and her circle is her definitive 902-page biography [N1,N2]. Its author, Arthur H. Nethercot, Professor of English at Northwestern University, became entranced by the story of “the unbelievable Annie” during his studies of G.B. Shaw [N1 p. vii]. It is impossible to resist observing that Professor Nethercot was born in 1895, the year in which Leadbeater and Besant first used clairvoyance to achieve direct observation of individual atoms, and that he died in 1981, just as Binnig and Rohrer, IBM physicists in Zurich, were developing Scanning Tunneling Microscopy (STM), the first really general technique for direct imaging of individual atoms. Of course skeptics would fail to see these coincidences as sufficient evidence for rotation of the Wheel of Life [V p. 221]. If so, the Occult Chemists might triumphantly point to the July, 1996 issue of the IBM Journal of Research and Development, which was entirely devoted to STM, the technique that within months would earn the IBM researchers the Nobel Prize in Physics. The Preface to this issue, while signed by IBM vice president Praveen Chaudhari, was actually ghosted by Arthur H. Nethercot, the physicist son of Mrs. Besant’s biographer.[C1][12].

Acknowledgements

My attention was drawn to this subject by the intriguing 1991 paper of Dr. Anthony R. Butler (Chemistry, St. Andrews).[B7]

For information and helpful comments I am grateful to Mr. George Green (Apapka, FL), Dr. York H. Dobyns (PEAR) , Dr. Arthur Nethercot (Bellingham, WA), Gladney Oakley, and Professors J. A. Berson (Yale), Norvin Hein (Yale), J. D. Roberts (Caltech), and Shirish Shah (Notre Dame of Maryland).

Notes

[1] Theosophy is a branch of religious philosophy that focusses on mystical or occult experiences. For more than a century it has been associated with the Theosophical Society, which, though never numerous, played a significant role in reviving interest in Buddhism and Hinduism in both East and West. American membership peaked at 8,500 in 1927.[M4 p.99] By 1995 it was 4225. A very recent example of Theosophy’s influence, and the attendant controversy, is the role of Dora Kunz, long-term President of the American Section, in developing Therapeutic Touch. TT is popular in many nursing schools and purports to provide healing through manipulation of a patient’s “aura”, but it was debunked by the 6th grade science project of Emily Rosa, a 11-year-old from Loveland, Colorado, as described in her coauthored 1998 paper in Journal of the American Medical Association. Today, April 17, 1999, the New York Times carried an obituary notice of Mary Lutyens, a writer and Theosophist who, as a 15-year-old, had been present with her mother, Leadbeater, Mrs. Besant, and Raja, when their protegé Krishnamurti first spoke in the voice of the “World Teacher” marking the “beginning of a New Age, a new civilisation, as has occurred five times already in the Aryan race — in Central Asia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, and Palestine”. [N2 p. 373-4]

[1a] Note that only conceptual shrinkage is invoked, not actual physical shrinkage à la Mary Jane.

[1b] The Sanskrit word “Anu”

appears at the beginning of

, which, as the

number between vertical lines (danda) at the end shows, is the 25th Sutra (or verse) from the Chapter V of “Tattvarthadhigama Sutra”, the first Sanskrit work on Jaina philosophy (2nd Century A.D.) and an important Jain scripture. It contains only two words “Anavah skandhashcha”, literally “anu and skandha”. Modern commentators have translated and elaborated this verse as “(Matter exists in the form of indivisible elementary particles and their combinations,” [J1, 177] or “(Matter has 2 chief forms:) atom and molecule.”[J2 119] In these commentaries the dozen rather vague sutras of Chapter V that deal with matter have been read to equate “anu” with the atom of modern science and “skandha” with the molecule. In their attempt to force much of modern physics and chemistry into the procrustean bed of these ancient sutras, 20th century commentators, some of who were not as skilled in classical Sanskrit as they were eager to establish links to conventional science, also equate “parmanu” with subatomic particles.[J1 pp. 177-182, J2 pp. xvii, 109 ff.] The very finest form of matter, “karma,” binds the soul, which must be liberated from its infection to achieve nirvana or “moksha”.[M2 p. 79] Telephathy and clairvoyance, including of the very small, play important roles in Jain philosophy.[M2 pp. 144-148] Among the resonances between Theosophical Society and Jainism note that the Society’s syncretic seal (shown above) includes the swastika. This is a symbol of well-being in Jainism and other Indian religions. In fact the name derives from Sanskrit words for “good”, “being”, and “related to”.

[1c] One individual who has published on theoretical physics [P1] still stoutly, and apparently seriously, defends the realism of the ‘micro-psi’ vision of the Occult Chemists. In several recent publications Stephen M. Phillips claims that the anu observed by Besant and Leadbeater were actually ’subquarks’, thus supporting his own versino of the theory that quarks have substructure. He explains the difference between the observed ‘micro-psi atom’ (MPA) and conventional atomic and nuclear models by supposing that the clairvoyant’s “micro-psi vision … caused for some reason a pair of atomic nuclei of that element to collide with sufficiently high energy for either subquarks or quarks inside them to become free momentarily… As this plasma cooled, new forms of quark matter crystallized and interacted strongly, forming a quasi-nuclear system of many types of stable constituents, bound together by electromagnetic and strong forces to create the MPA.”[P2a p. 511] As Y. H. Dobyns of Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research pointed out in his referee report, “This is an invalid mode of argument. By accepting apparent successes as given, while explaining away failures by invoking new phenomena for which there is no other positive evidence, one can support any theory whatsoever.”[D1 p. 528]

[2a] So broad a generalization begs for exception. That a good experiment must be literally reproducible is not obvious, or even necessarily true. Often, as in quantum mechanics, one is dealing with probabilities rather than with deterministic prediction. Chemists traditionally have had the luxury of working with properties averaged over an enormous numbers of molecules influenced by variables that are modest in number and relatively easy to control. Under these conditions statistical fluctuations are negligible on a percentage basis, so under controlled reaction conditions reproducibility is guaranteed. Thus chemists tend to place a higher premium on literal reproducibility than do physicians or wildlife biologists. But even in chemistry there can be difficulty in reproducing experiments when one deals with small numbers. One example involves nucleating growth of an unstable crystal polymorph.[D2] Another involves direct observation of nanoscale surface structures by scanning probe microscopy.

[2b] A future observation could involve a past event. For example, on the basis of previous finds in paleontology a new find might be predicted. Making such a find would be a future observation even though it involved an event that occurred long ago.

[2c] One school of thought seems to hold that experiments can only confute a theory, never confirm it. Such a system is logically consistent, but in holding all of natural science to a level of proof possible only in mathematics or abstract logic, it fails to describe science as it is practiced by the vast majority of productive scientists.

Of course, refuting a theory by experimentation supposes that the experimental results are reliable. There are myriad examples where careless or naive experiments have given incorrect results or where insufficient allowance has been made for experimental error.

[3] Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), who discovered the element thallium, made fundamental contributions to the study of cathode rays, and invented the x-ray tube, was a Fellow the the Theosophical Society as well as of the scientific Royal Society, and he supplied some of the samples for Leadbeater’s studies.[N2 p. 51, OC3 p. 2] He served as President the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a reputable organization whose members have first claim to being called “scientists”, because the word was coined in 1834 to describe them.[O] Crookes concluded his 1898 inaugural address as President the British Association by mentioning his simultaneous presidency of the Society for Psychical Research and discussing the promise of telepathic research, which “does not yet enlist the interest of the majority of my scientific brethren”. [C2 p. 447]

Crookes was not alone. Professor Sir Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), inventor of radio and pioneer in medical x-rays, chairman of the Physics Department at Liverpool, principal of Birmingham University, and himself President of the British Association, was a firm believer in telepathy and described communicating through a medium with his son who had been killed in World War I.[L2]

Like Crookes, Lodge served as president of the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1884. A list of other notable presidents includes British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour (1848-1930), Cambridge physicist Lord Rayleigh (1842-1919), Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), and more recently Duke parapsychologist J. B. Rhine (1895-1980). Gladstone, Ruskin, and Tennyson were early members.[N1 p. 194]

At the dawn of the 20th century, when matter-penetrating rays and wireless communication were new and poorly understood by conventional science, telepathy and spiritualism did not seem implausible to these serious individuals, though their views were not shared by many conventional scientists.

[3a] Their connection with Crookes may conceivably have provided a source of prepublication speculation by conventional scientists about the existence of isotopes.

[3b] A substantial file of documents relevant to the Leadbeater Affair at http://www.nellie2.demon.co.uk/webdoc4.htm ceased to be readily available during the summer of 1999, when the server disappeared from the world wide web. Nethercot provides a narrative of the Affair. [N2 pp. 84-98]

[4] The Occult Chemists did not discard all elements unknown to chemistry. To their credit they took the risk of reporting eight new (and still undiscovered) elements. In 1895 they might not have realized what a risk they were taking with Helium, of which Jinarajadasa wrote:

The fourth gas with atomic weight 3 was thought to be Helium, of which much had been said in the newspapers of 1894, following its discovery by Ramsay. It was only when the atomic weight of Helium was finally announced as 4, that the gas observed with weight 3 was realized as obviously a different gas. Later it was give the name of Occultum. [OC 3 p. 2]

[4b] It might reasonably be suggested that “Given the malleability and suggestibility associated with trance states, it is entirely plausible that Besant and Leadbeater did in fact ’see’ the number of anu they expected to see, because they expected it.” That is, rather than consciously cheating, they subconsciously adjusted the number of anu to 18 times an atomic weight they already knew. Consider whether it is plausible that the Occult Chemists could innocently and subconsciously have tailored their atom of gold to have the proper number of anu, if, as they state, all (conscious) arithmetic was carried out after the observed structure had been recorded. At the upper left of their Plate VII [OC1, p. 24] is shown an entire atom of gold. Within it are complicated substructures of five kinds, a-d, which are detailed in the rest of the plate. Each of the four a substructures within the “central body” of gold contains 84 anu within twelve bodies of two kinds. Each of the 16 “circling groups”, b, in two orbits around the central globe contains 33 anu in bodies of two kinds. The daisy-like structures top and bottom are identical, each has a central “ovoid” with one c and two ds, and each has 12 e “funnels”. Each c contains 101 anu; each d, 38; and each e, 97. There can be no question of subconscious manipulation of familiar subtotals, because none of the five substructures a-e had been observed with identical structure or number of particles in other atoms. The subconscious arithmetic for 4a + 16b + 2*(c+2d+12e) would have had to be something like the following: 4 * (4 * 15 + 8 * 3) + 16 * (4 * 6 + 9) + 2 * (12 * 7 + 6 * 2 +5) + 2 * 2 * (4 * 4 + 4 * 6) + 2 * 12 * (28 + 4 * 11 + 3 * 3 + 6 * 2 + 4)Most importantly, it was not just a question of keeping a subconscious running total, since the Occult Chemists would have had to adjust occupancies as they described the substructures in order to achieve the proper total. For example, had they finished their observation with the structure of e, the discrepancy to be corrected would have had to be an integral multiple of 24. Since this is unlikely to have occurred for many atoms, they would usually have needed to correct earlier errors in observation by subconsciously untangling a highly knotted skein.

Plate VII. Click for an enlarged view

[5] Leadbeater was damned with faint praise at a 1922 Theosophical convention in Sydney, Australia. In speaking to defend the Bishop from charges of perversion, Jeddu Krishnamurti, the youth he and Mrs. Besant were training up to be the new “World-Teacher”, suggested that Leadbeater’s clairvoyance might be doubted, but not his purity.[N2 p. 321] Among many other Theosophists with similar reservations were Ernest Wood [N2 p. 193] and U.G.Krishnamurti. [K above]

[6] Almost 40 years later the denial of her B.Sc. would be redressed in her own mind by the award of an honorary doctorate, the second to be granted by Hindu University, which she herself had founded in 1898.[N2 p. 321]

[7] Since this preceded Mrs. Besant’s days of trade unionism, the immoral activity was probably her advocacy of birth control,[B4] which resulted in the landmark case of The Queen v. Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant [N1 pp. 107-130], or possibly her attempts to help her partner Bradlaugh (1833-1891) take his seat in Parliament which had been denied him, despite election and reelection, because, as an atheist, he was judged incapable of taking the oath of office on the Bible.[N1 pp. 159ff.] After six years and three more reelections he was ultimately seated in 1886.

[8] When Aveling’s wife left him because of cruelty, he took up with Mrs. Besant for 5 years, dropping her for Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx. After dominating Eleanor for 15 years, and arranging to get his hands on her substantial inheritance from Friedrich Engels, he used his pen name to marry an amateur stage actress less than half his age. When Eleanor discovered this fact 10 months later, she committed suicide [B2]. In The Doctor’s Dilemma (1906) G. B. Shaw used Aveling as the model for a character who “was the most entire and perfect scoundrel, the most miraculously mean rascal, the most callously selfish blackguard that ever made a wife miserable”[S p. 188]. Aveling personally produced 40% of the collaborative first English translation of Das Kapital, Vol. I [M1]. He was presumably less active as a chemist, since from 1873 to 1885 his name does not appear in the Journal of the Chemical Society of London either as a member or as the author of any paper published or abstracted.

[9] In 1894 there was a power struggle in the Theosophical Society between its two surviving American founders, Colonel Henry S. Olcott and William Q. Judge. At this time Mrs. Besant found among her papers a note in red crayon on rice paper, the same medium through which the third founder, the late Madame Blavatsky, had been accustomed to receive communications from other worlds. It stated “Judge leads right. Follow him and stick.” Despite this blatant Americanism, Mrs. Besant apparently believed that the note came from its signatory, "Master Koot Hoomi", an etherial inhabitant of another plane sometimes resident in Tibet, rather than having been planted by Judge. [N2 p. 28]

[10] As of 1999, 98 of her works are still listed in Books in Print, mostly from Theosophical and occult publishers. For example, the 1999 catalogue of the Theosophical Publishing House lists 30 of her works and 23 of Leadbeater’s. One among myriad examples of Mrs. Besant’s indefatigable nature is that during a 21-day period in her 80th year she delivered 56 lectures in England, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, and France.[N2 p. 393] On returning to England from her first trip to India 33 years earlier she did admit to fatigue saying, “Lecturing is trying, and during the four months I spent in India, I have just given 121 set lectures to audiences varying from 600 to 6000 natives.” [N2 p. 24]

[11] Although of little use to serious scholars, Mrs. Besant’s 168-page translation enjoyed brisk sales and was often awarded as a prize to Hindu students [N2 p. 45]. It is still in print in its 7th edition from the Theosophical Publishing House.

[12] N.B. this evidence is non-scientific because it involves exclusively past observations and makes no testable prediction for the future.