“Anomaly” Science Conference Enjoys Gainesville Hospitality

Nelson Abreu reports on the 24^th Meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration

May 19, 2005, Gainesville, Florida – To most attendees of the 24th annual meeting of the Society for Scientific Exploration, the earth-shattering implications of psi research seem worth our time and resources like no other enterprise. Yet, in a century of psi research, only about one month's worth of investigation has been funded in proportion to psychology. More funding is available to study pig reproduction than to research if there is life after death. Dogmatic materialistic scientists censor the truly meaningful questions and feed the spiritual crisis of Earth, because their basic premise is that there is no meaning -- life started by accident, there is no spirit, and nothing survives physical death. The incoherence and sophism in mainstream scientism can be more bizzare than psi phenomena or even quantum non-locality. Mainstream media and science’s editor-censors overlook, scoff at, or outright refuse to consider the facts: promising rigorous research, the intellect of many of humanity’s geniuses like William James, Schoedinger, and Bohm, and a large body of anecdotal accounts of all times should capture the attention of any rational, curious human being.

About a hundred turned out, from throughout the USA and Europe, to hear Dr. Edgar Michell, the 6^th man to land on the moon, describe his expansion of consciousness and psychic anomalies he witnessed first hand. From the spontaneous remission of his mother’s glaucoma to telekinesis in a controlled environment, Dr. Mitchell pronounced these phenomena as real even if we don’t fully understand them at the moment (not “unexplainable” as misquoted in the April 22 Gainesville Sun report).

Concepts on truth, rationality, reason, knowledge, science versus psedo-science, genuine phenomena in a sea of fraud, rigorous protocols versus sensory leakage, life, evolution, reality… all these were visited through experiments, experiences, observations, and discourses on a variety of controversial subjects like alternative therapies and phenomena related to subtle vital energies known to billions as chi in China and hundreds of other names all over.

Brenda Dunne and Dr. Robert Jahn foresaw a Science of the Subjective that replaced current scientific “rules” that make too many assumptions about anomalous phenomena by failing to recognize factors like intention, oscillations in performance, irregular replicability, insensitivity to space-time distances, gender discrepancies in effect levels, and uncertainty as a source of anomalies. Such insights stemmed from rigorous engineering experiments over a quarter century at Princeton that have verified that humans can make small, but statistically significant effects on electronic and mechanical random processes. Adding to the military-sponsored research at Stanford Research Institute, these researchers and others like physicist Russell Targ have helped verify that we can gather information from a distance (remote viewing) beyond our five basic senses.

Dr. Marylin Schiltz of the Institute of Noetic Sciences described studies with Dr. Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe) of people influencing the physiology of others, even help heal, from distance. This type of research is so encouraging that they have attracted funds from the National Institutes of Health. Duke University engineers studied a man that can emit unusual levels of energy detected by sensors. Zavalin’s Vanderbilt research on effects of multipolar fields on living systems contrasted with our binary society and technology of “good or evil” and “0’s or 1’s.”

Of particular interest, the psi blocker effect, which is ignored in many tests by skeptic-scoffers like James Randi, was rigorously demonstrated when the exact same experiment had significant results when performed by Dr. Schlitz but not when done by a skeptic colleague. Dr. Mitchell described how when certain colleagues were present during SRI experiments, the psychic’s performance was adversely affected. The physicist Harris Walker (The Physics of Consciousness), progenitor of the Quantum Consciousness Theory, charged scoffers with stifling humanity’s progress throughout the times. Typically, skeptics do not collaborate with researchers, have their minds already made up, merely guess alternate explanations, and often employ flawed logical arguments and ad hominem attacks. Michael Lydon (co-founder of the Science of Self Club at UF and CUNY-Queens College) exposed materialistic science’s metaphysical biases for arbitrary or cultural-historical reasons and argued that subjective experience (consciousness) is the basis of all science and, indeed, reality.

TIME magazine’s Lemonick was very balanced in his skepticism during the conference and open to personal exploration of altered states like the out-of-body experience, but his article (Science on the Fringe, May 30) turned out shallow and excessively pejorative. Even in mainstream science, such as entomology, Dr. Thomas Dykstra (SSE secretary; Dykstra Labs, Gainesville) finds great resistance to his research because it exposes irrational attachment to old ideas in the face of glaring logical flaws in the archaic, dominant paradigm.

Ironically, while most people seem to believe in life after death, researchers like University of Arizona’s Dr. Gary Schwartz (The Afterlife Project) are not widely supported because most do not often check the details for themselves and trust others’ dismissals. In a society that avoids talking about death and whose dominant religious institutions dissuade individual exploration of the afterlife, Ian Stevenson’s U. of Virginia research (Children Who Remember Their Previous Lives) is as controversial as it is thought-provoking. Off mic, during the breaks, when much of the more interesting action takes place, many recognized that the fear of death and of the “paranormal,” as re-enforced by Hollywood’s sensationalism, as part of a major tool for manipulation of the masses who defer their responsibility for searching the truth and forfeit their liberty to those who are trusted with professing their truths and setting Humanity’s agendas: corporate-industrial-bellicose, anti-ecological, anti-ethical policy, consumerism, and the robotization of individuals. Most clairvoyants or individuals who have had lucid OBE’s or NDE’s lose their fear of death and excessive materialism after their “extraphysical” direct experience. When asked why they prioritized this line of knowledge, guests revealed it was not primarily research, but a profound, visceral paradigm-busting personal experience.

David Lindsay (International Academy of Consciousness) invoked Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most quoted works of the 20^th century, which showed scientific progress comes in revolutionary departures from “normal science.” In that spirit, Lindsay described an avant-garde, spherical Waking Physical Immobility Laboratory (in Portugal) that is completely bare (“but only in the physical aspect”) except for a recliner. Under the Consciential Paradigm, researchers develop an integral and “multidimensional” understanding of consciousness, bioenergy, and its related anomalies while they strive to recover one-third of life usually spent floating unconscious above the body. They explore other dimensions of being, individually or in “joint projections,” and compare notes afterwards. “Are we going to wait around for others to catch up? The Newtonian paradigm is out the window!” In the absence of convincing repeatable experiments or “extraphysical vision goggles,” astronauts to astralnauts invite you to investigate for yourself!

For local and internet resources to further explore these topics, contact the Society for Scientific Exploration’s Student Representative at pagatao@hotmail.com

“The greatest strength of science is that it is rooted in actual experience. The great weakness of contemporary science is that it admits only certain types of experience as legitimate.”

– Nobel laureate physicist David Bohm