All throughout this year and in previous ones, this column has discussed a wide variety of topics that are outside the scope of conventional science and orthodox religion.

These include issues such as: out-of-body experience; seeing or talking to spirits of the dead; unidentified flying objects; psychic surgery; bilocation; teleportation; exorcism; seeing future events accurately; near-death experience; extraterrestrial and alien visitations; existence of angels; the role of the mind in healing; the effect of thought on material objects; and many more.

Convergence

This column has also dealt with cutting-edge scientific research that challenge conventional or mainstream science such as body-mind interaction; discoveries in quantum physics; neuroscience and neuroplasticity; holistic healing modalities; trance states; hypnosis; and how cells communicate to each other through neurotransmitters and receptors.

Although these topics are still being questioned by ultra-conservative mainstream scientists, there are clear and definite signs that their hardline thinking is slowly changing as more objective proof of the existence of so-called unconventional phenomena begins to mount.

Forward-looking and pioneering scientists are beginning to question the age-old paradigms and assumptions of conventional science based on Newtonian physics.

We even see a growing convergence in the thinking of religious mystics and that of quantum physicists regarding the nature of the physical universe. For example, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr said: “Everything we call real is made up of things that cannot be regarded as real.”

This is probably because everything that happens in the smallest particles of matter, that is on the quantum level, cannot be explained in terms of the generally accepted principles of Newtonian physics.

At the quantum level, what seems to ultimately influence physical reality is thought or consciousness.

Mind stuff

That is why the British physicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington was forced to admit that “the universe is beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”

And I think it was also Eddington who said that “the ultimate stuff of the universe is mind stuff.”

Another great physicist, Dr. James Jeans, uttered a similar view.

The controversial but very important science of parapsychology studies things outside the realm or scope of conventional science that studies and explains only the physical facts.

So, when something exists that cannot be explained by the principles or theories of conventional science, they are often regarded as purely imaginary or dismissed as a hoax.

As Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Science in California, has an enlightening and extensively researched book, “The Noetic Universe: The Scientific Evidence for Psychic Phenomena.”

It is here where he said that “parapsychological ‘facts’ are uncomfortable because there are no well-accepted explanations for why the facts should exist,” although the evidence for their existence is massive and incontrovertible from an objective or impartial point of view.

Change the theory

When a scientific theory cannot explain a fact, it is time to change the theory, rather than ignore the facts or hide them under the table.

I am aware that there are still a lot of skeptics out there. To appreciate the topics that I have been discussing in this column for many years now, it is necessary to look at them from an open, unbiased mind, free of the age-old assumptions that have long been accepted as sacred by mainstream science.

A paradigm shift, a new way of looking at the phenomenal world around us, which involves our inner faculties and higher awareness, is emerging and can no longer be ignored.

To continue to insist on conventional, scientific explanations for understanding strange but factual phenomena around us will only end up in frustration and retard the growth and expansion of human knowledge.

It is clear, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ, pointed out in his classic book “The Phenomenon of Man,” the next phase of human evolution is pointing toward a higher level of consciousness which he calls “Christogenesis,” the omega point of human evolution.

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