Asked how we perceive the world outside, there are, of course, several ways to answer.
The most obvious is to say that we look at the outside world through five senses (sight, sound, smell, touch and taste). As Aristotle said, “Nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.”
No one, I think, will argue with that. But there are people who perceive the world or who can get information that is clearly beyond our normal five senses. Mainstream materialist science says that’s impossible and is thus ignored.
Not permissible
As psychologist Dr. Lawrence LeShan wrote in his informative book, “The Medium, The Mystic, and The Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal”: “The very large number of cases of the sort I have described so far, demonstrating that people sometimes have information that the common sense knowledge and by the laws of how-the-world-works that we know—they could not possibly have made it plain to me that ESP [extrasensory perception] existed… Impossible things were clearly happening, and in science, this is not permissible.”
Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, also pointed out in his book “The Noetic Universe: The Scientific Evidence for Psychic Phenomena”: “Parapsychological facts are uncomfortable because there are no well-accepted explanations for why the facts should exist. This does not mean that no scientific theories of psychic phenomena exist, actually there are dozens. It is the adequacy of the theories that is in question.”
Empirical science insists on repeatability to prove the reality of things. But as Dr. Radin pointed out, “Confirmed skeptics always feel justified in rejecting positive replications (of ESP) because they always see the methodology as flawed, whether it is actually flawed or not.”
Different views
In a previous column, I spoke about perceiving the world either from a mystical way which we can do because of our spiritual nature, or from a material way because of our physical nature. Another way of putting it is seeing the world either from the left (rational verbal) half of our brain or from our right (intuitive, nonverbal and nonrational) brain.
In 1981, neurobiologist Roger Sperry (1913-1994) won the Nobel Prize for medicine for his discovery that each hemisphere of our brain has a different way of perceiving the world around us. This has become known as the Split-brain Theory.
Dr. Sperry said, “There appear to be two modes of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, represented rather separately in left and right hemispheres, respectively, and that our educational system, as well as science in general, tend to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”
The left hemisphere of our brain is responsible for rational, analytical, critical and quantitative thinking, while the right hemisphere is responsible for creative, intuitive holistic and nonverbal thinking. ESP is primarily, although not exclusively, a function of the right brain.
Vanga Dimitrova, who was known as the “blind seeress of Bulgaria,” found missing persons, helped solve crimes, diagnosed disease and read the past or the future. Asked how she did it, Vanga replied that she had no control over the images that form in her mind. They have to come naturally and can’t be forced.
On the other hand, Swedish psychic Olof Jonsson described how he could accurately tell which card would come up next, during a demonstration of his psychic powers: “It is very hard to describe. I just see it. I feel it first in my mind, then I try to visualize it. When I begin to search for it, it will materialize in my mind.”
I met Jonsson in Manila in 1988 when he demonstrated his tremendous ESP powers before our group.
To perceive things beyond the physical world requires a shift in consciousness. Dr. LeShan interviewed many highly developed psychics and sensitives to find out what happens to them when getting a paranormal information, i.e. information that could not have been obtained from the normal way. For example: seeing a specific event in the future; seeing an incident happening at a distance; or performing some miraculous healing.
They said that shifting to another way of perceiving the world is “being at home in it.”
Next week: Part 2, “The shift in consciousness.”
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