A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 15 – Knowledge, Materialism, and the Paranormal

People have to break free of mainstream propaganda (including scientific propaganda) in order to learn to think comprehensively.

I was raised to be a scientist from the time that I could walk and was well on my way until that fateful moment in a meditation class at age 16. Five years later, former astronaut Brian O’Leary had a similar experience while performing the same exercise. It ruined him as a mainstream scientist, and my career was ruined before it began. We could never again drink the Kool-Aid of materialism. There is nothing wrong with the scientific method; the problems are the assumptions of materialism, the corruption of science, primarily due to conflicts of interest, and the natural limits of today’s science, which scientists rarely acknowledge. All schools of thought rest on assumptions, and when people have personal experiences that show the assumptions to be false, it is time for a new school of thought. Brian was a prominent advocate of scientific investigation of the paranormal.

It is also OK to acknowledge the limitations of scientific theory. Scientists do not know what energy is or where this universe came from. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered by today’s science. One might think that that would be a cause of modesty among scientists, but the opposite has often been true, as scientists have played priests and grand inquisitors all too often. Materialism is built on the idea that our senses or extensions of them determine all that can exist. That is the height of ignorance or arrogance, and paranormal experiences often expose how ludicrous such assertions are.

When scientists dismissed free energy as “impossible” and “contrary to the laws of physics,” Brian’s response was that there were no “laws of physics,” just theories. To even use the word “law” reflects religious faith. Bucky Fuller was no materialist, he remarked on the naïveté of scientists, and he called science a slave profession, as scientists are beholden to their patrons: rich elites. The scientific process itself has been deeply corrupted by those conflicts of interest, and it was never more apparent than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I can’t overemphasize that people should have their own paranormal experiences before they read spiritual literature or explore the paranormal fringes (and there is plenty of chaff there, too, as with all fringe areas). I went to watch UFOs three years in a row, and each time I saw something inexplicable by mundane ideas, and one seemed to interact with my mind, the year after one seemed to interact with my host’s mind.

When Brian explored the fringes, he led classes on spoon bending and other paranormal issues, and everybody in the room would have success except for the white male professionals in the room, as their natural abilities had atrophied due to their career paths.

I am not here to sell people on the paranormal. People can and should have their own experiences. When they have experiences, they have knowledge that nobody can take away.

That stated, there has been a great deal of scientific investigation of the paranormal, but you would never know it if all you had done was imbibe the mainstream media and the statements of debunkers. Raymond Moody, who coined the term “near-death experience” (“NDE”), recently published a book on scientific evidence that NDEs are very real and point to an afterlife.

In 2010, Robert McLuhan published a book on his scholarly investigation of the paranormal, as he had heard enough about it to be curious about such a potentially important topic (especially the idea of an afterlife), and he had seen plenty of debunking in the media about it. He then dove into the literature. He expected to see that the debunkers had performed deep scientific investigation to invalidate reports of paranormal phenomena, or had incisively questioned reports of the paranormal with keen intellectual acumen. He expected to see scientific rigor and brilliant thought from the debunkers, but he gradually became appalled at their efforts. They did not convincingly debunk anything of importance. Even worse, they were rarely familiar with the evidence, as they pontificated. The attitude that they clearly broadcasted was that the paranormal was not worthy of scientific investigation. What a fraudulent stance to take while dismissing the paranormal.

Not only that, McLuhan saw countless instances in which the debunkers mispresented the evidence. He initially thought that they were simply lying, but he eventually came to believe that the debunkers had minds so twisted by their ideological convictions that they could not see what was obvious to everybody else.

I have been on the receiving end of “skeptical” debunking, and when they were not lying, they could not string two rational thoughts together, and they never dealt fairly with the evidence. Ed Herman noted something similar, in that pundits were incapable of rational thought when dealing with information that contradicted their beliefs. I never saw one of Ed’s critics credibly address his Propaganda Model, which stands unrebutted, nearly 40 years after he first proposed it. When scholars attacked Howard Zinn’s masterpiece, they performed similarly.

It can be a highly dismaying experience to watch intellectuals behave in that way, as they lick the hand that feeds them instead of live up to what Noam Chomsky called their responsibilities. To say that those intellectuals are incapable of rational thought when encountering information that their belief systems cannot account for might seem to absolve them of personal responsibility, at least to a degree (these are examples of my journey’s primary lesson), but it then brings up the issue of whether humans are really a sentient species.

People who are stuck in their ideological convictions are incapable of thinking comprehensively. Materialism is a religion that pretends that it is not one, just like the USA is an empire that pretends that it is not one. People have to raise their awareness past the lies and dogma of popular culture in order to learn how to think comprehensively, and that also goes for the conceits of mainstream science.