Research into parapsychology topics like telepathy and ESP is normally designed either to prove that the phenomenon is real, or to understand how it works. Similar goals also guide research into new-paradigm technology such as cold fusion, over-unity devices, anti-gravity, scalar wave technologies, and a variety of alternative medicine and mind-body technologies. The psi research community has long recognized the futility of proving the authenticity of psi phenomena to dogmatic skeptics. If rigorous experiments dating back to J.B. Rhine in the 1930s have failed to convince them, then nothing will. Therefore, many researchers have turned their focus away from proof toward understanding. This essay reaches beyond these two goals toward a third. Conventional scientific thinking sees experiments as a way to query an objective reality independent of the observer. When scientists perform experiments to measure the speed of light or the mass of the proton, they believe they are measuring a fixed, universal, time-invariant quantity that won’t change as a result of performing the experiment. But what if there are phenomena that are not yet “settled” into objective constants? What if experiments do not only measure them, but can nudge them into one state or another—not just locally, but universally? More broadly, what if the experiments we choose to do, and the intention and manner in which we do them, can alter reality? And what if we can apply this principle deliberately? If that is the case, then research can pursue a goal beyond proving and beyond understanding. It becomes a creative act. Observer-dependent phenomenaThere is much in the field of psi research to suggest that something uncanny disturbs our objectivist intuitions. Consider, for example, the experimenter effect. One researcher performs an experiment to demonstrate some phenomenon and achieves remarkable results. A skeptic replicates it and gets nothing. Chance. What is going on here? There are several possibilities: (1) The original research was fraudulent or sloppy, so of course the replication delivers a null result. (2) Regression to the mean: the initial result was a fluke. (3) The experiment was valid but the replication of it was dishonest; perhaps hostile skeptics bent on paradigm protection set it up to fail. (4) The beliefs of the experimenter influence the result. In this case, the very concept of replication is incoherent, because the experiment is inseparable from the experimenter. The present essay proposes a fifth explanation. To draw it out, consider another oddity: the decline effect. It refers to the tendency of effective results to decline over time, in the presence of stricter methodological controls, and in formal settings. The decline effect also dates back to J.B. Rhine. His initial experiments with Zener cards showed extraordinary results. His first subject performed with 100% accuracy in the initial two test runs of nine cards each. The probability of nine correct guesses is about 0.0000005. Two of those in a row, less than one in a trillion. Next Rhine ran a longer test on the same subject. This time the success rate was only 39%, not 100%.¹ Subsequent experiments showed mixed results, with subjects performing well above chance on some trial runs, and well below chance on others. While coined in the context of parapsychology, the decline effect is recognized across many fields of study, particularly medicine and social psychology. To preserve the orthodox ontology of observer-independence, conventional explanations include:
And there are many others (placebo erosion, system adaptation to experimental interventions, cognitive bias, statistical overfitting, and conscious or unconscious p-hacking). But what all the conventional explanations share in common is that they attempt to preserve observer-independence and the ontological stability of the experimental subject.² A rebuttal of the conventional explanations for the decline effect is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that these explanations fail to account for the effect sizes and statistical patterns in question. Something spooky is going on that begs us to reconsider cherished scientific assumptions of observer-independence and experiment replicability. Ontological InstabilityLet us leave behind the conventional explanations that attempt to preserve the old division between mind and matter, and step fully into a new-and-ancient ontology from which we can perform reality-shifting experiments. Psi researchers are generally sympathetic to the beliefs-influence-reality interpretation of the experimenter effect. This is also their favored explanation for the placebo effect. In both cases, however, that explanation falls short. It isn’t wrong per se, but it subtly preserves a kind of objectivity in which ‘belief” is simply a new variable, a new causal influence mediated, perhaps, by heretofore-undiscovered physical forces operating on an independent reality. Let us instead step through the doorway that the experimenter effect (along with the decline effect and the placebo effect) offers into a wholly different understanding of what is real, and what the relation is between reality and consciousness. As you consider the following explanation, please exercise a generous understanding of the tendency of English words like “reality,” “actually,” and “object” to reinforce the very assumptions this explanation seeks to replace. A reality is not another new observer-independent object. It is inseparable from the observer-participant’s stories, body, consciousness, and relationships. The term “consensus reality” conveys something of this complexity, if we understand it to mean not just a consensus about reality, but to suggest that story, meaning, and agreement contribute to its constitution. The basic hypothesis is that phenomena that consensus belief, especially scientific belief, considers impossible require another, more hospitable reality in order to function. Consensus reality—the agreed reality of conventional physics, but more importantly that habits of thought and perception that accompany it—is inhospitable to telepathy, to ESP, faster-than-light travel, anti-gravity, over-unity energy devices, homeopathy, life after death, and much more. Just think of how differently you would live if telepathy were a normal, recognized, and routine feature of everyday life. Few of our social institutions, our forms of governance, or our economic system would stand. They are part of the “inhospitable” reality, and they condition our default beliefs and stories. This materially-reinforced climate of belief, also a climate of being, goes far beyond mere opinions about ESP, UAPs, or free energy devices. Therefore, to observe them one must enter another reality bubble in some way insulated from consensus reality. For example, telepathy is easily demonstrated in someone’s living room to open-minded observers, invisible to the public gaze and the scrutiny of scientists. It does not intrude upon consensus reality. It does not provide a data point that challenges it, simply because it is out of view. That changes when rigorous scientific protocols are imposed that would satisfy a skeptical observer. Now a window has opened into consensus reality, breaching the reality-bubble in which telepathy is authentic. Another reality leaks in through the breach, diluting the experimental results. The wider the window, the greater the dilution. Under the most strict possible protocols, including constant video surveillance, hostile observers zealously guarding against cheating, and so forth, maybe the effect disappears entirely. Anything that “shields” the experiment from public or scientific view will allow stronger effects. Lax anti-cheating protocols, small sample sizes, non-credentialed researchers, or lack of outside observers allow people occupying other belief systems to easily dismiss the research as fraudulent or inconclusive. If it is unpublishable, no one will ever even know about it. Imagine reality as a kind of field that coalesces around our beliefs, our psychology, and our embodied state of being. It is not something we can necessarily change through a mere act of will. It is a container created before and through this lifetime within which we can play out the dramas necessary for the development of the soul. For many people, there comes a time when they have outgrown that container; that is when an event comes along that may shatter it. Until that moment comes, they will find ways to avoid, discount, and dismiss any anomaly. In our time, many people are becoming ready, for our entire civilization has nearly outgrown the mythology that carried it for so long. That mythology generated a corresponding collective reality that colors the personal reality of civilization’s members. It creates the role of the orthodox, the heretic, the lunatic, the true believer, the skeptic, and so on, but all revolve around the primary defining mythology of Separation (reductionism, objectivity, mechanistic causality, quantification, etc.) For those who have outgrown the story-reality that contained them, a scientific experiment can be an induction into a new reality, a doorway. Put another way, it can make something real that was not real before. The scientific experiment, then, is a creative act. The researcher may think in terms beyond proof and beyond discovery. Not that he or she can dictate what shall be real by determining the outcome of the experiment—not at all. The experiment is a kind of request, a knocking on the door of possibility to see if we are ready for it to open. It doesn’t merely demonstrate that something is real; it seeks to draw a new phenomenon into the real, or to be “more real” than they were. It is a courtship of a new reality. If the experiment fails, it may mean that the reality it courts is not yet ready to merge with the reality from which it comes. The understanding of the experiment as a creative, not just a revelatory, act invites researchers to consider what they want to create, what they want to make real, and who they are in relation to that reality. If an experiment gives weak results, no longer can one simply assume that the phenomenon is inauthentic or that the test subject is incapable or that something is wrong with the experimental protocol. It could be instead that it is “less real” in the given circumstance, and that the experimenter himself, and the totality of those privy to the experiment, co-generate this attenuated reality. Not only does the attempt to prove something to skeptical outsiders dilute the very phenomenon one is trying to prove, so does the experimenter’s own skepticism, his need to see proof, An illustrative case: the SpellersA Speller is a non-verbal autistic person who has learned to communicate by pointing at a letter board to spell out words. Non-verbal auists have a condition known as apraxia (sometimes called dispraxia), characterized by a dysfunction in motor planning and fine motor control. Normally, it is only with great difficulty and long training that these non-verbal people learn to point at letters on the letter board. Then their cognitive abilities and even telepathic abilities are revealed, as described in the popular Telepathy Tapes podcast. A debate rages within the autism education community not just about the telepathic abilities of Spellers, but also about whether they are capable of using language at all. Critics say that Spellers are actually just responding to non-verbal cues from their communication partners (often a parent) who slightly move the board as the Speller points. If they are actually able to think and communicate autonomously, then why can’t they use a stationary letter board? Why does the communication partner (CP) have to be holding it? Their parents have succumbed to wishful thinking, say the critics, imagining their children to possess intelligence where there is none. They are just communicating with themselves. This account violently contradicts the reports of innumerable parents, who recount story after story of their children communicating information and using vocabulary words that the parents do not know. They describe starting out skeptical, wary of the very delusion the critics accuse them of, only believing their children are genuinely communicating after experiencing repeated confirmation. The skeptic’s position can stand only by an arrogant and belittling dismissal of the parents’ intelligence and sanity, an attitude of “I know better than they do” -- based on dogma and the most cursory of direct experience. Nor does it make sense to anyone who has watched the training process: hours and hours, weeks and weeks of painstaking one-on-one work between the communication partner (and the autistic person to learn the necessary skills. Surely a paradigm is infirm when it depends on the supercilious dismissal of critics’ mental faculties and ignores their direct experiences. So why can’t most Spellers perform using a letter board that’s just sitting on a table? Why does it have to be in the hands of another person, and not just any person, but a communication partner who has trained with them? Rather than default to the supercilious explanation of the skeptics (wishful thinking), I decided to ask some Spellers themselves. They use the concept of “synching” to describe the relationship necessary for them to be able to use a letter board. The weeks or months of training synch the CP to the autistic person. Spelling is not an autonomous function, but the product of a relationship. While synching might be conceived in fairly conventional terms of emotional comfort or brain wave synchronization, a much more radical hypothesis offers itself as we consider further oddities of the Speller phenomenon. Perhaps the long process of establishing synching brings autistic person and CP into a reality in which the former is intelligent, can use language, and may be telepathic. In a limited sense, the skeptics are correct—these non-verbal autistic people were cognitively incapable of using language. After learning to spell, they are cognitively capable, but not because they developed those cognitive skills. No. They shifted from one reality to another. To state this idea fully entails flagrant paradox: Synching shifts the autistic person from a reality in which he was cognitively incapable of using language, to one in which he is now—and always has been—cognitively capable. That is why, typically, they don’t learn spelling the way a beginner would. They start immediately with a full adult vocabulary and the ability to express sophisticated ideas, comment on literature and philosophy, etc.—often beyond the capacities of their CPs. The testimony of Spellers also suggests that they shift in and out of the reality in which they are cognitively present and capable. One said that he cannot think clearly except when he is in the Speller classroom. His weekly visits there are interludes of lucid consciousness. Others in the group said that they started out that way, but gradually over time became able to maintain consciousness and a sense of self. Some told me they have no clear memories from before they learned to spell. One said, “My first memory is of a voice piercing the fog and saying to me, ‘I know you’re in there. I’m going to teach you to communicate.” It was as if, before then, he did not exist as a fully aware human being. Other Spellers shared similar stories. They spoke of being in a fog, a semi-conscious state of suffering. They suffer a lot of physical discomfort due to the limitations of their bodies, plus the health conditions that usually accompany autism, but most of all, they say, they suffer from loneliness. One Speller told me, “I have been liberated from prison.’ The foregoing account is a little too tidy, tacitly accepting Cartesian assumptions of reality and identity. Who is the person here? One of the Telepathy Tapes podcasts discusses communication from the “higher selves” of people with severe dementia instructing their caregivers how to handle them. In what sense is that higher self “actually” the person with dementia? Phenomena at the frontiers of mind-body research disrupt our inherited ideas of a fixed Cartesian separate self. It does not always make sense to found experiments on the premise of a discrete subject. Who the subject is-—and what the subject is capable of doing—is a function of relationship: the relationship with the CP, with the experimenter, with the entire community of observers that narrows or widens according to the experimental circumstances. This may not be too big a problem when the topic under investigation lies safely within accepted paradigmatic boundaries, but when it challenges basic assumptions about the laws of physics and the nature of the self, we are forced to reexamine the very precepts of the Scientific Method. Observer-independence, replicability, time-invariance, and the independence of variables lose their absolute status and become mutable, conditional aspects of a relational field, and the function of the experiment becomes no longer merely to reveal, but to create. Irreplicability in observer-dependent experimentsSignificantly, these oddities of Speller communication make it easy for skeptics to remain in the reality that the phenomenon isn’t real. The reality of Spelling and telepathy is thereby cordoned off from expert consensus reality. For the skeptics, it is not real. That doesn’t mean: “They are in a delusion about reality. They think it is unreal when actually it is real.” That interpretation draws on the Cartesian worldview in which there is an absolute ojective reality underneath and separate from our opinions, beliefs, and perceptions. Something is either happening, or not happening; something is either there, or not there at a given point x, y, z, at time t. That statement is not true at the quantum level, where a particle resolves into a specific location only when a measurement is performed. Maybe it isn’t true on the macro level either. Then, our attempt to colonize relational reality by overlaying Cartesian coordinates atop it impoverishes that reality, unravels the twisted cords of interbeing, and leaves us in lonely solitude. The Cartesian coordinate system is the intellectual scaffold, as well as the mathematical foundation, for the sociotechnical dissolution of the bonds that tied human to human, human to nature, and self to other to weave ecology and community. No surprise, then, that the reweaving of these ties, whether through science or ecology or relational arts, always includes the realization of the inseparability of what we thought separate. Existence itself is relational. Does any one of us “exist” outside of relationship? Or, to play a little loose with the quantum metaphor, outside of a “measurement” (an interaction) with another conscious being? Most of us have had the experience of interacting with a new person and becoming something more than what we were before. Our being can morph and expand. In paradigm-challenging fields like ESP, we must see the experimental subject to be not just a discrete individual, but the entire experimental setup. In light of the experimenter effect, we must consciously incorporate ourselves as co-subjects in our experimental design. Implicitly, we therefore acknowledge the basic irreplicability of the experiment. Other researchers can at most copy it, substituting themselves for the original experimenters and thus changing the experiment. Even if the experimental subject is not a human being but a machine or a therapy, as long as it is at home in one reality and alien to another, it will be sensitive to who is performing and observing the experiment. Phenomena such as cold fusion and devices like the Bedini Wheel are famously fickle, seeming to work for one person and not another, always evading compelling demonstration. Cold fusion researchers have trouble getting consistent results. Is that because they haven’t landed on quite the right formula? Is it that cold fusion is impossible? Or is it because the phenomenon lingers on the borders of reality? In fact I personally find the demonstrations of cold fusion quite compelling. Yet they are sequestered away from consensus reality by various institutional filters that maintain narrative hygiene.³ Ontological shielding in research designWhat is the point of performing irreplicable experiments? Proof depends on reproducability. That is the ultimate verification of results, in theory accessible to any independent party. Yet an experiment can serve other purposes that don’t depend on reproducability:
Let us introduce the term ontological shielding to refer to the separation of an experiment from a reality inhospitable to the phenomenon under study. An experiment aimed at convincing skeptics must be accessible to their view; it cannot be highly shielded or it will be invisible to them, easily dismissable. On the other hand, an experiment designed to explore ESP among a community of practitioners will work better if it is shielded. Experiments can be designed with varying amounts of ontological shielding to achieve the necessary conditions for a given goal. Researchers can even perform meta-experiments to test the effects of ontological shielding, keeping in mind, of course, that the meta-experiments may be subject to the very observer-dependency that they seek to test. Using a hypothetical ESP experiment as an example, I will explore five layers of ontological shielding. Each layer hosts a different version of the experiment. Layer zero: no shielding. The experiment is methodologically impeccable, designed and conducted under the close supervision of multiple hostile observers to prevent any possibility of cheating. If the experiment produces a statistically significant result, it indicates that consensus reality is deteriorating. The experiment isn’t only aboutt ESP; it is about the state of the reality in which it is performed. Layer one; perfunctory shielding. This layer is for the scientific community and scientifically-informed public. It includes rigorous protocols to make it acceptable to that audience. However, to ontologically shield it from the reality of dogmatic skeptics, it purposefully includes a design flaw, which is calibrated to (1) allow hostile skeptics to satisfy themselves that the results can be ignored, and at the same time, to (2) make the skeptics’ criticism seem petty or desperate. The dogmatic skeptic should be able to concoct an explanation to dismiss the results, an explanation that seems ridiculous to everyone except himself. For example, a researcher into extra-ocular vision (blindfolded children reading text) told me that critics, unable to find any other flaws, dismissed the research for failing to account for photoreceptors in the skin. Can you read with your skin? Neither can I. When skeptics pounce on that “flaw,” they make themselves look ridiculous. Paradoxically, a design flaw of this type can make the results even more compelling to the general audience. It improves the results by shielding the study from dilution with a contradictory reality field. Layer two shielding: deliberately “unscientific.”. This layer is designed to be compelling to the general public, spanning the spectrum from open-minded, to sympathetic, to fully accepting of ESP. Its purpose is to provide results that make people say, “Wow!” For these results to be possible, the experiment needs additional ontological shielding, which could take several forms: laxer protocols, uncredentialed researchers, lack of a control group, no blinding, possible confounding variables, etc. The experiment “proves” nothing. The data it produces are unpublishable. It takes precautions to rule out conventional explanations (otherwise, no one would say “wow!”), but assumes the basic honesty of the researchers and their subjects. This allows much more flexibility and creativity in experiment design. Layer three: the reality bubble. This type of experiment is shielded from the public entirely. The only people privy to the results are the experimenters themselves, and anyone with whom they share the story of what happened in the room that day. Thus shielded, the phenomenon may reveal itself in its fullness to the researchers and show them what awaits humanity. In the protected ontological bubble the researchers have created, the phenomenon can develop and mature. It is like a baby in an incubator that needs to be protected from the cold drafts and germs of the outside reality. Here, the experimenters can plumb the full depths of the reality-field of ESP, limited only by what they themselves carry in. In this layer, protocols need be no stricter than what is necessary to placate the experimenters’ own internal skeptic. Furthermore, the same kind of trick can be utilized as in layer 1, applied to themselves: offer something for the skeptical mind to grab onto, but that our higher mind recognizes as a ridiculous objection. Thereby we offer ourselves a choice of what to believe (and who to be, in resonance with that belief). We do not attempt to compel belief. Layer four is more mystical. The experimenter must shield the experiment even from himself. Perhaps we have some telepathic test subjects. We run the experiment without checking their performance. Only the subjects are privy to the results, not the experimenter. Maybe the subjects tell the experimenters later, but there is no way to independently verify what they say. We step outside of the paradigm of objectivity entirely, outside the realm of proof, and into the realm of story. We hear about the extraordinary experience that happened in that room, and think, “I wish I could have been there to see it. Then I would know for sure!” But if we were there to see it, maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Yet, even though the event was ontologically shielded in that room, still we have created a kind of portal, a foothold for a new reality in our own. Even if the subjects never speak of it, still the event imprints onto the Akashic field and strengthens the channel to the reality the subjects are anchoring. The results of that experiment will find their way out. Sooner or later, maybe that very day, maybe months or years later, they will reach us. Playing with RealityThe more we understand that reality is not a fixed, external environment, but rather fluid and relational, the better able we are to play with it, to dance with it. For example, we might: deliberately run fraudulent experiments and expose them, so as to make it easier for hostile parties to reject genuine experiments. The reader will recognize a Trickster vibe to this idea. In fact, it is not necessary for sincere researchers to do this. There are plenty of, to coin a term, “authentic frauds” who contribute to the onotological shielding of new-paradigm research. These charlatans, hoaxers, and scammers, together with sincere-but-delusional or sloppy researchers, provide a slippery buffer zone that preserves the integrity of the reality-field of new-paradigm technologies and human abilities, where they can develop uncontaminated by consensus reality. Then, when consensus reality breaks, as it is doing now at ever-increasing pace, new-paradigm technologies can emerge from their cocoon into the collective embrace of a human civilization that is ready for them. Ironically, hostile skeptics and debunkers, especially dishonest ones who deliberately sabotage replication attempts or perform specious takedowns of new-paradigm research, help to maintain the ontological shielding that the phenomena require to develop. Cordoned off from consensus reality, new phenomena can establish themselves, growing like a baby kangaroo in its mother’s pouch until they are robust enough to face the world. New phenomena must be nurtured in protected environments. Researchers who expose their baby paradigms to the hostile forces of consensus reality suffer severe consequences. The history of research into topics like ESP, water memory, biological transmutation of elements, alternative cancer cures, and over-unity energy devices is littered with the corpses of once-sterling scientific reputations—and sometimes with the literal corpses of intransigent researchers themselves. Consensus reality has an immune system that will vigorously reject threats to its integrity. The published experiment, the press conference, the public demonstration attempt to overcome this resistance by force. If only we could get this published, if only people would read it, if only people would look at our evidence or visit our lab, then they would have no choice—they would have to change their minds. If only they would watch this documentary on chemtrails. If only they would read these articles about the Satanic elite. Flat Earth theory. Vaccine adverse events. 9/11 truth. The Gaza genocide. Election fraud. The CCP. Trumpian fascism and ICE. The AI apocolypse. Regenerative agriculture. Biodynamics. Past lives. The dangers of seed oils. The true story of Federal Reserve. If only they would read this rebuttal of the expert that debunks it. If only they would step into my reality, the true reality. I don’t mean to taint any of the above by association with the others. I accept some of them fully, some partially, some not at all. But whether we are speaking of politics, medicine, science, UFOs, or any other topic, experience tells us that such frontal assaults on established reality rarely work, unless that reality is so decrepit that it is already falling apart under its own weight. When that happens, when its immune system falters, then anomalies flood in. At such a time, the new paradigms that have grown in their ontologically shielded incubators can come out and colonize the soil of collective perception, made fertile by the decay of old structures of sense and meaning. It is happening. Reality is breaking. The Epstein Files are just the latest hammer-blow driving the cracks in reality’s facade wider and deeper. It will not hold much longer. 1 In fact, the 39% result in the second trial is even more impressive, mathematically speaking, than the 100% result of the first trial, because it used a series of 300 cards. The chance of performing that feat by random is about one in ten quadrillion. In subsequent trials, however, the results did indeed decline. 2 The exception is “systemic adaptation,” which is a step toward the hypothesis of this essay, which extends it from a systems level to an ontologic level. 3 For example, when MIT scientists attempted to replicate the original Pons and Fleischmann experiment in order to debunk it, their apparatus did register anomalous heat beyond what chemical reactions could easily explain. However, because this heat was not accompanied by neutron emissions at levels predicted by established nuclear fusion theory, they concluded that no fusion was occurring. The excess heat was attributed instead to experimental error or unaccounted chemical effects. That conclusion—rather than the presence of unexplained heat—was what the scientific community and the media accepted. Thanks for reading, You can support my work by becoming a paying subscriber. Paid subscribers also receive occasional, “Letters from Charles Eisenstein” written in a more personal voice for a smaller, more intimate community.
|
