I'll try not to preface this one with too much of a book, its a question I'm asking because - its important in its own respects.
Mainly this - while we laugh at most psychics and 'faith healers' as charlatans, yes most are, for some it gets a little too tricky to just blanket them all.
What I mean - there are enough psychics out there who've worked with local police, professional skeptics, and only got themselves in the good graces of law enforcement by giving suggestions where, even if they all could have been vague guesses, the consistency starts heading off to lottery-winning odds and then well past that.
You also have healers like Dr. Issam Nemeh who, whether its a newly discovered temporal process in the human nervous system or proof of deity - he has not only been able to work a great amount of healings but has even had NASA do quantitative analysis on what he does. The guy's not flashy, he's low key, if some might scream - "Aha! Sounds like Ignatius Loyola back in the flesh!" - again, after a while and after some very cut and dry health issues being resolved, it gets tougher and tougher to call it fake.
Now, Dr. Issam Nemeh in one of his interviews pointed out - a lot of people go to his healing sessions, see miracles, rejoice in it, and then when they leave they compartmentalize it like it its something wholly separate from their lives that they can't weave into their reality. For good reason too - looking around us at the world in general, at world history (particularly the worst human tragedies, some of which were 20th century and still fresh in our minds) - its pretty hard to digest anything that rolls that far to the opposite.
Me - I don't like letting that kind of cognitive dissonance just chill. Ie. - if it is in fact real, then its real; to need to call it something its not implies that we're too steeped in protective mechanisms. I could understand enough people saying that psychics just have a savantism of some type that goes beyond what we know as reality, not necessarily religious but with a scientific base. One might be able to argue that Dr. Nemeh's healings and what he describes himself seeing is full of imagry because perhaps the ability to do these things is in the temporal lobe and would cause hallucinations as a side effect? It seems like a little bit of a push but, again we don't know - just that if the anecdotal evidence builds and builds on someone's abilities its likely I think better to make one of those arguments than just refuse the existence of such phenomena.
Psychic ability - that can scare people a little, mainly that they'd be terrified of what a despot could do with that. Healing abilities though - could save billions of dollars a year though yes, might put an entire host of professions in a job search or at least heading toward geriatric health where physical decay is just inevitable.
I just wonder what you all think on this in terms of the research or lack thereof out there in terms of testing or quantifying these angles of the human being. I get the impression, or at least I partially do partially remain skeptic - that these things might be something similar to what Chinese pandas were before 1930; the broader community hasn't seen, hasn't photographed, or in the case of psychic phenomena or healing has had trouble testing. Strange things are coming up though, such as the random probability experiments run by supercomputers that will strangely enough seismograph large dips and thrusts in global consciousness - its fascinating in that, at the very least, it tells us that we have to be careful about how much we think we know about the full spectrum of forces undergirding our reality and even our own capabilities.
26 Aug 2009, 9:54 pm
