DREAMS AND DEATH

The fierce Sicilian sun beats down on the white marbles of the ancient necropolis, enveloped in a vast silence occasionally pierced by the mating songs of cicadas. Dotted by a lonely sail, the Mediterranean shimmers in the distance, unruffled by a cypress scented breeze. Now I hear a distant murmur of human voices. It originates from a vine enclosed bower, at the tip of a narrow tongue of land that affords the unobstructed view of the bay. A few persons can be seen seated at a long table covered by a white cloth; bread,fruit,and goblets of red wine enliven its immaculate expanse. A subdued conversation is in progress, which peters out as they become aware of my presence. Which does not appear to startle them: the astonishment is all mine, as I find myself among long lost friends of my youth. I am moved beyond words by this unexpected encounter. My friends eagerly inquire about my life, but gently deflect my own queries. They have changed but little over the years: their physical appearance barely altered, they seem to have become more thoughtful and considerate, but that is all. And then it dawns on me that all these friends but one (whom I shall call James) died years ago. This is a banquet of the dead, and I am invited to partake of their victuals. I am not alarmed, because the scene, and my presence in it, have nothing sinister about it; calm, serenity, and detachment prevail.
Slowly the air darkens, the sun a steadily diminishing crimson sliver beyond the watery horizon. One by one my friends leave the bower, bidding me a silent farewell. James seems uncertain as to whether he should join me or the departing friends. This worries me. I patiently wait for him to join me, but he seems unwilling or perhaps unable to do so. He finally waves his hand in a mournful salute, and begins walking toward the others, all soon fading away in the gathering gloom. I am overcome by an urge to leave the deserted enclosure, and hurriedly retrace my steps through the labyrinthine necropolis, now turned alien and forbidding.
This dream was recounted to me by an older man, intrigued by this unexpected descent to Hades. He added that the next day he got in touch with James, whom he had not heard of in a long while. He found him cheerful, and in good health. Evidently, the dream's intimation that James was departing the world of the living was not to be taken as ominous.
Less than a month later, the older man learned that James had died: in the night, of a heart attack, as he was about to begin a long awaited trip to Italy.

Intellectual Terror in the Land of Free Thought

Luc Montagnier, age 78, is the 2008 Nobel-prize winner French virologist who discovered HIV; he is also the founder and president of the World Foundation for AIDS Research and Prevention. Dr. Montagnier is taking on the leadership of a new research institute in China, at Shanghai’s Jiaotong University. Recently interviewed by the journal ‘Science’ (24 December 2010, Vol. 330, p. 1732), Montagnier explained that the move will enable him to continue investigating the implications of his discovery that the presence even at high dilutions of some DNA in water induces structural changes in the liquid which in turn lead to the emission of measurable resonant electromagnetic signals. Importantly, these signals result primarily from bacterial and viral DNA, and can therefore be used to identify the viral or bacterial origins of some diseases. Montagnier also found that the plasma of many patients affected by autism, Alzheimer disease, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis contains traces of bacterial DNA, possibly originating from the gut. The discovery thus points to the possible bacterial origin of these diseases, and has therefore potentially important implications for the early detection and treatment of these conditions.
The aspect of this story that I would like to emphasize pertains to the dismissive way with which this discovery was disposed of by the majority of the scientific community. It appears that much of the ‘discomfort’ felt by many of Montagnier’s colleagues concerning this finding is that it is reminiscent in some of its aspects of a scientific controversy that arose in France as a result of immunologist Jacques Benveniste’s studies. As ‘Science’ reminds us, Benveniste claimed in a 1998 paper that so called IgE antibodies can affect certain cell types even after being diluted by a factor of 10 to the power of 120. These dilution levels are comparable to those used in homeopathic medicine, in which the supposedly therapeutic substance is diluted to an extent that mainstream science deems incompatible with any possible biological effects. An investigation of Benveniste’s laboratory procedures resulted in a summary dismissal of his findings.
In the ‘Science’ interview, Montagnier argues that Benveniste was mostly right in his conclusions: yet they cost him his scientific credibility, his research lab , and funding for his research. Montagnier is far from uncritically endorsing homeopathy, yet is unhesitant in defending his findings, and the general claim that ‘high dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules’. The dilution levels he works with in his studies, though lower than those used in homeopathic medicine, are such that there is not a single molecule of DNA left: yet its electromagnetic signature is clearly detectable.
Montagnier reports that his attempt to receive funding on the Continent have been unsuccessful. ‘There is a kind of fear around this topic in Europe – he says -. I am told that some people have reproduced Benveniste’s results, but they are afraid to publish it because of the intellectual terror from people who do not understand it’. Hence his decision to move to China, as the head of a new research institute that bears his name.
There is a bitter irony in this saga. A great Western scientist wishing to freely pursue rigorous scientific research is forced to relocate to the forbidding, authoritarian shores of Communist China because of a state of ‘intellectual terror’ prevailing in the land of free thought...
Some wit once noted that Western academics celebrate every kind of diversity, except diversity of opinion. This is all too often the case. Dissent is tolerated mostly within the narrow confines of the established worldview. Whenever possible, the bearers of disturbingly heretical views, following an expeditious and often brutal trial, are unceremoniously expelled from the sacred precincts of the Citadel of Science to the barren lands surrounding it. One of the greatest physicists of the century just past, Max Planck, once ruefully remarked that (Karl Popper’s homilies notwithstanding) "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". We can only hope that this is an excessively dark view of the way scientific change unfolds.

Four Orientations Toward the Paranormal

There probably are as many ways of relating to the paranormal as there are people interested in it. Chances are, though, that this seemingly endless variety of opinions may result from the elaboration of a few basic attitudes toward the paranormal*.
Dogmatic skepticism is one such attitude. Those subscribing to this view are certain that, the world being a strictly closed physical system that obeys laws currently outlined by the physical sciences, there is no room for the ‘exotic’. Hence, ‘explaining’ the paranormal becomes an exercise in ‘explaining it away’: so-called psychical events are but the by-product of mental illness, hallucinations, misinterpretations, self-deception, or fraud.
Other people might be willing to admit that ‘weird things’ do in fact take place every now and then on this peculiar planet of ours: but such bizarre anomalies are best understood as rare, random violations of an otherwise lawful physical order. Because of their status, they are essentially meaningless; the study of these phenomena will teach us nothing of consequence, and should be abandoned. Were we to train a group of baboons to hit randomly at typewriters’ keys, we may expect that, over a long period of time, a meaningful sentence, or even a beautiful sonnet might result from this activity: but what would that tell us about the world? Nothing.
A few people are prepared to accept that, the evidence in favor of phenomena such as telepathy being at least suggestive of their existence, the latter should be regarded as possible evidence of physical forces, energies, or processes, as yet to be uncovered, that a more comprehensive future physical science will be able to incorporate in its conceptual framework. Throughout its short history, modern physical science has undergone a series of dramatic conceptual revolutions that have radically redefined the concepts of time, space, mass, energy, and so on, and this process is most likely to continue.
Some other people would argue that, if the phenomena studied by parapsychology are indeed real, as they suspect them to be, they point to the existence of an order of reality altogether different from the one investigated by the physical sciences: a universe of ‘mind’, or ‘psyche’, or ‘soul’, whether individual and/or transpersonal. Such a domain cannot be reduced to the physical order. As such, it has to be understood on its own terms, even though all the kinds of rigorous controls that characterize the scientific method ought to be employed in its study.
I doubt that this list exhausts all the possible basic attitudes toward the paranormal... but it is a beginning


*See also John Beloff (e.g., ‘The Relentless Question, 1990, Mcfarland & Co.) for a thorough analysis of various approaches to the paranormal

RESCUED BY AN OUT-OF-BODY-TRAVELER

Kari Mullis, 1993 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, was appropriately characterized by a London newspaper as ‘a deep and genuine eccentric’. Examples of Dr. Mullis’s propensity for thinking and behaving unusually abound in his memoir ‘Dancing Naked in the Mind Field’ (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). We learn there that in 1964, in his Kansas home, before doing his laundry, Mullis decided to inhale some nitrous oxide (or ‘laughing gas'), since he had found that by so doing his mind ‘would sail off briefly into something primeval and human-less'(Ibid., p. 88). It should be mentioned in passing that the potential of nitrous oxide as a catalyst for ‘mind trips’ has long be known, witness the writings of William James on the topic. It so happened that, the night before, Mullis had taken some powerful antihistamines; thus, when he started inhaling the gas through a small tube placed in his mouth he immediately fainted. When he regained consciousness the gas was still running, and the tube, now frozen solid, was placed on the floor in front of him. His lips and tongue felt numb and were frostbitten as a result of holding the frozen tube in his mouth. He somehow made it to the hospital, and within a matter of months his ravaged mouth healed. The hospital doctor pointed out a mysterious aspect of the accident. If Mullis was unconscious long enough to have suffered frostbite, how had the tube come out of his mouth? He could not have done it, for the gas induces complete immobility (a major reason for its use for anesthetic purposes in dental surgery). The solution to the mystery transpired 14 years later, in California, where Mullis met in a bakery an attractive stranger, who briskly initiated a conversation. At one point, this woman asked him whether he had found out who had pulled the tube out of his mouth. Mullis was astonished, since he had not revealed to anyone the embarrassing accident. How did she know about it? ‘I was there and pulled it out of your mouth’, she replied, ‘I waited until I was sure you were okay and then I left’ (Ibid., p. 93). But she was not in his Kansas house with her physical body, she added. An experienced traveler on the ‘astral plane’, she had been ‘in transit’ when she noted his predicament, and decided to intervene. She knew they would meet again.

GUSTAV FECHNER ON LIFE AFTER DEATH

Gustav Fechner (1801-1887) is a fascinating, paradoxical figure in the history of science. His 'Principles of Psychophysics’(1860), which sought to establish experimentally rigorous quantitative relationships between the various forms of physical energy that define our environment (light, acoustic energy, etc.), and the psychological effects they produce (e.g., the sensations of brightness, loudness, etc.), played a crucial role in establishing psychology as an independent empirical science. The discipline of psychophysics remains one of the core concerns of current experimental psychology, and every year scientists from all over the world celebrate a ‘Fechner Day’. Somewhat ironically, Fechner's aim was not to beget a new science, but to demonstrate by means of his empirical findings the correctness of a quasi-mystical metaphysical view, in terms of which mind and matter are but two sides of the same coin, and coexist not only in humans, but everywhere throughout the universe. This view also included a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, which he articulated in his 'Little Book on Life after Death' (Boston: Little & Brown. 1836/1905).
According to Fechner, Just as the about to be born infant, unaware of the wondrous reality that it will soon enter into, may experience as a dying the traumatic end of its intrauterine existence, so in our earthly life, our perceptions constrained by the physical body, we remain unaware of “the light, the music, the freedom, and the glory of the life to come” and do not realize that dreaded physical death is but a second birth into an happier existence. As we enter it, “All those things which we, with our present senses, can only know from the outside, or, as it were, from a distance, will be penetrated into, and thoroughly known, by us. Then, instead of passing by hills and meadows, instead of seeing around us all the beauties of spring, and grieving that we cannot really take them in, as they are merely external: our spirits shall enter into those hills and meadows, to feel and enjoy with them their strength and their pleasure in growing; instead of exerting ourselves to produce, by means of words or gestures, certain ideas in the minds of our fellow men, we shall be enabled to elevate and influence their thoughts, by an immediate intercourse of spirits, which are no longer separated, but rather brought together, by their bodies; instead of being visible in our bodily shape to the eyes of the friends we left behind, we shall dwell in their innermost souls, a part of them, thinking and acting in them and through them." (Ibid., p. 33).

CARL ROGERS ON LIFE AFTER DEATH

Most readers acquainted with contemporary psychology would agree that Carl Rogers (1902-1987) was one of the most influential psychologist of the century just past. In an autobiographical note written when he was 75 years old, Rogers observed that death was not looming large in his thoughts. The meaningfulness of his life, he felt, was not threatened by the prospect of death. Though inclining towards the view that death constitutes the terminus of personal existence, he refused to construe this as a tragic or awful prospect: ‘I have been able to live my life not to the full, cer¬tainly, but with a satisfying degree of fullness and it seems natural that my life should come to an end. I already have a degree of immortality in other persons. I have sometimes said that, psychologically, I have strong sons and daughters all over the world. Also, I believe that the ideas and the ways of being that I and others have helped to develop will continue, for some time at least. So if I, as an individual, come to a complete and final end, aspects of me will still live on in a variety of growing ways, and that is a pleasant thought. (Rogers, 1989, p. 49).’*
This serenely secular view was tempered somewhat by the serious consideration he felt compelled to give to Elisabeth Kubler Ross’s affirmative conclusions about life after death, and to Moody’s research on the near-death experience. In sum, Rogers concluded, “I consider death with, I believe, an openness to the expe¬rience. It will be what it will be, and I trust I can accept it as either an end to, or a continuation of, life” (Rogers, p. 50).
About two years later, however, Rogers wrote: In the eighteen months prior to my wife’s death in March 1979, there were a series of experiences in which Helen and I and a number of friends were all involved, which decidedly changed my thoughts and feelings about dying and the contin¬uation of the human spirit. (Ibid., 1989, p. 51). These experiences, barely hinted at, were of a paranormal character, and impressive enough to induce Rogers to “consider it possible that each of us is a continuing spiritual essence lasting over time, and occasionally incarnated in a human body” (Rogers, 1989, p. 53). A decidedly interesting statement from a man of considerable intellectual stature and profound personal integrity.
* Rogers, C. R. (1989). Growing old: Or older and growing. In H. Kirschenbaum and V. Henderson (Eds.), The Carl Rogers Reader. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

JUST A THOUGHT ON DREAMS... BY PHILIP SLATER

"No one agrees what dreams mean, but everyone agrees that they don't mean what they say. But what if they do mean what they say? What if the statements 'I dwelt in marble halls', or 'I talked to my dead grandmother' required no more interpretation than 'I walked to the drugstore and bought toohpaste'?... Freud lacked any respect for the dream as a reality in and of itself, without translation... For to interpret a dream is to say it is unreal - a mask for something else, not an actual event of its own."
From: The Wayward Gate', by Philip Slater. Boston: Bacon Press, 1977, pp. 23-24).