At the 20th International Conference
of the Society for Psychical Research, four of us - John Beloff, Guy
Playfair, Richard Wiseman and myself - were asked to speak for just
ten minutes each on the theme ‘Back to Basics’. The idea
was originally Guy Playfair’s. He suggested that we may have
lost our way and could benefit by going ‘back to basics’
and asking ourselves what our subject is all about and what we are
trying to achieve. At the last minute we were also asked by our Chairman,
David Fontana, to make sure we included a personal position statement;
to say where we each stand today. I rather enjoyed this improbable
challenge and the following is what I found myself saying.
The basics I want to go back
to are those with which our founders began more than a hundred years ago.
Myers once said that the most important question to him was: "Is
the Universe friendly?" (Gauld, 1968, p.149). And Gurney once told
William James that "the mysteries of the Universe and the indefensibility
of human suffering were never far from him" (Gauld, 1968, p.156).
I would say that this is true
of me too. In a sense those are as much the basics for me as they were
for them. But psychical research is more than those very deep and general
basics. Back in the very first Proceedings of our Society in 1882,
Barrett, Gurney and Myers said that if the phenomena they were investigating
were real they would "necessitate a modification of that general
view of the relation of mind to matter to which modern science has long
been gravitating" (Barrett et al., 1882, p.34). In other words, as
Alan Gauld put it in his (1968) book on The Founders of Psychical Research,
psychical research was like a candle in the dark. The darkness was materialist
science and the candle was the study of psychic phenomena. Nowadays we
may be more used to Carl Sagan’s view. His latest book is called
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. For him
and perhaps many scientists, materialism is the candle, and it shines
in the darkness of superstition, the paranormal, and all those popular
shows on television every week: a complete reversal.
I think our founders would have
been - I’m not sure whether delighted, or stunned, or mystified or
what - if they could see the success of materialist science now. Success
is measured in many ways, but we cannot deny that materialism, as a general
way of looking at the world, has been enormously successful in science.
To my mind there is one idea at the heart of materialism’s success.
It is the best scientific idea ever; the simplest, the most powerful and
the most beautiful idea in all of science today. It was around then, before
the founding of psychical research, and probably had quite a strong influence
on the origins of psychical research. It is, of course, Darwin’s
theory of evolution by natural selection.
Darwin’s is a supremely
materialist theory. It says that this beautifully-designed body of mine,
and indeed those of the microbes in me and the rat behind those skirting
boards, and everything else living around us are not designed by a creator.
No creator is needed; they are designed by a dumb algorithm. That’s
why the theory is so beautiful and so simple. It explains that this is
all I am. I am the beautiful product of a dumb algorithm working in a
complex universe. I am utterly dependent on the rest of that universe,
and the evolutionary processes in it, for my existence. Yet I have come
to the idea, the ridiculous, false and childish idea, that there is somebody
inside looking out through the eyes, and in control of this body.
David asked me to say where I
stand today. I stand in many places with many perspectives, but there
are two that are absolutely central to my life. First is as a scientist.
I think that science is inexorably heading towards a particular view.
It was doing so in the days of Myers and Gurney and William James, and
it still is. This scientific view is one that gradually reveals how and
why we come to believe in an illusion. The illusion is that there is somebody
in there; that consciousness does things; that we as independent, separately-existing
conscious entities run our lives and move our arms and legs. Scientific
analysis finds no such entity inside the brain, and no need for one.
I come to this view also through
a different aspect of my life; that is, my Buddhist practice. This is
not something I very often talk about in the context of psychical research,
but it is relevant here. I have been training in Zen for about fifteen
years, and it is, at least for many people, a very long and slow process.
It is a process that trains you, not by intellectual argument as I am
doing in the scientist mode, but through practice, through meditation,
through sitting and letting go of thoughts, or through mindfulness. Mindfulness
means being present in every moment of life. It means letting go of plans
and recollections, desires and intentions and just being here, now. The
strange thing about this practice is that it seems gradually to reveal
the illusion. You begin to see through, to experience seeing through,
the illusion of a self doing things.
As Peter Fenwick (1987) puts it, it means a "freeing
of the individual from the illusion that he is ‘doing’".
The Buddha taught, two and a half thousand years ago, that "actions
do exist, and also their consequences,
but the person that acts does not" and Buddhaghosa says "Here
suffering exists, but no sufferer is found." There’s nobody
in there.
This is where I stand, as nobody
separate - as just one part of this complex universe.
Now what about psychical research?
Where does that fit in? Psychical research is going the other way; it
is saying not only that ‘I’, as a conscious separate entity,
have the power to move my arms and legs, but that I might, as a conscious
separate entity, be able to affect that ‘No Smoking’ sign over
there and cause it to drop off the wall by the paranormal power of the
mind, or by the power of consciousness.
This is why I am so deeply sceptical.
It is not just because of the lack of evidence, or because of the lack
of a convincing theory or a plausible mechanism for psi. It is because
to my mind psychical research is going backwards. The exciting ideas in
science, and my own spiritual practice, are both going the same way; the
‘no-self’ way, if you like; the ‘no-power-of-consciousness’
way. It is a scary way, and a difficult way, but I think it is true.
Psychical research is therefore
claiming something which to me just does not fit. It wants to prove the
power of consciousness and put the self back on centre stage. Of course
I might be wrong, and that is why I keep coming to these conferences -
but I do not think consciousness has any power.
Barrett, W. F., Gurney, E. and Myers, F. W. H. (1882)
ProcSPR1, 13-34.
Gauld, A. (1968) The Founders of Psychical Research.
London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Sagan, C. (1966) The Demon-Haunted World: Science
as a Candle in the Dark. London: Headline.
Fenwick, P. (1987) Meditation and the EEG. In West,
M. A. (ed.) The Psychology of Meditation, 104-117. Oxford: Clarendon
Press
Rahula, W. (1959) What the Buddha Taught.
London: Gordon Fraser.
