t is tempting to account for my fear by appealing simply to the
fear of the unknown. But that won't get us very far. There are
lots of unknown things which don't scare us at all. So what was
it, specifically,that frightened me? Of course, on the
surface, at least, it appeared that something other that the three
people in the room caused the table to move. So perhaps I was
afraid of the possibility of discarnate agency. But why should
that have been frightening? For one thing (although I am by no
means certain of this), I may well have been too blindly and thoroughly
entrenched in my few philosophical conceits for discarnate influence
ever to have been a live option in my mind, even unconsciously.
ut more importantly, since that time there have been other contexts
in which I've suspended my customary philosophical prejudices
and allowed myself to entertain the possibility that discarnate
surviving personalities were influencing events around me. For
example, I did that often during the several years I spent getting
to know the healer Olga Worrall. But at no time did I ever experience
fear in connection with the phenomena I observed. Granted, in
principle, the very possibility of discarnate influence is simply
not as deeply intimidating as another possibility. Although
I did not see it clearly at the time, it was also possible that
one or more of those present in the room psychokinetically, and
unconsciously, caused the table to move.
ow, why should that have been frightening? More or less
elaborate answers to that question can be found in Braude, 1986,
1987, 1989, and Eisenbud, 1970, 1982, 1983 (and see Tart, 1986,
for a somewhat different but complimentary view of the matter).
The Newsletter-sized answer to the question is this; it does
not take much of a conceptual leap to connect the possibility
of innocuous psychokinetic object movements with other, far more
unsettling applications of PK. Whether we acknowledge it consciously
or not, if we can psychokinetically make a pencil, cigarette,
or table move-not to mention heal a person-then in principle we
ought to be able to do such things as cause auto accidents, heart
attacks, or merely annoying pains and tickles in our neighbors.
or one thing (and for reasons Eisenbud and I have outlined elsewhere-op.
cit.), given the current state of our ignorance concerning psychic
functioning, we are in no position to suppose that occurrences
of psi must always be of small or moderate scale. In fact, we have no idea at all just how refined
or large-scale psi might be. But quite apart from that issue, there is no
reason to think that car or airplane crashes, heart attacks, and
so forth, require more (or more refined) PK than that required
for small object movements. After all, events of small magnitude
can have far reaching consequences; so a car crash (say) could
be caused, in principle, by a well-placed small-scale psychic
nudge. Thus, there seems no escaping the conclusion that if PK
can be triggered by unconscious intentions, then we might be responsible
for a range of events (accidents, calamities) for which most of
us would prefer merely to be innocent bystanders. Moreover, we
would all be potential victims of psychically triggered events
(intentional or otherwise) whose sources we could not conclusively
identify and whose limitations we could not assess.
ore generally, what is so unnerving about this is that we must
entertain seriously a world view which most of us associate, usually
condescendingly, only with so-called primitive societies. It is
a magical picture of reality, according to which people can interfere
with each others' lives in all sorts of ways we would prefer to
be impossible. Of course, some of those interactions might be
beneficial; but what scares us, I believe, is the spectre of psychic
snooping, telepathic influence, and potent malevolent uses of
PK (e.g., the evil eye and hexing).
Most (or at least many) Parapsychologists nowadays will acknowledge
that the fear of psi is prevalent both in and outside parapsychology.
ndeed, Parapsychologists might betray it in quite subtle ways.
As Eisenbud has persuasively argued (1983), one way laboratory
researchers in the field exhibit that fear is by means of apparently
innocent or careless mistakes, oversight, and omissions which
undermine an experiment. But even more interesting, perhaps,
is a widespread kind of methodological piety in
which researchers exhibit endless pseudo-scientific fussiness
and obsessional piddling, which, as often as not, results in never
getting anything done unless under certain conditions that virtually
strangulate the emergence of anything faintly resembling a psi
occurrence (Eisenbud, 1993, p. 153).
o put it another
way, some researchers manage to make experiments sufficiently
complicated and artificial to snuff out all manifestation of psi
except, apparently, enough to be significant at the 0.5 level.
That is still enough to merit publishing a paper, and it helps
the researcher to feel successful and to justify his or her work
within the field generally; but it is not enough to seriously
challenge a possible deeper wish that psi simply doesn't occur.
hat may be more interesting, though, is the way the fear of
psi seems to have shaped the course of parapsychology around the
turn of the century. Skeptics often like to sneer that dramatic
large-scale PK, such as full table levitations and materializations,
seem to have disappeared from the parapsychological scene. The
main reason, they often charge, is that modern technology has
simply made it too difficult to get away with the fraud that was
more easily perpetrated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. But even though that position is often promulgated
as an obvious piece of received wisdom, it is, to put is bluntly,
clearly defective (if not simply foolish). Often, it demonstrates
such a grossly superficial command of the data and issues that
one can only wonder why proponents of this view would risk embarrassment
by flaunting their ignorance in print.
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