Rethinking Consciousness

Telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP . . . in these ten chapters, leading parapsychologists and philosophers explore experiences that challenge the modern scientific worldview—a worldview that has brought us to a state of planetary crisis. It is imperative that our thinking about perception and experience be outside the box—in this case, outside the Western commitment to a materialistic, mechanistic, atheistic metaphysics. The alternative offered by philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is a view more congenial not only to extraordinary experience, but to the current state of scientific research, which has revealed that activity, selection, and response are facets of every level of reality from the quantum event to the neural cell. 

The area of scientific research that challenges the modern paradigm most head-on is parapsychology, which has for decades churned out careful study after study supporting the existence of extrasensory perception, especially telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis. The reasons why this research has been doubted, challenged, and sometimes vilified are several, but underlying all of them are certain philosophical and, surprisingly, theological choices made about the nature of reality during the formative period of the scientific endeavor. Descartes’ mind/matter metaphysics on the philosophical side, and the denial of action at a distance—partly in order to preserve the unique quality of Christian miracles—on the religious side, still haunt the foundations of modern science, even though “mind” (and God) have been exorcised, while action at a distance remains a shrouded constant in scientific theory (e.g., gravity and electromagnetic attraction).

Transpersonal psychology, which studies all types of extraordinary experience—mystical, psychedelic, near-death, out-of-body, and psychical—presents an even greater challenge to the modern paradigm’s materialist-mechanical worldview: the notion that the universe is composed solely of bits of inert, insentient matter in motion. While the phenomena studied by transpersonal psychology offer more dramatic anomalies for the modern paradigm, especially in its most recent atheistic incarnation, the phenomena researched by parapsychology are far more amenable to experimental investigation and thus present a challenge on science’s home turf. This may also help account for the vehement reactions often elicited by the mere mention of parapsychology as a credible science.