My mother used to say, “Curiosity killed the cat.” I was a curious child and an even more inquisitive adult – so reading “Impossible Realities” was like the best sugar high I’ve ever experienced because there was no crash. Only the anticipation one feels prior to embarking on a journey filled with possibility.

“Impossible Realities” is a compilation of scientific data, anecdotes and the personal experiences of Maureen Caudill, who spent fifteen years researching artificial intelligence and neural networks. If that sounds very “techie”, let me assure you, this book is written in a style everyone can understand. It’s a fascinating and eye-opening study of the science behind psychic and paranormal activity. If you are a skeptic, you’ll find the research substantial enough to reconsider your views. If you are a believer, you’ll rejoice in the validation. And if you’re a student, you’ll find a wealth of information from which to learn and study.

Maureen has compiled a thought provoking blend of information to support the existence of eight areas of psychic/paranormal activity: psychokinesis, remote viewing, energy healing, telepathy, animal telepathy, precognition, afterlife and reincarnation. I’m sure some of you are saying, “Hogwash!” And that’s fine. Diversity of thought and action is what makes our world more interesting. However, I challenge you to read this book with an open mind and consider the possibility that these powers might exist.

The introduction tells a simple story about a village who believes swans are always white. And because no one had ever seen a swan of another color, a theory was born that all swans are white. The villagers accepted this as law. It was taught in their schools and never questioned until one day a little girl asked her teacher. “What if they’re NOT all white?” The teacher was shocked. How could this little girl be so impudent as to challenge what everyone knew to be the truth? She was duly punished. But years later, long after the little girl had reached adulthood, she was near a pond and heard a loud honking. Parting the reeds, she peered across the water and saw a black swan. The villagers would not believe her  but it didn’t matter. She knew in her heart the theory that all swans were white was wrong. She’d seen it with her own eyes.

The moral of the fable is this:  it only takes one person’s confirmation to prove the theory incorrect.

There are a lot of people who choose to believe psychic phenomena is a hoax, fake, an impossibility. Maureen admits to being one of those doubters at one point. But when scientific research, as well as her own experiences, proved certain theories wrong, like psychokinesis, she began to look at psychic and paranormal activity differently. “Impossible Realities” takes the reader on a journey into another realm where the impossible is possible…and then offers the proof.

I’ll be honest, I am so fascinated by this book I’m now on my second reading. I think you’ll feel the same. And to “prove” it, I’ve included an excerpt after my interview with the talented and mesmerizing, Maureen Caudill.

MEET THE AUTHOR:  Maureen Caudill

I can’t begin to express my enthusiasm for today’s featured author and her recently published non-fiction work, “Impossible Realities”. It’s a subject I find fascinating . . . the science behind psychic and paranormal activity. A former Defense Department contractor on artificial intelligence, Maureen Caudill offers evidence to support a wide range of paranormal phenomena.

Maureen, you’ve spent over 15 years as a researcher in artificial intelligence and neural networks. Just citing your experience might intimidate many readers yet you’ve written a book that’s easy for a lay person to understand. Have you always been interested in psychic and paranormal activity or did it evolve through your research?

I’ve always tried to have an open mind about everything, and let the data determine what “truth” was—something that’s not particularly common in certain types of questions. However, what really sparked me was something that happened to me 10 or so years ago. After a lifetime of having absolutely nothing psychic in the way of personal experiences, I took a week-long retreat and found myself doing things that I would have labeled as absolutely impossible.  The problem is, if you explain those events to someone else, there is always skepticism—it could have been faked or hoaxed, etc. etc. But when it happens to you and you know there was no hoaxing involved…well, it’s really difficult to discount these events as being fakes.

Because of those experiences, described in my previous book SUDDENLY PSYCHIC:A Skeptic’s Journey, and the ones I’ve had over the years since then, I now believe strongly that psychic skills are natural human skills that everyone has to one degree or another, just as everyone has some degree of musical talent.  We’re not all concert pianists, but pretty much everyone can hum a tune or pick out “Chopsticks” on a piano. And with practice and training, we can all become reasonably good at whatever psychic skills we have the most natural talent for.

We don’t yet have a solid theory for how these skills work, but to throw out the evidence for lack of a theory is the very opposite of “scientific.”

I especially like the fact you side step sensationalism in favor of a logical, “normal” approach to a series of topics many view with a skeptic’s mind, such as psychokinesis, remote viewing, energy healing, precognition, telepathy, reincarnation and NDE / afterlife. Which of these do you find the most interesting, and why?

The ones I find most intriguing—and puzzling—are generally the ones involving time.  There is no question that psychic skills somehow operate outside time. For example, a remote viewer can as easily view the past or the future as the present. (Though getting numbers is really hard for some reason, so remote viewing winning lottery tickets is very challenging!) We don’t understand that. But I think the one thing that’s very clear is that we don’t really understand what time is. It’s also possible that time really is what the old joke said: It’s something we all made up and pretend to believe in so everything doesn’t happen at once. The more I explore these realms, the more I begin to believe that everything really does happen at once.

In your opinion, why do some people experience “gifts and abilities” that others do not?

Mostly, I believe, it’s because people are culturally trained to suppress our psychic skills. There’s a reason reincarnation is mostly reported in Eastern cultures—it’s a perfectly accepted part of their culture and religion. When I was writing the reincarnation chapter, however, I looked for stories that were not from that part of the world—and I found them. There’s a great story of a NY cop—a Catholic (and Catholics are not known for their belief in reincarnation as far as I’m aware)—who not only reincarnated in his own grandson, he predicted before his death that he would do so.

As I mentioned, I believe anyone can be psychic if they are willing to open their minds and try. I occasionally do workshops where one of the most popular things is a segment teaching people about spoon-bending. I don’t stand up there and bend a bunch of spoons (or forks; I like forks better for reasons I explain in the book). Instead I pass out good quality cutlery and talk the group through the process and have everyone bend their own darned forks!  Watching me do it would leave lots of questions about how I faked it. When you do it yourself, you know it wasn’t a fake.

And you know what? In my experience, in a big group (several hundred people) I get about 85-90% success rate when I ask folks to hold up their twisted forks. In a small group, where I can give a little extra guidance to anyone who needs a little boost, I get virtually 100% success. It’s very rare in that case for someone to fail.

Everyone can change the crystalline structure of stainless steel just by working with their minds. Everyone.  Isn’t that amazing?

What are your views on multiple levels of reality?

Good question. Short answer: they’re very real. Heck, I’m on alternate realities a lot of the time. I’ve gone to find those who are dead and don’t know it to help them move on to a higher place. I’ve communicated with the dead and with spirit beings who were never physically incarnated. I’ve visited realms that are so amazing there are no words to describe them.

And if I can do all this, you can too. If there’s one message I want people to take away from this, it’s that these abilities are available to everyone. You don’t have to be born “special” or suffer a near death experience, or spend time in a coma. You can learn to do these things. Heck, if my left-brained, highly logical, scientific self can learn to do this stuff, anyone can.  I’m really serious about that. All it takes is a mind open enough to let yourself try.

None of my personal experiences can (or should) convince anyone of anything. That’s why I went looking for more scientific proof. But again…if you’ve done it yourself, you know whether you faked it.  You know it’s true, whatever anyone else says. So I’d like people to go out and have their own experiences. Don’t rely on other people’s—go have your own.

You’ve taught over a thousand people to spoon-bend in workshops, including an on-air episode with George Noory, host of Coast to Coast AM. What is a basic exercise someone can do to harness their Chi energy?

With a nod to my good friend Robert Bruce (an Australian mystic), here’s a simple way to feel yourself raising your chi energy:

• Start when you’re relaxed and there are no distractions (cell phone off, TV off, no radio, no one else around talking to you—though if several friends want to do this together that’s good). If you have pets, let them into the room as long as they’re reasonably well behaved. If you have young kids, either lock them out of the room, or do this when they’re asleep. (Pets enjoy the energy and will participate with you—probably ending up on your lap; young children often don’t have the attention span yet to keep quiet and calm, so it’s pets in/kids out.)
• Sit in a comfortable chair, preferably with your feet propped up. Do not lie down. Ideally have arms on your chair that you can prop your elbow on. Or rest your arm on a pillow.
• Make sure you’re wearing something comfortable—nothing tight or constricting. Frankly, a comfy pair of jammies is perfect, but at least loosen belts, take off shoes, etc.
• Pick one hand and prop it comfortably with your palm up. (I’m going to say right hand, but it doesn’t matter which you use.) Your fingers should be relaxed and slightly curled. Don’t tense up. Just relax and focus on your hand.
• With the fingertips of your other (left in this example) hand, lightly brush your right hand from base of palm to fingertip. Brush back and forth, forth and back. Focus on what that sensation feels like. Concentrate on remembering that sensation.
• When you’ve done that for a few moments, take away your left hand and see if you can recreate in your mind the sensations of that brushing movement in your right hand.  Can you?  If not, brush again for a few moments.
• Keep doing that until you can recreate the sensation just with your mind. What does it feel like? You should experience anything from itching, slight tingling, prickly sensation, even a slight burning sense.  People experience it differently so your sensations may vary a little. But your hand should feel energized in some way. It may not be 100% comfortable, but it shouldn’t actually hurt.
• Once you can do this with one hand, switch sides and do the same with the other hand.
• When you can do it with each hand, see if you can recreate it in both hands at the same time.

With a little practice (very little actually) you’ll find you don’t have to do the brushing at all. You can remember exactly what that sensation is, and you can recreate it at will just by thinking about it.

What this does is activate all the minor chakras in your hands and fingers, which is one part of your body that has an enormous number of these minor energy centers. Activating your chakras is the first step in learning to really manipulate chi and use it to do stuff like, well, spoon-bending!

Want more?  Do the equivalent of the same thing with your feet. Since it’s awkward to do the brushing thing half-bent over, get one of those cat toys with a feather on a stick and use that to brush the bottom of your feet (barefoot!) from toes to heels. If your feet are heavily callused, do the top of your foot instead. Again, focus on the sensation of what it feels like and recreate that sensation in your mind.  Your feet actually have even more minor chakras than your hands.

There are many references to the power of thought manifestation by great philosophers throughout history. In more recent years, it’s been called the power of positive thinking and law of attraction, popularized by the cult movie, The Secret. What are your thoughts on the subject?

Manifestation is an interesting subject. It’s certainly true that we do control our own reality to a certain degree, but the thing is, most of us try to manifest something like money. I believe that’s not necessarily going to happen. First, we have a life goal or a life experience that we’ve planned to go through in this lifetime. (Remember that there is good evidence that everyone has literally tens of thousands of lifetimes—this is not a one-shot experience—and that being in “Earth school” means embracing all aspects of Earth experience, good and bad, rich and poor, healthy and sick over those many lifetimes.)

If you try to manifest something that is contradictory to that life experience, your own higher self will stop it. For example, if you chose to have a life experience in this lifetime where you have a debilitating disease, it might not be possible to manifest a cure unless you’ve already learned the lesson intended from that disease.

It’s not that you’re not able to manifest something, so much as it is that you’re trying to manifest something that is not for your own higher good. That will generally fail.

On the other hand, I’ve seen some truly miraculous things happen that are not necessarily explicable by anything except manifestation. One of the tricks is not to focus on a specific “how”—that is, don’t say you want something to happen only one way. You don’t have enough perspective to necessarily know what is really best for you spiritually—and remember, at the spiritual level where manifestation happens, it’s not about “stuff” like money or a new car. It’s about making yourself a better spiritual being.

So if you want a job where you don’t hate your boss and earn more money, it’s important not to ask for a specific new job. Instead focus on making your work experience pleasant, productive, and sufficiently rewarding to give you an ample living.  That could happen a lot of ways, and the one that manifests is likely to be completely unexpected.

When I need mental stimulation or look for a way to relax, I pick up a good book like “Impossible Realities”. What do you do to de-stress and find your Zen moment? Or is your mind always “on”?

I love to read too; I always have. But really, meditation is my go-to device. I find it’s the best way to de-stress. It’s way better in altered states. Sometimes it’s deeply profound and moving. Sometimes it’s just plain funny.

Did I mention I have this spiritual guide who, for reasons best known to himself (itself?), occasionally pops into my meditations in costume? Such as the time I was in this deep, peaceful wonderful meditation and he suddenly appeared dressed as a giant chicken—think Big Bird as a chicken but with sort of glowing blobby feet because his spirit form has no legs!  Why a chicken, you ask?  I have no clue. But it killed that deep, wonderful meditation because I broke out laughing.

A friend of mine once asked me if I was bothered by the fact that my spiritual guides all seem to come from the Stand-Up-Comics-R-Us store.  Huh.

And now, just for fun . . . if you found a magic stone that could transport you to any time and place in history, where would you go and why?

I can only go into the past??  I’d want to go into the future, maybe by 1000 years. I’d like to see if humanity can dig ourselves out of the mess we’ve made of the planet, or if we’ve drowned in our own mistakes. That would be fascinating to know, don’t you think?

I think this century is a tipping point for our species. We’re either going to fail big time and disappear as a dominant species, or we’re going to overcome all our problems and surge forward in a big way. I wonder which way we’ll go?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Maureen Caudill spent more than twenty years as a computer scientist, fifteen of those as a researcher in artificial intelligence and neural networks. She was a program manager and Artificial Intelligence researcher working on such advanced projects as DARPA (“High Performance Knowledge Base” program) and ARDA (“Advanced Question Answering for Intelligence” program).

Website: http://www.maureencaudill.com/index.htm

Blog: http://scienceofpsychicphenomena.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MaureenCaudillAuthor

GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/63686.Maureen_Caudill

Impossible Realities: The Science Behind Energy Healing, Telepathy, Reincarnation, Precognition, and Other Black Swan Phenomena

By Maureen Caudill
Genre: Non-Fiction/New Age/Paranormal

Publisher: Hampton Roads Publishing, an imprint of Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
ISBN: 978-1-57174-663-4

Number of pages: 256
Word Count: 66,377

Cover Artist: Jim Warner

Amazon   Barnes and Noble

Book Description:

Impossible Realities is the first book to examine the science behind psychic and paranormal activity. A former Defense Department expert on artificial intelligence, Maureen Caudhill provides evidence for a wide range of paranormal phenomena.

Impossible Realities presents a wealth of anecdotal and empirical evidence to prove the existence (and power) of:

• psychokinesis (most famously spoon bending
• remote viewing
• energy healing
• telepathy, animal telepathy
• precognition
• survival after death
• reincarnation

Caudill presents the strongest case yet for bringing paranormal phenomena from the margins into the realm of the normal and credible. This is a book both for true believers and skeptics alike.

EXCERPT

The First Black Swan: Psychokinesis

I have a bowl in my house that is filled with the remains of various pieces of cutlery that are not exactly usable. These are forks and spoons and an occasional knife that used to be good-quality stainless steel cutlery, but which now are just . . . strange. Every so often I give a workshop for people who want to learn how to access their psychic selves. The format varies some, depending on the time available. Yet, no matter how long the workshop—a day, a weekend, or a week—the one skill people always want me to teach them is spoon-bending.

To be honest, I’m not quite sure why spoon-bending is so popular. It’s really a bit of a party trick rather than anything profound. But maybe it’s just that a warped fork is tangible evidence that they have done something unusual. When you go home with a fork that is bent and twisted into strange shapes, you have absolute proof that you did something extraordinary.

Spoon-bending is definitely a skill that has fallen on hard times. It had been extremely popular in the 1970s as celebrated psychic Uri Geller rose to fame as a spoon-bender extraordinaire, until in 1973, he was caught cheating on national television, on the Tonight Show. He was declared a fraud. He was pilloried by all and virtually drummed out of the United States.

Now to be fair, Geller did cheat. Everyone agrees on that, even him. What is often not heard is why he cheated. According to his side of the story, he was blindsided by that request, not expecting to be forced into demonstrating his skills in that particular venue. Furthermore (again from his perspective) he was exhausted, stressed, and simply not in the right frame of mind to be doing anything psychic, yet he felt hounded to perform on television. Still young and desperate not to look bad by refusing, he resorted to cheating.

Do I believe this story? Well . . . perhaps. Knowing what I know about doing any psychic function, Geller’s story is credible, at least in the basics. Psychic functions, like all other human talents, are not perfect all the time. No one—no one—can perform at their peak at any hour, day or night, or continuously, or on demand under stressful circumstances. That applies just as much to a top athlete, an exceptional musician, or a terrific student. Human beings simply aren’t perfect. And the public pressure to be perfect—particularly in any psychic field where people are simply waiting for you to fail—is overwhelming. A young man (he was only twenty-seven at the time of that infamous Tonight Show debacle) who had grown accustomed to acclaim might easily be tempted to mix stage magic with psychic skills. So . . . I think the verdict is “unproven” in this case, no matter whether you’re trying to prove Geller’s abilities or his lack of them.

It is also true that after that episode, a number of scientific studies conducted in Europe under extremely rigorous conditions validated his innate ability to manipulate matter with his mind. Here in the United States, however, his reputation seems forever tainted by that Unfortunate Incident.

A decade ago, however, I would have laughed to scorn anyone who defended the “fraud” Geller. Why my change of heart? Because I can spoon-bend. And I’ve taught close to a thousand other people to do it, too. I now understand that not only is spoon-bending possible, but also most anyone can learn to do it—and pretty easily, too. I’ve taught people to do it in small workshops, and in huge ones with hundreds of people. And in one memorable interview on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory, he asked if I was willing to try to teach people to spoonbend over the radio. I said I’d never tried that before, but I’d give it a shot. As it turned out, it was hugely successful, with one listener even calling in to say he had no cutlery handy, so he’d bent a large screwdriver instead!

A few years ago I was attending a workshop given by my good friend Robert Bruce. He is a renowned Australian mystic, whose work in energy and out-of-body experiences is some of the most effective in the world—and he’s an incredibly charming and funny man in person. At any event, on the second or third day of this five-day program, I asked him if he ever used his energy exercises to teach people to spoon-bend. He told me he’d never done it himself, so he didn’t teach it. Was I willing to show the group how to do that?

That night I went to the local KMart and bought enough good-quality cutlery for the smallish group to learn spoonbending. When the time came the next day, I handed out forks (I strongly prefer to teach people using forks rather than spoons for reasons I’ll explain later), and proceeded to use Robert’s energy exercises to get people to bend their forks. As I have come to expect, everyone in the class succeeded brilliantly, and within fifteen or twenty minutes, we had a whole menagerie of twisted cutlery sculptures.

The next morning, one of the women in the workshop came in and said she had to tell us what happened the night before. It turns out that this lady was dining with friends at quite a nice local restaurant. During the dinner, the talk turned to politics, a subject she was passionate about. She got a little, um, enthusiastic while talking with one of her friends. She was making her point rather forcefully and wagging her fork at the person she was speaking to, as you might wag your finger at someone. And

. . . the fork drooped and melted in her hands.

She was so embarrassed!

She hurriedly pulled the fork out of sight onto her lap and, hiding her actions with the tablecloth, tried to put it back into its original form. She never did get it quite right, of course . . . the specific curves and angles of cutlery are difficult to replicate by hand, particularly under cover of a tablecloth when you’re upset!

So the lesson from this is: If you must spoon-bend when you’re dining out, spoon-bend responsibly.5

The bottom-line conclusion I have drawn about spoon-bending is that it is one of the absolute easiest psychic skills to learn, at least at the elementary level I teach it. (Far from television worthy,

I might add!) And why do I prefer to teach people to bend forks rather than spoons? Because forks are a little bit harder. With a spoon, about the only thing a beginner can do is to twist the spoon at the neck, where the bowl meets the handle.6 That’s far too easy to do, even in fairly sturdy cutlery. But if you’ve ever taken a good-quality stainless steel fork and tried to bend just one tine with your fingertips, you know that it’s all but impossible to do. I ask people to try to bend their forks with their fingers before we start the spoon-bending process, just to make sure they’re convinced they can’t do it. Only then do I start guiding them in how to spoon-bend.

The basic process is one of running energy through the fork to soften it. I teach people some simple exercises on manipulating chi energy; then I get them to run that energy through the fork for a few minutes, concentrating on setting their intentions that the fork soften and bend.7 As they do that for a while—as little as a minute or two, or as much as five or six minutes, depending on how good they are at running energy and holding their concentration on what they’re doing—the fork really does soften. At that point, they can bend, twist, warp, and distort it however they like—including twisting individual tines. When they have it twisted it into the configuration they like, they put the fork down and don’t touch it for three or four minutes. When they pick it up after that break, the fork has “set” in that new shape and is as hard and stiff as it was before. If they want to change the shape again, they have to start the process from scratch.

It’s true that my success rate is not quite 100 percent. I find  that two kinds of people have trouble learning to spoon-bend. One set is people who are themselves quite low in chi, or life energy. This is usually people who are elderly or who have a serious illness. They barely have enough chi to keep themselves going, let alone some left over for softening stainless steel.

The other type is someone who is convinced that it cannot work. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve taught a lot of skeptics to spoon-bend, to their astonishment. The very first time I tried to teach spoon-bending, the group included a PhD physicist and a PhD anthropologist, each of whom individually assured me that spoon-bending was a total fake, all because of the flap over Uri Geller’s Tonight Show debacle. Yet, they were willing to humor me and give it a try. They took less than five minutes to become amazing successes. The physicist in particular had ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), so he had very poor strength in his hands, yet he succeeded at bending his fork.

I also remember one workshop in which there was a participant who was a professional magician. At the break before we started the spoon-bending exercise, he came up to me and assured me that it was all a fake8 and that he knew at least a dozen different ways to fake spoon-bending. I listened to him as he listed them all; then I assured him he wouldn’t have to use any of those fakes in the workshop—he could do it for real. He was skeptical but had an open mind and was willing to give it a try. Twenty minutes later, he came up to me, showing a wildly twisted fork and jubilantly said, “I did it! I don’t have to fake it anymore! I can really do it!”

The type of skeptical person who fails is the one who is so convinced that it can’t be done that she refuses to actually try— or subconsciously refuses to allow herself to try. I ran into one of those in a workshop with a number of scientists. While claiming to have an open mind, when it came to the spoon-bending part, one in particular simply could not get her fork to bend. I tried everything I could think of to help her, short of bending it myself: running extra energy through it with her, helping her focus and concentrate, and so on. Nothing worked. I could see she appeared to be trying to bend it but . . . nothing. Finally, I actually touched her fork . . . and it was so soft it was practically like squishy butter! Clearly, she’d made it so soft and malleable that a small child should have been able to bend it—yet when I again encouraged her to try to bend it, she still claimed she couldn’t, that it was too stiff. It seemed to me that her fingers were working against each other, something like doing an isometric exercise, where a lot of effort is expended yet nothing actually moves. My guess is that she has never been able to bend a spoon and likely never will.

As with any psychic (or physical) skill, you can convince yourself you are incapable of doing it. Yet, the truth is, as best I can tell from my totally unscientific observations of hundreds and hundreds of people, most people, possibly almost all people, can do spoon-bending. It’s easy to learn, easy to do, and when you do it yourself—as opposed to watching someone do it on the stage— you know for a fact that it’s not a fake.

And that’s exactly why I teach this particular little party trick so often in workshops. When I teach people about chi energy, it all sounds airy-fairy and nonsensical to anyone with a scientific mindset—it certainly did to me when I first heard about it. Even when I show people that they can literally feel the energy moving around their bodies, they often have the same reaction I initially had, that it’s all imagination and none of it is anything more than self-delusion. Yet, when I teach people to take that same “imaginary” energy, run it through a fork for a few minutes, and then feel solid stainless steel soften enough to become soft and malleable in their hands, suddenly what was nonsensical and imaginary becomes very, very real.

So perhaps that’s the real reason for the popularity of spoonbending. If you learn to do even one thing that conventional science deems wildly impossible, you begin to believe that other things are possible, too.

Spoon-bending is of course only one of many manifestations of psychokinesis. People have been known to have a wide variety of psychokinetic skills, including

• lighting light bulbs in their hands,

• sprouting seeds by holding them in the palm of the hand,

• moving objects without touching them,

• changing how dice roll or roulette wheels spin to force a specific result,9 and

• influencing random events (such as with a random number generator) to force a specific trend in results over many, many trials.

Again, these are only examples of skills that have been studied. While my experience has been primarily spoon-bending, I did once try sprouting seeds in the palm of my hand. It was, well, not exactly either a success or a failure. Here’s what happened.

I was preparing for a new workshop I planned, and I wondered if I could manage to teach people how to sprout seeds in their palms—in spite of the fact I’d never done it myself, nor even seen anyone else attempt to do it. Someone had mentioned to me that it was possible to do it, so I figured I’d give it a try. If I could manage the trick, I’d think about adding it to the workshop.

I got some vegetable seeds from my local nursery and gave them a little soak in water for about an hour. This particular type of seed was supposed to have a seven- to ten-day sprouting time once planted. After that brief soak, I sat down in my favorite meditation chair, put about three seeds in the palm of my hand, and started doing the same energy process that I use for spoonbending. (I have no idea if this is how people who know how to sprout seeds do this—it’s simply the process that I tried.) I was very careful to hold my hand steady by propping it on a pillow so I wouldn’t accidentally tip it. I cupped my other hand over the one holding the seeds and started running energy between my palms. After a few moments, I felt something very odd—a flash of heat and light combined with a shock, a bit like an electric shock. Startled, I uncovered my palm holding the seeds to see if they had sprouted. They hadn’t.

Instead, they’d disappeared.

So much for my seed-sprouting abilities. I never did add seedsprouting to my workshops. Probably that’s just as well, don’t you think?

A couple of points about this aborted seed-sprouting effort are important. One thing is that when you’re working with these energies, you sometimes get results that are not what you intend. Was I trying to make the seeds disappear? Not at all. It never occurred to me to even try to do that. Nonetheless, that’s what I accomplished. Particularly in a case like this where I didn’t have any idea what I was doing, never even having seen someone else do it, it was likely a little foolhardy on my part to attempt seedsprouting. Maybe someday I’ll get someone to show me how to do it correctly.

Another key point to remember is that the energies you work with when doing psychic work are significant. These are not toys or games. I cannot emphasize that enough. Working with life energy and altered states of consciousness is serious business. These energies are powerful and they can do things to you and to other people that are not so pleasant. Fooling around with psychic skills is highly risky unless you learn how to do it under the guidance of a competent, caring, and highly ethical instructor. It is especially risky when you lack the discipline and maturity to use these skills wisely instead of arrogantly. While not quite as dangerous as handing a four-year-old a loaded pistol to play with, the impact of careless, irresponsible “play” in these arenas can have serious consequences.

On second thought, maybe playing around irresponsibly with psychic skills is more dangerous than handing a four-year old a loaded pistol.10

If psychokinesis is impossible, what are we to make of other reports by researchers in which some amazing effects are noted? For example, Dong Shen reports on a Chinese experiment in which solid matter (a piece of paper) apparently passed through other solid matter (a capped plastic canister)—and did so instantaneously— or at least so quickly that no one observing the scene saw it happen.

Shen described a program in which Chinese volunteers are trained to see a “third eye” screen behind their foreheads by entering a trained state of “second consciousness.” When in this state, they can visualize an object being other than where it is— and the object relocates to a new location. Here’s how it works.

A capped black plastic canister, such as that holding 35mm film, is used to hold a piece of paper. The paper, prepared in secret, has something written on it, unknown to everyone except the preparer. The preparer also folds it in a personally unique way and places it in the plastic canister where the cap seals the paper inside. An independent observer monitors the preparation of the paper and the canister but cannot see what is written on the paper.

In the experiment Shen witnessed, the main participant was a seventeen-year-old with only a middle-school education but who had received approximately six months of training in accessing this second consciousness state. Once the canister was ready, the participant sat in a chair one meter (a little over three feet) away from a table. The canister was placed on the table. The two researchers plus five observing guests sat also between one and three meters (between three and ten feet) away from the table. No words were spoken during the experiment.

For about forty minutes, the participant focused his attention on the plastic canister. Neither he nor anyone else moved from their chairs. No one was close enough to the container to reach it. Other than staring at the container and occasionally looking up at the ceiling, the participant did not move.

After forty minutes, the participant announced that the paper was no longer in the container. It instead had moved about six meters away (nearly twenty feet) to the far wall of the room. The participant also announced that what was written on it was “830,” in blue ink.

An observer checked that location and retrieved the paper. The person who prepared the paper verified his own handwriting, the content of the message, and that the paper was still folded in the idiosyncratic way he had folded it at the beginning of the experiment.

There it was, just as the participant had announced: 8-3-0, in blue ink.

There are many curious features about this experiment. First, the participant had no demonstrable psychic skills until undergoing the Chinese training program. Thus, whatever skills he possessed at the time of the experiment were learned skills. Second, although there were at least seven witnesses, all watching attentively, no one saw the paper move out of the cylinder and across the room. Furthermore, the paper, even folded as it was, was far too small and light to be able to be thrown for that distance (nearly twenty feet).

Shen describes the subject’s efforts:

During the experiment he concentrated on the black cartridge container and got it deep in his consciousness while entering into the SCS [second consciousness state]. Then an image of the container appeared on the third-eye screen located in front of his forehead. He saw the image of the paper in the same way. At the very beginning, the paper image was not stable and not clear. After he focused on the image for a while, it became stable and clear on the screen. The number on the paper could then be easily read, that is 830 written in blue, even though the paper was folded inside the capped container. When the image of the paper was clear on the screen, he started to use his mind to move the paper out of the container. At a certain point he “saw” in his mind that the container was empty and saw in the room that the paper was on the floor near the wall.12

It’s easy to dismiss reports like this. They’re clearly idiosyncratic to this subject. The researchers make no claims that everyone can achieve effects like this. And yet, cultural biases should not lead us to ignore reputable reports, even if they’re not conducted in western European or American institutions. The Shen report discusses the prime candidates for training in psychic skills as being children between the ages of eight and twelve (prepubescent) or young adults between fifteen and twenty-two years who have limited education—in other words, people who don’t know that they’re doing something that isn’t supposed to be possible.

Is it the case that we educate our children out of a whole range of abilities by informing them that they can’t do them? Does the Western mindset force psychic phenomena underground?

What Is a Meta-Analysis?

Often, a single study doesn’t generate convincing results, particularly

when the size of the study is small. Generally, the most trusted form of

evidence for or against an effect is not a single study but an analysis of

all studies that have been done on that effect. Doing a meta-analysis

is tricky, however, because studies are typically done by different

researchers, using different protocols, with different degrees of care

in study design.

The primary reasons researchers do meta-analyses are because

they are more general than any one specific study. In addition, metastudies

can determine if any type of publication bias is occurring.

They also tend to demonstrate if an effect is specific to one particular

researcher or one specific study protocol or if it extends to

multiple researchers and protocols. This process also increases the

total number of participants or trials—and in statistics, more data

means more significant data. If you flip a coin five times, it’s not all

that unusual to get five heads in a row—it happens about 3 percent

of the time. But if you flip a coin fifty times, the odds of getting

fifty consecutive heads (or fifty consecutive tails) are about 1 in 1

quadrillion (specifically, 1 chance out of 1,125,899,906,842,620). In

other words, if you flipped fifty coins every second, it would take you

well over thirty-five million years before you flipped fifty consecutive

heads or fifty consecutive tails.

There are many ways that meta-analyses can go wrong. First, the

analysis is only valid if it includes all studies published on a particular

subject (or at least all studies in which necessary analysis information

is included in the study report). How individual studies are encoded

and selected for inclusion in a meta-analysis is a subjective process. A

meta-analysis can be considered trustworthy only if it explicitly defines

the criteria for selection and the methodology of encoding the studies in

advance and explicates those criteria and methodologies in its report.

All this is well and good, but what is the scientific evidence that these are not just amusing and interesting anecdotes? Does science in any way support the reality of these experiences?

As it happens, it does.