Science and psychics

Saint Thomas Aquinas is often thought of more as a mystic than a saint. He struggled with and wrote about many facets of life and afterlife. In part of his writing, and I am paraphrasing as best I can, he says that science presents itself as based on an immutable set of universal, eternal laws . . . laws that always have been and always will be, such as gravity, repulsion, attraction, inertia, atoms, photons, neuron, electrons, etc. However, only within the human mind can we appreciate these eternal laws, and so that, in itself, makes our minds eternal.

One of the earliest scientific descriptions of psychics that I am aware of took place in Great Britain back in 1696, in the writings of John Aubrey called Miscellanies. Aubrey was describing the phenomenon of Second Sight or the telling of future events, principally taking place in Scotland.

In 1763, Rev. John Fraser wrote about the same subject in Deuterosophia (Second Knowledge) or a Brief Discourse Concerning Second Sight. Many other Scots writers covered this subject and in the 1880s the London-based Society for Psychical Research began sending out questionnaires and making house calls to amass all the information they could on this phenomenon. Among their members was the current Prime Minister of England and the future Prime Minister. There were many scientists and members of royalty and also authors Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and a ton of other great books) and Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).

The conclusion of this group, lacking any real ways to measure scientifically, was that second sight was commonly believed in nearly every household throughout the Highlands of Scotland, and many stories were recorded of its accuracy.

More recently, in the late 1900s and early 2000s, a group from the University of Arizona carried out extensive, rigid scientific studies using the popular psychic John Edward, three additional nationally known psychics, and a local psychic. The results showed success in some cases of up to 90%, while a control group of 65 non-psychics had a typical success rate of only about 20%.

The records of this scientific study can be found in the book The Afterlife Experiments, by Gary Schwartz.

Even more recently a documentary appeared on the History Channel speaking of the human soul. One Medical Doctor described how she, herself, had gone out of her body as she watched herself swim in ice cold water to the shoreline after a small plane she was in crashed through the ice of a small lake. A rescue plane saved her and she has been working with those who have experience "near-death" ever since.

Another anesthesiologist, with 35 years experience in causing people to lose consciousness, is convince that the soul or conscious is separate from the brain or body, and that it goes off somewhere while subjects are under anesthesia. There is no scientific explanation for how anesthesia works, but it obviously does, and has for over a hundred years.

There are millions of people who have now claimed to have experienced the near-death phenomenon. Millions more have had positive experiences with psychics. Dozens of police cases, if not hundreds, have been aided by psychics.

There have been many recent studies of the brain using MRI machines that show the same transmitters firing for thoughts of the same objects. This has been reported on 60 Minutes by Leslie Stahl. Their use has also proven that many in comas still have total consciousness, just not the ability to relay their thoughts to the outside world. The MRI is proving a lot of what was once thought impossible or mystical.

As Schwartz pointed out in his book, photons from stars which died billions of years ago still float through our solar system and can be measured. Why not photons or some energy source from our own brains living on forever, too?

The scientific studies of recent years, the anecdotal evidence from centuries of practice, and my own experiences, numbering in the hundreds, leave no doubt in my mind about the reality of the soul and its ability to communicate, while alive, or in the afterlife.

Scientists have long said we use only 10% of our brain.

What if we use only 10% of our soul?