@mattbrowne I agree.
@LostInParadise What is it exactly that you object to here, the New Age use of science as metaphor, or as a jumping off point for spiritual speculation, or the New Age yearning for spiritual connectedness?
Homeopathic medicine dates back to 1796, which doesn’t seem all that new to me. It simply looks like bad science.
Similarly, with respect to parapsychology, it is difficult to know what kind of claims are being made. I once chatted with a fellow who was a Christian missionary in Africa, and he was telling me about his experiences with an animist tribe he was living with. He said that they were as remote and cut off from the rest of humanity as it is possible to be, but yet he said they would occasionally have dreams and visions about things happening in the rest of the world that they could not possibly know about—things like disasters and developments that were too specific for them to concoct by sheer chance.
We are, of course, expected to reject such accounts out of hand, particularly from such a questionable observer. But, then, something like that once happened to me. A few years back my mother, whom I hadn’t communicated with for several months, called me out of the blue, saying that she just had a bad feeling about me and thought she had better call. As it turns out she couldn’t have been more right. I had just gotten out of jail not more than 15 minutes before, where I had languishing for the previous two weeks on a fairly serious drug charge. It was also after midnight, at a time she almost never calls.
Was it some kind of telepathic spooky action at a distance? Probably not, it might be just a more sensitive manifestation of the way we are normally able to mirror one another’s interior states. Perhaps I was overdue on whatever unconscious interval governs our communication. One thing I’ve learned from studying Sync is that there is hidden order in time-ordered phenomena. There are only six degrees of freedom between most people on earth. Perhaps there is a lot more coordination going on outside of our awareness.
I had some strange experiences when I was in prison in this regard. I was in this one dorm with about 300 other people where there were, at most, only two degrees of separation between people in this system. It was as if the collectivity had a mind of it’s own. It had a kind of calming murmur to it. But if you had a question about some little fact you wanted to know, they had an uncanny way of turning up a few minutes later. Someone would know someone who had a book and they would look it up. And it was almost automatic. Somebody asked me if I still had a magazine they had loaned me two weeks prior. I didn’t but I mentioned to someone at random that someone had asked me for it and within 10 minutes, the magazine was on his pillow.
It wasn’t a huge coincidence, but I mentioned it to some friends in passing and they started their own queries. I mentioned to one of them that I had gotten separated from one of my books because you are only allowed to bring so many in, and I had given my extra book to someone who got sent to a disciplinary wing. So the book could be anywhere in the 4,300-man prison. “Really?” said the person I was telling this to, “that wouldn’t be ‘The Elegant Universe’ by Brian Green, would it?” “Well, yes it would.” “No shit, I have that in my locker.” And so I was reunited with my book by what would seem like an improbable string of circumstances.
When you think about it, it wasn’t so improbable after all. The dorm I mentioned was a kind of sifting and sorting place where most mainliners spent some time before going home or moving on to other quarters. So, any free-floating books in the prison eventually make their way there. Then it isn’t all that far-fetched for the two white nerds to find each other in such a tightly-coupled social system. Race narrowed our searching down by about half, and anyone reading something challenging tends to stand out. He noticed me reading something else intellectually challenging and so struck up a conversation. It was only later that I got around to mentioning my lost book.
The Law of Attraction may work in a similar way. We are constantly putting out signals advertising who we are and what we are looking for. Repeating certain affirmations to oneself, like “I want to be rich.” (Or “I’m looking for a book.”) May very well influence the probabilities that you will encounter the people and resources you are looking for. Perhaps it is too strong to call it a “law” but there may be something to clarifying and broadcasting one’s intentions into a social network that influences what you get back.
Interestingly, one of the things that came up in that dorm experience was Masaru-Emoto’s water crystal experiments. Certainly, if there is any “mind over matter” influence, the place to look for it would be at the phase transition point where water converts to ice. Any slight influence at the crystal’s edge will be amplified as the crystal grows. Its a shame that nobody has done the rigorously controlled double blind studies necessary to rule out things like vibrations from the person’s voice or contact with the table on which the experiment is being conducted.
Supposedly, if you repeat the mantra “Love and gratitude” you get nicer looking crystals. It may well be that what the mantra actually does is put you in an agreeable frame of mind that influences the social network that surrounds the experiment so that people are simply more willing to agree that the crystals are more “beautiful.” I can tell you for sure that walking around prison radiating “love and gratitude” does produce interesting effects on people (calming to some and hostility-eliciting to others). This sort of thing, I think, warrants more systematic observation.
There might even be something to leaning a certain way when you pick up something you like. It may be something like the universal micro-momentary facial movements that are associated with various emotions. These have recently been popularized through the TV show “Lie to Me.” It may very well be that we are much more networked and tightly coupled as a species than we think. We find things like fractal distributions in the price of cotton spanning decades. We find that when groups of people are asked to estimate the number of beans in a jar (or the weight of a steer) the average of those estimates is almost invariably closer to the true value than any single estimate. There are all sorts of collective phenomena that haven’t been systematically investigated that may yet make sense of some of this “nonsense.”
On the other hand, I’ve met people who, when presented with alternative explanations, tend to reflexively pick the most spooky, magical and unlikely of explanations.
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