So one day I decided I would get on the plane and carry nothing at all. Nothing to entertain me, nothing to save me from boredom. I stepped on the plane in a state of panic—none of my familiar stuff! What was I going to do?
It turned out I had a fine time. I read the magazines that were on the plane. I talked to people. I stared out the window. I thought about things.
It turned out I didn’t need any of that stuff I thought I needed. In fact, I felt a lot more alive without it.
One of the most difficult features of direct experience is that it is unfiltered by any theories and expectations. It’s hard to observe without imposing a theory to explain what we’re seeing, but the trouble with theories, as Einstein said, is that they explain not only what is observed, but what can be observed. We start to build expectations based on our theories. And often those expectations get in the way.
Claridge’s Hotel in London is famous for catering to the idiosyncrasies of its guests. If you like mineral water at your bedside every night, the staff of Claridge’s will notice this, and each night you’ll find the bottle of mineral water by your bed. If you like it half empty, you will find it half empty. And since the staff is English, no eccentricity is too bizarre to indulge.
I lived at Claridge’s for several weeks in 1978, rewriting a screenplay. I was typing and cutting and pasting the pages together. But I couldn’t get an ordinary tape dispenser; I just had a plain roll of Scotch tape and a pair of scissors. Of course, every time I cut a piece of tape, the edge would fall back onto the roll, and I’d have a terrible time prying it free with my fingernails to cut another piece. Eventually I hit on the expedient of cutting long strips of tape, and running them lightly down the knobs of my desk drawers on both sides of the desk. This allowed me simply to cut between the knobs to get a piece of tape. I followed this procedure of taping the drawers for several weeks.
A year later I returned to Claridge’s and checked into a room. It was a nice room, but it had a peculiarity: someone had stretched rows of Scotch tape down all the drawers of the desk in the corner.
They’d remembered! I was flattered, but I tried to imagine what the staff must have thought. Who knows why this guy likes it? But he always tapes the desk drawers shut. So make sure they’re taped shut on arrival, so Mr. Crichton will be comfortable.
That’s the difficulty with making theories. The original observation wasn’t wrong—but the conclusion drawn was wrong.
It takes an enormous effort to avoid all theories and just see—just experience directly. But, for a time, subjective experience might benefit from a little freedom before we try to slap it into a conceptual straitjacket.
Sometimes it’s better just to sit and watch.
It’s surprising what you can learn that way.
I believe the experiences reported in this book are reproducible by anyone who wishes to try.
I went to Africa. You can go to Africa. You may have trouble arranging the time or the money, but everybody has trouble arranging something. I believe you can travel anywhere if you want to badly enough.
And I believe exactly the same thing is true of inner travel. You don’t have to take my word about chakras or healing energy or auras. You can find out about them yourself if you want to. Don’t take my word for it. Be as skeptical as you like.
Find out for yourself.
I have many friends from scientific backgrounds who accept me with amused toleration. They like me despite my views. But I have learned not to debate with them any more. Unless you are willing to experience these things yourself, even so mundane a phenomenon as meditation sounds fanciful and absurd. From my point of view, these scientists are exactly like the New Guinea tribesmen who refuse to believe the metal birds in the sky contain people. How can you argue with them? Unless they’re willing to go to the airport and see for themselves, no discussion is really possible.
And, of course, if they do go to the airport, no discussion is necessary.
So, in the end, find out for yourself.
There are plenty of people around who can assist you in these inner explorations. Inner travel agents, you might consider them. Many offer organized tours lasting a day, a weekend, or two weeks. Like all travel agents, some of these people are flashy and spectacular, while others are quiet; some attract celebrities and media stars, others attract health professionals, others, people with illnesses. Some are outright frauds who don’t deliver what they promise. Some are flaky and unpredictable. Some are demanding and cultish, others are open and free. Some are intellectual, some are emotional, some are rational, some are religious.
There are a lot of trips out there. It’s even possible to become a conference groupie, going from one seminar to another and being a Beautiful Evolved Human Being until you start making the people around you throw up.
You may wonder how to find a person, group, or conference that’s right for you. If you look around, you’ll find something. And if what you find is not right, keep looking until you get what you want. I won’t recommend any particular person or thing to do. But I will tell you my inner travel prejudices:
1. Be cautious around anyone who even implies he has the answer. The real gunslingers always tried to avoid pulling their guns. Same with the real gurus. Anyway, nobody has the answer for you except you.
2. Be cautious around anyone who creates proselytizing followers. In most cases, personal development is only temporarily associated with any particular group.
3. Be cautious around anyone who seems interested in your money.
4. Expect results. Nobody gets enlightened overnight, but if you don’t get results, change your methods. Don’t be afraid to experiment—nobody has the answer for you except you.
5. Trust your instincts. If it feels good, don’t let others discourage you. If you smell a rat, bail out.
I’ve come to take a rather simple-minded view of all this. There’s a natural human resistance to change. We all fall into patterns and habits that eventually constrict our lives, but which we have difficulty breaking anyway. Rilke described the problem in this simple way:
Whoever you are: some evening take a step out of your house, which you know so well. Enormous space is near.…
Postscript:
Skeptics at Cal Tech
In the spring of 1987 I met Paul MacCready, the witty and charming aeronautical engineer who in 1977 made the “Gossamer Condor,” and thus achieved one of man’s oldest dreams: human-powered flight. MacCready went on to make the “Gossamer Albatross,” the first human-powered airplane to cross the English Channel; he also made a solar-powered airplane.
During our conversation, Paul began to talk disparagingly about psychics, people who claimed they could see auras. MacCready’s view was that these people were at best deluded, and at worst fraudulent.
I disagreed, and in the ensuing discussion Paul told me that he was an active member of the Pasadena chapter of CSICOP.
The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal was founded in 1976 by a group of eminent philosophers, psychologists, scientists, and magicians. In its quarterly journal, The Skeptical Inquirer, CSICOP had had great success in debunking the claims of “paranormal” phenomena. There were CSICOP chapters all around the country, and the Pasadena chapter, which included many members of the Cal Tech faculty, was especially active. MacCready thought I should address this group.
I agreed at once. I thought it would be an interesting experience, both for me and for the audience. Paul said he would arrange an invitation for me. I went off to prepare my talk.
Because I knew very little of the work of CSICOP, I first read a selection of essays from The Skeptical Inquirer published in a volume called Science Confronts the Paranormal.1 Many of the essays held no interest for me at all; they debunked phenomena such as biorhythms, palmistry, astrology, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle, which I did not believe in anyway. Other essays, such as a critique of the Loch Ness monster searches,2 seemed uninteresting b
ecause there were no philosophical or intellectual implications.
But in several essays I was disturbed by the intemperate tone of many writers I admired; there was a tendency to attribute the basest motives to their opponents. In fact, there seemed to be a good deal of personal animosity and name-calling on all sides. For example, discussing the supposed similarities between physics and Eastern mysticism, as outlined by writers such as Fritjof Capra, Isaac Asimov observed:
… If intuition is as important to the world as reason, and if the Eastern sages are as knowledgeable about the Universe as physicists are, then why not take matters in reverse? Why not use the wisdom of the East as a key to some of the unanswered questions in physics? For instance: what is the basic component making up subatomic particles that physicists call a quark?.…
And Asimov concluded:
What nonsense all this supposed intuitional truth is, and how comic is the sight of the genuflections made to it by rational minds who lost their nerve.
No, it isn’t really comic; it’s tragic. There has been at least one other such occasion in history, when Greek secular and rational thought bowed to the mystical aspects of Christianity, and what followed was a Dark Age.
We can’t afford another.3
Now, these were heated words, and, reading them, I began to sense there was more at stake for CSICOP than the dispassionate assessment of questionable data. Asimov himself had implicitly drawn the comparison between science and religion as competing ways of viewing the world. That, of course, opened the door to the possibility that science was a religion—a heretical position few scientists would accept. But, in reviewing the essays of CSICOP, I began to see science as battling for supremacy against perceived threats from other modes of perception.
If I was going to talk effectively to the Pasadena chapter of CSICOP, I was going to have my work cut out for me.
I began by saying that I didn’t expect to change anybody’s point of view by what I was going to say. It wasn’t my intention to convince anybody of anything, that night in Pasadena.
I believed there was validity to certain psychic phenomena, and I knew most of my audience did not. Rather than dispute this in detail, I suggested we could all agree that history would eventually prove that either I was mistaken in my views, or they were mistaken in theirs. We could all confidently look forward to the eventual resolution of this issue.
Meanwhile, I wanted to tell this group some of the experiences that had led me to modify my own views, and to try and explain how things looked to me now. Because, I suggested, the real issue as I saw it went far beyond the relatively narrow question of “paranormal” phenomena. It went to the basic intellectual posture of science in the latter twentieth century.
I then said, Has anyone in this room had their tonsils and adenoids removed? Has anyone had a radical mastectomy for breast cancer? Has anyone been treated in an intensive care unit? Has anyone had coronary bypass surgery? Of course, many people had.
I said, Then you’re all knowledgeable about superstitions, because all these procedures are examples of superstitious behavior. They are procedures carried out without scientific evidence that they produce any benefit. This society spends billions of dollars a year on superstitious medicine, and that is a problem—and an expense—far more important than astrology columns in daily newspapers, which are so vigorously attacked by the brainpower of CSICOP.
And I added, Let’s not be too quick to deny the power of superstition in our own lives. Which of us, having suffered a heart attack, would refuse to be treated in an intensive-care unit just because such units are of unproven value? We’d all take the ICU. We all do.
I then went on to mention the many cases of fraud in research science. Isaac Newton may have fudged his data;4 certainly Gregor Mendel, father of Mendelian inheritance, did.5 The Italiano mathematician Lazzarini faked an experiment to determine the value of pi, and his result went unquestioned for more than half a century.6 British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt invented not only his data, but research assistants to gather it.7 In more recent years, there were cases of fraud involving William T. Summerlin of Sloan-Kettering, Dr. John Long of the Harvard Medical School, and Dr. John Darsee of the Harvard Medical School. Other cases involved a research team at the Dana Farer Cancer Institute, Dr. Robert Slutsky of the UCSD Medical School, Dr. Jeffrey Borer of Cornell University, Stephen Breuning of the University of Pittsburgh. Though most cases had come from medicine and biology, there were examples in other fields as well; three papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society were recently retracted, in a case still under investigation. The extent of fraud was unknown, but I reminded the group that fraud undeniably exists in science. Thus the fact that there are some fraudulent practitioners in a field cannot be an argument to dismiss that whole field of inquiry.
Next I reminded them that science as a field does not progress in a uniquely rational manner different from other fields of human endeavor, such as business or commerce. Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in physics, said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
I reminded them of the tendency of scientists in every age to think that they finally know it all. For example, the French anatomist Baron Georges Cuvier, one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of his day, announced in 1812 that “there is little hope of discovering new species of large quadrupeds.” Unfortunately for Cuvier, this statement preceded the discovery of the Kodiak bear, the mountain gorilla, the okapi, the white-backed tapir, the Komodo dragon, Grant’s gazelle, Grevy’s zebra, the pygmy hippopotamus, and the giant panda, to name just a few large quadrupeds. Similar claims of nearly complete knowledge have been made by physicists in almost every generation; such claims have been invariably proven wrong.
I reminded them of the past failures of science to accept legitimate discoveries at the time they were made. When J. J. Thomson measured the mass and charge of the electron in 1899, many of his colleagues suspected him of fraud—or ineptitude, since he was famously clumsy around any experimental apparatus.8 When Carl Anderson of Cal Tech discovered the positron in 1932, both Bohr and Rutherford dismissed the new finding “out of hand.”9 And the theory of continental drift, proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1922, should have been obvious to anyone who looked at a map of the world and saw how the continents could be fitted together, yet it took forty years for geologists to overcome the opposition of such eminent men as Harold Jeffreys and Maurice Ewing to this theory.
I reminded them that the rate of progress in science was highly variable. Newton’s theory of gravitation stood unchallenged for more than two hundred years before the precession of the planet Mercury was found to disprove it.10 And, conversely, hypnotism was a discredited practice for more than two hundred years, ever since a blue-ribbon panel of scientists in Paris, including Benjamin Franklin and Lavoisier, had pronounced mesmerism without merit; yet today hypnosis is unquestionably genuine and widely practiced. Thus the rate of progress within a field is no indicator of the validity of the field.
Next I pointed out the trends and fads of science, which affected scientists at every level. It was perfectly acceptable for dozens of the world’s most distinguished scientists to propose that our society engage in a costly search for extraterrestrial life,11 despite the fact that the study of extraterrestrial life is, in the words of the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson, “a study without a subject.”12 A belief in extraterrestrial life is a speculation indistinguishable from pure faith. Few if any of those great scientists would sign their names to a proposed study of psychic phenomena, because the paranormal is not fashionable in the way extraterrestrials are. Yet there is arguably more evidence for psychic phenomena than there is for extraterrestrials.
So I was saying that, from where I stood, the enterprise of science did not look so different from other human enterprises. T
here was institutionalized superstition; there was fraud; there were missteps and errors; there was conservatism and plain pigheadedness; and there were fashionable trends. Observed Marcello Truzzi, a former editor of the CSICOP journal, “Scientists are not the paragons of rationality, objectivity, open-mindedness and humility that many of them might like others to believe.”13
I was reminding the audience of this, not to discredit science, but to place the workings of science in a more realistic perspective with regard to unaccepted phenomena.
Next I said I wanted to address one of the most difficult stumbling blocks in the scientific approach to disputed phenomena. In many cases, such as so-called psychic activity, researchers came up against the argument by so-called practitioners that they couldn’t reliably produce results on demand; that they couldn’t work in a laboratory setting; that they were inhibited by the frowning skeptics around them; and so on. It seemed that the practitioners were defining a state-dependent phenomenon. Practitioners had to be “in the mood,” and the mood was easily shaken. Traditionally, scientists found this position hard to accept. Mystical states, meditative states, trance states, were all hard for scientists to accept.
Yet everyone has firsthand knowledge of activities for which you must be “in the mood”: for example, sexual intercourse, requiring lubrication in the female, erection in the male. Creative work is another state-dependent activity that cannot be reliably performed on demand, as the vast literature devoted to “courting the muse” testifies.
We know from subjective reports and from our own experience that these state-dependent phenomena are accompanied by a change in consciousness. There may be a perceived or a real change in energy and concentration; there may be a change in perception of time, and so on. Such changes vary from day to day, from person to person, and from experience to experience within the same person. The highly variable nature of the experiences, and the subjectivity of the experience, make state-dependent phenomena a difficult challenge to scientific investigation.