Proof of Spiritual Phenomena

This engaging book by a cognitive neuroscientist tells the story of the author’s ‘flip’ from diehard materialist to open-minded seeker who comes to adopt a new spiritual framework in her understanding of life and the nature of consciousness. It is a journey that will be familiar to many readers, especially the outcome in terms of a meaningful outlook – and in spite of powerful psychological and structural resistance. This transformation resulted from a combination of experiences – including her mother’s coffee ground divinations and interactions with mediums and intuitives – with a wide range of reading on quantum physics, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and research into past lives, psi and significant government programmes on ESP. All this is annotated with extensive references.

The book begins with a public funeral for the ‘old me’ – ‘an aggressively anti-religious, anti-spiritual, strictly scientific materialist and agnostic neuroscientist’. As readers will know, this is the mainstream view into which students are initiated. This book is part of a movement also represented by our recent publication Spiritual Awakenings to encourage scientists and academics to close the gap between the personal and professional, the private and public – and to embrace new ways of thinking consistent with extensive scientific research.

The chapter on the untrustworthy brain and the religion of science highlights filtering processes and confirmation bias based on past experiences, expectations and beliefs, not to mention social pressure to conform. Significantly, it is experience that begins to open the author up with uncannily accurate readings that initiate a deeper search and a dark night in emerging from the bleak materialist philosophy. Brian Weiss’s work on past lives plays an important role in the emergence of her new spiritual framework that sees life in terms of lessons and challenges; however, all the time her old self is ready to dismiss this as unproven nonsense. Gradually, however, the author comes to realise the extent of research into unexplained phenomena, the sound methodologies employed, and the qualifications of the researchers, who cannot simply be brushed aside. She begins to ask what if the universe is not random and meaningless, what if we did have reincarnating souls?

Her quest is for a meaningful and constructive relationship between science and spirituality, which is also the purpose of the Network and the Galileo Commission. On the way, she realises the important difference between the scientific method as such and closed-minded adherence to the philosophy of scientific materialism. Crucially, this model fails to explain the wide range of phenomena and human experiences examined in this book. Hence her conclusion that ‘a model simply cannot be correct when ignoring so many classes of data. Ignoring one line of outlying evidence is understandable, but overlooking many lines of evidence is just reckless disregard, and maybe even intentional ignorance. There are too many converging lines of evidence to think that all these findings are simply unimportant anomalies.’ (p. 170) This is the conclusion that many readers will already have reached for similar reasons: ‘our scientific models of reality need an update.’

More specifically, the author considers Joachim Keppler’s model of cosmopsychism as a plausible theoretical framework whereby the zero-point field is the field of consciousness containing both physical and phenomenological aspects with which the brain is connected. She uses this model as a framework to consider such phenomena as past life regression hypnosis, meditative states and psychedelics, savants, terminal lucidity and NDEs, souls, energy healing, divination techniques and Universal Spirit - while raising further questions for consideration. It is clear that some such model is required and, to quote Jeff Kripal, ‘to dismiss is to miss’. Fundamental changes in worldview are resisted by the old self and conservative institutions and identities. A further consideration is lack of funding and the fact that research agendas are shaped by the government and wealthy foundations often in their own interests.

The title of the book reflects two senses of proof: scientific and personal, experimental and experiential – both of which are covered here, leading the author to the conclusion that ‘the Universe has meaning and there exists a spiritual and mystical dimension to life.’ All this calls for a revision of metaphysical assumptions underpinning science (p. 183) and a recovery of the Anima Mundi worldview axed by Descartes and the mechanistic metaphor; also for a balance between right and left hemispheric thinking – here the work of Jill Bolte Taylor is cited, but not that of Iain McGilchrist, whose approach could have reinforced the argument. Existentially, and from the angle of mental health, the materialist view is proving toxic, and there is an urgent need for more spiritual scientists like the author who realise the implications of living in a field of interconnected consciousness that entails a participatory and co-creative Universe. This is a significant contribution to opening up an informed spiritual worldview that takes into account all the relevant evidence.