by J H Brennan
Subjects usually figured out what was happening fairly quickly and trained themselves to “will” the pictures onto the screen without touching the button at all. It soon became clear that subjective mental state was everything. For the trick to work, they had to duplicate exactly their mind-set in pressing the button. If their attention wandered or their minds locked themselves up by thinking of the need to concentrate, the readiness wave failed to rise and no picture was delivered. But once they got the knack, they could actually combine auto-start with auto-stop. They could will pictures onto the screen directly, then dismiss them with the relevant mind-set when finished.
Despite superficial appearances, none of this was the mind acting directly on matter since the switch was triggered by a perfectly ordinary electrical surge originating in the subject’s brain. But once the subjects learned they could produce the pictures without pressing the button, their minds were directly influencing matter—the physical matter of their own brains. A decision of the mind, applied in a particular way, was all it took to change the electrical potential of the frontal cortex. There was no physical aspect to the cause: as the subjects got into their stride, the button was neither pressed nor attempted to be pressed.
A 20-microvolt surge is a small thing, but its implications here are enormous, for it settles once and for all the controversy about the independent reality of the mind. Grey Walter’s findings have never been challenged, merely ignored, yet they show clearly that the prevailing scientific paradigm is just plain wrong. The mind is not simply the way we experience the electrical activity of the brain. It is a thing in its own right, separate and distinct from the body. This single fact leaves open the prospect of mind at large. It also lays down a scientific foundation for the possibility of postmortem survival and the reality of spirits.
If, as Grey Walter demonstrated, mind is a thing in itself, then it becomes reasonable to ask what it is made from and where it is located. Surprisingly, modern physics seems to provide answers to both these questions.
Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna in 1900. At the age of twenty, he produced a two-hundred-page encyclopedia article on Einstein’s theory of relativity. Five years later, he had completed the work on electrons that was to win him a Nobel Prize. In 1930, he predicted the existence of a very peculiar subatomic particle called the neutrino. It was the most elusive of particles, having virtually no characteristics. It had neither mass, electric charge, nor magnetic field. It was not subject to gravity, nor influenced by electrical or magnetic fields, and it could pass through any solid body, even a planet, as if it were empty space. The only thing that could stop it was a head-on collision with another neutrino, and the chances against that happening were estimated at ten billion to one. Long though these odds might be, it seems there were enough neutrinos to make sure collisions did occur. In 1956, scientists F. Reines and C. Cowan eventually detected one at America’s Atomic Energy Commission nuclear reactor on the Savannah River. But if neutrinos existed, they did not exist in the way many other particles exist. They resembled nothing more closely than the building blocks of ghosts. This resemblance was not lost on scientists, who began to speculate about the possibility of other particles that, if they did not actually define ghosts, might at least provide a more respectable “missing link” between matter and mind.
It was the eminent astronomer V. A. Firsoff who first suggested (in 1967) that mind was a “universal entity or interaction” of the same order as electricity or gravitation. Firsoff went on to speculate that “mind-stuff” could be equated with other structures of the physical world. As Pauli had done more than thirty years earlier, Firsoff predicted the existence of a new particle, the mindon, as the elementary aspect of “mind-stuff.” Mindon properties would be very similar to those of the already-confirmed neutrino. To an entity composed of mindons, the physical universe would scarcely exist. At best it would be seen as thin patches of mist. Even massive bodies like suns would be barely visible, detectable only by their neutrino emissions. According to Firsoff, the brain of such an entity might deduce our existence but would have trouble confirming it with instruments that themselves were composed of neutrino/mindon particles. At least, the mindon entity would have problems confirming the existence of our physical bodies. The entity would be aware of the human psyche (itself composed of mindons, according to Firsoff’s own theory) and might, if it managed to communicate, accept the psyche’s perception of itself as having a physical body. At this level, it becomes possible to envisage the growth of a belief structure in which the “immaterial” bodies of humanity were one of the mysteries of existence.
Firsoff has pointed out that our physical universe is no “truer” than that of the neutrino, only rather more familiar. We now know that neutrinos exist, but exist in a different kind of space and are governed by different laws. Einstein’s calculations show that the speed of light is an absolute in the physical universe. This is normally taken to mean that it is simply impossible for anything to travel faster. But what Einstein actually found was that nothing could be accelerated to a speed faster than that of light. The difference is subtle but real. It leaves room for naturally occurring particles that come into existence already traveling faster than light. For such particles, the speed of light is a barrier downward, not upward—they can never slow below 186,000 miles per second. Firsoff suggested that since neutrinos were not subject to electromagnetic or gravitational fields, they might not be bound by speed limits either. They might, in fact, have their own—different—time. Physicists have since gone on to speculate about the existence of another particle, the tachyon, which exceeds the speed of light and moves backward in time as a result.
Mental entities like Jung’s archetypes or even the essence of identity have no definite location in physical space. One may imagine their essential self to be located just behind their eyes, but clearly this does not hold true for the self experienced in dreams or altered states of consciousness. It does not even hold true for certain racial groupings, notably the Celts, who had a tendency to experience themselves as living behind their navels. Although people are aware of an inner self, there is no instrument on Earth that can locate it directly. To Firsoff, this suggested that mindons inhabited a genuine mental “space” governed by different laws from those of the physical universe—in short, an alternate reality. Alternate realities used to be the stuff of science fiction, but that was before the emergence of quantum mechanics.
The foundation of quantum mechanics was laid down in 1900 by the German physicist Max Planck, who postulated that energy is composed of tiny, separate units he called quanta. Albert Einstein built on this insight and won a Nobel Prize for his work. In 1913, a Danish physicist named Niels Bohr applied the new rules of quantum theory to the basic structure of the atom and discovered they worked. By 1927, Germany’s Werner Heisenberg had formulated his “uncertainty principle,” which states that it is impossible to measure both the position and momentum of a subatomic particle. You can measure one or the other, but not both. Heisenberg went on to create a complete theory of quantum mechanics—he called it “matrix mechanics”—as did the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger from a different viewpoint.
Quantum mechanics solved all of the great difficulties that troubled physicists in the early years of the twentieth century. Eventually, it became the most successful theory ever developed to describe the fundamental nature of the universe. It has been tested experimentally time and again and continues to provide the best explanation of a whole host of effects. But for all its successes, quantum mechanics describes an Alice in Wonderland world based on probabilities where nothing makes much sense anymore.
In a fundamental experiment of quantum mechanics, a beam of subatomic particles is directed toward a sensitized target that will register their impact. A screen with two slots—which can be opened and closed independently —is placed between the beam and the target. It seems obvious that if both the slits are opened, twice as many particles will get t
hrough compared to if you only open one. The reality is that more particles reach the target if only one slit is open. This finding runs contrary to common sense and scientists have wrestled with the dilemma since the 1930s when the experiment was first carried out. To make sense of their findings, they began to suspect that subatomic particles were not particles at all, but waves. A wave would pass through both slits simultaneously, recording no more hits on the target than would be the case with a single slit. Indeed, since a number of the waves might be expected to collide—thus canceling each other out—fewer would get through two slits than one. Unfortunately for this solution, the particles only behaved like waves while they were passing through the slits. When they hit the target, they behaved like particles again. A wave would be expected to strike all at once, like a sea wave breaking along the length of a beach, but this did not happen. The particles struck in specific locations like little cannonballs.
Physicists were forced to accept that these particles behaved like particles in certain circumstances and like waves in others. This made so little sense that they began to wonder if the “wave” might actually be a collection of possibilities that behaved in a wavelike manner. In other words, the basic particle was still a particle, but instead of simply observing its actual behavior, one must take into account everything that could happen to it—all its probabilities, in other words—and the mind must organize them into a wavelike structure. Quantum particles began to be seen increasingly as probability waves. As each particle approached the open slits, the probability wave (which really only exists in the mind of the observer) represents the different possibilities open to it—whether it passes through the top slit or the bottom slit, or strikes the screen and is absorbed or deflected. This probability wave could not predict exactly where the particle would go, only where it was most likely to go.
The theory of probability waves explained particle behavior up to a point but left physicists with the problem of explaining how probabilities somehow managed to interfere with one another exactly like physical waves. But in 1957, a young American physicist named Hugh Everett III came up with the answer in the course of his doctoral work at Princeton University. He suggested that if two probabilities can interfere with each other, each of them must have an actual existence. But since there is no way that conflicting probabilities can exist in our universe, it followed that there must be a second, parallel universe to house the second probability.
It has to be said that while Everett’s theory has attracted a large number of supporters, a majority of physicists still hold to a different explanation. Rather than evoking a parallel universe, they believe our own universe actually splits briefly to accommodate the passage of a single particle through two different slits and re-forms again once it has done so. The determining factor here is not the particle or the slits but the fact that the particle is under observation. This idea seems unlikely, and even Einstein once remarked that he could not accept that the universe changed just because a mouse looked at it.
But then as it happens, Einstein’s relativity theory (when applied to black holes) supports the idea of parallel universes as well.9 The mathematics of rotating black holes suggest the existence of an infinite number of alternate realities. There is even a theoretical process, called quantum tunneling, by means of which it might be possible to pass from one parallel universe to another. The implications of these theories have not been lost on the more maverick of modern physicists. One of them, Fred Alan Wolf, has gone on record with the speculation that quantum tunneling may provide a rational explanation for ghosts and other psychic phenomena. For Wolf, a parallel reality may be the home of spirits.
Curiously enough, there are spirit contacts who agree. The idea of a parallel reality is echoed in the words of Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki’s Upuaut. Asked bluntly if he was real, he replied, “Yes, very, but on my plane of existence rather than yours.” White Bull, the guide who uses Ian Graham as a channel, describes himself as “dangling at the end of a rope” held by friends in a “world of light.” Although expressed in religious terms, the “world of light” is clearly another dimension of reality. “Mark,” a collective of entities communicating through a British channel, enlarges on the theme: “We are a different expression of energy … we do have structure but it is more like patterns or like waves of sound and light. Both is correct in a sense but not really very complete as a description … We cannot be measured in the way that you would measure light or heat. We are existing in another reality altogether, another dimension you sometimes call it.”
Interestingly, “Mark” believes humans do not exactly move into a different dimension of reality after death, but rather become more fully aware of a dimension into which they have always extended—and it is the same dimension, the same parallel reality, that nonhuman entities share:
In a way you move closer to our reality then (after death) and sometimes humans who extend towards us consciously in their physical life will connect with us much more fully on what you term death, which is more truly a transformation of perception and consciousness.10
The comment neatly bridges the theories of Wolf and Firsoff and encompasses the findings of Grey Walter. A unified theory begins to emerge. It starts with the discovery that the mind is a thing in itself, not simply an illusion created by the electrical activity of the brain. But even as a thing in itself, it is clearly not of the same order as, for example, a chair or the book. It exists in its own “space” and quite possibly its own “time.” This gives us a wholly new concept of ourselves. The essence of a human being is actually an entity, composed of particles similar to neutrinos or Firsoff’s mindons, that exists in a parallel reality. In order to experience the world as we know it, this entity links itself—at least temporarily—to a physical vehicle, the human body, as players link with their avatars in massive multiplayer online games. In so doing, it limits its perceptions of its own reality, narrowing focus for the sake of survival.
There is no longer any reason to believe death of the physical vehicle results in the destruction of the mindon entity. But nor, contrary to much religious thought, does it go anywhere. Rather it again expands its awareness of its own sphere of reality, the sphere it never actually ceased to inhabit. One could speculate that it might, at some stage, decide to link with another body for further experience of physical reality, thus providing a foundation for the widespread oriental theory of reincarnation.
It would appear that in the normal course of events, the mindon entity’s link with matter is forged at a very early stage of development of the physical vehicle—perhaps at the moment of conception, perhaps in the womb and certainly no later than the moment of the infant’s first breath. The formation of the link begins a process of growth and the storage of impressions that continues until physical death. Clearly if suitable vehicles exist, there is no reason why incarnation of the mindon entity should not take place on planets other than Earth.
Within this theory, “spirits” become mindon entities without permanent links to physical bodies. The difference between “human” and “nonhuman” entities is less clear-cut than it might seem from our usual perspective, as is the difference between “male” and “female” entities. A human may be simply a mindon creature, of whatever pedigree, that manages to make the physical link; or it may be that only certain mindon “species” are equipped for human body incarnation. Sex is dependent on the body selected, although there is the possibility of a preexistent gender structure that influences the body of choice. While contact with matter is usually achieved through the incarnation process, it seems there are rare circumstances in which two or more mindon entities may share the same physical vehicle (indwelling) or where one may oust the other (possession). The transfer of mindon entities, as reported by Ernest Butler, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, and others, while still largely mysterious, becomes at least feasible.
This is a theory that accords with the history of spirit contact down the ages. It reconciles the conf
lict between the experience of spirit voices as an inner phenomenon and spirit claims to be separate, objective beings. But is there direct evidence to support it? Is there even evidence to back up Grey Walter’s startling findings? Once again, the answer is yes.
In 1959, an amateur ornithologist named Friedrich Jürgenson went into the woods near his Swedish home to record birdsong. He had made similar recordings many times before, but on this occasion he found a faint, strange voice on the tape, calling his name. He ran the tape again and again, adjusting the volume, concentrating hard. The voice was definitely there and he eventually decided it belonged to his mother. It sounded as if she had been somewhere deep in the woods calling to him. Yet Jürgenson’s mother had been dead for years. This was the beginning of a whole new chapter in the annals of psychical research. Jürgenson went on to produce many more mysterious recordings. In 1964, he went public and a Stockholm publisher brought out his book Rösterna från Rymden or Voices from Space. Among those who read it was a Latvian psychiatrist with a lifelong interest in the paranormal, Dr. Konstantin Raudive.
As Raudive began the book, he was not particularly impressed. He was familiar with most of the scientists engaged in psychical research at the time and Jürgenson was definitely an outsider. Perhaps more important, he came across as a highly imaginative man—perhaps even overimaginative—and Raudive suspected he might be capable of conjuring up visions in an empty room or voices out of the silence. But as he continued to read, Raudive found himself fascinated by the central theme of the book—that spirit voices, “voices from space,” could actually be recorded.
Jürgenson’s work contained no hint of how recording the dead might be done. Jürgenson confined himself to claims that he had recorded not only the voices of dead relatives and friends, but historical personages like Hitler and the recently executed Carl Chessman, an American who became a best-selling author while confined to death row for murder. It was all very frustrating for someone like Raudive whose whole instinct was to investigate such claims for himself. In April 1965, he contacted Jürgenson and asked to hear some of his tapes. Jürgenson agreed.
