Frontiers of Knowledge: Scientific and Spiritual Sources for a New Era

By Douglas Kinney

Frontiers of Knowledge is the story of unfolding developments that are revolutionizing our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. We are birthing a new era in which our ideas about the nature and source of reality are swiftly changing. Insights from quantum physics suggest that the basis of our physical world is actually mental—conscious thoughts. Other discoveries are causing us to redefine our concepts of mind and the elusive thing we call consciousness. All strongly hint that spirituality is the underlying source of everything.
Frontier scientists and scientifically trained researchers are providing us with a rich and expanding base of knowledge through systematic investigations of startling phenomena that have been observed in quantum physics, cosmology, biology, psychology, disease and healing, death, near-death experiences, reincarnation experiences, and those occurring in spiritual hypnosis on the nature of the spiritual realm. New concepts of reality are especially needed to explain the incredibly finetuned characteristics and the mysterious nature of our physical universe. Ninety-five percent of the universe’s energy and mass are a mystery to scientists, and for the moment, we resort to naming them dark matter and dark energy.
The last time a comparable knowledge revolution occurred was in the late sixteenth century when astronomers determined that the planets revolved around the sun, not the earth. Historians call it the Copernican Revolution because it led to modern Western science. From one perspective, the new era predicted in this book—a revolution in its own right—can be considered the completion of the quantum revolution by defining and explaining the role of consciousness in our universe.
An underlying aspect of this new revolution is the sense that humanity is moving into a new era of rapidly expanding knowledge of the human spirit (our soul aspect) and non-physical realities. Until now, this emerging knowledge has not been organized into a coherent and comprehensive structure. Frontiers of Knowledge provides the first outline of this new structure of reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mira Digital Publishing
• Release date: Mar 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9780991226344

Book preview

FRONTIERS

OF

KNOWLEDGE

Scientific and Spiritual

Sources for a New Era

Douglas Kinney

Copyright © 2014 by Douglas Kinney

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

Published by Douglas Kinney

Printed in the United States

eISBN: 978-0-9912263-4-4

Cover design uses photo from http://www.astronomy-pictures.net/supernova_2.jpg

Dedicated to all the organizations and individuals who made this book possible: frontier scientists of the Society for Scientific Exploration, visionary physicists, subtle-energy workers, spiritual explorers, especially the spiritual hypnotists, and my wife, Terry, who supported me through the long research and writing process.

Seeing. One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing . . . But unity grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more.

—Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: The Human Phenomenon

(Translation, Sarah Appleton-Weber, p. 3)

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

New Scientific Concepts and Spiritual Knowledge

Answers to Fundamental Questions

How This Book Is Organized

Aids to the Reader

PART 1 Science and the Exploration of Reality

1.The Exploration of Reality

Exploring Reality at the Frontiers of Knowledge

Scientific Revolutions and Worldview Changes

Hints of an Expanded Reality

2.The Field: Potential Answers to Anomalies in Physics

Anomalies and Strange Phenomena in Quantum Physics

Anomalies in Cosmology—the Large-Scale Physical Universe

Summary: Insights on the Nature of Reality from Physics

3.The Field: Vehicle for Evolution and Expressions of Mind

Evolutionary Biology

Puzzling Mind Observations of the Brain, Senses, and Memory

Summary and Explanations for Observed Mind and Brain Puzzles

4.The Field: Vehicle for the Full Expression of Consciousness

Consciousness: First-Order Anomalies of the Mind

Consciousness Anomalies Requiring the Concept of the Soul

Part 1 Summary: Science and the Exploration of Reality

PART 2 Evidence Supporting New Views of Reality

5.Scientific and Systematic Investigations of Near-Death Experiences

Investigations of Near-Death Experiences

The Near-Death Experience

NDE Research Studies that Create a Degree of Proof

Summary of NDE Evidence for Nonphysical Consciousness

NDE Cases with Transcendent Experiences of the Spiritual Realm and Beyond

Summary—Highlights and Importance of NDE Findings

6.Scientific and Systematic Investigations of Reincarnation

Investigations of Children Who Remember

Helen Wambach’s Group Past-Life Historical Regression Investigations Study

Independent Reincarnation Cases and Semkiw’s Reincarnation Hypothesis

Semkiw’s Discoveries of His Adams Connections

Chapter Summary on Investigations of Reincarnation

7.Spiritual Hypnosis and Between-Lives Regression Experiences

Introduction to Spiritual Hypnosis

Overview of the Soul’s Between-Lives Journey in the Spiritual Realm

Highlights of a Sample Between-Lives Session

Summary and Significance of Spiritual Hypnosis

8.Spiritual Hypnosis Discoveries—New Views of Heaven

Soul Levels, Hierarchies, and Organization of the Spiritual Realm

Soul Activities in the Spiritual Realm

The Phenomenon of Reincarnation

Purpose of Reincarnation and the Roles of Karma, Free Will, and Love

Source God, Creation, and the Evolution of Consciousness

A Summary of Spiritual Hypnosis Discoveries

Part 2 Summary: Evidence Supporting New Views of Reality

PART 3 Subtle and Expanded Dimensions of Reality

9.The Human Subtle-Energy System

Introduction to Subtle-Energy Systems

Brennan’s Seven-Layer Model of the Human Subtle-Energy System

Dale’s Subtle-Energy Body System

Universal Calibration Lattice and Reconnective Healing

The Human Subtle-Energy System in a Sea of Subtle-Energy Fields

Evidence of the Human Subtle-Energy System

Chapter Summary

10.The Ability of Mind to Affect Human Conditions

A Scientific Survey of Psychophysiological Phenomena

Example of Psychophysiological Phenomena

Factors Affecting Our Ability to Influence Human Conditions

Modeling Psychophysiological Phenomena

Healing with the Human Subtle-Energy System

Explaining Psychophysiological Cases with Model

Summary of the Ability of Mind to Affect Human Conditions

11.Parallel Universes, Multidimensional Realities, and Creation

Parallel Universes

The Multiverse and Multidimensional Realities

Concepts and Information on the Creation of Universe

Chapter Summary

Part 3 Summary: Dimensions of Reality

Part 4 Integrated Concepts of Reality

12.Creating a Knowledge-based Discipline for Consciousness and Spirituality

Reviewing the Background and Need

Characteristics of a Knowledge Discipline

Creating a Knowledge Discipline for Unusual Consciousness and Spiritual Phenomena

Understanding Consciousness and Love: Two of Science’s Biggest Challenges

13.Summary: Realizing a New Era of Knowledge

Overview of Key Findings and Explanations

Characteristics of Key Investigators of Consciousness and Spirituality

Summary Answers to the Five Fundamental Questions of Existence

Integrated Framework of Reality

Subtle-Energy Fields—Foundations of Our Universe

Growing Consciousness and Spirituality into Knowledge Disciplines

Epilogue: Sharing the Knowledge

My Bother’s Funeral—Poem of Human Transition

Postscript: Communication from the Other Side

APPENDICES

A. Overviews of the Scientific Approach in Physics and Medicine

B. Overview and Highlights of Jan Price’s NDE

C. Karen’s NDE

D. Development of Spiritual Hypnosis

E. A Sample Between-Lives Regression Session

F. The Universal Calibration Lattice and Reconnective Healing

G. Homeopathy and the Subtle-Energy Field

H. Nonromantic Expressions of Love

Endnotes

Glossary

Recommended Reading and Viewing

Index

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I deeply appreciate all of the help, support, and encouragement I have received from many people who during the past few years helped me bring this book to completion.

First and foremost has been my wife, Terry, always the first to read my drafts and provide me with constructive comments and encouragement. She assisted me in the final proofreading of the main text. I want to acknowledge my late brother, Jeff next. He was my first editor, and he helped me find the basic structure for the book—the right blend of science and spirituality. My second editor, Jeanne Pinault, taught me how to write a book—a critical skill for a budding author. My final editors, the experienced team of Sheridan McCarthy and Stan Nelson at Meadowlark Publishing Services, eliminated errors, provided critical guidance, and polished my writing—all necessary for a quality product. They were a great joy to work with and their critical eyes and professionalism made the process easier.

I greatly appreciate the frontier scientists, researchers, and explorers who reviewed early versions of chapters for which they are recognized experts: P.M.H. Atwater for near-death experiences, Jim Tucker and Walter Semkiw for reincarnation, and Linda Backman for between-lives spiritual regression. Their critiques and suggestions helped me produce a better book.

The critiques and suggestion provided by two of my friends, Jane Weaver and Herbert L. Calhoun, inspired and guided me at a critical juncture to producing a more integrated, concise, and coherent story. They were my muses. I also want to acknowledge my sister-in-law, Linda Switalski, for her invaluable proofreading help and providing reader feedback.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Jan Price and Ron Scolastico for their kind permission to extensively quote from their published material. Also, thanks to Susan Lewis and John Jacob Baughman for allowing me to share their personal experiences. A special thanks to Peggy Phoenix Dubro for allowing me to use her exquisite painting of the human body’s subtle-energy fibers and the energy shell they create around it.

Foreword

Often, at a considerable distance, we have watched the entire procession across history of man’s struggle to address questions about the true nature of human reality. Among many other things, we desire to understand better how a new, more all-encompassing reality is to be conceived—one that takes into account all of the things that we have long known to exist in our world and in our mind’s eye but that do not seem to be fully accounted for in existing models of reality. We want to better understand how this more broadly framed reality is to best be defined, how it is to be delimited, what its boundaries are to be, and what knowledge bases are to be used to interrogate it. These are just some of the questions Douglas Kinney touches on in this wide-ranging, often freewheeling analysis of what we currently know about reality and how we have come to know it.

As Mr. Kinney reminds us in his introduction, the sharpest edges and most of the flying elbows of the reality debate are often framed as being between what can loosely be characterized as the spiritualist and the scientist camps. Over the course of two millennia, it would be fair to suggest that the spiritualists prevailed for the first 1,500 years of literate Western culture, and at least from the Renaissance up to the turn of the nineteenth century, it would also be fair to say that the scientists have held sway. In this brief span of written human history, we have watched the procession go from a god-centered and god-driven medieval universe, in which the spiritual aspects of man’s existence predominated, to a Newtonian clockwork universe where the spiritual aspects have been more or less suppressed.

In the more spiritual, god-centered worldview, man existed under the certainty of—and under the constant watchful eye and hammer of—divine authority. Still, the god-centered universe was broad enough to encompass all of mankind’s fears and demons and the widest extent of his imagination. Its main drawback was never its range but the fact that as a paradigm of our reality, it was weak on explanation, analysis, and understanding. The god-centered paradigm was a noncausal, nonlinear, synchronous world similar to the reality one would expect to find in normal living biological systems. There was no requirement that meanings be attached to logic and reasoning. The god-centered universe also came outfitted with a purpose; it was teleological: it came with the certainty that as a biological organism, the human whole was always more than the sum of its parts. Plus, there was great security and certainty in having a deity’s hand on the rudder of human reality. In fact, this alone was seen as enough to compensate for what was missing—the lack of knowledge, explanations, analysis, and understanding—in the god-centered model of our universe.

But that all changed with Sir Isaac Newton. In the last five hundred years, the only role the Newtonian clockwork would leave for the gods to fulfill was that of setting the initial conditions for kick-starting the universe. Once it got rolling, thereafter, the wheels of the clockwork began to turn on their own and the Newtonian world became one big computer simulation: everything within the clockwork was not just explainable, but also analyzable and predictable. These, in fact, became important aspects of the new canon of science called the scientific method.

The Newtonian clockwork universe was a linear, causal, reductionist machine. Everything within it could be broken down into its constituent parts; and with rare exceptions, the whole was exactly equal to the sum of its parts. Rene Descartes told us that mind and body were always separate parts of nature, with a permanent barrier between them. Thus in the main, and despite its shortcomings, the Newtonian-Cartesian machine was a very orderly mechanism. Only after a good half millennium of laps around the cosmological track, at the turn of the twentieth century to be exact, did cracks begin to appear around the edges of the Newtonian model of reality.

Einstein led the wrecking crew that brought an end to the Newtonian machine. His relativity theories and the quantum theory he helped fashion pointed unerringly to a host of exceptions to the well-established Newtonian rules. What he and his colleagues discovered came as a package of anomalies and exceptions that still bedevil most scientists even today. As Mr. Kinney makes clear in Part 1, it is these anomalies and inconsistencies that forced a reopening of the floodgates over which new bridges for connecting the old and new realities into one unified model could be built.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the puzzles and anomalies of quantum physics that Mr. Kinney speaks of here have raised a continuous stream of unanswered questions. Many of them take on a different coloring once they are viewed through the lens of a new broader paradigm that includes, among others, the deeper implications of the spiritual side of human existence.

This new direction is so clear that there now seems to be general consensus that the two sides have finally started moving closer together. And while it would be an exaggeration to say they are now in bed, Mr. Kinney has it about right when he suggests that quite a bit of cross-pollination is taking place, and the larger crossover is from the scientific side to the spiritual side rather than the other way around.

This book is an exciting continuation of that cross-pollination process. Put simply, Mr. Kinney in Frontiers of Knowledge has one overriding goal: to bring the readers up to the very frontier of contemporary understanding about the state of our reality—at which point the reader will be able to see and decide for himself that the two camps have finally reached a point where the chances of cross-fertilization are now much greater.

In short, this book brings readers up to a level of knowledge that enables them to see what the fruits and possibilities of cross-pollination can mean to the enterprise of expanding our understanding of a wider reality. And it illustrates how the borders of this new reality might be reshaped and widened so that we can admit ideas that we have always known to exist beyond what science has been able to demonstrate or embrace.

As the reader will see, the author argues convincingly that we are now on the threshold of a new revolution—a paradigm shift, as it were—leaning strongly in the direction of more systematic investigations into what previously has been described as unusual spiritual phenomena. If he is correct, and I think he is, then previous competing paradigms of reality, which are still quietly developing at their own pace and along their own parallel tracks, will have reached a natural point of convergence where cross-fertilization is not only likely but may be the only logical next step. That convergence will occur when the quantum revolution is finally completed by satisfactorily resolving the role of human consciousness.

In this sense, Frontier of Knowledge is as much a progress or status report on where we stand regarding each of these separate but parallel projects—scientific anomalies and unusual consciousness-spiritual experiences—and how they are to best be integrated into one unified paradigm of reality. It is the introduction and advancement of a new scientific theory of spirituality.

There is a great deal to report on, no matter from which side of the competitive ledger one finds oneself. But here Mr. Kinney focuses the reader’s attention most acutely on the spiritual side, where—using the tools of science, and then reexamining knowledge and databases and data resources on that side—he brings us up to the critical point: one in which he puts the data into an intellectual clearing where the reader has free rein to examine them and assess their worth to the new paradigm as well as to the new joint analytical enterprise.

And as in any emerging discipline, the science and art of cross-fertilization require the fashioning of a new set of concepts, a companion vocabulary, new grammar and new rules, and the proper terms of engagement between the scientific or material side of reality and the spiritual or human side. Many readers will be introduced to such concepts as the zero point field, subtle energies, near-death experiences, and reincarnation for the first time. To them I say, hold on to your hats and enjoy the ride, for this author will take you by the hand and ensure that there is always a soft landing for you.

I do not believe it is an accident that, as this author shows so elegantly here, at the core of many of the world’s foremost spiritual traditions lies the basic notion of energy exchanges between subtle energy fields, the kind that pervade human spiritual connections, human healing and wellness, and the ability to communicate beyond physically established barriers. Investigations of human understanding do not get more interesting and exciting than the one the reader will find here. This is a virtual launching pad into the next generation of understanding our human reality. This is heady stuff indeed.

Herbert L. Calhoun, PhD

Retired State Department Scientist

Introduction

Frontiers of Knowledge is the story of unfolding events that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. We seem to be birthing a new era of human knowledge, one in which our ideas about the nature and source of reality are being inverted. While we have long embraced the idea that physicality is the basis of reality, deeper insights from quantum physics suggest that the basis of our physical world is mental—conscious thoughts. Other discoveries by leading-edge researchers—whom I call frontier scientists in this book—are causing us to expand and redefine our concepts of the nature of mind and this elusive thing we call consciousness. Many of these strongly hint that spirituality is the underlying source of everything.

Some have always made this claim about spirituality. What is different today is that scientists and scientifically trained researchers across a broad range of disciplines are now leading this effort. They are providing us with a rich and expanding base of knowledge through systematic investigations of unusual phenomena spanning an extensive range of subjects: quantum physics, cosmology (the physics of the universe), evolutionary biology, psychology, disease and healing, death, and unusual consciousness-related experiences. This knowledge seems to portend a new worldview for humanity.

The last time something comparable occurred was during what historians call the Copernican Revolution, which occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and eventually led to modern Western science. Many think that the quantum revolution of the twentieth century was an equally major conceptual shift, but as I will show, this shift has not yet been completed. From one perspective, the new era I predict in this book—a revolution in its own right—can be considered the completion of the quantum revolution.

An underlying feature of this coming revolution is the sense that humanity has moved into a new era in which knowledge of the human spirit (expressions of the soul) and of other nonphysical realities is rapidly expanding. This emerging knowledge has not yet been organized into a coherent structure. The primary purpose of this book is to help work toward that goal.

New Scientific Concepts and Spiritual Knowledge

Over the last two centuries, the exploration and expansion of human knowledge has been guided by a scientific worldview, and it is my belief that any new worldview needs to relate to science and build on its great accomplishments. New sources of information on spirituality and unusual consciousness phenomena are emerging in parallel with new discoveries and concepts at the frontiers of science. The integration of these two sources is what I hope to accomplish here, creating an expanded vision of human knowledge. Let me briefly summarize both.

New Concepts at the Frontiers of Science

At the leading edges of many of the scientific fields I mentioned earlier, the old scientific order appears to be breaking down as anomalous discoveries accumulate that cannot be accommodated within our existing scientific theories and worldview. Frontier scientists and researchers are exploring these anomalies and introducing new concepts and hypotheses to explain them: ideas that can be considered forerunners of a new scientific worldview.

At the heart of this new thinking is a posited fundamental universal field of energy and information that forms and connects all matter and life. This field has been wonderfully introduced in Lynne McTaggart’s The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe¹ and Ervin Laszlo’s Science and the Akashic Field.² This new field concept—labeled the zero point field (ZPF) and the Akashic field by McTaggart’s scientists and Laszlo, respectively—contributes to potential explanations for many scientific anomalies and represents a fundamentally new scientific worldview.

Laszlo writes that hints of this field are present in many of the world’s spiritual traditions and beliefs, especially Eastern ones, such as the Hindu concept of the Akasha and the Chinese Taoist belief that a basic energy called Qi pervades all life, but its application to scientific phenomena is a new development.³

New Spiritual Information and Knowledge

An expanding number of researchers are exploring the spiritual aspect of life through experiments and investigations of unusual consciousness-related phenomena, such as the effectiveness of prayer, near-death experiences (NDEs), and the remembrances by children of their previous human lives. Some of these researchers are open to the concept of a foundational energy and information field as the basis for these phenomena. Only a limited number, though, are willing to take the next step and explicitly recognize the presence of intelligent spiritual life in dimensions outside our physical plane. Introducing this new information and presenting it in an integrated manner are key threads running through Frontiers of Knowledge.

The spiritual information I provide here goes far beyond the ancient revelations coded in our historical sacred literature (for example, the Bible, the Koran, and the Kabala) and in the oral traditions of indigenous cultures. I think that limiting ourselves to these older sources is similar to medieval scholars attempting to define the nature of the physical world by studying only the works of the ancient Greek philosophers.

Our present understanding and knowledge of the physical world only took off when individuals started their own explorations and discovered new information that others could verify or experience for themselves. I believe we now find ourselves at a comparable stage concerning spiritual knowledge. The new findings don’t invalidate all of the old, but they do put key religious beliefs into a larger spiritual framework, one that can hold all of the truths represented in our world’s many religions and indigenous cultures.

New Concepts on the Nature of Mind

Extreme scientific skepticism toward spirituality is probably at least in part the product of a wrong turn that psychology took in the early twentieth century. At that time, psychologists, wanting to emulate the hard sciences of physics and chemistry, gave up on exploring inner, subjective human experiences. As Edward F. Kelly describes in Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, psychology launched into the observable, objective, ‘third-person’ world of physiological events and processes in the body and the brain.⁴ Kelly and his coauthors have set a goal to get psychology back on track. Their book is one of my inspirations and a valued source, both for the information it provides on science related to the human brain and mind and for its inclusion of scientific studies of the unusual consciousness and spiritual phenomena that many humans experience but that the major scientific disciplines do not recognize as important and legitimate problems to be studied.

The central concept of mind emerging from frontier scientific research is the holographic form. This has been championed by the great brain researcher, Dr. Karl Pribram, who is the main source for information and concepts on the mind in McTaggart’s The Field. Pribram’s pioneering work had been previously described in Michael Talbot’s groundbreaking book, The Holographic Universe,⁵ in the early 1990s. Talbot also introduces the general public to the work of quantum physicist David Bohm, who first developed many of the original ideas about the information aspect of the zero point field through his concept of the informed universe—one in which information exists within this field to inform, or direct, the expressions of various forms of energy and matter in our universe. Bohm is the source of many of Laszlo’s ideas on the Akashic field, which can be considered an expression of universal consciousness, or mind. The book provides support for this expanded concept of reality.

Answers to Fundamental Questions

I have found that the broad scope, depth, and consistency of the information emerging from scientific and spiritual investigations supply us with the means to begin answering five of our most fundamental, existential questions:

1.What is the nature of reality? Is it more than just our physical universe?

2.What happens to us when we die? Is there an eternal soul consciousness that continues on?

3.Is the concept of reincarnation real; and if so, what is the soul’s purpose in having a human life?

4.Is there a spiritual realm (heaven) where souls reside; and if so, what are the characteristics of this realm?

5.What is the nature of God? Did it expand itself through the creation of souls (angels), universes, and all life?

The information I have gathered in this book to address these five questions hints at the hypothesis that spirituality is the foundation and source of everything. In essence, this book provides an outline of a different kind of grand theory of everything.

My vision and hope for the future is one in which the discoveries and knowledge of many frontier scientists and spiritual explorers will be codified into a systematic and evolving knowledge base for a new discipline that the general mass of enlightened humanity will accept as our best understanding at any given time of the answers to the five questions—especially the question of the nature of reality.

Developing and evaluating information to help answer these questions is illustrative of the research activities this new knowledge discipline would undertake; in fact, a major goal of this book is to help initiate the development of a new knowledge discipline that would integrate organized consciousness and spiritual knowledge with science. With such an active effort in place, we can look forward to a continual expansion of our understanding over time because the universe is, from a human perspective, an unlimited expanse.

Of scientifically oriented skeptics of things spiritual, I would ask that they keep an open mind and consider: Why do the great majority of humans believe that there is a spiritual essence in this universe? In many cases, this belief is based on their own unusual consciousness and spiritual experiences or those of someone close to them. Skeptics too quickly dismiss these beliefs as superstitions grounded in old cultural tales and illusions. Yet this book summarizes evidence that clearly supports the reality of unusual consciousness and spiritual experiences.

Not everyone will accept this new viewpoint and the array of information I present here, but I make it available for all those who search with an open mind and heart for answers to our scientific and spiritual mysteries. This book is a progress report on an amazing and evolving story, one that builds on the impressive efforts of many frontier researchers and explorers.

How This Book Is Organized

I have organized Frontiers of Knowledge into four parts with twin aims: helping the reader navigate through a large number of topics and themes, and giving me an organizational construct within which to present my perspectives on the new insights and expansion of reality. The parts are as follows:

•Part 1—Science and the Exploration of Reality

•Part 2—Evidence Supporting New Views of Reality

•Part 3—Subtle and Expanded Dimensions of Reality

•Part 4—Integrated Concepts of Reality

Chapter 1 of Part 1 is an overview on the exploration of reality. Since the late sixteenth century’s Copernican Revolution, this exploration has been led by science through its use of what is generally known as the scientific method. I also introduce you to the nature of science and the how it is practiced in the close-knit cultures of different scientific disciplines. A key theme of this chapter and the book is that we appear to be living in a revolutionary period because of the growing number of unanswered puzzles, referred to as anomalies in science. These challenge the existing cultures in many scientific disciplines which, as in all cultures, have a natural resistance to change. Eventually, however, scientific disciplines go through scientific revolutions in order to incorporate new phenomena, and I describe how this occurs.

The next three chapters of Part 1 presents overviews of puzzles and strange phenomena existing in five general scientific fields that prepare you for the rest of the book. Chapter 2 provides fascinating glimpses into the mysterious nature of physical reality at the quantum level and the expanding number of mysteries about our universe that astronomers and cosmologists have found in the last 20 years. Chapter 3 does the same for evolutionary biology and the mind—introducing the concept of subtle-energy fields and the holographic mind concept. Chapter 4 presents many fascinating examples of unusual consciousness phenomena, some related to spirituality. For all of these puzzles, I propose explanations from an expanded perspective of reality—one that I integrate into a graphical framework. This framework can only be seen and appreciated with the expanded perspective of reality that Part 1 develops.

Part 2—Evidence Supporting New Views of Reality—presents in chapters 5 and 6 overviews of NDEs and reincarnation investigations, respectively. Both of these subjects are being investigated by frontier scientists and others using systematic and scientific approaches. These researchers have developed information relevant to the first three existential questions: the nature of reality, what happens to us when we die, and the question on whether reincarnation is real.

Chapter 7 introduces the development of spiritual hypnosis in the latter part of the twentieth century, including the breakthrough between-lives regression methodology that has been used to explore the spiritual realm. Chapter 8 presents highlights of between-lives discoveries of this realm. Together they afford us a new and expanded view of heaven and help provide information relevant to the fourth and fifth existential questions: what are the characteristics of the spiritual realm and the nature of God?

Part 3—Subtle and Expanded Dimensions of Reality—includes two chapters that explore the role of subtle-energy dimensions as part of our reality. Chapter 9 is an overview of the human subtle-energy system that includes multiple subtle-energy bodies or fields. It relies heavily on information from two of the leading energy-healing practitioners who have developed the ability to sense subtle-energy fields and chakra-transmission junctions and work with these fields to heal patients.

Chapter 10 covers a wide variety of unusual expressions of consciousness, cases in which psychological processes create very unusual physical effects in the human body. Some examples are prayer healing, healing by hypnosis, and the stigmata phenomenon in which marks appear on the body at regular intervals. These phenomena cannot be explained using existing scientific theories, and they provide strong evidence for the existence of mechanisms that do not fit within our current mainstream-scientific worldview. To help advance our understanding of these phenomena, I develop a model using subtle-energy fields as the mechanism through which these strange physical phenomena can be created.

Chapter 11 expands the exploration of reality through two advanced concepts of physics: parallel universes and the multidimensional nature of the universe. (Both of these subjects are first introduced in chapter 2.) For both, I bring in information from spiritual sources that support and expand on the speculative scientific concepts. I end this chapter with ideas about the creation of the universe from spiritual sources and the thoughts of theoretical quantum physicists who have grappled with the deeper implications of consciousness (and the role of the observer) in their field of study. From both, I introduce the speculative idea that the observers behind our universe’s creation are souls with highly evolved levels of energy consciousness.

At the beginning of Part 4, Integrated Concepts of Reality, chapter 12 returns to the idea of developing unusual consciousness and spiritual phenomena into a knowledge discipline that explicitly includes the role of consciousness, in both human and spiritual realms, as part of an expanded description of reality. I illustrate the potential for this new knowledge discipline by using the concepts developed in earlier chapters to provide insights into consciousness and love—two of the hard problems for mainstream Western science.

In chapter 13 we come full circle. In it, I summarize the book’s findings and my framework of reality that explains and integrates all of the scientific anomalies and unusual consciousness experiences that the book covers within an integrated model of reality. It is one that provides the best available answers to the five fundamental questions I have posed here, and I give those to the reader. I close the book with a brief epilogue in which I share a few personal experiences around the recent death of my older brother that incorporate some of the book’s key concepts.

Now that I have given you an overview of Frontiers of Knowledge and an orientation to its contents, it is your turn to join in and explore the fascinating parallels that are emerging at the frontiers of science and spirituality. It has been an amazing journey of discovery for me, and I hope that you, the reader, will experience some of the pleasure of discovery and insight that I have.

Aids to the Reader

This is a large book, and to keep the story moving, I have offloaded as much material as I could to appendices and some long endnotes. Think of the latter as mini-appendices. I note them when they are available with a parenthetical statement at the endnote’s location in the main body, such as: (Details or more information in endnote.)

To help the reader keep track of the many scientific and spiritual concepts presented, brief summaries of the key ones are provided in a Glossary at the back of the book.

PART 1

Science and the Exploration of Reality

The only source of knowledge is experience.

—Albert Einstein

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation

prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

1.The Exploration of Reality

I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible.

—William James

When a man finds a conclusion agreeable, he accepts it without argument, but when he finds it disagreeable, he will bring against it all the forces of logic and reason.

—Thucydides

One way to view the history of knowledge is to see it as man’s changing perspective on the underlying source of reality. In almost all early cultures, the source was attributed to gods. Over time in much of the world, multiple gods were replaced by a single, omniscient and all-powerful God as the source and explanation for all existence. Running alongside this spiritual perspective, though, were efforts to gain greater control by having more secure sources of food, shelter, and defense. These efforts gave rise to technology and systematic ways of experimentation and thinking. Eventually man used such methods to explore and understand physical reality—and evolved it into modern science.¹

In the twentieth century, most scientists became enamored with the power of science and decided that the only reality was that which could be demonstrated physically. Many dismissed the belief in God as the underlying source as superstition, thus setting up the seeming conflict between science and spirituality.

The latest chapter in science’s search for a deeper understanding of physical reality has been quantum mechanics—probably the twentieth century’s biggest science-based change in our view of reality. The new perspectives quantum mechanics offer are so radically different from those of our everyday, nonquantum experience of the physical world that physicists are still struggling to define what they say about reality. This is known as the interpretation problem of quantum mechanics. Understanding the role of consciousness is at the center of theoretical physicists’ interpretive efforts and the controversies that have arisen as a result of them. Almost a hundred years into the quantum era, there is still no agreement among quantum physicists on the role consciousness plays.² Some have gone so far as to claim that the underlying causative force of all physical reality is mental—a nonphysical feature associated with mind.³

Today I find scientific perspectives and worldviews of reality to be very mixed: Quantum physicists, frontier scientists, and consciousness researchers have what I see as a twenty-first-century perspective of reality—one in which consciousness plays a significant role. Most other scientists and nonscientists, though, seem to maintain the nineteenth-century view that existed before the quantum revolution—one that does not recognize a significant role for consciousness.

Exploring Reality at the Frontiers of Knowledge

I believe that the next steps toward expanding our knowledge of reality require us to complete the quantum revolution—which is largely about understanding the role of consciousness—and find ways to integrate findings from unusual consciousness and spiritual experiences into a broader perspective of reality. I see a relationship between these two steps.

If consciousness, in some unknown manner, is behind physical reality as quantum physics expresses it, and if unusual consciousness and spiritual experiences are real, then we would expect to see traces, or hints, of consciousness in the observed phenomenology of other scientific disciplines. These would appear in the form of findings or observations, known as anomalies, that don’t fit within existing theories.

I and others believe we have found these traces.

In the remaining three chapters of Part 1, I present overviews of anomalies from quantum mechanics and four other scientific disciplines: cosmology, evolutionary biology, mind and the brain, and consciousness. All of these call for expanded concepts of reality to explain their existence. Let me illustrate this with findings from each discipline (you will find more details and references in the three chapters that follow):

•Cosmologists have found that several dozen of the physical constants or ratios in our universe are phenomenally fine-tuned to support the stability of stars and the existence of life. Could cosmic consciousness in some form be the source of this fine-tuning?

•In evolutionary biology, something more than DNA appears to be required for the development and evolution of complex organisms such as humans. One proposed explanation includes specieswide, subtle-energy fields, each containing a given species’ evolutionary information. A species’ field—containing intelligence and species-level consciousness and governing all its members—must connect in some manner to each member of the species. One candidate for this connection is through the individual subtle-energy fields that energy healers and martial-arts experts are able to sense.

•Consciousness research on humans with multiple personalities provides evidence for the psychological reality of secondary centers of consciousness: more than one personality existing within a single human mind. In some cases, the consciousness of each personality seems to create different bodily responses to allergies and medications. This is one example of many in which human consciousness appears able to affect and influence the physical body.

•Another type of consciousness research, covering near-death experiences (NDEs), is providing information—some in the form of evidence—that the mind can exist as a nonphysical entity. In many NDEs, individuals describe viewing their death scenes from a perspective outside their unconscious bodies and come back with descriptions of a nonphysical realm. In some cases, the NDE out-of-body viewings have been verified.

Most of this book covers explorations of these nonphysical dimensions of reality by frontier scientific researchers and other investigators, and I provide summaries of what they have found. Currently, much of the scientific community sees nonphysical experiences, forms, and intelligence as imaginary because they don’t fit within existing and accepted scientific concepts and theories. Also, we lack good explanations and theories for most of the observed phenomena and experiences—a necessary step towards an integrated structure supporting an expanded description of reality. Achieving this in its first, rudimentary form is one of my goals.

Historical Perspective—the Copernican Revolution

We can gain some perspective on the challenge of expanding our perspective of reality by reviewing the historical development of science and how knowledge has evolved. The beginning of modern science is often traced to the Copernican Revolution, in which Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and others used observations, measurements, and critical thought processes to determine that the earth revolved around the sun instead of being the center of the universe and that the other planets also revolved around the sun. This became elevated to a scientific theory when Newton found an explanation for how this was possible—through the innate quality of gravitational attraction present in all matter.

This was a daring endeavor in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For most Europeans in those days, the accepted view was provided by descriptions in the Christian Bible and the interpretations of priests: earth was the center of the universe, and the Church threatened anyone who disagreed with punishment.⁴

Eventually this new view of reality took form as a scientific paradigm shift—a new conceptual framework of how to see the world and practice science—that in time became a new worldview as it captured the attention and acceptance of the general, educated public. To illustrate this effect, Thomas Kuhn—one of the most influential philosophers and historians of science of the twentieth century—presents the example of how Newtonian physics led to a change in the scientific worldview.⁵ In the seventeenth century, scientists got away from the Aristotelian and scholastics explanations that relied on the essences (or innateness) of objects, which easily became circular (also known as tautologies). The new scientists saw that these traditional approaches relied on occult properties and were not useful in advancing knowledge. They made big scientific strides in the early seventeenth century using a mechanical-corpuscular perspective to analyze the motions and interactions of objects. Kuhn writes that Newton’s three laws of motion can be seen as a reinterpretation of well-known observations in terms of the motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles (for example, the alteration of motion by collision).

Kuhn describes how Newton’s introduction of gravity as an innate attractive property represented, at first appearance, a step back to relying on an occult concept. To escape this, scientists (including Newton) expended a great effort to find a mechanical explanation for gravity that would allow them to retain their paradigm built around the mechanical-corpuscular concept.

Eventually, as Kuhn describes it, scientists were forced to make a choice: stay with their hard-won mechanical-corpuscular paradigm and try to practice science without Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction, or accept his description of gravity as an essential quality of matter. According to Kuhn, the first choice would have marginalized their science to a narrow aspect of reality, and eventually they would have become unscientific, unable to fully participate in the advances of scientific discoveries.

I believe that we are in a similar situation today relative to the central role of consciousness—sometimes expressed in a spiritual form—that is present in the anomalies at the frontiers of many scientific disciplines and in the struggles of theoretical physicists to relate the implicit role of consciousness embedded in quantum mechanics to our large-scale, everyday experiences.

Overview of Twenty-First-Century Science

Here, I provide a brief overview of the nature and state of early twenty-first-century science to demonstrate both its natural reluctance and eventual ability to incorporate radically new perspectives of reality, such as one in which consciousness is central. The scientific method—which uses systematic investigation, critical review, defining and testing hypotheses, and independent verification—is generally accepted as the best approach for developing new knowledge about our universe and human life. For many, it is the best, if not the only, acceptable method for understanding our world.

Even though one of my main sources, Ervin Laszlo, recognizes that there are many approaches to knowledge, he argues for using the scientific approach in spite of its limitations because it has a rigorous process.⁶ The most significant limitation he cites is its tendency to give us a fragmented picture of our world because of its many independent disciplines.

Michael Shermer, the director of the Skeptics Society and a strong supporter of science, acknowledges another basic limitation in scientific communities. Science, in common with all communities, is socially and culturally embedded and thus biased.⁷ Countering this are its processes, including the requirement that others must corroborate one person’s subjective perceptions.

However, two things must be understood about science and scientific verification. First, as noted, science is not a monolithic entity with a single approach. It includes the rigorous methods of physics and chemistry, the complexity and open-endedness of organic chemistry, the diversity and intricacy of life in biology, paleontology’s scarcity of information and historical context, and social sciences’ efforts to study human behavior in the cultural settings of societies. Second, in the last 60 years there has been a great expansion in the number of scientists and scientific disciplines that has caused further fragmentation in the existing branches of science.

Given the large numbers of scientific disciplines, philosopher Sherrilyn Roush, introduces what she calls the layperson-expert relationship: a scientist is as dependent as a layperson on experts in another discipline for understanding its theories and interpreting its experimental results.⁸ For example, we all depend for our knowledge of quantum mechanics on information physicists working in this discipline provide. A similar situation exists for the hundreds of scientific disciplines; we should not expect, for example, a biologist to provide us with useful information on consciousness and spirituality unless he or she has spent time studying and working in these areas. (A theoretical physicist, though, might have something to contribute on the general role of consciousness in our universe from interpretations of its role in quantum mechanics.)

Being aware of the limited expertise of scientists outside their own disciplines is an important perspective to carry with us as we evaluate the arguments of critics of the research on consciousness and spirituality that I present in later chapters.

Variability in the Scientific Method and the Practice of Science

Science’s built-in corrective mechanism for discovering truth is the scientific method, which emphasizes verifiable, repeatable outcomes, whether in experimental tests of physical phenomena or observations of human behavior. In its idealized form, this method is centered around cycles of experimentation and/or observation that develop hypotheses and theories to explain the data. If successful, the method eventually leads to new theories about the nature of the phenomena or subject matter. Also, the idealized goal of a new theory is to derive and predict a physical effect that can be replicated in experiments or observations by others. In actual practice, the methods and approaches vary for different scientific disciplines (see, for example, Stephen Weinberg).⁹ (More of his thoughts on this topic are provided in endnote.)

Henry Bauer introduces the concept of frontier science—the research occurring in new scientific disciplines and at the leading edge of established ones where major anomalies are present.¹⁰ At the other end of the spectrum of scientific research is what Bauer labels textbook science, in which there is steady advance in well-defined research areas. (These ideas are summarized in table 1-1.) Thomas Kuhn goes further, describing conventional science as normal research and characterizing its goal as cumulative: [It] owes its success to the ability of scientists regularly to select problems that can be solved by the conceptual and instrumental techniques close to those already in existence.¹¹ Kuhn makes the point that normal science is not looking for new facts or theory. It is successful when it finds none.

Bauer’s view of frontier science is one where many ideas and theories are very tentative, controversial, biased, and unreliable because the issues have not been settled. However, he observes that errors and biases are weeded out and settled over time by the systematic and critical exploration of relevant phenomena and by the development of new concepts, theories, and explanations for the observed phenomena.

Table 1-1. Variability of Scientific Uncertainty and Unsettledness in Normal versus Frontier Science

Bauer’s ideas provide us with a useful perspective for investigating consciousness and spiritual phenomena. Both clearly fit in the frontier science category because of their immaturity as scientific (or knowledge) disciplines.

Below I illustrate some of the differences and limitations of science for two very different scientific disciplines: theoretical quantum physics, a scientific discipline working at the boundary of physical reality, and medical research, an applied scientific discipline whose subjects have consciousness and a degree of free will (see appendix A for a more complete discussion of both disciplines). First, some highlights about quantum physics:

•Weinberg emphasizes how in theoretical physics, scientific explanations of experimental results and observations contain a unique sense of direction toward uncovering a deeper understanding of the phenomena; that is, later explanations such as Einstein’s general theory of relativity are more fundamental than earlier ones, such as Newton’s theories of gravity and motion.¹²

•Weinberg also emphasizes that modeling elegance plays an important role at the leading edge of today’s theoretical physics; in a sense, good theories convey a sense of simplicity, elegance, and integrity. Kuhn offers an example of nonelegance in the pre-Copernicus theory of planetary motion, the Ptolemaic system, which led one of Copernicus’s coworkers to state, No system so cumbersome and inaccurate as the Ptolemaic had become could possibly be true of nature.¹³

•Deeper realities in physics seem to be best represented by field descriptions that usually cannot be directly measured except through their effects (for example, gravity’s effect on matter). This applies even at the quantum level where particles can be considered to appear as the manifestations of these fields.¹⁴

These highlights, especially Weinberg’s, describe a scientific process that could be characterized as the art of physics rather than a highly structured application of a rigid, experimental-centric approach.

The scientific approach in medical research also shows limitations in its methodology. The sources I examine in appendix A point to the need for more than the current simple application of a universal and abstract scientific method (assisted by statistical procedures) because medical research involves complex human beings. For example, the current linear approaches in medical research for discovering new drugs and procedures, each for a single health problem, cannot be easily integrated when a patient has multiple problems and is thus not suitable for dealing comprehensively with the complex, mind-body medical behavior of the entire human being.¹⁵

Characteristics of Scientific Disciplines

Some insights into the acculturation process scientists undergo in their training are probably necessary if nonscientists are to understand today’s science. Kuhn describes students and practitioners of a scientific specialty as going through a much more professional initiation and cultural emersion, with clearly defined boundaries, than occurs in most other fields.¹⁶

In the postscript to the third edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Kuhn asserts that a paradigm governs not only the subject matter of a discipline but also its practitioners, who, he says, share a disciplinary matrix. Key components of that matrix are the shared learning examples they study in their initial undergraduate studies and, later, the technical problem-solutions found in their discipline’s periodical literature.¹⁷ (More details provided in endnote.) In a sense they have all learned to see the world of their technical discipline in the same way. I interpret Kuhn to mean that scientists and educated laypeople outside a discipline cannot fully participate in that discipline without a significant cultural immersion associated with its knowledge and practices.

Kuhn also makes the point that shared values associated with the growth of scientific knowledge are a key attribute of the scientific mind-set and distinguish scientists from practitioners in other professions.¹⁸ For Kuhn, this value is important because it provides an impetus for a community to eventually accept a new concept or theory. We saw this in his account of the scientific community’s initial reluctance to accept Newton’s theory of gravitation followed by its eventual acceptance of it, even though it went against previously established scientific concepts. Kuhn describes the alternative: these scientists would have become marginalized, unable to participate in an exciting new area of scientific development.

Scientific Revolutions and Worldview Changes

I believe we may be at the beginning of a time of great scientific upheaval, similar to what occurred in the early part of the twentieth century when quantum physics was born. One sign of this is the proliferation of scientific anomalies in numerous disciplines that cannot be accommodated within existing theories—a few samples of which I provided earlier in the chapter.¹⁹ Kuhn explores examples of conditions supporting scientific revolutions, generalizing about how a crisis in scientific understanding simultaneously loosens stereotypes and provides the new data required for a fundamental paradigm shift.²⁰ (More details provided in endnote.) The accumulation of scientific anomalies and the work to understand them seem to be providing the impetus for such a shift.

Major Anomalies in Astronomy and Cosmology

A major scientific community in which existing paradigms have ceased to work is the joint one of astronomy and cosmology. Astronomers and cosmologists are confronted with a large number of key cosmological anomalies that appear to invalidate several major scientific theories and descriptions of the universe, such as the following three:

1.The extraordinary amount of fine-tuning found in key universal physical constants and ratios (introduced earlier).

2.The continued expansion of the universe that can only be explained by a new, unknown form of energy called dark energy.

3.Anomalies in the observed motion of stars in galaxies that do not follow Newton’s laws of gravity and motion for the known matter present in a galaxy. For this anomaly, scientists are hypothesizing the existence of a new form of matter, called dark matter, that cannot be observed with visual or radio telescopes.

The dark energy and matter suggested in items 2 and 3 are estimated to account for more than 95 percent of our universe’s total energy and mass. This represents a huge failure in our existing paradigm to explain the physical universe. (Chapter 2 provides more detail on and discussion of these and other cosmological anomalies.)

To deal with the astonishing degree of fine-tuning present in the universe and to avoid evoking a cosmic intelligence, some cosmologists propose a very radical concept: a multiverse that contains an almost infinite number of possible universes, one of which has the physical constants and ratios that are just right for life to exist.²¹ Even though several well-known theoretical physicists have proposed this, there is no experimental or other information to support the multiverse concept. I see it as representative, though, of one of Kuhn’s precursors to a paradigm shift: new information forcing scientists to consider radically new concepts and theories.²²

New Universal Field Concept—a Potential New Paradigm

A new scientific paradigm provides a framework within which new concepts can be developed to explain anomalies as part of a more expansive description of reality. I believe that the top candidate to explain the anomalies in cosmology and many other scientific disciplines is a universal energy and information field. This was initially proposed by physicists such as David Bohm and Hal Puthoff to explain fundamental quantum phenomena. Lynne McTaggart, Ervin Laszlo, and other scientists have extended its application to help explain puzzles in other scientific disciplines such as evolutionary biology and the expression of the mind and consciousness. This field potentially represents a new framework and foundation for an expanded worldview of reality.

Laszlo calls this new field concept the Akashic field, while McTaggart’s physicists (primarily Hal Puthoff) use the term zero point field (ZPF). Both describe the same field concept, and in this book I either use the two interchangeably or refer to them together as the Akashic field/ZPF. The quantum physics community recognizes and accepts the ZPF as an energy field and the source of all quanta, but only a small minority accepts the concept that it is also an information source for our universe. This is to be expected when any radically new scientific concept or hypothesis is put forth; the scientific trail blazers are never numerous. Max Planck, a famous early twentieth-century physicist, probably had a sense of its existence when, near the end of his life, he stated this in a speech:

There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. . . . We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.²³

Laszlo has superb capabilities for contributing to this new scientific worldview. I consider him a systems scientist: a person who can assimilate information from a wide range of disciplines and synthesize individual bits of information into a grander system vision and theory. Drawing on his 20 years of research and five more technical books, he wrote Science and the Akashic Field for the general public. In it, he summarizes key problems (anomalies) in four different scientific disciplines and presents new ideas and concepts to explain them—the central one being the Akashic field. He also argues that it provides an integrative, plausible solution for most of the intractable problems in each of the four scientific disciplines.

McTaggart was a working journalist when she wrote The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe. Her writing exhibits exquisite capabilities for investigation, synthesis, and communication. The book reflects her ability to forge personal and professional relationships with the frontier scientists who are conducting much of the new scientific research and developing theories to explain their findings. They have tutored her sufficiently on key aspects of their work to enable her to take the highlights of their original discoveries and weave them into a rich and compelling story. The integrated totality of their discoveries and how such discoveries support a new scientific worldview form a persuasive narrative, and she provides many references to basic research papers for those wanting to dig deeper.

Extraordinary Research Results

As I said earlier, Kuhn found that the impetus for a paradigm change sometimes comes from extraordinary research results that frame an anomaly and provide the requirements for such a shift in thinking. An example of this is the near-death research that provides evidence suggesting the survival of human consciousness and hints at the existence and nature of a spiritual realm. (I offer a detailed treatment of NDEs in chapter 5.)

Many scientifically trained medical doctors and psychologists are investigating the NDE phenomena in a systematic and scientific manner, and many, if not most, are convinced that there is enough cumulative evidence to refute the theory that the physical brain is the mind and that consciousness is a function only of the physical brain. This evidence represents a clear challenge to the mainstream paradigms and theories of psychology and medicine.

A revolution in thought concerning consciousness and spirituality could be colossal, potentially affecting many scientific disciplines because it would change basic views about many aspects of reality. As Kuhn describes, when a new paradigm is fundamentally different from the previous one, it necessitates a redefinition of the science. ²⁴ (But this does not necessarily invalidate all past accomplishments and models.²⁵)

Consider as an example the impact that the acceptance of NDE research, showing that consciousness can exist in nonphysical forms, would have on psychology and medicine. Since today’s psychological and medical paradigms deny or greatly minimize the significance of consciousness and spiritual factors as causative agents, both disciplines would require new paradigms—maybe the same one—to support the new concepts and theories of consciousness.²⁶ (More details provided in endnote.)

Another insight into the potential significance of NDE’s extraordinary research results is provided in a statement by Weinberg, a Nobel Laureate in physics, when he wrote, If it could be shown that there is any truth to any of these notions [referring to subjects such as telekinesis, astrology, precognition, channeling, and clairvoyance as 'would-be' sciences], it would be the discovery of the century, much more exciting and important than anything going on today in the normal work of physics.²⁷ He did not list NDEs, but I think he would have put them in with the other phenomena when he wrote that statement in 1992.

Bias and Resistance to Change

Resistance to change naturally rises within a culture when the status