Challenging orthodox science

Bob Rickard praises an intelligent and informed scholar who is bravely striking at the roots of how science should tackle provocative anomalies

Radical Transformation

The Unexpected Interplay of Consciousness and Reality Imants Barušs

Imprint Academic 2021 Pb, 228pp, £14.95, ISBN 9781788360418

The late William Corliss was very fond of a particular quotation from the 19th-century psychologist William James. At the front of his Sourcebook anthologies (of anomalies reported in scientific journals), Corliss would put this passage:

“Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dustcloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to … Anyone will renovate his science who will steadily look after the irregular phenomena, and when the science is renewed, its new formulas often have more of the voice of the exceptions in them than of what were supposed to be the rules.”

In the 19th century, the venerable academy of anthropologists and historical folklorists was confronted by a new breed of scholar more interested in “fieldwork”, recording the living experiences of shamans, mediums, spiritualists and the like. Where the old archivists and cultural revisionists were content to codify sagas and legends, the new took an active part in firewalking, telepathy or the use of trance, frequently discussing the apparent “reality” of parapsychological and psychical phenomena. The animosity – including character assassination of opponents of either party – became so notorious that Scottish anthropologist and folklorist Andrew Lang wrote a scathing commentary, calling it the “War of Two Sisters”. Of greater interest, he describes how the conflict gave rise to the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, backed by many of the world’s top scientists and thus reconciling the different approaches.

Similar rifts have opened on the fronts of other, different fields of science and have failed to be resolved as the “old guard” digs in and firmly rejects, a priori, the proponents of the new. One of these – discussed here by Imants Barušs – is currently in progress as orthodox anthropologists (who like to keep the subject at arm’s length) are closing ranks against their fellows who argue that the religious and mystical experiences triggered by entheogens (consciousnessaltering substances) can only be fully understood by directly experiencing the drugs themselves.

Behind such animosities is the entrenchment of materialistic physicalism in the academic establishment, creating a formidable obstacle to any serious (even scientific) discussion about mental, psychical or mystical phenomena. It is a brave orthodox scientist who risks his tenure and the fury of his colleagues, who sheds the biases of his profession and is willing to engage with the investigation and theorising of truly profound anomalies.

Barušs is such a hero – an accredited academician who is striking at the very roots of precisely how orthodox science should tackle provocative anomalies. He is a psychology professor at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario, an editor of the Journal of Scientific Exploration and a founder of the Society for Consciousness Studies, with many books and papers behind him, and he firmly believes that a new approach to physicalism is both necessary and not beyond contemporary science.

Within a few opening paragraphs, Barušs goes directly to the heart of the problem. He “takes up several substantive issues that arise in the new academic landscape supporting the study of consciousness, moving away… from materialist versions of reality toward some yet-tobe-articulated post-materialist interpretation”. He declares that, with colleagues, he has reviewed the empirical evidence and is certain that some version of consciousness is not a by-product of brain activity, that it is not confined to a physical locality (i.e. has non-local properties including “the ability to perceive and act at a distance”), and that it appears to survive the death of the body.

He begins with a short critique of the current theories of consciousness and in clear, understandable prose, explains why they are incomplete. He then introduces a scheme of at least 10 significant variations of consciousness. Existing theories of the ordinary waking state are first shown to be wholly inadequate. The remainder – including hypnosis, sleep, dissociation, drug-induction, transcendency, impending death and others – are shown to be distinct states with their own phenomenologies and therefore worthy of much further engagement.

Fortean topics such as as outof-the-body abduction scenarios are freely discussed here; but, for once, this is by an intelligent and informed scientist eager to find elements worthy of serious investigation. He understands and explains precisely why science is wrong to exclude them. Barušs’s conclusion is that human consciousness itself is sleepwalking towards planetary disaster if we can’t learn to understand our own mind and how it creates and uses a protean, non-local, multiphasic “reality” – the eponymous “radical transformation”.

This is definitely not hysterical waffle from a crank – we’ve seen enough of those at Fortean Towers to know the difference. Here is a lucid, rational and surprisingly readable dissection of precisely why today’s materialistic science and medicine have failed us in crucial areas. This deceptively modest book may be one of the most important steps on the way to a better understanding of the many genuine mysteries of the human mind. Forteans, do not pass it by!

★★★★★

Anthropologists and folklorists took an active part in firewalking, telepathy or the use of trance