Proceedings of the
SECOND INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PARANORMAL RESEARCH
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY, FORT COLLINS, USA
JUNE 1-4, 1989
Julika Kiskos: International Association for Alternative Therapies, Sao Paulo, Brazil
CONCEPT OF REALITY
Some years ago I was invited to give a lecture to the members of the Psychiatry and Psychology Depts. of one of the leading Brazilian universities. During my conference, I touched upon the subjects of ASCs (Altered States of Consciousness) and the possibilities of alternative methods of treatment that could help the adaptation of patients with PSI capacities.
At the end, many professionals approached me to clarify specific aspects of my talk. I never forgot a 35 year-old, good looking psychiatrist, who congratulated me and said that he could relate much of what I had said to his schizophrenic patients, particularly in reference to telepathy and precognition. After mentioning some of his personal experiences with his clients, he commented on how unfortunate it was to have their sensitivity anihilated by the indiscriminate administration of drugs.
I enthusiasticallyreplied something like "wonderful, so now you can look for new ways of approaching them", when, to my surprise, he stated that he would not engage in this field because it would require a whole revision of what he had learned and practised so far.
Although this kind of attitude can be found in almost all fields of knowledge, it certainly is more frequent in the area of mental health.
ASCs- whether adapted or disadapted- challenge our sensorial logic, our rational mind and confront us all the time with alternate modes of perception and levels of reality.
This can be an extremely conflicting experience for professionals who have not been exposed to interdisciplinary views and approaches during their training. Let's take as an example a student of Clinical Psychology, who will work as a psychotherapist in the future.
In most countries he will learn a Psychology that has remained closed within the theoretical model of Universe proposed by Classical Physics (i.e., a three-dimensional space, absolute time, causality and determinism).
There is a historical explanation for this fact. In its beginnings, Psychology strived hard for respectability as a Science.
Aiming to attain precision and objectivity, it adopted the parameters of Newtonian Physics. It was not for other reason that consciousness, mind and other subjective concepts were banned from this Psychology- after all, they were not measurable variables.
So, Psychology did not keep pace with the evolution of Modern Physics, Parapsychology and related sciences, and psychologists hardly ever question its basic assumptions further.
Modern Physics has demonstrated that the model proposed by Classical Physics became limited because it only describes a certain level of reality- the microscopic level- perceived through our five senses. It is not suitable, however, to describe the phenomena taking place at sub-atomic levels and which escape our perception- and often, I would say, our logical thinking.
Parapsychology has been progressing slowly but steadily since 1882, when the Society for Psychical Research (London) started the scientific study of the so-called paranormal phenomena. If more than one hundred years later some scientists are still trying to discredit this field by using positivistic argumentation, one can only imagine the difficulties those early researchers had to study phenomena which conflicted with the principles of Classical Physics. Several categories of phenomena studied have become specialized areas of research which, when compared, form a network of evidences pointing to alternate modes of perception and levels of reality.
On the other hand, recent data and evidences produced by experiments in the area of Psychoneuroimmunology, placebo, and the Physics of consciousness in general are demonstrating the extraordinary potentialities of mind. Concerning the brain/ mind relationship, Wilder Penfield made the following comment some years ago (Penfield, 1978, page 79-80): "And yet the mind seems to act indepently of the brain in the same sense that a programmer acts independently of his computer, however much he may depend upon the action of that computer for certain purposes."
Psychotherapists are daily confronted with perceptions and subjective experiences of clients that do not fit in the model dictated by current Psychology and Psychopathology. Since this model relies on sensorial reality to define what is real or not and- as a consequence- what is suggestive of pathology or not, the unfamiliarity with psi phenomena can, at times, lead the psychotherapist to commit mistakes concerning the evalutaion, prognosis and treatment of certain psychological disorders (Kiskos and Samuel, 1979, page 342-346).
Although this is not the rule, the cases selected are clear cut, almost didactic examples of psi interference.
PSI AS A COMPONENT IN SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDERS
