Gretchen and Loyd discuss why it is important for the scientific community to keep an open mind when considering paranormal studies.
Loyd Auerbach is a leading expert on parapsychology and is on the Board of Directors of the Rhine Research Center. He earned his B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Northwestern University and his M.S. in Parapsychology from John F. Kennedy University.
Loyd has authored multiple books on parapsychology, appeared on several television shows and documentaries regarding the paranormal, and teaches parapsychology at several universities across the country. His knowledge and experience of magic and mentalism, coupled with his background in Parapsychology and broad knowledge of other sciences has led a number of researchers to consult with him, especially with regard to laboratory controls and where the potential for psychic fraud has existed.
Gretchen O'Neal is a spiritual accountability and empowerment coach. She owns and operates www.cometoyourself.com. Come To Yourself provides unbiased, easily accessible information from the top scholars in the fields of transpersonal psychology and consciousness studies, coupled with personal insights from successful artists, musicians, and business professionals, to anyone looking to start their spiritual journey to discover and serve their soul's mission in life
Gretchen:
Hi, this is Gretchen from come to yourself.com with our series facts, not fiction, featuring a discussion about Paris psychology with Lloyd Auerbach, enjoy throughout, which you just mentioned though. One of the key words that you repeated was openness in the fields where openness is required. Could you, uh, explain a bit why that is so important when it comes to your psychology?
Loyd:
Yeah. In Western Western philosophy, the philosophy of science and in Western science and gym, mainstream science, uh, mainstream science has a real problem in general, with any idea that seems to go against, uh, the grain, uh, go against the, what they think they know. You know, there's an awful lot of scientists who, while they may not be religious, um, they are, are as one, uh, person in our field years ago said they were practitioners of scientism, dogmatic science, where, and you see examples of this throughout the history of science, where someone will say, we've learned all we possibly could learn about this subject. We don't, there's no other possibility here. And we hear that all the time.
Gretchen:
And then 50 years later, Oh, look what we found.
Loyd:
There's some challenges now with the big bang theory. Yeah. You know, even, even with all the evidence we have, there's some questions about what actually happened back then. So science is a process. Yes. There's a body of knowledge there, but you know, I'm always asked for proof of ESP or proof of ghosts. There's no proof in science. Yeah. It's proven, it's acceptance. There's acceptance in science. Now you can test a theory and show that it actually works. That's not necessarily proof because you can have an exception to that theory that you didn't know about that comes along. And then the language that's used is often a problem. Also, I, I, I sat through a press conference after Saul Perlmutter. One of the people who actually discovered dark energy or came up with that concept, uh, he won the Nobel prize and I was at the press conference at Lawrence Berkeley national lab. And he talked about how they came up with the idea about they were looking at the speed of the expansion of the universe. And they came up with the idea that there was this, this force or, or energy that was, and matter that essentially is missing from our concepts that we can't see or detect. And one of the reporters said, so what is dark matter? Dark energy is that just invisible energy? And he said, well, a lot of energy is invisible. No, we were in the dark. So we call the dark energy. I don't know. And he said something like, I don't know if it's dark or light or what, it's just, we don't know cause we're in the dark, but people have used that phrase now, you know, because of science fiction and because of other new speculation in very different ways than what you mentioned was, and the same with dark matter. Yeah. So, you know, it's really, you gotta be open to new ideas. Um, you can stick by your guns. You can have an idea, but if you're confronted with information that contradicts it, you need to change your, your opinion. Um, maybe not your belief though. I mean, I, I have specific beliefs about psychic phenomena and, and life after death and so on, but I may be wrong and I know I may be wrong. And if somebody can come up with a better explanation, that's not reaching further than we're reaching with our explanations. Then I'm happy to entertain those explanations. And for individual cases that we deal with, I do have to change my opinion, my initial hit, or even my initial conclusions based on new information that comes in.