Controversies and Viewpoints Read online

  Pierre Janet20 has studied the case of a stigmatic named Madeleine, which he presents in his book De l’angoisse à l’extase.21 Following extensive meditations on Christ’s crucifixion, Madeleine displayed stigmata that consisted in the presence of excoriations on the palms of her hands, her feet, and her left breast. The inquiry showed that ‘Madeleine often sank into crises of ecstasy which kept her absolutely motionless for hours on end, with her feet crossed and fists clenched. One thus understands that the great pressure exerted by the limbs could indeed have caused natural excoriations in precisely the right places. And this occurred all the more easily since, generally speaking, the state of ecstasy surfaced on the eve of her period, at a time when circulatory issues were accentuated’.

  This is where one touches upon the problematic of the pathological manifestations of faith, upon those ‘inferior forms of mysticism’ to which Philippe de Félice22 dedicated a first-rate series of books: Poisons sacrés, ivresses divines23 (A. Michel, 1947), and L’énchantement des danses et la magie du verbe24 (A. Michel, 1957).

  The procedures resorted to by fakirs are of a simpler nature. Those who climb ‘sword ladders’ make sure that the previously-sharpened blades are obliquely positioned and bevelled. By contrast, those that lie upon a bed of nails need not even take such precautions:

  It is all too easy to understand that if a man whose actual weight is, say, seventy kilos places his body upon a hundred nails, each nail will only support 700 grams of weight and the resulting force will not suffice to ensure the penetration of what is often a more or less flexible nail with a slightly blunt tip.

  The skill displayed by manipulators is immense, but credulity also intervenes in the process. Those that Mr Tocquet calls ‘imaginative interpreters’ are, at their own expense, the most loyal allies of all ‘magi’ and ‘clairvoyants’. Their good faith never fails, and their enthusiasm makes them fierce propagandists. It was La Fontaine25 who once remarked: ‘Man is of ice when it comes to the truth, but of fire when it comes to lies’. In 1935, a Parisian doctor name Louis Couderc sent a randomly chosen number of correspondents a ‘prediction’ bulletin (whose contents were identical in all cases). It did not take long for him to receive an entire mass of mail fraught with statements along the following lines: ‘You have read my life as if it were a book’.

  Such credulity is closely connected to the Coué method26 and the astounding powers of both suggestion and autosuggestion. It is, for instance, possible to make someone that is allergic to milk sick by making them drink a glass of water but convincing them that it is actually milk that they are drinking. This is the vast domain of ‘psychological medicine’, ‘organic neurosis’ and placebo effects.27

  In 1903, René Blondlot, a distinguished professor of physics at the university of Nancy and a correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences, believed himself to have discovered mysterious rays which he baptised ‘N rays’ (thus named in honour of his own city of birth). These rays, whose actual properties he determined and whose wavelength he even managed to measure, became the focus of numerous scientific communications and hypotheses, each more stupefying than the last. Convinced of the existence of such rays, further scientists took turns contributing and bringing countless clarifications to the topic. It took several years for people to acknowledge the fact that ‘N rays’ have never existed outside their inventor’s own imagination.

  In 1958, France was said to be home to an estimated 40,000 healers, compared to 38,000 doctors. Nowadays, the estimates are of about 60,000 astrologists and ‘clairvoyants’ but barely 44,000 priests. Such ‘magical’ activities are not subject to legal punishment.

  In 1950, a certain Georges Roux, who worked as a deputy inspector at the mail sorting facility of the Avignon railway station, discovered that he was actually ‘Christ reincarnate’. Shortly afterwards, he founded the Universal Christian Church and established his identity as the ‘Christ of Montfavet’; but the Pope refused to acknowledge him as such. He thus chose to become a healer, banning his disciples from resorting to a doctor’s assistance: ‘If a sick person dies, it is because the Lord has willed it so’. Over a period of six years, Roux managed to convert a total of 6,000 people but was ultimately condemned following several deaths in his own entourage.

  Paranormal Phenomena

  The entire issue lies in ascertaining whether, in the final analysis, all events declared ‘paranormal’ are the result of mistakes, illusions or hoaxes.

  There are numerous authors that affirm this, beginning with Jean Rostand,28 who writes:

  Unless proven wrong, I consider all physical phenomena such as the remote moving of objects, levitation, materialisation and so on to be no more than vulgar hoaxes. As for mental phenomena, including the transmission of thoughts or telepathy, premonition, clairvoyance, etc., they all seem to be, depending on the case, either ascribable to pure coincidence or to fraud, regardless of whether the latter is committed consciously or not. (Science fausse et fausses sciences.29 Gallimard, 1958)

  According to Mr Robert Imbert-Nergal,30 ‘never in over twenty centuries have occult sciences succeeded in providing us with as little as a handful of phenomena that can be reproduced independently of the observer, the location and the circumstances in which the activity is conducted. This generalised deficiency suffices to ruin, once and for all, the pretension of paranormal phenomena to be classified as scientific facts’ (in Les sciences occultes ne sont pas des sciences.31 Ed. Rationalistes, 1959).

  And here is what Mr Guy Fau32 affirms:

  One must never stop repeating that of the thousands of experiments that have been carried out, every single one, beyond any and all exceptions, has allowed us either to demonstrate the presence of trickery or, at the very least, to establish the fact that, whenever serious monitoring took place, nothing occurred at all. (Les charlatans devant la justice33 )

  Mr Tocquet, who is part of the International Metapsychic Institute (an Institute that was founded in 1919 by physiologist Charles Richet, a Nobel prize winner), begs to differ. An uncompromising adversary of all charlatans, he nonetheless presents himself as an ‘ardent defender of metapsychics’ and declares that ‘authentically paranormal phenomena do indeed exist’.

  Such was once the viewpoint espoused by Alexis Carrel,34 William Crookes (the inventor of cathodic rays), Paul Broca,35 Richet himself, and Julian Huxley.36 Today, the same conviction is adhered to by Arthur Koestler, as well as many other American and Soviet scientists.

  Very recently, psychologist Hans J. Eysenck (Planets, Stars and Personality, in New Behaviour, 1975, pages 246 to 249), who based his claims on the works of Michel and Françoise Gauquelin (Songes ou mensonges de l’astrologie.37 Hachette, 1969), allowed himself to assert the following: ‘It seems certain that the time of the year which coincides with one’s date of birth is intimately connected to each person’s personality’. An abnormally high number of sport champions and military figures, for instance, are apparently born ‘under Mars’, whereas most actors and scientists are allegedly born respectively ‘under Jupiter’ and ‘under Saturn’. If one is to believe Mr Eysenck, who is anything but a credulous man or a mystic, the likelihood that such a phenomenon could be attributed to mere coincidence is less than one in a million.

  In an entirely different field, some interesting electrophysiological experiments have been conducted upon certain great mystics when in a state of ecstasy. The EEG (electroencephalogram) revealed an unwavering permanence of Alpha waves in their bodies, which are characteristic of a ‘calm state of mind’ (unlike Beta waves, which relate to an ‘attentive state of mind’): as long as the trance lasted, no arrest reaction (a passage from Alpha to Beta waves) took place, regardless of what stimulations were introduced.

  This is what Mr Aimé Michel38 writes on the topic:

  When a yogi (or a zazen) is submitted to various tests which, by mobilising attention, cause an arrest reaction in every normal man, he remains unaffected. The Alpha condition persists as if nothin
g were wrong. This result is obtained not only in the area of the temples, the occiput and the parietal bones, but through all other electrodes as well — the Alpha mode invades the brain in its entirety, and the latter thus finds itself in a completely idle state. The fact that such a state can persist in spite of all external stimulations, even the most dramatic ones, proves that all the stimulations are voluntarily shut down before reaching the cerebral cortex, which acts as the centre of both our consciousness and our intellectual and voluntary operations. The mystic has acquired the ability to tame the nervous system which transmits the sensations that originate from our organs and usually reach the different specialised “areas” of the brain. (Le mysticisme,39 CAL-Retz, 1973; and Psychologie,40 November 1973)

  Non-Contradictory Determinism?

  The debate thus seems to have been reduced to a dialogue of the deaf, and one can wonder whether, ultimately, the problematic regarding the truthfulness and untruthfulness of parapsychological phenomena only seems unsolvable as a result of being inadequately presented. Whatever the case, such is the hypothesis proposed by Mr Marc Beigbeder41 in his essay on A Possible Logic in Paranormal Phenomena (in Nouvelle école,42 number 30, Winter 1976–77).

  Mr Beigbeder begins by reminding his readers that every scientific fact only exists through a theory, and vice versa. At present, experimental theory is mainly based on the notion of statistical determinism. This determinism, however, is necessarily contradictory precisely because it is merely statistical. In our scientific language, the word ‘always’ only has absolute value for conventional reasons: it would be more accurate to use ‘almost always’ when highlighting all that is founded on statistics. Yet as soon as one considers (both monitorable and monitored) facts as a majority of events relating a certain theory, one must also acknowledge ‘event-driven regulatory exceptions, the rare structural counter-examples which, although acting as an exception to the dominant rule that has thus far been more or less exclusively formulated, still express a complementary antagonistic rule representing a minority of rare cases, one that has been “forgotten” or underestimated by the prevailing axiom and the manner in which it is outlined’. In other words, every event-based system rooted in statistical majority necessarily ‘bears within itself’ a minority of cases which, owing to the very presence of theory, serve as exceptions to the rule.

  Paranormal phenomena — among which one should further distinguish para-biological, para-physical and parapsychic phenomena in the strict sense of the word — could, if one believes Mr Beigbeder, correspond to such ‘exceptions’.

  This could account for one of the traits of paranormal phenomena, which Mr Robert Tocquet reminds us about using the following terms:

  Paranormal phenomena cannot be reproduced at will and are, as a result of this, eminently suspicious whenever presented in a constant and regular manner. (Meaning that they are not reproducible due to their actual ‘minority’ status with respect to theory.)

  This would also explain why it is as impossible to prove such phenomena using current scientific theories as it is to reject them in the name of scientific fact. Mr Beigbeder remarks:

  And yet it is into our current scientific understanding that the advocates of paranormal phenomena attempt to incorporate the latter, and it is above all by means of our contemporary scientific instruments, in application of known scientific calculations, that they strive to establish such phenomena. We must free ourselves of this deadlock. And the best means to achieve this lies undoubtedly in putting forward novel theoretical proposals, proposals that could, with the help of innovative devices whose construction they would foster, either be authenticated or discredited.

  Due to its focus on large numbers and averages and its resulting adoption of a global and probability-based shape, statistical determinism lacks the ability to evaluate the truthfulness or untruthfulness of cases that are necessarily exceptional. It is, furthermore, founded upon a non-contradictory identity axiom. By definition, the very value of such an axiom is determined by the non-contradictory aspect of the object being studied. This is why it found itself rather mistreated following the emergence of the kinetic theory of gases43 and, most of all, the development of microphysics. And it is probably because it favours and even sublimates identity non-contradiction that current scientific logic ‘has implicitly proceeded to exclude in advance all such “exceptions” from science, on the basis of its own operational and verificatory possibilities; in actual fact, however, such “exceptions” represent the few regulatory and contradictory manifestations of a system which could perhaps incorporate so-called paranormal phenomena’. Consequently, Mr Beigbeder believes it necessary to reconsider the notion of statistics and proposes, in harmony with the conceptions of Stéphane Lupasco,44 the creation of new kinds of calculations characterised by contradictory axioms and ‘the logic of the included third’;45 calculations with the capacity to account for and verify exceptions as a minority that contradicts the norm, thus defining paranormal phenomena as ‘a relative minority-based excess’.

  It would thus seem that numerous phenomena only appear to be ‘paranormal’ because they contradict the traditional conception of causality or the usual perspective founded upon the course of time. And yet the essential revolution brought about by quantum mechanics has consisted in the sidelining of the old concept of causality. As highlighted by Mr Rémy Chauvin46 (‘Physique et Parapsychology’,47 in Question de, issue number 13, third trimester 1976), not only does microphysics prove that it is the observer that creates science, but that it is in fact man that creates the universe; meaning that ‘in the absence of observers, there would be no phenomena at all.’48 This paradoxical remark raises the issue of our universe’s organisation ‘prior to’ the appearance of man. Precisely, however, ‘there is nothing truly accurate that can be termed as being “before” or “after” in Relativity or quantum physics; it all depends on one’s reference system, on one’s position in space-time in relation to the phenomenon itself.’ If we thus were, for instance, to define precognition as a ‘memory of the future’ (a situation where the brain perceives events that will only impact it in the future), we would have a better understanding of the words of Olivier Costa de Beauregard, the head of research at the CNRS49 and the author of Deuxième principe de la science et du temps:50

  I wholeheartedly wish for parapsychology to become a genuine science so that light can be shed upon the results obtained in quantum physics.

  Only by breaking with traditional logic and the linear conception of time will we stand some chance of grasping paranormal phenomena.

  *

  Les dessous de l’impossible,51 an essay by Robert Tocquet. Ed. Spéciales, 280 pages.

  *

  Princeton Gnosis

  They long to resemble the sages that once belonged to the schools of the waning Antiquity, to be akin to the Epicureans52 and the Stoics,53 while simultaneously mistrusting both Marx54 and Freud55 and abhorring Wilhelm Reich56 and Marcuse57 . What they seek is a new kind of deism and perceive ‘ideologists in the same manner as monks once viewed Church priests: as being lost in the world’.

  These bizarre individuals are all American academics and scientists. In a book bearing the enigmatic title La gnose de Princeton,58 Mr Raymond Ruyer, a professor at Nancy University, labels them ‘neo-Gnostic’.

  During the first century of our era, Gnostics affirmed that the world was dominated by the Spirit; that the Spirit faced (or rather created) its own resistance and opposition, namely Matter; and that it was through knowledge that man could attain salvation.59 (By contrast, the Church Fathers put the libido sciendi on the same footing as other forms of concupiscence.)

  The new gnosis adopts the affirmations of the old one but attempts to conform them to positive science. It states that the Spirit forms Matter, ‘representing its sole and unique fabric’; that no material reality could precede consciousness; and that consciousness is both the ‘place’ and the envelope that constitutes mat
erial reality.

  The World Is Intelligent

  Although this reference to gnosis dates back to 1969, the movement itself is older than that. It actually surfaced around 1963–64, among both Princeton University Researchers and those of the Pasadena Astronomical Centre, and asked ‘anti-paradoxical questions’ such as: ‘When breathing, do we still take in air molecules inhaled by Julius Caesar at the time of his assassination?’ (The answer is: ‘Yes, probably dozens of them whenever we inhale’.)

  In the eyes of the Gnostics, there is both a ‘place’ and an ‘underside’ to the universe: through observation, all that we can perceive is the outer part of the universe, which is embodied by its underside, and not its ‘internal consciousness’, which is its location. Vulgar materialism consists in thinking that ‘everything is external’, that ‘everything is an object’; in short, in considering the universe to be the actual place. We cannot, however, truly get to know a universe to which we ourselves actually belong. Man can no more be reduced to a mere description of himself than a flower ever could; or even the world, for that matter.

  On the other hand, the neo-Gnostics assert that the universe constitutes one whole; that all the phenomena taking place within it are solidary. The organisation of the world is the very condition of its existence: a ‘purely chaotic’ universe could never exist. In this regard, the new gnosis is connected to the philosophical tradition which has, since the days of Leibniz,60 claimed that life can only be interpreted and conceived of as part of the relations that tie it to our universe’s entirety. It is a sentiment that is also encountered with Giordano Bruno,61 as well as Shaftesbury, Herder, Goethe, Schelling and Schleiermacher.