Is Pseudoscience a Pejorative Term?

Pseudoscience is a favorite term to throw out against anything that suggests consciousness is foundational to reality. I am not saying that there is not pseudoscience at all. Rather, academic science uses pseudoscience as a pejorative to dismiss and ridicule aspects of paranormal phenomena that could be studied with at least a modicum of scientific rigor.

The materialist, physicalist paradigm and its accompanying dogma has discouraged and, in many cases, eliminated ideas that were important in times past. Much of humanity has been completely cut off from spirituality, and the aspect of being human which is a product of consciousness. This has been all because of not accepting things that cannot be falsified.

I am referring to phenomena such as near-death experiences, visitations of departed relatives, UFO encounters, especially human contact and abductions. I am also referring to shamanism and all mystical experiences. What kind of scientific examination could be used you may ask? Well, for one, self-reporting could be encouraged and not stigmatized.

Each of these phenomena lends themselves to providing data that could be analyzed by computers to find recuring similarities. They could be categorized in ways that statistical data could be used to identify the similarities. The problem is that there are not enough groups interested to take on this work, and it is in my view mostly because of scorn. I am quite certain that ancient civilizations that were philosophically advanced would take advantage of the opportunity to do the analysis made possible by technology.

I think that the current attitude is much more a reaction to religious dogma than anything else. Admittedly, especially in the western world, Orthodox Christianity has been controlling. In the United States Puritanical values have added to the rejection of anything spiritual. In Europe, the control of the Roman Church has had a similar effect.

In spite of this, spiritual and paranormal phenomena have been ubiquitous across all nations and cultures across the globe. The problem is that there have been too few attempts at understanding it and little if any innovation in developing methods of study. Further, all of the people who undertake study are ridiculed and called false science. That is what pseudoscience means.

Yet, within the ranks of theoretical physics, there is a plethora of hypotheses and theories that are many times hotly contested by others within the discipline. That seems to be okay but the minute that someone tries to link the strangeness of quantum mechanics to consciousness and spirituality they are ridiculed and accused of woo.

A glaring example of this is that the author Whitley Streiber has collected a group of stories in his book “The Communion Letters.” They are a few of the almost 200,000 letters he received after writing his book “Communion.” Once it was published, thousands of people from all over the world sent letters reporting similar experiences to the ones he included in the Communion book. According to Streiber the similarities were striking in a lot of accounts. It would take a lot of human power to examine all of the letters he received. His wife did a heroic job but was still only one person. Those personal stories could be analyzed in much more depth if there were more human and technological resources available.

A similar story was just recently published. It was a book entitled “The UFO of God” by Chris Bledsoe. Both he and Streiber report having contact with a non-human other-worldly female that presented esoteric information. Additionally, you have the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) that has collected and investigated thousands of stories over the years. It would be great if all of these stories could be collected and examined by a computer program that would identify similarities and present the data in a statistical format.

This represents merely one aspect of the many paranormal phenomena that are reported by individuals. More resources could be applied to near death experiences, NDE’s as well. Computer programs could be written that would categorize and correlate the information. While there are many doing this already, the number is too small in my view and more people should be interested in the investigation and the results.

Likewise, there are many cases of past life remembrances that need similar investigation. Some of these have been traced to events that can be verified. While I realize that it would be impossible to determine if someone was Napoleon or George Washington in a past life, there are many reports of more mundane lives that offer detail that could be analyzed and correlated to historical events.

We have used quantum mechanics to advance technology so much over the last one hundred and fifty years that it is a shame that we do not invest more time and resources into investigating these phenomena that have been reported throughout history. It could certainly make our lives richer, and to admit that there is a world of spirituality and consciousness that we do not understand does not mean that one has to believe in past religious dogma.

I believe that consciousness is fundamental and foundational and if that is true, the more we explore that aspect of reality, the better we as the human race will adjust to the dimension that we currently occupy, and the more positively we will affect our individual lives.