f this resistance to findings in parapsychology?
Culture of superstition regarding the weird supernatural?
Have most scientists thought of psychical phenomena as not being amenable to understanding because of the association of psi with the word 'spiritual'? This is the notification that natural science can not conceive of anything 'supernatural'. If so, it can hold out no hope of explaining such weird befits as spirits and a spiritual afterlife, in terms of a physical theory.
However, even though they do not claim to remotely understand the perplexing findings of quantum mechanics, this object does not seem to have stopped doctors in general accepting them.
Natural-minded orientation of science
We can certainly assume individual scientists have different philosophical beliefs concerning the nature of reality. Some may be dualists and consider that science and religion are concerned with different spheres of reality – the empirical and the spiritual. However many are probably monists believing that a variety of existing things can only be explained in terms of a single material reality – the one that can potentially be studied by science.
Emanuel Swedenborg scientist and spiritual philosopher, describes three discrete planes of the human mind. According to this view, when a person's higher planes of perception are open, he or she sees things in terms of spiritual perception such as the eternal purpose of the Divine. His theory continues, when only the lower plane is open, then the individual will just perceive life in terms of what is material and natural.
Such naturally-minded people will not believe in anything more because they can not think beyond that which is natural. They would say they are able to believe anything without sensory evidence or through factual knowledge.
Having a negative attitude due to knowledge
I would suggest that less educated people have a common-sense way of discerning what is true. This applies to such weird psychic experiences as intuitive hunches, distant healing and the sense of being stared at. On the other hand, the well-educated speech wherever psychic phenomena are even possible.
"It is a common and well-known fact that the learned have less belief than the simple in a life after death, and that in general they see Divine Truths less clearly than the simple do. they possess a greater abundance than others, with a negative attitude, and by this destroy in themselves any insight gained from a higher or more interior position. the world; for facts exist in the light of the world, and if they are not lit up by the light of heaven they bring darkness, however different it may seem to be to them. " (Emanuel Swedenborg, Heavenly Secrets )
In other words trying to fathom the mysteries of the universe without being open to the deeper side of life, is doomed to failure. As long as people are locked in controversy about whether parapsychological phenomena are real, then they can not possibly make any headway in understanding what is really going on in our weird universe.
Copyright 2014 Stephen Russell-Lacy