Falling Apples

I've started rereading Many Lives, Many Masters, rereading Dr. Brian Weiss's first book. I wanted to revisit how he dealt with discovering the past lives and reconciled their existence with his materialist scientific background. He had never heard of reincarnation, when one of his patients, under hypnosis, started reporting events from past lives. Ever the academic, he turned to libraries and, looking for any information on the subject, he turned up a large body of work. Carefully research and documented and published in mainstream journals, this work varied, comes from people with impressive credentials, is unassailable on rational scientific grounds, and is almost completely ignored by the scientific community. Look for yourself. With the internet, now it's easier than every to look this stuff up. And it's all there, and more, and still "Does not exist" according to any science course, text book or mainstream compendium on the state of scientific knowledge in the 21st century.

What's going on here? I justification I've heard goes something like this: "This looks really great! But wait, if this was for real, everybody would be talking about it. But nobody's talking about it, therefore there must be something wrong with it and I won't talk about it either." Circular logic that creates and unacknowledged code of silence about anything that might upset the materialist applecart. (Research funding, don't you know, old boy. It's all about the money.) Apparently, Issac Newton was the last scientist capable of looking at a falling apple and willing to acknowledge the implications of that simple act.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake addresses this issue in this TED talk Rupert Sheldrake - The Science Delusion BANNED TED ... Once removed from the TED web site and now published on alternate locations. TED's decision to censor scientists that spoke against the status quo created quite a brouhaha, see TEDs Controversy – 3 Threatening Talks They Tried to Censor for that story.

There is a saying academic circles "Physics advances not discovery by discovery but funeral by funeral." Meaning that new controversial ideas cannot get any traction as long as there are famous and respected "mature" scientists who's position, reputation and ego threatened by them. Since in this case, pretty much every conservative group, including religions, are on the side of suppressing the information.

In a way, I guess that's kind of cool because it leaves room for the citizen scientist. Amateurs can do research and make discoveries without be blindsided by some big corporate or university research budget. So, for now, we amateurs rule the roost! 

Read for yourself. Foremost research on reincarnation: Dr. Ian Stevension.
Psychic research in general: Dr Dean Radin.