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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Shamanism and Belief with James McClenon
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Shamanism and Belief with James McClenon James McClenon, PhD, is a former sociology professor, licensed clinical social worker, civil engineer, and researcher. James is author of Deviant Science: The Case of Parapsychology,
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Book three in the new thinking allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP are we really Alone? Now available on Amazon.
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You can now Download a free PDF copy of issue number 8 of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinking.org thinking allowed conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Hello and welcome. I'm Emmy Vadnais, co host with Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is Shamanism and Belief with my guest James McLennan, who is a researcher and former sociology professor, licensed clinical social worker and civil engineer. James has been a guest several times on New Thinking Allowed. He is author of four books, Deviant the Case of Parapsychology, Wondrous Events, Foundations of Religious Belief, Wondrous Healing, Shamanism, Human Evolution and the Origin of Religion and the Entity Letters. A Sociologist on the Trail of a Supernatural Mystery. He is co author with Mohammed Khodiarifard of An Iranian and American Veteran Exchange Stories and Discuss inner peace. We were 13. If you enjoy this program, please like subscribe, press the Bell icon and share. James is joining us from Chesapeake, Virginia. Now I'll switch over to the Internet video. Welcome, Jim. It is a great pleasure to be back with you on New Thinking Allowed today.
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Thank you.
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Today we're going to explore your field research with shamans, where you traveled around to many countries and was a participant observer with many shamans. To get us started, how did you become interested in this topic?
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I was working on a PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland, and I completed that in 1981, and I had studied parapsychology, the field of parapsychology. And that had resulted in people contacting me. And I was doing haunting investigations at the time. And then I was looking for my first job and the only job I was able to get was with the University of Maryland Asian Division. And so I ended up in Japan, Korea, Philippines, Okinawa, and I spent I was just curious about what was going on, what were I refer to them as shamanic practitioners. I'd known Michael Winkle, and we were just both men, young men at the time. The word shamanism refers to people who are associated with hunter gatherer societies. So these are, these aren't shamans per se, but they're shamanic practitioners. They, they go into trance. And so I ended up spending most of my weekends traveling around and hanging out with traumatic practitioners. So I got 11 cases from the Philippines, nine cases from Okinawa, four cases from Sri Lanka, three cases from Taiwan, three from Korea, two from Taiwan one from People's Republic of China and 17 from the USA. And that's my population of cases that I investigated at the time. I looked at the anthropological research, and there's an issue as to is there really a proper category of shamanism? Because there's a huge cultural variation. There's some anthropological observers say that there isn't really a category. This is just something that's been fabricated. So. So I just took notes for. From 1982 to 1986, I probably accumulated around 1,000 pages of field notes. And I really wasn't unclear what the central theme was, because there's such a real wide variation in cases, in the cultures. Buddhist, Hindu, shamantic, indigenous ideologies, just a huge variation in practices. I remember coming back in the US and thinking people were saying, well, what'd you find out? You know, I had a lot of strange, interesting experiences and stories, but I wasn't. I wasn't clear what did I actually find out. But when looking at these people's biographies, there's one characteristic that seemed to be very consistent, and that was anomalous experience. Every single practitioner had anomalous experiences. That history of anomalous experiences. So that's what triggered that interest. That seemed to be the connection in my mind was anomalous experiences. And I wasn't sure exactly what that term means. In fact, in those days, I don't think I ever used that term. But I wanted to create categories. Sometimes the experiences involved hearing voices or seeing apparitions or extrasensory perception. Parapsychologists were studying ESP and pk, extrasensory perception and psychokinesis. And I had. In my haunting investigations, I had some personal experiences. And I thought, well, by hanging out with these people and by watching their. Watching them gauge in their healing, I would see more. But that wasn't really the case. I didn't see miracles. Except with Masawaki Kyoto. Okay. I had interacted at the time, I was in my 30s, and he was a teenager. I think he was about 19 at the time. And he was a metal bender, a Japanese metal bender. And so I had read up about the research on pk and so when I got to Japan, I went to his house and I used to hang out with him, and he'd do metal bending, and I had cameras and a tape recorder and all this stuff. I had had one experience where I had held a spoon, and it seemed to have been to my hand, but it was very, very slow bending. But I put it down on the table in front of me, and it still continued to bend. And that was very startling that it convinced me that there was this psychokinesis was possible. So I decided I wanted to try to prove it scientifically. That's what the parapsychologists wanted to do. So they had done experiments with this nitronol wire. It's a wire that, that if you bend it and then you heat it, it'll return to its original shape. There have been people, I think one was Byrd and there's another, some other researchers, a psychic practitioner had bent the wire. And then when they heated it, it didn't return to its original shape. So it seemed like some kind of anomalous process was involved. So he would be holding a spoon and I would look away and then it would bend. And so it seemed. And I had talked to the parapsychologists and some of them had mentioned that there's kind of a hiding quality to the phenomena, that it was very, very difficult to prove it perfectly. Macro PK had not been established. There didn't seem to be exist videos of it being performed that proved that it occurred. So I was going to try to do this. I got a piece of this nitromol wire and I super glued it to the edge of a spoon. And I'd done a bunch of experiments to see how much it had to bend before it wouldn't. You know, oftentimes when I heated it, it would return almost to the shape. So I had established a certain criteria. I think it was 1/16 of an inch that it had to. If it did more than that, then I would consider, you know, when I heated it and it didn't return to its shape, then I would consider that to be something worth publishing, you know. So I remember he did the bend and it was a very good bend. And I put it on the table and the darn thing returned almost back to its original shape. And exactly the amount that I had established wouldn't allow me to make any kind of certainty with it. So that was my first encounter with what people refer to as the trickster effect. When you're looking for psychic phenomena, there's a tendency for it to have kind of hide from you. A lot of polar guys do that too. The object will move, but not when you're glancing away.
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So it sounds like you differentiate a shaman from a shamanic practitioner. If you could share a little bit more about that distinction. And when I think of a shaman or somebody who has maybe that term, it seems that it is someone who works in the invisible or spirit world to have a hopefully in most cases, a positive impact or a healing impact on somebody. And it sounds like when you're mentioning this metal bending, that you were in the process of establishing how people can have effects across what we consider space and time in the physical world.
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We're trying to be scientific and establish the possibility of people can do that. And a spiritual healer is thought to be doing that. But I was not establishing hypotheses. I was a sociological observer. So I was just. We go out and we interview people and we take notes. Okay. So I was doing that with Masawaki, and I was hanging out with his family. He had a sushi. His parents had a sushi restaurant. And that it was a fun way to do research. And it was an informal research. Now, if you want a formal definition of shamanism, I'll give you a shamanism, a spiritual practice that involves a practitioner interacting with the spirit world through altered states of consciousness. But we have terms we're not really defining perfectly, like exactly what is the spiritual world and what is consciousness? The philosophers haven't figured this out yet. So I would go to someplace like the Philippines, and there's people who are seeking clients. Particularly north of Manila is an area where there's a lot of spiritists there. And so I travel up to that area and just start talking to people and watch them watch psychic surgeries, for example. And I must have seen about a thousand psychic surgeries because I do it every weekend. And astonishing to look at. It looks like people were using their bare hands to enter the surgeries. But later I talked with James Randi. I looked at his videos, and it's something that can be simulated through sleight of hand. And after I came to that understanding of how sleight of hand works, like, although I'm switching my hand one side to the other, you can only see one side at a time. So a very skillful practitioner can manipulate objects and conceal objects in the hand. And I came to the realization that's pretty much how it's done. You know, there's a tradition in the Philippines for the local indigenous healers to use sleight of hand. And there's practitioners called bula bulas. And I went down to Sequihor island, which is just kind of a center of Filipino, I think. I don't know whether I'm pronouncing it perfectly correctly. But, you know, there's psychic practitioners, there's a center for them. So down there, I saw some of these bulubula working. And I was with a French anthropologist at the Time and he had an affected thumb and the bulabula. Put a glass of water over top and blew through a tube into the water. And the water became cloudy. Then he blew again. The water became clear. And then there's a bone with a cross carved in it. So he assured me this was done through sleight of hand. And when you look closely at the surgery, you can see ways that the practitioner is able to load their hands up with some substance. I think most of the time it's chicken guts. And then they seem to extract it. And it's just not unusual within practice to engage in a certain degree of deception in a lot of cultures. Now there's a wide variation among cultures for this huge variation.
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You also experienced a psychic surgery. What was that experience like for you?
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When I first started looking at it, I thought, I can't figure out how this is done, you know. But then after a little bit of guidance, I began to see how it's done. So I thought I would have one, you know, just because it's a little bit scary. I mean, they're supposedly cutting. So I talked to this. I knew these practitioners on a first name basis. They were very friendly to me. And the guy, I said, I think I would like to have a treatment. He said, well, what's your symptom? And it involved traveling long distances by these tough bus rides. I said, well, I'm feeling really tired. And so he kind of went into transplant. Well, you. Something's wrong with your heart. You need a heart surgery. So I laid on the table and they did pulled something out on my heart and I felt a lot of pressure. And a photograph is taken and it looks kind of interesting, like something's being extracted. And I was excited. And afterwards I felt elevated mood because it's not often you have a heart surgery, but there's a little bit of bruising. And they had really pushed hard on the chest, you know, so there's a slight amount of bruising. And that was my adventure with going to a practitioner. I've been to a number of practitioners and watched have friends receive treatment. And we've even done semi controlled kinds of experiments. Having a lot of, you know, people going to practitioners to see what happens.
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When you had your psychic surgery, I gather, did they use any type of anesthesia and did you have an incision that then like healed up with a. That had like a healing process to it?
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The surgeries in Brazil are there. There are some times where they do make incisions and they can remove tumors. And I Think they can conceal, like, pieces of mica on their fingernails, and they can make decisions. They can. Can remove things. They can do eye surgeries. And they're also really interested in what I've learned from watching other people.
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But I'm just curious, did you receive any anesthesia?
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Oh, no, there's no anesthesia involved. It's something that there are crowds of people seeking treatment, and so the surgeon doesn't have much time, or if the surgeon does take a lot of time, then he can't really treat very many people. And the crowds are. You know, there's a heartbreaking quality to this. People with cancer are seeking treatment, and it's not very frequent that they receive benefits or they perceive psychological benefits, but it's not very frequent that the cancer is cured. Now, people came to me with documentation saying, oh, look, I'm diagnosed with cancer, and I have been cured. But I'm a sociologist. I don't have medical expertise. Expertise. But I. But I did see, I had. I spent hours hanging out with people with severe medical problems, and I never experienced. I never saw a miraculous event. And that's in a lot. There's a lot of different places. Taiwan, People's Republic of China, you know, Okinawa, Korea. When you talk to people in an audience, you will come across a lot of positive things. A lot of people have had extremely positive experiences, and oftentimes they become part of the healer's entourage, a collection of people who are around the healer with remarkable stories. And then every country has its own indigenous problems. Like, for example, in the Philippines, some people are plagued by kind of like a witchcraft curse. Something's been buried in their yard, and the practitioner will go and dig up the thing and then do a ritual and fix the problem like that. There's different ways of treatment in a place like Okinawa. Oftentimes the problem is one's ancestors. The problem. Say the parents come to the practitioner, and the son isn't studying for his exams properly, and they're very upset about this. And the practitioner will go into trance and say, oh, it's your great grandfather is causing this problem, because you're not performing rituals properly at the home shrine. Most Okinawans are modern people, and so a lot of them have stopped doing that. So the practitioner is saying, that's the problem. So in a way, there's a kind of a Freudian treatment, like the family has to gather together, and then they're supposed to apologize. We're sorry that we haven't been doing. It's not the son's fault. You see, so the pressure's not on the son, but they have like, buy a canned ham or something and do all this praying, and then they'll. They'll have a feast and eat the canned ham. So the family. So like a family therapy session that they conduct on their own. We can see how this could be effective. Rather than telling son, you've got to study, you've got to study, and he really can think of better things to do. They're focusing attention on something else, the family tradition.
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Yeah. Well, that seems to also connect with modern psychological therapy where it focuses on the family systems and how people's. Whether it's genetic or behavioral characteristics that are passed on to the next generation. That can really be a family wound that needs healing.
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In Korea, they have what's known as coots, and a similar family will come. And I observed a ceremony, which it was like a simulated poltergeist event. So I saw this connection between spontaneous experiences and the practitioner threw objects across the room and just barely missed these people who were hiding under a blanket. A lot of percussion instruments were playing during dramatic treatment. And this was going to help improve the family's luck. They'd have experienced over a string of very unfortunate events are going to cure this problem. Then another thing, one thing I observed. A lot of these treatments involve some kind of dramatic performance of something that you wouldn't think would be possible. The going into trance involves that coming up with information that you wouldn't think would be available or putting the hands on someone and radiating energy from the hands. And in Korea, sometimes they prepare these chopper blades. I had a chance to really investigate this. They make them really, really sharp. And then the practitioner will stand on the blades and do a kind of dance on these super sharp chopper blades.
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So it really gets people's attention.
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Yes. Yeah.
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In fact, there was a woman who would defy normal pain thresholds. Can you share a little bit about her?
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Well, this is one of my favorite people, Willa Nassi. I was with my first wife at the time. We were just sitting in a park and wondering, how can we find my Thai skill? I always try to learn the language I'm in, but my Thai skills weren't really adequate to do really very good research. We're sitting in the park. How can we locate these people? This guy just walked past us in the park and he had a magazine under his arm. And I pointed to it, said, what's that? And it had an article about shamanic practitioners, and one of whom was this woman, Willa Nasi. And she lived in Bangkok. And so we both went out there and I made a number of visits to her. And she was somewhat famous at the time in Thailand and had even traveled to other countries doing these kind of performances. Now she had been a school teacher and I think her mother had died and that caused her to visit mediums. And because she wanted to talk to her mother and she found she could go into trance herself, okay? And so she would go into trance. And the neighbors and relatives found out about this and so they wanted to talk to their deceased relatives and they. And she seemed to be very, very successful at this. And so these trans personages helped her design this performance that she gave. And this doesn't fit. You know, in sociology we think the practitioner is socialized into the role through interacting with other practitioners. But this wasn't really what happened. And this is a repeating phenomenon observed a lot of times. Practitioners are socialized by the inner voices telling them what to do and how to perform. And her inner spirits, some of whom were kind of like Thai folk heroes, they had her do this performance. And so audience would gather on the weekends and she would start off telling them about the spirit world, which doesn't resonate well with Buddhism. It's not an important feature of Buddhism, but in Thailand there's a kind of synthesis between this spiritism belief and Buddhism. So this tells about the spirit world and she goes into trance. Then she sticks a skewers through her cheeks and through her tongue. And the people were laughing and I was saying, why are they laughing? And someone said, well, she's telling jokes. She's telling jokes about a spirit who likes women. Okay, so she's flirting with the middle aged women and this is some Thai general that has taken over her body. And so then she removes the skewers. There's no bleeding. It's a pain denial feat. And I found that's very common, particularly in Hindu in India and in Sri Lanka. There's a lot of pain. Denial feeds there. So it's something that does hold your attention, it captures your attention and so you're, you really are. And it stimulates the belief. And so I came to realize that this is very effective for hypnotic suggestions and placebo effects, as when you do it, when you do a performance like that, people are going to watch very intently and then the suggestions you provide take root and they can be very effective. That was a morning session. Then in the afternoon she gave a preaching. She preached about the tenets of Buddhism, about living a moral life. A lot of Times it means not drinking alcohol too much was important or not doing drugs too much was important. A lot of times people's problems were related to that or family issues, you know, and the proper behavior, telling the truth, things like that. And then she went into trance and she diagnoses people's problems, which is kind of like an extra sensory perception feat. But my Thai language skills weren't really adequate to evaluate that kind of thing. But then she heats up a red hot iron plate and she takes her bare foot, puts it on the red hot plate and then touches the infirm place on the person's body. And that's kind of a violation of time norms. The head is the closest to heaven and the foot's far away. So you don't want to point your foot or you don't want to touch. But this shocks people, I think. And a lot of people felt they had benefited from the service. But I saw, actually I got to know some of the audience members who came and people who had their women who had very severe arthritis in their hands. And I don't see any change. And other people had chronic disorders. I didn't. A lot of people are not have really experience zero effect. But there's a kind of a community that's established and you're surrounded by people who have had positive experiences. And so I could see that this is a, a pathway towards, you know, positive thinking and positive mental states. And now I've gotten to be an old man here, so I know a lot about this. You know, as you get old, you develop chronic medical problems and people, for example, cancer, some people will die and others live. What determines that? And we know there's this thing, mind body medicine. And so if you can use that strategy, you're going to improve people's survival rate. So then I came to the realization that this traumatic treatment, undoubtedly over time has had evolutionary impacts. And we human beings have shaped ourselves. Those who respond to shamanic treatment have survived, and those who don't had a lesser chance of survival. Survival. So that would explain why we're quite different from primates. We're not the same as chimpanzees. We have a capacity for symbolic treatment, for ritual healing. So I refer to this as the ritual healing theory.
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What role does fire walking play with these shamanic practitioners?
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That's something I wanted to find out because I was curious. What is it? What can you see? You know, when I was in Asia, what can you actually see? And I was working in Japan, I was teaching American military personnel at military Bases, sociology classes. And I learned that there's at Mount Takao, which is not that far from Tokyo, it's a train ride. The Buddhists were going to engage in a firewalk. Okay. And so when I look in the anthropological literature, there's firewalking all around the world, all through the South Pacific and through Greece and many different places. There's firewalking exhibitions and they're somewhat regular ceremonies. So I thought I'd go up and see one of these things. And this is a sect of Buddhism, the Shingon Buddhists. And they do this every year. The priests build this huge fire and people write down their infirmities or their requests on these special sticks and they throw it into the fire, you know, so problems are being dealt with by the fire. And then the monks, they rope, they break down the fire, a red hot coal bed, and the monks walk across it. Okay. Then we audience members are invited to follow them. Okay, so this is my chance. I'm not a person who is just an observer. I'm a participant observer. So I'm going to walk across this hot, red hot bed, you know. But I noticed that the monks all this. There have been about 40 monks walking across. They created pathways, so it looked like, okay, we'll be walking on hot ash, all right? And so I'm standing in line and I'm caught behind this old woman and she's not a very fast walker. And I remember looking at the monks and one of them looked me right in the eye and then he gave a command to the rest of them and they raked out the coal bed. So there wasn't any walking path. There was just this hot coal bed we go walking across. And you're supposed to make your mind free of thoughts. And I guarantee you my mind was free of all thoughts. I was just thinking.
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Don'T think about the hot coals.
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This woman's walking slowly, you know, I walked across and I did it, you know, like success, you know, so it's a remarkable experience. And it's a, it's a fundraising activity for the local shrine there. You know, they sell. Japanese are actually kind of secular minded, but they have a Shinto, I mean, they have a, you know, local Buddhist heritage. So that was a success. Okay. So then when I went down to Sri Lanka and continue this and really encounters astonishing practitioners, spiritual healer type events down there. But one down in Katagama, they do annual firewalking there and it's even more intense, the fire beds longer, hotter. And we spent a week preparing. And you have to wear special robes. People were very excited about this because I don't think a Westerner ever participated in this before. You have a special clothing and clothes and you have to take vows regarding vegetarian, no sex, proper diet, you know, no lying or, you know, moral like that. Early, early in the morning, we formed up and walked across the bed and was painful. You know, I found it. I found it painful. But everyone wanted me to go. The, the Hindu, they're both Hindus and Buddhists, they all wanted to go visit the different shrines in Thanksgiving. So I spent about an hour and a half visiting with the Hindus and visiting with the Buddhists. And everyone wants me to be within their group. And I was standing around, they're saying, how are you? And I said, well, I think I may have a problem. And I looked at my feet and the blisters were forming. And I went to, there's a first aid center and I met about one third of the other fire walkers were already there. So there's. And the various sadhus explain. Well, sometimes fire seems to be hotter than other times. So that was. So I was pretty severely burnt and took about three weeks or four weeks really to recover from that. But. So that gave me plenty of time to think about it. And we have in the Bible, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego went into the fiery furnace and they survived. And it's something to do with the mental state. And I began organizing my own. First. I practiced on my own and did a. Because I knew I could do it. I'd done it before. I walked across a 12 foot bed and built hotter fires. And I began running firewalking workshops with American military personnel and with Okinawan people and do firewalking. And then I talked to people who are more skillful and they said, well, you have to walk evenly. It is a kind of gymnastic feat. There's skeptical hypotheses, like, for example, low thermal conductivity between the fire bed and the foot surface. So if you walk evenly, you can avoid injury. And then perhaps there's a water barrier under the feet which protects you. Now you can test these hypotheses. And there's plenty of cases which seem to violate those explanations. And there seems to be some contribution to a hypnotic suggestion reaching a proper mental state. Now, this hasn't been proven, and I was hoping to prove it. I did experiments where I glued sensor monitors to the bottom of my feet which would change color when they reach a certain temperature. And I found it gets very hot under there above 350 degrees. And since water boils at 212, you think there would be some damage. But it seems that the bottom of your foot, the cells replace fairly frequently. And then it's hard to walk evenly. So maybe the hypnotic state helps facilitate that. Like my wife at the time, she assisted me because you need to have someone tend the fire. You need to have while I would help people do hypnotic, give hypnotic suggestions. And I had a group of people and I would say again and again, when you see me walk across the bed and see that I'm not injured, you'll be able to walk yourself. And so I walked across and I turned around and my wife had followed me behind me. I said, why are you doing this? Well, you said I could do it. So it shows that hypnotic suggestion doesn't require deep trance. It's called waking suggestion. You give the suggestion and for some people, it takes hold. The people who are responding to hypnotic suggestions have a capacity to be healed, to achieve spiritual healing benefits.
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Well, perhaps that power of suggestion and belief helps open people to possibilities within themselves that maybe were not there and shift their physiology and perhaps even open themselves to intentions from the shamanic practitioner as well.
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People, of course, they come with stories which defy that explanation. There's a lot of times where people benefit where they didn't even know they were being treated with. The attempts to scientifically verify these hypotheses had very mixed results. Again, we're confronted with this kind of trickster phenomena. The phenomena isn't really apparent. And then in my visits, I did not see the miracles, but I did see how psychological processes are connected to these riveting performances. The show is the thing, the performance is part of the process.
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At the same time, you do acknowledge that psychic phenomena is real based on your research and experiences as well.
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It has the appearance of being real. Yes. And the people who have the experience, this is part of this ritual healing theory. The people who have the experience, they. It's not a matter of questioning for them. They know it's real. You know, like they've had the phenomenal. You know, they've received a message from their loved one, you know, so that. So they know there's life after death. You know, this isn't a scientific issue for them anymore. And so that gives them a special capacity to perform rituals for other people, because they have that kind of certainty. And I think maybe this is kind of outside of science in a way. If the scientists can't prove it, well, then it's tough. Too bad for them, perhaps.
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Yeah, well, it blends into psychology, spirituality, philosophy. There's a lot happening there.
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Yeah. Mind, body, medicine.
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Yeah. And I also just want to visit one of your experiences with a doctor in Taiwan who was able to diagnose his patients in a unique way. And also he used art in his healing methods.
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B
Dr. Lee had achieved a slight amount of fame. In every two weeks, he put on a kind of performance at about 40. When I visited him. I visited him a number of times, actually. When I visited him, there were about 40 people there. And I interviewed a lot of the people in the audience, and they told all these astonishing stories about, for example, this one guy, his grandfather. There had been no photographs of him. And then Dr. Lee had painted up this artwork. And it was people who knew the man said, this is a remarkable portrayal of him that was exactly accurate. Okay. And so I talked to Dr. Lee through a translator, and he had. He was a Christian, he was a medical doctor, and I think it was a kind of a Presbyterian sect or something he was a member of. But he found he could diagnose his patients without ever interviewing them. Okay. That was his first experience. Then he found he could go into trance. And these Buddhist people, a Buddhist monk came through him and could do. Help him to go into trance and do artwork which responded to clients problems. Okay. And also the Goddess of Mercy came to him. So he painted the Buddhist monk who lived, I think, in around the 1200s or something like that in China. And also the Goddess of Mercy. He made paintings of that. And people would come to him and he would make paintings which seemed to deal with their personal problems. So, for example, one woman said she had problems with her in laws, that there was like a schism. Three people were against her and two people were for her. And the painting showed three birds on the limb and two on the other side. And this seemed to really reflect her problem. And then there was an interpreter who helped people to understand the paintings. And. And it looked like to me there's a kind of like a counseling session going on and how to deal with the problem. And so a lot of people felt this had been really, really beneficial. So his painting for me was a la cassia tree. And he said, you must be some kind of educator. I was. I was a college professor. You must be some kind of educator, and you shouldn't expect to make much wealth. The cassia tree has no fruit. It's just a blossom. Makes this blossom that's your students benefiting. And I thought, well, this shows a kind of a psychic awareness. I don't know whether it's paranormal or not. But of course, at the time I was wanting to be scientific. So I. I got five of my fellow professors and they all wrote down their problem that they were going to address, wanted address, and sometimes text about the problem. And then we sent them in and they all got psychic paintings by Dr. Lee. And then we took this to judges. It's kind of like a remote viewing experiment. You have what they had written before and see if you could match that with Dr. Lee's response in the painting. And three of the five felt there was a wonderful correspondence between the painting and their problem. Remarkable miracle had happened, but the judges weren't able to create the match. This, to my mind, was one of the most remarkable body of evidence that I'd come across in all my research. But we hadn't really been able to verify it scientifically. So that seemed to be. That's been my experience through much of my field research. We're not successful really improving this, but. But it happens anyway. So it's kind of the way this goes.
- [41:32]
A
Going back to the fire and the ritual that was performed before the fire walking. You mentioned that people would write down their problems and put it into the fire. There is a person, James Pennebaker, who has done research on expressive writing where people will do that, where they write down, just have a flow of thought on a piece of paper, not filtering what comes to you mentally or emotionally, writing it down for maybe, say, 15 minutes. And then a key part of that is actually destroying the paper or if somebody's writing on a device that they delete it and by ripping it up or burning it. And I've personally done that and found that beneficial. And there's over a thousand studies that show that when people do that on a regular basis, that it can actually help with wound healing and have mental, psychological and physical impacts that are beneficial. So I just. That came to mind when you were mentioning that.
- [42:34]
B
And we did a previous session about my Vietnam experiences and my Iranian friends experiences with the Iran Iraq War. And we used that strategy, writing to Heal. And I think there's probably people watching this right now that should look into this and I'll give a plug. I have a book out on Iranian and American veteran exchange stories and discuss inner peace. We use that strategy. And a lot of these, a lot of shamanic practitioners, there's a therapy process associated with this, this and that. The show itself captures people's attention and directs them to think about their problem. And perhaps typically it offers an alternate way of Looking at the problem, like, for example, Dr. Lee has two calligraphies on. He has a special altar. And there's two signs on the side of the altar. And I ask a translator what the. What do these things say? And on one side it said, try to understand what it means to be human. And on the other side it says, try to understand the mind of God.
- [43:54]
A
Can you share a little more about what happened in Okinawa?
- [43:57]
B
Okinawa turned out to be very fruitful for me because I spent an entire year there. And I met up with a guy who had. Who's kind of a folk therapist and used hypnosis. And he was curious about the relationship between hypnosis and the folk practitioners in Okinawa. So he worked as a. He provided me with. He was my translator, and we visited shamantic practitioners in Okinawa. And I learned a lot about how things work there. Okinawa is not exactly. The Okinawa are not exactly like mainland island of Japan. They had their own indigenous shamanic practices. But In World War II, the American conquest of Okinawa was devastating to the civilians, society and culture. About 25% of the civilians were killed. And the shamantic practices were based within the community. And so that disrupted them very severely. And the Shinto practices were also disrupted because the defeat of Japan had required the emperor to reveal himself to be not a God, but a human. And that devastated people's beliefs. So it's as if a wildfire had burnt off all the trees. The religion of Japan was overturned by the conquest. And then I was there in 1980, and it seemed to me as if, although there were people who were kind of like indigenous practitioners, they were working as like, folk therapists, they were dealing with individual clients. I went to one, and she went into trance. And then the spirit of Jesus came through. And I was given instruction about we should respect the Okinawan culture and go to this particular holy place. Okay, So I did that. But from there, my friend Takamiyagi San, he learned well, there's all kinds of other people besides. Besides this regular Okinawan tradition. And I talked to one of these shaman's husband, and he said how devastating it was. He was an older man, and so he had experienced World War II as a youth, how devastating it was to have his religion burn away. And then he had met this woman, and it was very difficult for him to believe that the spirits still existed and that they could spread speak through her. But he come to realize that they did exist. They were speaking through her. You know, you should listen to this, you know, and it seemed like kind of a therapy process. But that led to, oh, so many other practitioners, people who were receiving visions and going into trance, and the Okinawan spirits were talking through them, and they were collecting followers. And then the followers told all these wonderful stories. Their businesses had improved and their life had been improved by this. But at the same time, I had. For that particular visit, I had another friend was working as a translator, and he became angry because it seemed to him that this woman was psychotic. She was claiming she was a God, okay? And that's a sign of psychosis, in his opinion. And so I said. I said, well, you. We're doing sociological field work here. We don't, you know, just translate for me, would you, please? You know, so we continued this, and the people continued. She told about her experiences and what the things that she said were coming directly from God, and that was the value of them. And she had a meteor, and this had magical abilities, and she had this other rock, and this could do miracles. And I didn't see any miracles, but I did talk to a lot of people who had come there, and they had their families, and they're having, like, a picnics, and there was a good. An interesting community. And the lawyer could meet the businessman, and they could become, you know, form business contacts. And the religion has positive functions. And they also. People who had chronic illnesses had been cured. It would seem that was the opinion that people visiting this event claimed. So even things which seem to be completely fraudulent still have benefits. For example, there was a famous psychic practitioner in the US and he told me about a case in Sri Lanka that he wanted me to investigate. So I went to this kind of very isolated rural area, and this school teacher had a medium who he's working with, and they blindfolded the medium, and the medium was able to see people's problem. People would write down their problem, and the medium would hold the shutter sheet of paper and then address the problem. Okay. And they had collected thousands and thousands of testimonies of people who had benefited from this. She showed me boxes and boxes. I didn't count all 10,000, but it looked like certainly probably were 10,000 letters in these boxes. So many files. And a large percentage of them had to do with drugs, substance abuse problems, and alcohol problems. And people had been cured. And a lot of the monks, Buddhist monks, apparently sometimes have alcohol problems. So then they had been cured. That seems astonishing because this was not indigenous Buddhism. This is kind of like something which had sprung up. You know, he was practicing. So I'm watching this, and it seemed to me it Was pretty clear to me that there's a trick. You put a blindfold, and then you can peek down your nose and you can see the paper, you know the people. And then you. It's called the one ahead trick. In others, you say you're reading one paper and then the person comes, oh, yeah, that deals with my problem. So you got one correct. And that's perhaps planted in the audience. So then you've read the next paper, and then you can address that issue on the next paper. And it's like you're performing this extrasensory feat, but it's done through trickery. But the school teacher didn't realize this, okay? And so I told him, I said, I think that may be how this is done. And so after I was gone, he had put a box over the lady's head, which I think she could still peek down anyway, so she could still perform and the media could still perform, and they could still have this high rate of success. So the performance doesn't have to actually involve psychic phenomena to create the beneficial and seemingly miraculous event. Because, you know, I've had a chance now since then to work, train as a social worker. I've worked in a psychiatric hospital and treating alcoholics. The rate of recovery through a treatment program is not particularly high. So this treatment program was the most astonishing thing I've ever seen. They had a lot of success, Very high level of success, it would seem so. That's remarkable. And in the AA meetings, you call upon a higher power, and that contributes to success.
- [52:00]
A
It sounds like there was a fair amount of variation of styles of the shamanic practitioners, of outcomes, the rituals, and that some seem to do with perhaps a person's own openness or suggestibility. Belief sounds like there was paranormal phenomena where people were perhaps receiving benefit from the spirit world, maybe even psychically or intuitively. What did you come to find were sort of the universal themes from all of this field research.
- [52:41]
B
When I came back and I had a thousand pages of notes, the themes were anomalous experience. Okay, now there's a person. Oftentimes there's a pattern within the biographies of these people. There's just an incredible difference. Like in the Philippines, you have. It's a Christian context, occurs within the context of Christianity. In Okinawa, it was a kind of an indigenous folk religion and shamanic practices which were the basis. But then it took all different forms with this innovative New age kind of phenomena that was going on in Sri Lanka. It was within a Buddhist and Hindu context. There's both Buddhists and Hindus there in Sri Lanka. But then that also has this kind of shamantic performance, people going into trance, doing performances. In Taiwan, you have a kind of Taoist context and folk practitioners using that. And Korea is. There's folk traditions. It's like a folk religion. Shamanism is like a folk tradition. The Buddhist God of Heaven or the Buddhist King of Heaven. That's not within traditional Buddhism, but that comes through the shamanic practitioners. So in Thailand, they synthesized Buddhism with the folk belief in spirits, souls, life after death, and that kind of thing, you know, and People's Republic of China. That was a very unusual. I was there in 1986. One of the earlier foreign foreigners had just been recently allowed to come and had a chance to work as a. As a college professor in Xi'. An. And so I was able to see what life is like. And they have a Taoist, a qigong master working in the hospital. An astonishing, astonishing person who, you know, you have a. Breathing exercises. You do it all the time, you practice all the time. And then that gives you the ability to treat, diagnose particular. Particular problems, really. Like a sprained ankle. You would send him to the. Rather than thinking you could, you know, he would be perhaps the first line of treatment for a sprain or damaged ligament or something like sports injury.
- [55:21]
A
Yeah.
- [55:22]
B
So you have just huge amount of variation. But. But there is a pattern within the socialization or the biography. Oftentimes the practitioner as a child has experiences like a precognitive dream. And then the people in the community see that and they recognize, oh, that's very unusual. And then perhaps psychokinetic phenomena occur and maybe a death in the family, and there's some psychokinesis surrounding that. So then that person acquires a character. The community recognizes that person as a. As a possible future practitioner, or perhaps not. And so then the person who. So some people seem to have a propensity for anomalous experience. And so that's why I wanted to. When I was a college professor in Northeast North Carolina, and I wondered, well, what is anomalous experience? What are the kinds of things that people have? And so I gave my anthropology students the assignment of Ask3People the following question. If you've had an unusual experience, would you describe it? And so we'll see what kind of stories come back. And so I collected over a thousand of these narratives. And there were. There's a pattern to the kinds of stories that people tell. The majority with that particular collection system, the most common was apparitions. People were told about seeing apparitional events. Now a lot of them had no evidential quality. Those people would see a ghost and it wasn't connected to a deceased person. There just was a ghost. Okay, but that was an astonishing experience. And so they had told the story. But with the Liska's apparitions, paranormal dreams was number two on the list. And oftentimes has to do with something happening in the future. Precognitive dream, but sometimes not. Sometimes having to do with the present or sometimes with the past. A piece of information that the person was unaware of, but a knowledge of the past was being transmitted. But number three on this was psychokinesis. A lot of times a deceased person, there's a deceased person and objects move in the house. So you have a like poltergeist phenomena. Number four was spiritual healing. A lot of stories, wonderful stories. There are two types of spiritual. There's a lot of different types, but there's two bodies. One. We're kind of like folk practitioners. They have in northeast North Carolina, they have people who can heal burns, for example, or wounds. They could stop blood. There's particular Bible verses you can read that stop blood from flowing. And they would read those verses and you can control bleeding. Then another kind of healing has to do with the church. Church group meets, they pray for someone, that person is healed or benefited. Then another type is sleep paralysis. Waking up, not being able to move, feeling like there's a spirit present on the chest. Then within northeast North Carolina, there's African American traditions having to do with root war. So we have. It's like a variation of hoodoo or voodoo, but within a Protestant context. Stories of that of treatments and events happening. The next on my list was waking. Extrasensory perception, then synchronistic events. Two things happening. It's like an omen occurring. I had a category, just miscellaneous other things. Like people see clouds that have a particular shape and they find that very remarkable. Then down the list, we're only talking about 2% of the stories, or 2.3 to be exact, are what I call to is on a cult event, another person does a performance. Like visiting a medium or I'll do table tipping in the table or a Ouija board playing with a Ouija board. And then next with a out of body experience or near death experience. And then see UFOs. Okay, so and so this seemed to be the pattern. There's a but. But it seemed remarkable to me because in parapsychology they're looking at extrasensory perception and psychoanalysis. But these aren't Particularly common within people's lives here in the regular world, there's other things which are far, far more common. And the way extrasensory perception or psychokinesis is done in the laboratory is it's a performance. If you're going to become a believer, it's not likely that you'll become a believer by going to a practitioner and then that practitioner, practitioner revealing some astonishing information to you. That doesn't happen very much. But it is pretty common for a person to have a precognitive dream. That's very common. And then that kind of person. Yeah, then it's very common for that person who has a precognitive dream to then have some other experience. It's as if something's being opening up by the experience and they recover. And that there's something. There's something about belief which is the key. And we're using the belief, the word belief in a very special way. Because when I'm a sociologist, so I pass out a question, do you believe in esp? Okay. Person checks yes. Yeah, they would say yes, but that doesn't really mean they really believe in esp. If a person has had an ESP experience that people can create the real belief, the certainty type of belief.
- [61:16]
A
Right. I think you said a key word there. It's when people have a personal experience.
- [61:21]
B
Yeah, the personal experience. And that gives them a capacity to be socialized. Maybe it's an internal process to do a kind of performance. And that performance then induce, according to this theory that I have then, that can produce this. Now it's impossible to collect miraculous stories about spiritual healing which don't fall into the rubric of this theory. In fact, most of the stories aren't really explicable to that way, but a lot of them are because there's a tendency for the stories to do. Like say you could remove a wartime. That could be done through hypnotic processes. There's a lot of things like reduce your fever or keep this, make blood flow, do something with the blood flowing incorrectly. Internal bleeding, you could stop it through hypnotic processes. So there's a line which we can't in the field work. You can't really distinguish paranormal from non paranormal. So in this, this job that I'm doing, the sociology thing, we're just writing down what people say and then we analyze that body of doctrine.
- [62:36]
A
Right. It seems that we really are all interconnected as well. We have a personal identity, we're in our own bodies, but at the same time we can know each other's thoughts. There's the sender and the receiver. We can sometimes know precognitive information. So there is some type of connection that does seem to happen. Would you agree with that?
- [63:00]
B
There's a characteristics of empathy. Some people are far more empathetic than others. And so they have a. They're far more capable of understanding what other people are thinking. So it may or may not involve paranormal processes, but it's a part of being human is to have that empathic.
- [63:23]
A
Well, yeah. I just co authored a piece in the issue 8 of the new Thinking Allowed magazine about how compassion and love can actually increase psychic and intuitive abilities.
- [63:39]
B
So I went on, I had my list of items and I created a questionnaire which would ask people, have you ever had an apparitional experience? If so, how often is it just one, one or two times more frequent? Or have you ever had a paranormal dream? Or have you ever had a psychokinesis? Or have you ever experienced spiritual healing? So we had a standardized questionnaire and had the students pass that up. We collected about 1,000 responses of that. We also asked him about psychological symptoms and we also asked him about dissociative processes and dissociative experiences. We also asked him about problem childhood problems and adolescent problems. I wanted to see what was the relationship between this propensity for anomalous experience and the propensity for psychological symptoms and childhood difficulties. And also the relationship between the different types of experience. And I found that things are very highly intercorrelated. It's a very high correlation. If you've had one of these kinds of experiences, very likely that you'll probably have another one and that the distribution is not. It isn't like these things are being just sprinkled out randomly. Some people have a lot and other people have none. There is a correlation between that and psychological symptoms because a lot of the hearing of voices which could be receiving messages could also via symptom of psychosis. And in fact there's a continuum. And all these things seem to be related to childhood difficulties. So this is part of our pattern, the biography of these practitioners. Oftentimes it involves childhood difficulties. And not some people become psychotic. But people who maintain their cognitive organization have a capacity to take part in devising strategies which seem to work for other people. And they can also overcome their childhood difficulties. So it's as if this process of traumatic treatment is designed. We're no longer living hunting and gathering societies. We're living, living in modern societies. But we need to devise ways of treating the kinds of problems that we have right now our young people are experiencing high levels of depression. It's a very important issue. So I think the psychic practitioners are. That will be something that they could help with, you know, because it's a therapeutic process. There are different types of therapies which are highly effective for treating depression. And most people don't, aren't going, they're not going to receive treatment. And the pharmaceutical treatments are not always very successful. And maybe a lot of them involve placebo effects. They're effective due to placebo effects. So it's important that we help our trainer doctors to have a good bedside manners so that they can be effective.
- [66:59]
A
Right, right. Because how a practitioner treats a person can also impact their outcomes. And perhaps the people who have had negative childhood experiences, there's even a term called adverse childhood experiences, ACE scores. And that the higher a person has with that, the higher they're more likely to have physical or mental health problems as life goes on. And at the same time, what I hear you're suggesting is that there are people who can be taken under by those traumatic experiences and those who can be perhaps more resilient. And maybe the people who are more resilient have that compassion so that they can have these experiences and maybe learn how to have them under their own volition, if you will, or to be more open to them so that they can maybe help guide them in their lives. You know, when they're benevolent experiences versus malevolent.
- [67:59]
B
Yeah, there's a lot of malevolence associated with the experience. The typical apparition experience. People are afraid. There's a lot of fear involved. And it's only when you look at the like. For example, when I had these thousand, all this collection of cases, I had the students rank the stories which one, which, which of these stories are worth retelling? Because most of the things that parapsychologists have involved with are people come to them and tell the stories and they're getting the very best stories and then they're. They're doing it. Now my stories, a lot of them weren't that. Well, you know, they weren't that exciting. People just fulfilling students are just gathering a story because they've been required to do it. So I wanted to, I wanted them to rank the stories. Which ones seem to be the best story. Spiritual healing was by far the best stories because it creates a folklore. What do you do when you have a severe medical problem? What can you do? You can consult a practitioner or you can go to church and ask for people to pray for you and sometimes miracles happen.
- [69:05]
A
I just did a series of interviews with the president of the International association for Near Death Studies, Janice Minor Holden, about veridical or evidential near death experiences, spontaneous and induced after death communications. And she talked about how when people have near death experiences, most near death and spontaneous and induced after death communications are positive for people. However, and her research and others, they found that when it was upsetting for people, it was typically when it was beyond their current worldview of what they were experiencing and that somehow it shook them to their core and that it could take them, for example, near death experiencers can take up to seven years to really integrate that experience.
- [69:58]
B
We started off in our talking about this trickster effect. There is this kind of a strange undercurrent or opposition to psychical research. And the field of psychical research hasn't really made progress towards attending legitimacy. So there seems to be a current, perhaps human consciousness doesn't really work the way we might think it does. Perhaps it's something that's constrained, you know, and we're constructing this regular consciousness. And that's what skepticism contributes to, that if you're going to have a normal life, you need to live in a normal world where the sun rises and sets on time. And so, and that's psychological, that's part of the psychological health to be have a degree of skepticism. And in fact when the people, when they're telling the stories, there's a difference between a psychotic story and a paranormal like story. And that the paranormal respondent reveals a certain level of skepticism and it tries to preclude alternate explanations to the event.
- [71:13]
A
Yeah, I mean we are like your Dr. Lee had his quotes that said what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be God? That we are, it seems, spirits in a material world and that we do need to be in this world to live our lives. But that we could also have these other, what we consider other experiences. But at the same time they seem quite natural for a lot of people and there is a lot of evidence of these abilities. It's just that not everybody, at least professionally speaking, embraces them always. But it does seem in research, like according to people like Dean Radin and others, that when people do have these experiences, they're more likely to believe them, be open to them. Dr. Bernie Bytman, who has researched meaningful coincidences and synchronicities, has shown that when people had these synchronicities that and they're open to them, they can continue to have more. I know I've experienced that A lot in my life as well.
- [72:19]
B
They're more likely to be dissociative and they're more likely to have this absorption capacity to be able to focus clearly. So one of my surveys was of the elite scientists of the United States. And they have a very low rate of anomalous experience. They didn't report a very high rate and they had a very low rate of belief in extrasensory perception. So it could be that part of the scientific process kind of thwarts the phenomena, stops it from happening.
- [72:55]
A
Yeah, I think I recall reading that it's according to like the Myers Briggs personality type that the. I think it's the st personality that is sensing and thinking tends to stay in that rational, logical mind versus where when we're more in the intuitive feeling state nf that we can be more open to these.
- [73:20]
B
There seem to be certain occupations that people have a lot more propensity for psychic paranormal experience, like poets, artists, musicians, actors, and on the other hand, people who are accountants and sea captains and engineers, engineering.
- [73:43]
A
Although I know you're an engineer yourself. I just want to go back to the aspect of belief that particularly in healing, that people like Dr. Wayne Jonas, who wrote a book, How Healing Works, he was the first director of the Office of Alternative Medicine, now the national center for Complementary and Integrative Health here in the United States, has talked about how in his research that over 90% of what we believe that will help us will likely help us in our lives and that we believe will perhaps also heal us, can also impact us in our lives. And also Deepak Chopra has come to a similar conclusion about that. And so I know that in your research it was sort of scattered with what you found with that. But I just want to share that that is some current research that I've come across as well.
- [74:40]
B
I refer to this as a ritual healing theory. There's a kind of cycle that I perceive as going on within the evolutionary process and that it's possible to test the elements within this theory. These are. It leads to testable hypotheses. I investigate these traumatic practitioners and I'm hypothesizing that placebo hypnotic and placebo effects occur. So that's a testable hypothesis. We could give a questionnaire to an audience. We could measure the hypnotic capacity. Not that easy, but you could do it with a pencil and paper test and then we could see who benefits from the treatment. And I would hypothesize that people who are more open to who have particular trait respond to are more highly dissociated in particular, they would have a. They would have better. We could ask them, how well did you feel the treatment worked? And the ones who were more open would find that it worked better then we could see. Now, I would argue that that same capacity, that absorption capacity is associated, is correlated with the propensity for anomalous experience. So that's another hypothesis. People who have a high degree of dissociative capacity, they would have more anomalous experiences. And there's been a lot of research that shows that correlation. Then we would say the people who have a lot of anomalous experiences, they tend to become believers. Okay. This is called the experiential source hypothesis. And so there's been a lot of research that shows that that is indeed the case. People have a lot of experiences. They are the ones that are believers. Now, another hypothesis. The ones who are the believers, they tend to become the shamanic practitioners. The anthropologists could investigate that. And they have. And we find that relationship. So we have this cycle going around and around last 70,000 years. We've seen selecting for certain genotypes. That's why we, human beings are the way that we are. We have this propensity for religiosity and spirituality and, you know, anomalous experience.
- [76:48]
A
Right. We can harness the placebo, which is, my understanding, means positive expectation of a particular. It's often used in research studies like an inert substance. But people like Dr. Herbert Benson, medical doctor, who was at Harvard and was a cardiologist, he coined the term the relaxation response after working with transcendental meditators and nuns and monks who were able to shift their physiology. And he found that people can harness that ability. And then where the nocebo is a negative expectation or a common way to think about that is how we tend to worry in our lives.
- [77:41]
B
The people who are watching this program, the question is, what could they do? Say you have some problems bothering you. And I would suggest finding some spiritual pathway, and I would advocate meditation and practicing it and then integrating that in to some type of therapy program. Now, I'm an advocate of cognitive behavioral therapy. So you could read up about that. Identifying the positive things you could do and identifying positive behaviors and integrating that into your meditation practice. You're sitting there meditating, and the thoughts go, come. And you recognize, oh, yeah, there's a negative thought. How should I respond to that? How can I. How can I refute negative suggestions that I'm giving to myself? So you can integrate your spiritual practice into a therapy practice.
- [78:34]
A
Yeah, Great advice. Jim, is there anything else you want to share today about shamanism and belief?
- [78:42]
B
If people are interested in this, I'm easy to get a hold of them. My email address is beinghermail.com and so you could send me an email and anybody, if you've got something to say or. I'm open to. I'm a retired person, so I have time.
- [79:01]
A
Wonderful. At the same time, you're still active with research. In our next conversation that I'm really looking forward to, we're going to talk about your current research with psychokinesis.
- [79:13]
B
Yeah, we have a group, I have an online group, psychokinesis experiments that we're conducting. So if you're interested in the online group psychokinesis, just send me an email and we'll have to talk about that.
- [79:28]
A
Jim, thank you so much for sharing these amazing stories from all of your travels, your scientific inquiry and results that you have shared with all of us. Thank you so much for being with me once again.
- [79:44]
B
Thank you.
- [79:45]
A
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here. Book three in the new thinking allowed dialogue series is UFOs and UAP. Are we really Alone? Now available on Amazon.
- [80:24]
B
You can now Download a free PDF copy of issue number 8 of the New Thinking Allowed magazine or order a beautiful printed copy. Go to newthinkingallowed.org.