The Greatest Superstition

	Book review on The Power of Premonitions by Larry Dossey Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2009 published in Network Review No 100
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Larry Dossey is the author of a series of groundbreaking books written in the last three decades - I first read his Space, Time and Medicine as far back as 1982. He has always pushed the boundaries while adopting a scientific approach and making the case that we should extend our understanding of reality beyond the physical world. This book is no exception, containing as it does 60 pages of notes and references. The greatest superstition, referred to in the title of this review, is that the brain generates consciousness or is identical with it. Like Charley Tart and many others, Larry takes the view that consciousness or mind is in fact non-local, and that the evidence for this view is robust and must be reckoned with. However, up until now, an insufficient number of scientists have mustered the courage to take a thorough look at the kind of evidence presented in this book. Furthermore, the kind of experiments they conduct and the research questions they ask fall almost exclusively inside the materialistic framework, which therefore goes unquestioned. In addition, scientists are no less zealous than their mediaeval counterparts in seeking out heresy, and few researchers relish the prospect of being burned at the metaphorical stake.

As with other books of this kind, there is evidence both from life and from the laboratory. The book begins with a striking and well-known account of a mother waking up in the middle of the night at 2:30 AM with a dream that the chandelier hanging above their baby's bed in the next room had fallen into the crib and crushed the infant. In the dream, the clock on the baby's dresser and read 4:35 AM. In spite of of her husband's scorn, she went next door and brought the child back into their bed. They were then woken by a loud crash as the chandelier fell into the crib at 4:35 AM. This case raises all the pertinent questions about the nature of premonitions: are some events predetermined, or are we occasionally able to avert disaster as in this case? What about cases in which disasters are not averted? What is the nature of human consciousness? How should we understand time? Do we really have free will? One can see that from an evolutionary point of view such premonitions might be life-saving, as in this instance; and it is clear that many precognitions or premonitions are warnings of death or disaster, as with the larger scale events of Aberfan or 9/11, both of which feature in this book.

Larry's personal experiences, dating back to his first year in medical practice, sparked his interest. He dreamed a sequence of events involving the four-year-old son of one of his colleagues, which he saw actually happen the following day. One suspects that these kinds of experiences are far more common than is generally admitted, as Jeff Levin discovered in his research on spirituality and health. He gave a talk on his work to his medical colleagues, at the end of which he reminded them that almost all had unburdened themselves of a private paranormal experience in his office. In other words, 'the people sitting either side of you have had such experiences that are unwilling to talk about them in public.' Their concern about their public persona was so great, even in these circumstances, that they could not drop their pretences and be honest with each other. The social conditioning of scientists and doctors is so strong that it overwhelms their capacity to be honest and open about experiences that do not fit neatly into their training. Larry quotes Upton Sinclair and his book Mental Radio, with which he engaged Einstein. Einstein took Sinclair's work on telepathy very seriously, remarking in another context that physicists have no right to rule out a priori the possibility of telepathy, adding that 'the foundations of our science are too uncertain and incomplete.'

One interesting reason for resistance to premonitions is the evidence that people unconsciously repress premonitions of a looming disaster; almost by definition, it is only with hindsight that they can be validated, as was the case with Abraham Lincoln's famous premonition of his death. Larry speculates that this resistance may account for why many passengers on the Titanic disregarded premonitions of doom. A number of cases cited here will convince any open-minded reader that valid premonitions do occur, including the remarkable dream on June 28, 1914 by Bishop Lanyi (p. 159) in which he had opened a letter from the Archduke (he had once been his tutor) in which there was a picture with some accompanying text as follows: 'I herewith inform you that today, my wife and I will fall victims to an assassination.' The bishop was careful to write all this down immediately and before the event had occurred or been made public. Larry comments that there is a spectrum of accuracy in premonitions, of which this is a striking example, but even here the bishop had seen two assassins rather than one as actually occurred. Nevertheless, he is right to point out that 'when premonitions are rejected as anomalies and outliers, we misconstrue the nature of our own consciousness. The result is a mangled, cheapened, narrowed concept of who we are - which, at our species' precarious state of existence, we can ill afford.'

After an interesting discussion on why and how we might wish to cultivate premonitions, Larry directly addresses the issue of premonitions and our worldview. He cuts to the chase by stating that 'we can work our way toward the possibility of premonitions by readjusting our vision of time through new models of physics; by giving up the illusion of a flowing, one way time through meditative approaches; by rethinking the nature of consciousness, or by some combination of these alternatives.' This is pretty radical, but necessary, and readers will have their own approaches and draw their own conclusions. We can't say that premonitions contradict the laws of nature, but only that they contradict our assumptions about reality. Larry's own conclusion is that consciousness is not a thing or substance, about a nonlocal phenomenon, by which he means infinite: nonlocal events are immediate, unmediated, unmitigated, omnipresent and eternal. This may sound like a stretch, but Larry contends that this is the image of consciousness required in order to accommodate the evidence for premonitions. One could add that much of the evidence from other fields discussed in Charley Tart's book requires a similar model. Personally, I don't believe that we have to jettison free will, but rather that we live in a universe of multiple possibilities in which we play our own creative part. This eye-opening book will help you work through some of these seminal issues.

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