But the feeling of my mother's death, when I sensed her passing in New York at the moment that she died in Florida, seemed perfectly normal to me, a quiet part of our sensing powers in a human community. Again, and not to belabor the point, a general acceptance of experiences like these, by which I mean the supernatural, has always been a part of my life. So these later events were never conversion experiences, just confirmations of longstanding beliefs. A sociologist might say that my Catholic upbringing accelerated these expectations, since in Catholicism the human community consists of both the living and the dead. Maybe so, but the preoccupations preceded the Catholic education I received in grammar school.
Some psychic phenomena are real.
The problems of confirmation I elaborate in the book can be traced to a flawed understanding of objectivity, one influenced by the material and scientific cultures in which we live in the West. In testing the supernatural we seem to be preoccupied with an odd need to elevate the controlled experiment to iconic standing, where the only truly reliable conclusions must be measured against the gold standard of laboratory conditions, and experiments replicable by anyone repeating a critical test. I argue in Lives of the Psychics that a more robust version of science, one that addresses spontaneous experiences outside the laboratory, is needed to assess the supernatural. Unseen worlds are part of human cultures from antiquity to the present, and we need research methods that can negotiate these experiences successfully, attending to their limits and validity even when they are spontaneous. Q. You discuss a wide range of psychic phenomena in your book, from out of body experiences to faith healing.