So what’s your perspective on people who hear voices?
Recently, I read articles in the New Yorker and the New York Times about psychiatric treatments for suffering patients who hear voices, a phenomenon diagnosed as pathological. Then I pored over a booklet, plucked from the mail, about sessions to be offered at the 17th International Conference of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS)*—including one called “The Science and Practice of Channeling.”( Hello. Aka… hearing voices.)
On any given day, I’ve learned to hold space simultaneously for materialist, mainstream thinking and the unconventional, metaphysical kind. I remind myself of why we find it hard to resist going to the default button in our brains instead of staying open to expanded experience.
Quantum physicists tell us that life is multi-dimensional, but most of us are stuck in a one-dimensional physical reality—restricted to what we experience with our five senses. What we perceive “with these alleged foolproof tools of observation is nothing but what we decide to look for,” the author of “E Squared” tells us. In her best-selling book, writer Pam Grout explains how it is that she can make this surprising claim.
She says that scientists now know the brain receives 400 billion bits of information per second. Our minds continually sift through all this “reality” to focus finally on only a fraction of information we deem worthy of “seeing” and believing—about 2000 bits, or one-half of one-millionth of a percent of what’s actually out there. Generally speaking, it’s what we already know, what we learned early on—a drastically condensed version of what-is.
Grout explains that as the brain repeatedly registers certain “bits” to the exclusion of others, it builds bridges between various nerve cells and sets up interlacing fibers, creating neural pathways. With such ingrained routing and familiar thought processes, we “quit traveling the rest of the country,” so to speak. The result? Amazingly, “what we typically see, experience, and feel comes after the decision to see, experience, and feel it!” Meanwhile, much more of what’s “out there” and “in here” waits to be acknowledged.
How to open to more? How to hold space for a new paradigm, just as physicists once held space for the wild possibility—a hypothesis, once considered preposterous—that light is both particle and wave in nature? As researchers continue to set up controlled experiments to explore consciousness, for most people, says afterlife investigator Bob Olson, there’s a fairly typical progression in acknowledging the existence of continuing consciousness and communication with the Other Side. The individual, at his or her own pace over time, moves from being skeptical to believing and finally to “knowing,” the last stage characterized by unwavering acceptance. This knowing comes from the soul, perhaps, or a higher level of self or consciousness.
Such deeper knowing can result from metaphysical readings or repeated meditation. From witnessing recurring signs and wonders—one incident of eye-opening synchronicity after another. It may arise from a direct experience that dramatically tangles with the assumed-to-be-true, jumpstarting a mystical or spiritual awakening. In some cases, the shattering of time-worn assumptions is “mind-blowing, as in a near-death experience. In any case, this “opening” now makes it impossible for one not to hold space for a greatly expanded definition of reality.
Evolutionary momentum is building for this shift in awareness. As with any attitudinal change, early adopters, change agents, free thinkers, gifted intuitives ultimately bring the rest of humanity along. The paradigm viewed as “wild-and-crazy” morphs into the “culturally creative,” then into the “comfortably commonplace”—a final point at which what was once taboo is now simply taken for granted. What was previously and literally unthinkable becomes everyday normal.
The result, typically, is personal expansion and cultural/global evolution. Given the present collectives of nonphysical helpers—beings of higher consciousness lending their “voices” and loving guidance via channelers around the globe—even justice for all and planetary peace may one day become the norm, as improbable as such a reality currently seems.
Anyone can experience one or more of the aforementioned ways to expand those neural pathways, holding space for an inner and transformative shift. That said, certain folks—some families like mine—appear to have, in varying degrees, something especially intuitive or psychic in their genetic makeup.
More on this DNA cocktail with a twist, next time.
*IONS was co-founded by Paul Temple and astronaut Edgar Mitchell, after the latter had a peak experience/spiritual awakening when he first viewed our planet from space. Other offerings at the conference include: Extended Minds: Interconnections in Space and Time,” “Science on the Survival of Consciousness after Bodily Death” and “The Emergence of Post-Materialist Science.”
