A Short Essay on "Spiritual Energy".

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[opinion=mine]

In physics, the basic idea of energy is the capacity of a physical system to do work.  In physics, energy is a term used to express the force needed to move things, either potential or actual (e.g., the product of a force times the distance through which that force acts).  Energy is not a thing itself, but a quantifiable attribute of something.

New Age spiritualists have clumsily co-opted some of the language of physics -- including the language of quantum mechanics -- in their vain quest to legitimize their beliefs by making primitive superstitions seem like respectable science (especially to those who are ignorant of real science).  These "New Agers" preach the enhancement of your "vital energy", tapping into the subtle "energy of the universe", or manipulating your "biofield energy" so that you can be happy, fulfilled, successful, and lovable, and so that your life can be meaningful, significant, and endless.  New Agers promise you the "energy" to heal the sick and create reality according to your will -- as if you were a god -- yet they deliver nothing.

Of course, New Age "energy" has nothing to do with the real sciences of mechanics, electricity, or the nuclei of atoms (e.g., the stuff of physics).  There are no ergs, joules, electron-volts, calories, foot-pounds, or other precisely-defined objective standards for New Age "energy"; hence, New Age "energy" will remain forever outside the bounds of scientific study because it simply cannot be proven to exist.  New Age "energy" is expressed only in vague, spiritual terms like "chi", "prana", or "orgone".  New Age "energy" is not measurable by any validated scientific instrument, but only by the alleged and entirely subjective "feelings" of those who claim to be "energy-sensitive".

However, if belief in New Age "energy" keeps people happy and docile, then belief in New Age "energy" may be beneficial to human society.  It is just that New Agers should not waste any of their precious "energy" trying to make me believe in it too.

[/opinion]

Very true. I have spiritual beliefs, but they're nothing like the New Age concept of energy. If it's not hurting anyone, then it's fine to believe in. The problem is when people use tat to manipulate others.

I also have spiritual beliefs from my years at seminary and in the church; but I have scientific training as well, so I can (theoretically) argue from both sides.

My take is that one side should not invade the other's "space".  Scientists should not seek to disprove G^D, and Spiritual people should not seek to re-write Science.

On the other hand, members who have used this website long enough know me as one who would challenge Spiritual beliefs from an empirical standpoint (e.g., "Evidence, please?").  I just want them to understand and accept that mere belief proves nothing.

There are times when I do wish that "spiritual energy" could be measured with real, validated, and calibrated scientific instruments -- imagine being able to actually measure something like "midichlorians" in a three-year old's blood, and then induct that child into a regimen of training to draw out and develop whatever spiritual abilities he or she may have.  But this is not to be.

So I go to church, pray, worship, and hope for the Second Coming; and then I go home and customize another computer, align another Ham radio, or calibrate another piece of test equipment, knowing full well that my Spiritual and Scientific worlds will never coincide, and that any hope for valid "psionic" science will remain unfulfilled.

Yeah. I'm not a Christian myself, I'm an animist actually. I believe that there are non-physical entities out there and that we, they and many types of inanimate objects have souls/entities attached to them. This belief can't be proven as true, but it can't be proven as false either. I also love science so I can see where you're coming from. G*d can't be proved to exist or not exist. The problem is deciding what resources online are just mumbo jumbo or if they're based on genuine beliefs, whether they exist or not, whatever religion they're for.
I'd love to see spirituality and science actually intersect in a genuine way but like you said, they can't.

Have you ever wondered why you don't get invited to parties?

(Well, you have been diagnosed, so I guess you do.)

there has got to be a place better than this world.

Can you imagine their electricity bill?

WHAT electric bill?  They do not need electricity.  Don't you know that they are always walking "in the light"?  Of course, to many of them, the concept of "energy" itself merely symbolizes a wave of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity propagating out toward the maudlin cosmos of nothingness.

Seriously though, I would like to see quantitative research performed by real scientists on every aspect of spiritualism.  And I mean real research -- double-blind tests with real, valid, calibrated instruments on large samples of the spiritualist population, et cetera -- a process that does not rely on subjective descriptions of one person's "feelings".

Gist would be something along these lines:

If you do certain things, or go through certain things that 'wakes up' something within you (extreme stress or trauma can cause it, enough time with psychedelics can cause it, alternative sexuality can cause it), you're stuck in the odd position of having something 'new' in your system that you weren't used to dealing with - a bit like an other which has its own identity and a mind of its own. You may also feel quite a bit of warmth in the base of your spine with or without cutting wind or sitting tight in a leather chair. You might find something 2nd person waking you up at night or flirting with you during the day (a bit like Jungian anima or animus). First question isn't whether woo is real, it's what to do with it.

One could say 'Get psych meds - that should make it go away', well - the question is - if it interacts with way in which you keep hedonic balance and gives you a wider array of options in getting through life - not sure what the point would be unless it's either making you significantly less function in other critical ways or putting you in truly dangerous places. Even if one could call it an adaptive neurological hallucination that's still something rather uncharted and it's almost impossible to prove or disprove one way or another - at least at present - where it comes from or what the precise origin is. That just means if its happening to you explore it and see what you can dredge up about how personal or impersonal it is, how much of it directly ties back to your own psychological content and/or unfilled needs, and then you do have something that seems shockingly paranormal happen you mostly focus on what patterns are there and what it suggests either about its source and/or its general framing. It's clearly paradoxical and the trick is figuring out what kind of paradox it is.

While you should really avoid anyone who thinks they're a prophet, has some new religion to sell, has a robes and Koolaid stand, or wants to sell you on their alien contact story, even the physical world as we understand it is a rabbit hole. The stories we tell ourselves to try and size-down groups of people we either politically or personally don't like doesn't make it less of a rabbit hole. I really don't think experiencers should wave the experience around like 'Look at how much more awesome I am than someone whose not having this!', that puts it squarely in the territory of politics and social climbing and it just doesn't belong there. Stepping back from the smug hippy crap might help but I think just as important is to say that we genuinely don't know what it is.


Someone whose caught my interest in this territory lately - not a spiritual guru or hippy in any sense, actually a GameB guy and social / civic philosopher whose diving deeper into the nuts and bolts of Kant, Heidegger, etc. and has friends in both the staunch materialist and other camps is Forrest Landry and his immanent metaphysics. He seems to look at subject, object, and observation in an interesting way - puts observation above both the observer and observed and sees that as something which branches outward into broader implications.


No one needs to take my frame on though. I'm just sticking it to the wall in case anyone's curious whether there's a way of seeing this that isn't strictly antitheist/misotheist or strictly new age cargo occultism that rhymes with the prosperity doctrine 'Praying for a Lexus!'. The answer is yes, and what I'm saying here is just one of many of those ways.

On the question of experimentation or double-blind tests for said things, the closest thing I can think of that's been floating around and catching people's interest is the Ganzfeld experiments and their drift from the expected 0.25 results. People have said similar things about RNGs/REGs but it seems like that's almost locked out in controversy as positive hits seem to be about variance from base line in either positive or negative directions and with small statistical effects people can argue that there's P-hacking and all sorts of other things.

If we can't even figure out why we're experiencing selves to have these conversations, at least past neural correlates, it seems unlikely that we're going to have answers on anomalous states or anecdotal veridical experiences that people claim during NDE's and the like. All we really have to go on right now is the content of these experiences and how well they either do or don't hang together with other phenomena. Even those categorizations are a limited sort of triage where they might help us form better hypotheses or find saner sociological reactions than dividing in True Believers and Skeptics.

The plural of 'Anecdote' is not 'Data'.

An experiment that has never been successfully replicated.  There were sufficient problems with the original database that nothing could be concluded when an in-depth statistical analysis was performed.  There were other problems, as well.  Only fifteen of the original studies appeared in refereed journals; twenty were abstracts of papers delivered at meetings of the Parapsychological Association; 5 were published monographs; and two were undergraduate honors theses in biology.  Overall, there were three types of flaws:

1) Security Flaws (e.g., sensory leakage): Information could have been transferred by experimenters to receivers by talking in the hallway or inadvertently communicating information during the judging phase)

2) Statistical Flaws: Errors in recording that were deleted and or "corrected" after the experiments were finished.

3) Procedural Flaws: Randomization problems, in which 58% of the studies used inadequate randomization procedures; and documentation problems, in which some data were missing, illegible, or simply copied from one session to another.

Twenty of the Ganzfield studies (about half the database) can thus be rejected as fatally flawed.  Stripping the data down to twenty-two studies by eight investigators and 746 trials accounts for only 48% of the original data base. Finally, after adjusting for selection bias and quality of study, the replication success rate can be calculated as only 33% not 55%.

Hence, in spite of beliefs to the contrary, the Ganzfield experiments were no better (and somewhat worse) than random coincidences.  Even if we take the original data at face value, we know that no matter how statistically significant the results may be, the actual size of this alleged psi effect is so small that it cannot be detected in any individual in any obvious way.

Final verdict: The Ganzfield experiments were inconclusive at best, and utter failures at worst.

Elaboration on the "Plural of 'Anecdote' Is Not 'Data'" meme

Testimonials and vivid anecdotes are one of the most popular and convincing forms of evidence presented for beliefs in the supernatural, paranormal, and pseudoscientific.  Nevertheless, testimonials and anecdotes in such matters are of little value in establishing the probability of the claims they are put forth to support.

Anecdotes are unreliable for various reasons; stories are prone to contamination by beliefs, later experiences, feedback, selective attention to details, and so on.  Most stories get distorted in the telling and the retelling because:

• Events get exaggerated.
• Time sequences get confused.
• Details get muddled.

Memories are imperfect and selective:

• Details are often filled in after the fact.
• People misinterpret their experiences.
• Perceptions are influenced by biases, memories, and beliefs.
• Most people are not be aware of deceptions in which others might engage.

Some people make up stories.  Some stories are delusions.  Sometimes events are inappropriately deemed psychic simply because the alleged witnesses do not fully understand what happened.  In short, anecdotes are inherently problematic and are impossible to objectively test for accuracy.

Thus, stories of personal experience with paranormal or supernatural events have little scientific value, because if others cannot experience the same thing under the same conditions over and over again, then there will be no way to verify the experience.  If there is no way to test the claim made, then there will be no way to tell if the experience was interpreted correctly.

Only if others can experience the same event under the same conditions over and over again is it possible to make a test of the testimonial and determine whether the claim based on it is worthy of belief.

Oh right, I was posting for other readers. That wasn't meant to be an entry in the 'Prove Fnord wrong to himself' sweepstakes. The context of that information was a set of framing tools for handling said effects from the experiencer's side without public clarity to what they actually are. It's a post that other people will at least be able to read and process whether or not you can.


The sheer beauty of the situation:

- There likely never will be clinching evidence of these things, I personally take that as a paradox in that like other paradoxes in the world there's probably something structural to learn from it. That means people who've had these experiences need to take it like adults, understand that the world won't bend to their experiences, and possibly even see a future in some places where to talk openly about it risks forced medical treatment if said culture ever needs that much control of public discourse.

- The list quoted above is an excuse for handling other people's memory and experiences or the inconvenience that you can't get inside their skulls and empirically verify them so the trick then is to throw the switch all the way in the opposite direction. I really don't know what you'll do with your own if something happens - I'm guessing see a psychiatrist for meds. Probably insanely frustrating to watch people keep talking about things, for years and years on end, as if you don't exist. I can pretty much guarantee this will continue for the rest of your life and likely the remainder of the lifetimes of anyone who have this much of a clinching need for 100% old fashion reductive materialism of the 19th century sort to be the ground of all that's real (quite likely with panpsychism and neutral monism type ideas on the rise in academia things will only get worse).

We don't get to set the state of reality for PWNing people online, for as gratifying as that might be. Second best might be to just pretend we're right about everything and see who can dish a better brow-beating but I'm assuming there are other people around who get more genuine excitement out of that than I do.

It always seems to come down to this:

• I doubt the material existence of concepts like "Spiritual Energy", yet I express hope that one day they will be unequivocally demonstrated.

• Others criticize my doubt and offer as evidence anecdotes, testimonials, debunked theories, and data that is buried so far down in statistics that it must be tortured and wrung out before it can be presented.

Please, if you want to prove something, do it in a scientific way, preferably with a physical demonstration.

I have been waiting all my life for just one valid physical demonstration of "Spiritual Energy" or something related to it, and all I have seen so far are tricks used by stage magicians and stories that would have been rejected by the producers of The Outer Limits.