This essay is intended to introduce the major themes behind my forthcoming book, “What Lies Beyond: Consciousness Science, The Paranormal and the Post-Material Future” by Matt Colborn (2025). There’s also an audio version available.
Just occasionally, you touch the unknown. In November 2022 I volunteered for a dream precognition study run by a UK University. Precognition, seeing the future with your mind, is routinely dismissed as unlikely or even impossible by most mainstream psychologists and neuroscientists.
We were to write down the content of our dreams on Monday and Tuesday night. The aim was to dream of a target that would be chosen by the computer on Wednesday. On Wednesday 16th November we were sent a link to a site where we were to record our dream-diaries and get shown four possible target photographs. We were asked to choose which of the target photos most closely matched the imagery of our dreams.
Of the four photos, only one matched my dream content. In the diary, I’d written ‘I dreamt of two bears. One male bear tells stories to the female bear to get her to marry him’. An unusual topic, and not one I remember dreaming before. (In the dream, the male bear was whispering to the female with his eyes shut; a detail I didn’t put in the diary). One photograph showed a baby polar bear lying on top of its mother. It looked a little as if the baby bear was whispering to its parent (although, reviewing the image, at a distance). I ranked the image the highest, and a week later a confirmatory email was sent through. It was the target (below).
This could be dismissed as coincidence, or perhaps ‘saliency bias,’ the tendency to see patterns that aren’t there. Still, it was hard to dismiss the feeling that information had somehow bled from the future into my dreaming brain. A possibility that many intelligent, educated people would dismiss outright.
My book What lies Beyond is in part an ‘on ramp’ for those who want to think seriously about ‘psychic’ or psi experiences. Psi phenomena include telepathy or ‘mind to mind’ communication, clairvoyance, or the apparent ability to ‘see’ things in distant places, precognition and psychokinesis or ‘mind over matter’. These controversial phenomena form the core of what researcher Rhea White called ‘Exceptional Human Experiences’, which also includes things like mystical states, apparitions and Near-Death Experiences. Taken at face value, this large family of experiences suggests that human beings have hidden capacities that are rejected by conventional science.
In What Lies Beyond I look at the history of scientific engagement with ‘magical’ or paranormal experience, finding that it’s far more extensive than many pop science accounts suggest. I examine reports of spontaneous psi experience and experimental evidence as well as recent scientific controversies surrounding mystical experience and psychedelics. I also look at the skeptical opposition. Skeptics routinely reject psi because they’re defending the worldview of modernity, a worldview they see as fundamentally anti-magic.
This modernist worldview is reflected in conventional mechanistic, materialist views of consciousness, brain and the living world. What biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘scientific materialism’, really a form of scientism, sees the universe as pointless and mechanical, consciousness as an illusion, mystical experiences merely unusual brain function and psi nonexistent. [1] Scientific materialism is not identical to science, but it forms a significant part of the imaginative vision of modern cultures. And it’s causing problems.
Civilizational crisis
Modern societies can boast some tremendous successes, including science, but are now dogged by large-scale failures. Failures include widespread crises of meaning and health as well as climate breakdown and the sixth extinction. [2] They are part of what environmental philosopher Rupert Read has called a ‘civilizational crisis,’ which he thinks is in part a spiritual crisis. [3]
Popular solutions to this civilizational crisis tend to be what futurist Jennifer Gidley calls ‘technotopian’. [4] ‘Technotopian’ approaches also assume that humans are ‘nothing but’ machines. Advocates want maximum technological development, pushing for the engineering of ‘transhuman’ saviours. An extreme form of scientific materialism underlies these visions, and there are good reasons to think that such ‘solutions’ would only make things worse. Read in particular rejects the idea that technological innovation will be enough to solve the polycrisis.
So many are seeking alternatives. For this reason the latter part of What Lies Beyond explores some urgent, vital questions. If psi is real, then what is its significance? Might Exceptional Human Experiences point the way to a more humane, encompassing future? But before these questions can be explored, it’s important to acknowledge the skeptical challenge.
The Skeptics
There’s a great tension between those who are willing to accept the possibility that psi phenomena may be real and those who reject this possibility. This situation is typically, unhelpfully, framed as rivalry between belief and doubt. In debates over psychic experience, advocates and counter-advocates argue heatedly over the smallest details. A chair that moved seemingly of its own volition is evidence of a psychokinesis or naughty children. The sighting of a distant grandparent in a dream at the moment of her death is evidence of telepathy or coincidence. Encounters with the extraordinary entities in psychedelic ‘trips’ are evidence of access to other worlds, or else just brain-noise. Spend enough time studying the debates, and you’ll find that antagonists rarely agree on anything.
Critical thinking remains essential. Still, the very existence of this polarized debate is enough to keep Exceptional Human Experiences marginalised in modern societies. You could even argue that this is the debate’s function. As long as ‘believers’ and ‘skeptics’ are at loggerheads we’re prevented from thinking about the deeper significance of this persistent and ancient facet of human experience.
A different way of framing the debate might be to think about the positive fruits of such experience, and how these fruits might help people navigate the civilizational crisis. In addition, we should acknowledge the harm caused when mystical and psi experiences are mocked, ridiculed or otherwise supressed in educated company.
Three Worldviews
Possible alternative worldviews exist. In What Lies Beyond, I outline three. The first is that psychic phenomena can be explained entirely as mistakes, hallucinations and brain illusions; this has been termed the ‘smoke without fire’ theory. [5] A second possibility is that some psi phenomena are real but that many of the stranger experiences like Near Death Experiences and ghosts can indeed be explained by conventional brain science. A third, radical, position links the apparent existence of psi phenomena with the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness and suggests that we need an entirely new worldview to understand both. [6] This third worldview reframes the brain as a filter of consciousness and is basically animistic or vitalistic.
Exceptional Human Experiences seem to be better integrated with what Jennifer Gidley calls ‘human centred futures’. [7] These are futures with very different values than the ‘technotopian’. Gidley states that human-centred futures are based on the view that people are kind and have a duty to find ecological balance with the Earth and the wider Cosmos. One such human-centred society was depicted in Aldous Huxley’s utopian novel Island. In Island, psychedelic drugs and meditation are used to access extraordinary human states. This is to aid personal and cultural healing.
What researcher David Hay called ‘relational consciousness,’ related to mystical states, may be one of a slew of crucial ‘inner capacities’ for a turbulent and difficult future. [8] Because the totality of the evidence, including that for psi, suggests that we live in a world with deep, unexpected interconnections. Together such experiences suggest that the visible world is far more than mechanical, mindless ‘fields and forces’.That when we smile at nature, just occasionally, nature smiles back. [9]
Notes
[1] Sheldrake, R. (2020). The science delusion (2nd ed). Coronet.
[2] Walach, H. (2019). Beyond a materialist worldview: towards an expanded science (Galileo Commission Report), Galileo Commission. Available at: https://galileocommission.org/report/
[3] Read, R. (2022). Why climate breakdown matters (why philosophy matters). Bloomsbury Academic.
[4] Gidley, J.M. (2017). The future a very short introduction. Oxford University Press.
[5] Blackmore, S.J. (1996). In search of the light: the adventures of a parapsychologist. Prometheus.
[6] Kelly, E.F., Crabtree, A. & Marshall, P. (2015). Beyond physicalism. Rowman & Littlefield.
[7] Gidley, 2017.
[8] Hay, D. (2007). Why spirituality is difficult for westerners. Exeter: Imprint Academic.
[9] I am indebted to Michael Grosso’s book for this image. Grosso, M. (2020). Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Anomalist Books.