Praying for rain

[Carol]

In his famous book Black Elk Speaks, John G. Neihardt recounts the story of a demonstration provided for him by the elderly medicine man of the title. Although Black Elk said that his shamanistic powers had waned with age, he was persuaded to pray for rain during a drought. Under a cloudless sky he solemnly recited his prayer. After a short time, a small patter of rain began to fall. It wasn't much, but it did come seemingly out of nowhere.

Fast-forward to Georgia, where on Tuesday, Governor Sonny Perdue led a crowd in a prayer for rain. On Wednesday, reports the AP,

A storm crashed through the Southeast and brought up to an inch of rain in parts of drought-stricken Georgia, but forecasters said the storm likely did little to ease the state's historic drought.

"The ground probably sucked it all up," said Vaughn Smith, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. "The ground is so dry, I seriously doubt if any of the lakes rose any."

The Wednesday storm packed lashing rain and powerful gusts, injuring at least nine in Tennessee.

So the rain did come, albeit without much an effect on the drought.

Of course, it could be coincidence - or just clever politics. Apparently, rain was already in the long-term forecast before the governor issued a call for prayer. Maybe he selected Tuesday as a day of prayer because he knew the meteorologists were anticipating rain in the near future. On the other hand, it appears that there was only a 30% chance of rain in the forecast. If it was a stunt, wouldn't a canny pol have waited till the odds were at least 50%?

The AP story also notes that "the roof of a Baptist church in Tennessee's Marion County was heavily damaged" by the rain, which some doubters take as evidence of lack of divine intervention.

But we don't have to believe in divine intervention to see a possible link between the prayer and the rain. If human consciousness does interact creatively with what we call "reality," then a prayer - which in this case is just a statement of intention - might be expected to influence the weather, at least to a small degree.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/mich ... r-rai.html

[Carol]

Heads I win, tails you lose

My last post noted that the odd fact that, one day after a well-publicized prayer vigil in Georgia, a heavy rainstorm moved through the drought-ravaged state.

I was thinking more a little more about this, wondering why the issue stuck in my craw a little bit. After all,I don't much care about praying for rain. It's not an issue of personal importance to me. Then I realized that what troubled me about the story was the skeptical response, which was all too typical of the stubbornly intractable mentality of hardcore skepticism.

Consider what would have happened if no rain had fallen after the prayer vigil was held. The skeptics would have lost no time in declaring this to be "proof positive" that prayer doesn't work.

Instead, rain did fall. Unfazed, the skeptics responded that it wasn't enough rain, or that the rain damaged a church, or that there was a 30% chance of rain in the long-term forecast.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

No matter what the outcome of the prayer vigil experiment (if we can call it that), the skeptics would refuse to revisit their beliefs. Even if a downpour had arrived out of the clear blue sky while the prayer was underway, the skeptics would have chalked it up to that all-explanatory last resort, "coincidence."

A slightly more sophisticated skeptic might say that a single instance proves nothing, and that a whole series of tests must be run in order to establish a meaningful pattern. Fair enough ... but observe that even when whole series of tests are run in other areas of psi investigation, with positive results, the skeptics still refuse to accept the outcome. They quibble about side issues, question the experimenters' honesty, misrespresent the statistics, or simply decline to talk about the subject (except when issuing armchair denunciations). So the issue of running more tests turns out to be a red herring. An infinite number of tests would not change the skeptics' minds. Nothing can change their minds.

Many scientists today accept Karl Popper's thesis that a scientific theory must be falsifiable - that is, there must be some way to test it that could, in principle, disprove it. By this standard, skepticism is an unscientific approach, since clearly it is not falsifiable by any known means. No matter what evidence is presented against the skeptical worldview, skeptics cling to it. There is no psi experiment, no matter how rigorous, that would persuade a Michael Shermer or a James Randi to change his mind (even if, for public consumption, they like to profess their open-mindedness). If 2,000 individual trials of the ganzfeld protocol cannot persuade skeptics that something paranormal is going on, nothing ever will.

But why? What is it about skeptics that makes them so resistant to changing their minds, at least in this area? I think it has to do with the subject of my second-to-last post.

Psi phenomena seem to occur when inhibitions are lowered. Conversely, when inhibitions are high, no such phenomena are likely. In order to encourage psi abilities, you have to lower your inhibitions. In other words, to a certain extent, you have to surrender control.

I think that the skeptics, for the most part, are people unwilling to surrender control. They want to believe that through ratiocination they can achieve control over the circumstances of their lives. For them, any practice of intuition is a threat to this sense of control. Spontaneity, impulsiveness, any sort of emotional freedom is dangerous and scary to them. They must think everything through, analyze and judge, find (or create) rational or rational-seeming connections in order to maintain this feeling of control, which is pivotal to their sense of self.

Control is the province of the ego, which is hypervigilant, paranoid, defensive, and judgmental. Most skeptics are strongly ego-driven. Of course, ego development is a normal and healthy stage in personal growth; but some people get stuck at a level of ego development that is counterproductive. They don't outgrow the aggressive need for certainty (founded on deep insecurities) that is characteristic of adolescence. Long into adulthood and even old age, they remain at the emotional level of teenagers, scared of a world they perceive as hostile, and seeking to compensate for their fears by pretending to be in control of everything around them.

But don't people who pray for rain also seek to control outside circumstances? Yes, but with this difference: they don't attibute the control to their own powers of ratiocination. They regard God, not themselves, as the controlling agent. Even if their own minds are ultimately responsible for any effects that occur, they don't know it. Moreover, the part of their mind that may bring about the results is not the ego, but the intuitive, nonrational part that can be called the subconscious or the higher self - the very part that the ego, in its hubris and neurosis, belittles and denies.

The ego is built on lies, and its sense of control is itself a lie. At some level the skeptic knows that it is not actually possible to control the world by even the most concerted effort at rationalization. This may explain the unfocused anger and hostility that so many skeptics project. It is unfocused because its actual focus is the ego itself, and this is a truth that the ego can't face. Far easier for the ego to project its negative feelings outward onto other people, demonizing and caricaturing them. Self-hatred becomes hatred of the Other.

A person saddled with an ego-based need for control is not going to surrender control under any circumstances. To accept psi is to relinquish control. It is to acknowledge that the rational mind cannot apprehend all mysteries, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the skeptical philosophy. And psi, by its nature, is a realm of ambiguity accessed by surrender of inhibitions. Nothing could be more threatening to the ego.

I think that's why skeptics are so stubborn and, often, so oddly vehement. Any suggestion that psi is real threatens the core of their being - as they perceive it. They will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves from such an attack. They will insist that the coin always comes up a winner, whether it's heads or tails.

And meanwhile, the rain it raineth every day.

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