Special theory of immateriality: Ruickbie #28

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  The observations presented here allow two hypotheses: 1) that consciousness can exist independently of the physical body; and 2) that consciousness can seemingly operate in a state outside our everyday experience of space and time. The first does not violate any ‘laws’ because we have no laws of consciousness, although it does contradict our expectation that consciousness is dependent on the brain but is explicable if we use the alternative “reducing valve” model.

Herman Minkowski             

The second does not contradict any laws because physics has shown that our everyday experience of space and time is not an accurate one. Physics now operates on at least a four-dimensional understanding of spacetime (Einstein–Minkowski). As cosmologist Prof. Bernard Carr has pointed out, there is plenty of “space for psi” in current physics; however, here we are looking for a model of spacetime that could accommodate the view of consciousness and reality revealed in this paper. Under certain conditions, consciousness demonstrates the ability to transcend space and time as we ordinarily experience it, so as well as another location for consciousness, we also need another time, or another understanding of it.

Near the end of his life, Einstein famously wrote that “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” The problem persists: the British physicist Paul Davies also confessed that “To be perfectly honest, neither scientists nor philosophers really know what time is or why it exists.”

Cambridge Professor of Astronomy, Sir Arthur Eddington coined the phrase “time’s arrow” in 1927, meaning simply that physical things have a necessary and unavoidable direction of change from one state to another that cannot be reversed. This is essentially our experience of time. However, the fundamental equations of classical physics (such as Newton’s laws of motion) do not distinguish between past and future, they are time-reversible, and what we call the present “has no proper place in the temporal of physics at all,” according to the Slovakian astrophysicist Metod Saniga. What physics does is quantify points on the time dimension – it takes no account of subjective, experiential time, the time that moves constantly forwards, the so-called arrow of time.

As Prof. Utts has pointed out, after studying the research data for her official report on Project Star Gate, “Physicists are currently grappling with the concept of time and cannot rule out precognition as being consistent with current understanding,” and that “distance in time and space do not seem to be an impediment” – exactly the conclusion I came to in my analysis of Scott’s WWI traveling clairvoyance experiments.* But the question of time does not only relate to precognition because, as we have seen, precognition can apply to a range of sensory experiences that are experienced directly by consciousness, not the senses, meaning that what we are talking about here is not some ability of consciousness, but consciousness itself.

We have seen examples where an observer in his present sees an apparition in its past, and even where an apparition sees the observer in its future, then this must logically lead to the premise that time exists in its entirety all of the time, that is, time is not just the movement of physical objects through space (change), but a thing in itself. This itself seems counter-intuitive, but modern physics can support such a possibility.

Albert Einstein’s mathematics teacher, Professor Hermann Minkowski, argued that the past, present and future co-exist ‘at once’ in four-dimensional spacetime, where time is itself a dimension in addition to the familiar three spatial dimensions. This was the basis for Einstein’s theories of relativity. In contrast to our generally accepted idea of time being absolute for everyone, within these four dimensions, observers moving relative to one another will have a different experience of what is happening now, that is, their experience of time will be different. Thus, an observer moving faster than another could experience as ‘present’ what is for the other ‘future.’

This four-dimensional “block universe” in which time exists all at once would allow an external observer (e.g., in the higher dimensional bulk) to see past, present and future, just like someone experiencing an NDE life review or life preview, or someone having a premonition. But how could this be possible? 

* See Ruickbie excerpt #14.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Relativity of space/time: Ruickbie excerpt #27

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:  

Taking one example, journalist  Irene Corbally Kuhn's (1898–1995) consciousness could ‘see’ and ‘hear’ in a three-dimensional, full-color, realistic world, with time progression, in her future, even though her sense organs – her eye and ears – were still in the body holding onto the lamppost in her present.* Only a consciousness that is not the product of the brain could seemingly act independently of it, but then we must also concede that consciousness is no longer in space and time as we commonly experience them.

As the accusation stands against some of our colleagues, have we also violated “the basic laws of physics as they are currently understood?” Are Newton and Einstein turning in their graves? The orbit and rotation of Mercury violated Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation, but did we deny the existence of Mercury because of that? Luckily not, because Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was able to account for the observed deviation. Just as Einstein at first rejected later interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, with its “spooky action at a distance” and dice-playing deities, so he finally had to accept them. As Einstein found out, even the ‘laws of physics’ violate the laws of physics. There is always an ongoing tension between some observables and the framework established by so-called laws, which are really just mathematical statements about physical relationships. So, have we violated any laws and what would that mean?

Science had once reached a point when everything seemed certain and only a small amount of tidying up remained. In 1878, the German physicist Philipp von Jolly advised one of his students not to go into physics because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes.”

Max Planck                  

That student was Max Planck, who along with Albert Einstein, revolutionized physics in the early twentieth century: Planck with his solution to black-body radiation in 1900, which introduced the concept of “quanta,” and, drawing upon that, Einstein’s solution to the photoelectric effect in 1905 (before his Theory of Special Relativity, and later General Theory of Relativity), and we were plunged down the rabbit hole of Quantum Mechanics.

“Physical objects are not in space,” said Einstein, “but these objects are spatially extended (as fields). In this way the concept ‘empty space’ loses its meaning [...] the field thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description, irreducible in the same sense as the concept of matter (particles) in the theory of Newton." But ‘the field’ changes our understanding of ‘matter.’

Giving a lecture in Florence, Planck told his audience “having studied the atom, I am telling you that there is no matter as such. All matter arises and persists only due to a force that causes the atomic particles to vibrate, holding them together in the tiniest of solar systems, the atom.” We have since revised this model: it is only the measurement of the electron’s position that creates a point-like particle, meaning that unmeasured electrons should be thought of more like waves (or fields), creating an electron ‘cloud’ around the atomic nucleus in which there is a probability of finding an electron.

The materiality of things – this page, the eyes reading it and so on – are mostly empty spaces defined by probabilities surrounding infinitesimal balls of quarks in gluon fields. That is certainly not how we experience reality in the everyday world. And the immateriality of ghosts and consciousness suddenly seems less problematic. 

 

* See Ruickbie excerpt #18.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Cloud consciousness: Ruickbie excerpt #26

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

The lack of direct evidence for consciousness as a product of the brain, leaves open the question of whether the brain creates or, in some sense, receives consciousness. As early as 1891, the Oxford philosopher F.C.S Schiller proposed that “matter is not what produces consciousness but what limits it and confines its intensity within certain limits.”

Henri Bergson       

The French philosopher Henri Bergson took a similar position when he theorized that mind was not reducible to matter, and vice versa. Like Schiller, for Bergson the brain channels the mind in biologically pragmatic directions, principally survival, but he was also finding his way towards a holographic theory before holography was known, by stating that “the part is the whole.” Bergson was influenced in his thinking by the reported experiences of life preview occurring on the brink of death. William James also suggested that as well as thinking of the brain as having a productive function, we should also consider that it may be a “permissive or transmissive function.”

Although, as James noted, the production model was “a little more popular,” the idea of transmission continued to be researched and explored. The influential British psychologist Sir Cyril Burt argued:

A comparison of the specific micro-neural situations in which consciousness does and does not arise suggests that the brain functions, not as a generator of consciousness, but rather as a two-way transmitter and detector; i.e., although its activity is apparently a necessary condition, it cannot be a sufficient condition, of conscious experience.

Aldous Huxley found these theories useful for making sense of his experiences with psychedelics, comparing the brain to a “reducing valve” for “mind at large.” Further research in the field has strengthened the observation that psychedelics seem to have the ability to turn off the brain’s filtering of consciousness, giving access to mystical states and/or higher dimensions (which may or may not be the same thing). But there is still a demarcation between drug states and other altered states, for example, Greyson cites a case of LSD overdose and an attempted suicide using opioids where the drug-induced hallucinations demonstrably affect the physical brain but not the mind during an NDE.

Any theory that might support survival does not have to account for those things that appear not to support survival. For example, a woman changes behavior due to Alzheimer’s and where once calm and pleasant becomes violent and disorderly, thus if the mind is independent of the brain, then this would not happen goes the argument. However, even if the mind is independent of the brain, we still know that for physical existence the brain is very necessary, or else we would not have it.

A malfunctioning brain due to disease does not rule out the independence of the mind, but simply shows that the reception of consciousness can become impaired to the point where we seem to be dealing with a different person. We have no insight into what is going on with regards to that original, pre-disease consciousness, therefore the condition tells us little, although we often assume much from it. Such theoretical objections based on dissimilar cases do not undermine the empirical evidence we have for the continuation of consciousness beyond the body (alive and dead). It would be like arguing that because oranges and apples are both fruits, and oranges are orange, that apples cannot be red or green.

Modern neuroscience often uses information technology analogies to explain the working of the mind–brain. We can do that, too, but we will need something different from what I call the ‘fleshbot’ model. If the brain is the receiver of mind, then mind can be thought of as ‘in the cloud,’ and consciousness is like cloud computing, allowing us to see a possible model for consciousness to be non-local and in two places at once (the here-and-now and the here-after). After the permanent failure of the receiving instrument, consciousness simply continues in the cloud. We could call this ‘cloud consciousness,’ but we could also call it the consciousness dimension – we are just grasping for the best metaphor to represent this possibility to ourselves. The problem is where is the cloud and how does it work? 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Consciousness isn't material: Ruickbie excerpt #25

Leo Ruickbie

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: For mainstream science, the living body is like a haunted house. We can scan the brain and find out which parts are used when this or that happens, like flipping light switches on and off in 30 East Drive, but we have still not met the owner of the house – consciousness remains elusive. And when we die, the doctors can only observe that the lights are no longer working.

For mainstream science, the living body is like a haunted house. We can scan the brain and find out which parts are used when this or that happens, like flipping light switches on and off in 30 East Drive, but we have still not met the owner of the house – consciousness remains elusive. And when we die, the doctors can only observe that the lights are no longer working. 

To be meaningful the survival of consciousness must mean the survival, not just of “awareness,” but of the thing that is “aware.” Since early attempts with ill-fated phrenology, medicine has been trying to pinpoint our psychological functioning in specific areas of that grey mass between our ears, what the philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers called the “easy problem” of consciousness. Whilst successful to an extent, we have still not found where “I” comes from, what Chalmers called the “hard problem” of consciousness. Philosophy professor Alva Noë argued that “Consciousness does not happen in the brain. That’s why we have been unable to come up with a good explanation of its neural basis.” 

The defeat of Cartesian Dualism (Descartes’s idea of the “ghost in the machine”) at the hands of Enlightenment materialism (all machine) has left no philosophical room for a mind that is not the product of the physical. But just as Descartes prepared the way for materialism by excluding recourse to unprovable spiritual explanations, so materialism finds itself challenged by evidence that has only become possible due to both the scientific method and advances in science (especially medicine). 

People are seen outside their own living bodies. People are seen when they no longer have bodies. People report conscious experience when clinically dead with no measurable physiological activity. That experience is usually reported as more vivid and meaningful than ordinary consciousness, so it is not some residual as-yet-undetected brain activity, the end-effects of the dying brain or due to anaesthetic drugs, all of which, where known, produce a diminished consciousness, and certainly cannot be explained as a reconstruction of birth memories (Carl Sagan’s contribution to the debate). 

During these altered states (apparitions, OBEs, NDEs, premonitions, etc.), the witness is not seeing and hearing in the ordinary sense. In extreme conditions (NDEs), this perception must act independently of the physical sense organs because they are unavailable, effectively shut down in a dead body, and is also sometimes described in ways that are impossible for the visual system even when operational, such as 360-degree vision. If this perception functions independently of the senses, then it cannot use the information normally processed by the senses, that is, light and sound. Consciousness can only ‘use’ consciousness under these conditions. 

Other researchers have also noticed this. Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper interviewed thirty- one people who were severely visually impaired or blind, including blind from birth, who had experienced consciousness beyond the body during an OBE or NDE. Most of them also claimed to have been able to see during these experiences, and in some cases their observations were verified by others. Ring and Cooper termed this ability “mindsight.” The same ability must be involved in all cases of extra-sensory perception, or whatever we might call it, from Victorian gentlemen projecting themselves into ladies’ bedrooms to government agents remote viewing secret Russian facilities (Star Gate). 

There is still a default tendency, often implicit, to think of extra-sensory perception (ESP), or psi more generally, as some ‘sixth sense,’ as it was formerly thought of, when the evidence points to it not being a ‘sense’ at all, but a feature of consciousness, that is, of ‘being’ itself. Terms such as mindsight perpetuate this and are demonstrably theoretically limited, since ‘mindsight’ involves mind-hearing and mind-feeling (emotions), just as much as mind-seeing. The psychological primacy of sight in normal individuals has led to a psychological primacy of sight in abnormal conditions. 

What the evidence shows is, not that we have some hidden super power, but that consciousness is super-extended in a way that is normally hidden from us. Thus, all these scattered bits of information labelled clairvoyance or premonitions, apparitions or OBEs, are parts of a jigsaw puzzle that, when put together, provide a fuller picture of this consciousness. And what this picture shows is a level of consciousness (or, the real extent of consciousness) that operates outside of physical space and time, including the physical structure of the brain. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Credible testimonies? Ruickbie excerpt #24

In observational research it is always going to be the problem that our powers of observation are imperfect. We know that, yet we must work with it. As Albert Einstein observed, “All knowledge of reality starts from experience and ends in it.”

However, it is not just a question of evidence, but also of theory. That the evidence appears to contradict mainstream physics is often the greatest reason for its rejection, sometimes without even considering the evidence at all. But as physicist Henry Stapp contends, when considering the question of postmortem survival: 

 Physicist Henry P. Stapp         

Rational science-based opinion on this question must be based on the content and quality of the empirical data, not on a presumed incompatibility of such phenomena with our contemporary understanding of the workings of nature.  

Stapp is right, of course, but if Scrooge does not even trust his own senses, then he is unlikely to trust the good sense of others. At root, his disbelief in Marley’s ghost is because ghosts should not exist, therefore some other explanation must be sought, such as indigestion. This means that we must also look at what the evidence implies for the dominant models of consciousness in mind–brain dependency and reality in physical materialism, the theory that everything has a causal dependence on, or can be reduced to, physical processes – a mechanical universe in which our sense of ‘I’ is just an incidental puff of smoke.

The Scrooge Paradox – “seeing is not believing” – is why we have to use more than one witness, and more than one case. Even the best single case demonstrating the survival of consciousness after death may only be some wild exception, but when there are a hundred such cases, or a thousand, then the evidential balance shifts in favor of the fact.

For example, since Heim’s foray into the subject in the nineteenth century, NDEs have now been extensively studied. Forty-two studies involving more than 2,500 NDE cases were published from 1975 to 2005, and, despite differences in methodology, were consistent in their descriptions of the content of NDEs.196 Extensive research over time is now able to present similar findings on ADCs, OBEs, deathbed visions, reincarnation (Stevenson amassed 3,000 cases alone), etc., showing patterns in large numbers of cases.

Using large numbers of cases also means that flawed witness testimony (lying, fraud and deception) is averaged out in the same way as the wildly exceptional, and what we are left with are probabilities. The balance of probabilities is usually the lower form of evidence required in civil cases, but where probability is high then it must also push into the “beyond reasonable doubt” category, since doubt is only a question concerning the probability of something.

This is the golden test: can a case demonstrate that the experiencer received information that would otherwise have been impossible to know or guess?

We have had credible witnesses present reliable testimony. In many cases this has been corroborated by other witnesses, who have either experienced the phenomenon at other times or at the same time. In addition, we have strong supporting evidence from incidents in which information was relayed that could not, under the circumstances, have been known to the percipient. Beyond that we have statistical analyses and meta-analyses that show patterns in human experience that are indicative of a real effect. Not only is this convincing evidence, but it rules out the alternative explanations, such as deliberate fraud, misperception, psychopathological hallucination, telepathy between the living, and environmental recording as being able to account for all of the cases.

Even Scrooge was finally convinced by the evidence of his eyes – made easier by a religious context that required ghosts and an afterlife to put them in. According to some, materialistic science has no room for such immaterial and autonomous intelligences, forcing Scrooge to re-consider the matter of indigestion yet again; but according to others, science has already moved beyond materialism. 

 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

 

Outside of time: Ruickbie excerpt #23

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie reports in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: “Something catches my attention,” recalled Dr. Bettina Peyton as she talked about her near-death experience. It is “twinkling light, like a tiny jewel,” containing her “entire experience, past, present and future, playing out simultaneously.” Her conscious viewpoint – her consciousness – was external to her own time and able to see all of it. She has not been the only one.

Fifty-five year-old anesthesiologist at the University of Texas Health Center, Dr. Gerard Landry had had a conventional twenty-seven-year career in medicine when he died of a heart attack on March 24, 1979. Surprised to find himself still conscious, he described being in “a dimension beyond sequential time” where “past, present, and future are all merged.”

There are so many more experiences that could be quoted in support of this. According to psychiatrist and near-death researcher Bruce Greyson, 75% described the afterlife as outside of time, and, in an earlier study, 53% of OBErs mentioned “timelessness.”

Many different terms have been used to describe the apparent ability to see into the future, such as clairvoyance, precognition, premonition, second sight, and life preview. Whilst the words differ, the essential elements remain the same. People can experience anything from physical and mental symptoms to actual visions, during dreams or wide awake, even whilst clinically dead, of things yet to come. 

If time is like an arrow, then the future has not yet come into existence, therefore nothing can be known about it. I might predict that tomorrow I will be sitting at my computer writing, because I was sitting at my computer yesterday and today, but this is obviously not the same thing.

The content of premonitions is fundamentally different to what we would normally predict based on past actions, that is usually what makes them stand out in the first place. So, we have to think again about the relationship between consciousness and the future, and the nature of the future, of time, itself. 

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Proof of precognitions? Ruickbie excerpt #22

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies: Before Dr. John Barker, Society of Psychical Research members Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic Myers, H. F. Saltmarsh, and Dame Edith Lyttelton, as well as winner of the Nobel Prize Charles Richet, the Director of the Institut Métapsychique International Eugene Osty, and the writer J.B. Priestley had all collected reports of premonitions and attempted to make some sense out of them. Sidgwick, working with the fewest cases, remained the most sceptical, but, working with rather more cases, Myers concluded that “our conception of time loses its accustomed meaning.”

Lyttelton received many accounts of apparent precognition after a BBC radio broadcast in 1934, whilst she was President of the SPR, publishing the best cases in 1937. Although trying to reserve judgement, she conceded “that some predictions are cases of definite precognition I personally have no doubt at all,” and that from this “the world of the senses is then illusory.” Struck by the veracity of evidence and credibility of the witnesses, Saltmarsh concluded that “we are bound to admit that the future does exist in some sense now – at the present moment,” and “we must revise our ordinary ideas about the nature of time.”

   Charles Richet     

Already in 1931, Richet put it nicely when he said: It would be inexcusably rash to affirm, as I have boldly done, that there are premonitions, if abundant and formal proof had not been advanced. This abundant and formal proof has, I think, been given.

Eugene Osty worked for twelve years with a group of psychics and was able to question them closely about their abilities, including the way time was represented to them. M. de Fleuriere saw time symbolically projected “on a semicircular screen,” with the past on the left, the present in the middle and the future on the right. Mme Morel seemed to stand in the stream of time, seeing the past behind her, the present at her side and the future ahead. “Time, as well as Space,” he concluded, “is penetrable by the faculty of super-normal cognition, just as if Time were but an illusory creation of the human mind.”

Saltmarsh also saw that the questions about time arising out of the study of precognition necessarily led to a re-examination of the possibility of life after death, although he did not go further than that. Additionally, he also concluded that the future is both predetermined and what he calls “plastic.”

Experiments continued after the closure of the original Premonitions Bureau. The remote viewing pioneer Ingo Swann (1933–2013) ran the American Prophecy Project from November 1989 to December 1990. The Estate of Ingo Swann relaunched this as the Prophecy Project in 2018. The website UKPsychics.com also ran an online “Premonitions Registry” from 1999 to 2005. 

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove also ran a premonitions registry as a restricted access group on Yahoo from 2001, following the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attacks. There have been several attempts to recreate Barker’s original experiment, including a growing business in commercial precognition aimed at predicting market trends.

After a year working on what she called “a classified project for the United States government” (i.e., Project Star Gate), the President of the American Statistical Association, and professor of statistics at the University of California, Davis, Jessica Utts, reported:

The data in support of precognition and possibly other related phenomena are quite strong statistically and would be widely accepted if it pertained to something more mundane. Yet, most scientists reject the possible reality of these abilities without ever looking at data!

After studying 35 new cases, Ian Stevenson concluded that “true precognition may occur.” A 1989 meta-analysis of 309 “future-telling” studies by 62 different investigators involving a total of 50,000 subjects between 1935 and 1987 concluded that there was a “highly significant precognition effect.” Stevenson recognized that this “may require some of the more recondite explanations that upset our habitual notions of causation and time.” We can upset that even more when we consider precognition by disembodied consciousness.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

The Premonitions Bureau: Ruickbie excerpt #21

Psychologist Leo Ruickbie writes in “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies:

John Barker

In December 1966, psychiatrist John Barker contacted Peter Fairley, science editor of the London Evening Standard, with a plan to establish a clearing house for predictions, the Premonitions Bureau, using the Evening Standard to solicit premonitions from the general public in order to prevent future tragedies like Aberfan. Fairley agreed, giving Barker twelve months. The Premonitions Bureau went live in January 1967, receiving 469 premonitions in its first year. Several were deadly accurate.

The first was from Alan Hencher. He telephoned the Bureau at 6 am on March 21, 1967, telling Barker about an aeroplane crash “over mountains,” with high fatalities: “There are one hundred and twenty-three people, possibly one hundred and twenty-four.” On April 20, a Globe Air Bristol Britannia aeroplane carrying 130 people crashed into a hillside south of Nicosia Airport in Cyprus. The Evening Standard’s frontpage headline was “124 Die in Airliner” – two more subsequently died in hospital. It was Cyprus’s worst aircrash.

On April 23, 1967, Lorna Middleton contacted Barker: she had seen an astronaut looking “petrified, terrified and just frightened.” On April 24, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov died when parachute failure caused his Soyuz capsule to smash into the ground at full speed. Hencher and Middleton again felt disaster loom towards the end of 1967, with Middleton describing a vision of a crowd and a railway platform, and seeing the words “Charing Cross,” a busy station in London, on November 1. On November 5, the Hastings to London Charing Cross train derailed near the Hither Green rail depot, killing 49 and injuring another 78. “Quite honestly it staggers me,” Barker told the Evening News afterwards, with the newspaper adding, dramatically, “Somehow, while dreaming or awake, they can gate-crash the time barrier.”

In Spring, 1968, messages started coming in to the Bureau of another impending tragedy. Middleton wrote “There may be another assassination. It may be in America shortly,” whilst telling a journalist that “The word assassination continues. I cannot disconnect it from Robert Kennedy.” Joan Hope in Canada wrote “Robert Kennedy to follow in his brother's footsteps.” On June 4, Middleton wrote again to the Bureau: “Another assassination and again in America.” On June 5, Miss C.E. Piddock in Kent wrote in her diary “Janitor will die today” – she later realised that “Senator” must have been meant. In the US, Alan Vaughan wrote to Dr. Stanley Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center, with the warning that “This dream may presage the assassination of a third prominent American, one who had connections with John F. Kennedy [...] Could that other martyr be Bobby Kennedy?" Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded in a hail of bullets at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, at around midnight on June 5, 1968, dying in hospital the next day.

The Premonitions Bureau was scoring remarkable hits – its success had inspired Robert Nelson to start a similar operation in the USA, the Central Premonitions Registry – but there were dark clouds on the horizon. At the same time as the Cyprus plane crash, Hencher started to receive premonitions that Barker’s life was in danger. Hencher’s warnings persisted into 1968. Now Middleton was having troubling premonitions about Barker. On February 7, she had a vision of him – just his head and shoulders – with her deceased parents: “my parents were trying to tell me something,” she said. Barker suffered a brain haemorrhage on August 18, 1968, dying later in hospital.

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” his 2021 prize winning essay in a competition sponsored by the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.