All you need is “one white crow.”
That was the sentiment expressed by William James, the nineteenth-century Harvard psychologist and philosopher who had also been trained as a medical doctor. James is widely considered to be not only one of the founders of the very sober philosophical system known as American Pragmatism, but also one of the leading minds of the modern era to have explored mysticism, spiritualism, and religious experience.
Pragmatism is the no-nonsense school of thought based on the notion that only those philosophical principles or truths that can be demonstrated by practical use or utility deserve intelligent consideration. Yet James was converted to a belief in unusual, credulity-straining psychic phenomena to such a degree that he became one of the founding members of the American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR). So how does a no-nonsense pragmatist become a convert to the world of clairvoyants, spirits, and things that go bump in the night? James's seemingly impossible conversion was the result of his encounter with a quiet, nondescript Boston housewife named Leonora Piper, an unassuming woman who demonstrated extraordinary and unexplainable abilities time and again under very controlled circumstances. James felt that these unusual abilities required us to reexamine our understanding of what it means to be human.
In his efforts to better understand the human condition and, indeed, our human potential, James believed that scientific exploration should focus on the exceptional—the outlier—and not on the hump of the bell curve; it's the exceptional person with anomalous or unusual abilities that shines a light in the darkness and lets us know what's possible. When asked about his interest in Piper and her abilities, James explained that she was “the one white crow that proves that not all crows are black.”
Just as it's a waste of time and resources to look for the possibility of a white crow by studying a million black crows, it's a futile, quixotic quest to search for clues to human potential the way mainstream psychology does: in pathology and least-common-denominator approaches driven by volume-based quantitative methodologies. Because, as James believed, all you need is one single paradigm-shaking outlier.
It's the outlier—the white crow—that lets us know what's possible. Don't tell me about the masses or blather on about disorders; instead, tell me what I'm capable of! Tell me—show me— the white crows!
But what do James's white crows have to do with Greek philosophy? Answer: The enigmatic ancient Greek mystics were white crows as they pushed the boundary of human capability to logic-defying limits. Philosophers like Pythagoras were able to intuit aspects of the universe that are being validated by today's science while also being seemingly imbued with supernormal abilities of mind and body.
However, as I'll elaborate in more detail later, belief in the possibility of our own potential is key; without that, doors of experience slam shut. As Pythagoras said, “[R]emember to be disposed to believe, for these are the nerves of wisdom.” To become a white crow, one needs to believe in white crows; for alchemical transformation to occur, one needs to be open to the possibility of our possibilities.
So let's then open the door of possibility by meeting some modern-day white crows.
It's 2004, and Daniel Tammet sits in a chair and looks straight ahead; he takes a sip of water and, with the cameras rolling, he begins to recite the numbers in a soft and steady voice:
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644 . . .
Tammet was attempting to do something that fewer than a handful of people in the world can do: accurately recite the infinitely long numerical value of pi to thousands of decimal places without the use of any electronic or mechanical devices. As he sat and calmly recited the incomprehensibly long sequence of numbers, the only tool at his disposal was his incredible mind.
Meet Daniel Tammet, math savant.
As he recites number after number, the thin bespectacled man occasionally pauses to sip from his bottle of water and then continues once again. In the background, mathematicians from Oxford are furiously attempting to double-check his math with the aid of computer-generated printouts. As the afternoon wears on, Tammet, like the Energizer Bunny, keeps going and going and going. The small crowd gathered at Oxford's Museum of the History of Science is amazed; how can this slight young Englishman in his early twenties be doing such an amazing feat? How is it possible for any human being to correctly recite the value of pi to so many thousands of decimal places?
Pi is considered a transcendental number; to remind those who have forgotten their basic algebra, it's the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle and can be calculated by dividing the circumference of any circle by its diameter. The resulting number is a mathematical constant that's represented by an infinitely long irrational number. That means that it can't be expressed exactly as a fraction, but is instead a decimal representation of a series of never-repeating numbers that go on for infinity.
As in, without ever ending. Ever.
In order to give some perspective on just how long an infinitely long sequence of numbers is, consider this: If you started methodically writing the ratio for pi at a rate of one digit per second from now until the universe slowly died out billions of years from now, you'd barely make a dent in (the) pi. In fact, if we wrote a digit per second for, say, 10 billion years, we'd have 315,360,000,000,000,000 digits, which would give us pi to roughly 315 quadrillion decimal places. While that may seem like a lot of numbers, it still wouldn't even be scratching at the door of infinity.
The first computer calculation of pi occurred in 1949 on a humongous machine that weighed over thirty tons; it took seventy hours of calculating on that house-sized computer to calculate pi to a measly 2,037 decimal places. More recently, in 2002, and aided by the explosion of computer technology, Yasumasa Kanada at the University of Toronto was able to calculate pi to more than one trillion decimal places. And even that's still not close to the pi promised land.
How far was Daniel Tammet able to go? At his demonstration at Oxford in 2004, he quit from exhaustion after over five straight hours—and after having recited pi without a single error to 22,514 decimal places. While that may be a drop in the pi bucket, it was over ten times what that thirty-ton computer needed seventy hours to calculate in 1949. And when you consider that the average person has a difficult time reciting twenty non-repeating numbers, 22,514 digits seems absolutely mind-boggling.
When asked how he did it, Tammet replied that the numbers “appear in the landscape of my mind.”
The world of savants is full of white crows like Tammet.
Renowned educator, visionary and author Joseph Chilton Pearce, in his groundbreaking book Evolutions End (1993), describes the amazing abilities of George and Clarence, who were what's known as calendrical savants. The two brothers weren't able to do the simplest arithmetic and couldn't even take care of themselves. (They had been institutionalized since age seven.) Yet they could tell you the day of the week for any given date up to 40,000 years into the future or 40,000 years into the past.
Yes, you might be saying, “I've seen savants like that on 60 Minutes or Nova; they can stutter out the day of the week for any given date, but so what? They might have a dynamite memory, but is that really so special?”
Well, yes, actually, it is. Because it's quite a bit more than just an amazing memory. The brothers are not regurgitating information from calendars that they had memorized; Clarence and George haven't been exposed to printouts of hundreds of thousands of months spanning tens of thousands of years. Instead, they just seem to know the days of the week for any date.
If you were to ask them, for example, when Easter would be in the year 12,010, they can quickly tell you. As Pearce points out, knowing the day on which Easter falls in a given year requires adjustments for both solar and lunar calendars, as well as corrections factoring in leap years.
Similarly, if you were to ask the twins the day of the week for a date prior to 1752—the year that Europe shifted from Georgian to Julian calendar systems—they would respond with the correct answer, automatically adjusting to the correct system. Yet when asked how they knew to accommodate for the change in calendrical systems in 1752, they stare with a confused look, incapable of answering such an abstract question. In fact, they don't even understand the meaning of “calendrical system.”
But how do they make adjustments that they're not even aware of?
Pearce speculates it was the twins' childhood exposure to a nineteenth-century brass novelty device that was pivotal in the development of their calendrical skills. The gadget, with various interlocking cogs, could be turned to provide the date for a 200-year period. But this brass-cogged gizmo didn't merely provide the twins with dates to memorize; the device has a 200-year limit, while the twins had a 40,000-year past-or-present calendrical radius. Pearce believes that, in essence, the device “tuned” the twins' neural field to be resonant with a larger “calendrical field.” The twins, living a drab and dreary existence and being of a blissfully uncomplicated intellect, were able to repetitively and intensely focus on the magical little mechanical device—and, in the process, a door to a larger transcendent realm was opened. From that point on, when asked a question that taps into the “calendar realm”—that is, when presented with the appropriate stimulus that seems to resonate with that larger knowledge base that they're cued for—they have been able to almost instantly respond with the correct answer, apparently “accessing” information that they've never even been exposed to.
This should be impossible. But like all white crows, George and Clarence redefine what may indeed be possible.
Pat Price stares at a blank sheet of white paper.
He is sitting in the small, electrically shielded interview room on the second floor of the Stanford Research Institute's (SRI) Radio Physics building in Palo Alto, California, and beside lead researcher Russell Targ; the year is 1974.
Targ looked the part of researcher; a laser physicist by training (Targ would retire from Lockheed Martin in 1998 as senior staff scientist, having developed airborne laser systems), he bore a striking resemblance to Art Garfunkel—only with thick, hornrimmed glasses. His research partner was Hal Puthoff, also a laser physicist, who received his Ph.D. from Stanford and had been involved in gravitational physics, having published several scientific papers on polarizable vacuums.
Clearly Targ and Puthoff knew their science; after all, Stanford doesn't just hand out doctorates at Star Trek conventions. But some might argue that on that day in 1974, Targ and Puthoff were exploring a phenomenon that was so on the fringe it seemed more like science fiction than legitimate science research. Targ and Puthoff—two academically trained physicists—were doing pioneering research in the logic-defying abilities of the human mind; in fact, they were researching an exotic form of psychic phenomenon—that thing most scientists put right up there with Big Foot, the chupacabra, and Santa Claus. Only on that day, mild-mannered Pat Price was the paranormal subject that would make these two very intelligent men with doctoral degrees scratch their heads in wonder.
As Targ is about to begin interviewing Price, he starts a small tape recorder. Speaking into it, Targ gives the time and date and briefly describes the nature of that day's session. Then he reads aloud to Price geographical coordinates (the latitude and longitude) of a location unknown to Price; in fact, all Targ knows about those coordinates is what a physicist sent by the government to monitor the research had told him: they're of a “Soviet site of great interest to the analysts.”
But Price hadn't been told even that; he was merely read latitude and longitude coordinates.
After hearing the numbers, the middle-aged and graying Price slowly polishes his glasses and leans back in his chair as he closes his eyes. After about a minute, he beins to describe what he sees: “I am lying on the roof of a two-or three-story brick building. It's a sunny day. The sun feels good. There's the most amazing thing. There's a giant gantry crane moving back and forth over my head. . . . As I drift up in the air and look down, it seems to be riding on a track with one rail on each side of the building. I've never seen anything like that.”
Price then leans forward and begins to sketch on a blank sheet of paper on the table in front of him. In addition to drawing the eight-wheeled gantry crane that he'd described, he draws many other details from the site, including a cluster of compressed gas cylinders and a “large interior room where people were assembling a sixty-foot diameter sphere” from “thick metal gores,” like sections of an orange peel.
How accurate was Price's description and drawing? You can judge for yourselves by looking at figure 1.
Figure 1. The real Semipalatinsk target site
This is a CIA artist's tracing of a satellite photograph of Semipalatinsk; these tracings were typically made by the CIA to conceal the accuracy of detail of satellite photography at that time.
Figure 2. Pat Price's drawing
Close-up detail of the CIA drawing of the actual crane is to the left; Pat Price's drawing obtained via Remote Viewing methods is on the right.
The site located at the coordinates Price had been given were a top-secret atomic bomb laboratory at Semipalatinsk (in eastern Siberia), where the Soviets had also been testing particle-beam weapons designed to shoot down U.S. surveillance satellites. These very same CIA satellites would confirm via aerial photographs (see figure 1) the amazing accuracy of Price's drawing of the gantry-crane (which had been a very prominent component of the site), down to his drawing the correct number of wheels (eight) on the crane! (See figure 2.)
What about Price's description of the “sixty-foot-diameter metal sphere” with “thick metal gores” in orange peel sections? Because that sixty-foot metal sphere was inside a building, in a huge room, the SRI team wouldn't know just how accurate Price was until almost three years later, when further high-resolution reconnaissance satellites were able to catch a better peek. You can evaluate his accuracy as you read this Aviation Week article from May 2, 1977, describing the just-photographed site three years after Price had described it::
SOVIETS PUSH FOR BEAM WEAPON . . . . The US used high resolution photographic reconnaissance satellites to watch Soviet technicians dig through solid granite formations. In a nearby building, huge extremely thick steel gores were manufactured. These steel segments were parts of a large sphere estimated to be about 18 meters (57.8 feet) in diameter. US officials believe that the spheres are needed to capture and store energy from nuclear driven explosives or pulse power generators. Initially, some US physicists believed that there was no method the Soviets could use to weld together the steel gores [sic] of the spheres to provide a vessel strong enough to withstand pressures likely to occur in a nuclear explosive fission process, especially when the steel to be welded was extremely thick.
At this point, you might be saying, “C'mon! This has to be non-sense, right? There's no way that Price could be able to ‘see’ half-way around the world and accurately describe what's there in such detail, right? That should be impossible—and believing he can see something he logically can't makes Price some sort of a nut.”
But these sorts of abilities are possible—for those very special white crows.
And Pat Price was no crackpot. Easygoing by nature, he was the decorated retired police commissioner of Burbank, California. In addition to being a seasoned and respected cop, able to deduce clues from a crime scene, he was also able to “access” seemingly impossible-to-attain information. This no-nonsense law-enforcement veteran was able to concentrate on a location and see it in his mind's eye—regardless of whether that location was around the block or around the world.
This ability to expand one's level of awareness to experience nonlocal phenomenon has been dubbed remote viewing and was the subject of the heavily funded government research at SRI ($25 million was allocated over an almost twenty-five year period) as the CIA had quickly realized the intelligence potential of such a skill. In fact, the 1974 experiment was such a success that Targ and Puthoff were investigated by the U.S. House of Representatives committee on intelligence oversight to determine if a breach in national security had occurred. Hauled in front of Congress for an interrogation, the SRI research team was soon cleared of any wrongdoing. After the hearings, and enjoying continued governmental support and funding, the SRI team trained U.S. army officers in remote-viewing methods. The technique helped locate downed military aircraft, as well as finding a crashed Soviet plane, which had been carrying a nuclear weapon, in Africa; this discovery would lead to a cover-blowing commendation from then-president Jimmy Carter.
While the very notion of remote viewing may sound impossible, the supporting data is substantial. Targ and Puthoff, after their experiments with Price, went on to publish several articles about remote viewing in respected journals, such as Nature and the Journal of Scientific Exploration. In chapter 15, “New Science and Old Wisdom,” I'll discuss some of the scientific theories that might explain how remote viewing, along with other manifestations of nonlocal consciousness, might indeed be possible.
A handful of people, like Price, are just natural remote viewers. Price was the Roy Hobbs—or the Michael Jordan, if you prefer— of remote viewers, as he was documented to have an over 80 percent “target-hit” rate. In fact, Price is the only person who has ever been able to remotely view not just locations or buildings, but written words as well.
Unfortunately, Price died mysteriously in a Las Vegas hotel room two years before satellite surveillance confirmed the amazing accuracy of his 1974 remote view. But even before his untimely death, Price had developed a national reputation for his amazing mental abilities. In fact, his reputation was such that other law enforcement agencies would sometimes call for his services.
One such high-profile example occurred on February 4, 1974, when the Berkeley police department called Price for assistance in finding a young girl abducted from a very wealthy and prominent family. It was the sort of crime that focuses national attention on a local police department, as every newspaper across the nation had the story splattered across their front pages: Patty Hearst Kidnapped!
The heiress of the Hearst fortune had been taken by the little-known Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Desperate to solve such a widely publicized case, the Berkeley police decided to try the less-than-traditional psychic route.
Called the day after the kidnapping, Price, Targ, and Puthoff piled into a car and headed up to Berkeley. Upon arriving, Price asked to see a book of mug shots; as he slowly flipped through the photos, he soon stopped and pointed to a man that he had never seen before: Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze. Still pointing at the photo, he told the local police gathered around him, “He's the leader.”
It was a direct hit.
DeFreeze was indeed the leader of the SLA, and Price would even tell the Berkeley police the make, color, and location of his vehicle. But it would be several months before DeFreeze himself would actually be found. Cornered in a house with his associates, he was killed during a confrontation with police.
Just how did Price do it? How did he pick Patty Hearst's kidnapper out of a mug-shot book? And just how was he able to describe in such detail the Soviet atomic bomb plant in Semipalatinsk?
There are many questions that white crows force us to ask— questions about who we are, what we're capable of, and, more fundamentally, what is the nature of existence? Because if what these exceptional human beings can do contradicts the physical “laws” of nature—the conceptual glue that helps us to make sense of our world—then what are we to make of a universe that we had so confidently thought we understood?
Kyriakos Markides isn't crazy. Nor is he a religious nut. A self-described skeptic, Markides is a sociologist and tenured professor at the University of Maine, where he's been on the faculty since 1972. As an academic, Markides has written and lectured on a variety of topics in sociology, ranging from political sociology to the sociology of mental illness to the sociology of international terrorism. But along the way in his academic career, Professor Markides also became quite interested in a very particular white crow named Styllianos Atteshlis, a Christian mystic in Markides's native Cyprus. Nicknamed Daskalos (Greek for “teacher”), Atteshlis was an unusually gifted man in his sixties who had demonstrated rather miraculous healing abilities.
Markides had been teaching sociology at the University of Maine for several years when he decided to put aside another research project in order to spend time studying Daskalos and his circle of disciples. The agnostic Markides had heard whispers of strange healings, along with other incredible tales of psychic phenomena, attributed to the humble Daskalos; intellectually curious, Markides felt compelled to apply his sociologist's lens to these mysterious practitioners of esoteric wisdom and objectively examine their alleged exploits.
What Markides experienced would change his life forever.
As part of his research, Markides witnessed Daskalos healing a paralyzed woman who medical specialists in both Cyprus and Israel had considered incurable; the skeptical researcher was in the room when the tall mystic simply stroked her back for approximately half an hour, after which she was able to get up out of her bed and, to her and her family's astonishment, walk again. Markides, ever the scientist, was able to obtain copies of her new, post-healing X-rays, which showed a normal spine, and compare them with her earlier X-rays, which had showed significant spinal damage only a week before Daskalos had laid his healing hands on the woman.
But how can this be possible? Even if, as Markides notes, there may have been some psychosomatic effect occurring, where the woman's belief in her own healing may have some-how enabled her to walk, it would still not explain the changes to her spine that the X-rays clearly showed—physical evidence that Markides academically trained mind told him should be impossible and yet, with the before and after X-rays in hand, was incontrovertible.
Markides would soon discover that these kinds of seemingly impossible events were commonplace in Daskalos's world. The charismatic mystic patiently described for Markides an energetic cosmogony (one that we'll soon see is very similar to Pythagoras's cosmogony) where “everything that exists is the result of frequencies of vibrations, including the composition of matter” (Markides 1985, 187). Indeed, in such an energetic and vibrational world, where thoughts and matter are essentially comprised of the same elemental “stuff,” a well-trained mystic that has achieved mastery in that energetic realm could certainly manifest exceptional abilities, such as somatic healing or other types of matter transmutation. (“Matter transmutation” is just another term for alchemy, which, by the way, Markides tells us that Daskalos is also able to do.)
Over time, Markides, the skeptical social scientist who had maintained what he described as a “critical predisposition,” witnessed firsthand so many unusual phenomena that his very pragmatic and scientifically based beliefs were shattered. What started as a sociological research study of Christian “shamans” by an agnostic professor eventually turned into a ten-year immersion in a world of unexplainable phenomena, which would subsequently lead to his conversion into a belief in what some may call the metaphysical.
Markides went on to write a critically received trilogy of books describing his experiences with Daskalos—experiences that forced him to conclude that “human beings have dormant abilities within themselves that extend beyond the five senses and that mind is not confined to brain . . . that there may be stages of consciousness that extend beyond the rational stage . . . that there are trans-rational stages of consciousness that mystics of all traditions have talked about throughout history and that what we call death is nothing more than another beginning, a transition to a different plane of life and existence” (Markides 2002, 4). In fact, when Markides was directly asked by a sociologist colleague whether or not he believed Daskalos had “so-called metaphysical abilities,” Markides replied, “I will tell you what he himself says, and what in fact all authentic mystics say: that there is nothing really metaphysical in the world. It is the limitation of our awareness that would classify certain phenomena or abilities as metaphysical. Had our awareness been different, perhaps such things as nonmedical healings, psychic abilities, and so on would have been considered perfectly normal and natural” (Markides 1990, 9).
As Markides chronicles in his books, he experienced a shift in his beliefs—and in his level of awareness—based on his first-hand experience with a white crow; like William James before him, Markides found that a brush with the truly remarkable can be paradigm shattering and life altering.
That's precisely why white crows can be so important: they can become the philosopher stone in our own transformation, compelling us to take off our blinders and acknowledge our own potential. Once we unlock the confining box of our own perceived limitations—once we are freed from our own ignorance—we can then open doors of perception and awareness that the skeptically minded never even knew existed.
And, as I've mentioned, once the numinous is glimpsed, then nothing is ever the same, and everything changes.
Sometimes there are instances when a person doesn't become a white crow, but instead has an ever-so-brief momentary flash of transcendent inspiration (what in transpersonal psychology can be called a peak versus a plateau experience)—one of those wondrous and illuminating “aha” or “eureka” moments that seem to manifest in our conscious awareness from some deeper reservoir of wisdom. These magical glimpses can be life changing. The lightning bolt hits, blowing open the door of our potential, before disappearing into the heavens.
Let's explore some decidedly nonrational instances of expanded—albeit brief—moments of transcendent awareness as we take a look at a couple of people who have been struck by a lightning bolt of insight or transcendent knowing.
Imagine devoting yourself to a puzzle for fifteen long years without ever solving it. That's 180 months—or 5,475 days—of frustration. That's fifteen Christmases, New Years, birthdays—well, you get the picture. It's a long time to rack your brain over a seemingly unsolvable riddle.
But that's what the nineteenth-century Irish mathematician William Hamilton came up against: a seemingly unsolvable mathematical puzzle. Today he's known as a brilliant innovator who made important contributions to classical mechanics, optics, and algebra and is best known as the inventor of quaternions.
Now, most people today couldn't tell the difference between a quaternion and a Rastafarian, but in math circles, it's quite a big deal. For our purposes, it's not really that essential to understand the subtleties of what a quaternion is. Suffice to say that it's a way of extending complex numbers (which can be viewed as points on a two-dimensional plane) to a higher, four-dimensional spatial plane. Indeed, the discovery of quaternions would essentially establish vector algebra and become a cornerstone of modern math.
The discovery of the quaternion was no easy trick. Poor old Hamilton had wrestled with the elusive secret of that mathematical formula for years. Finally, frustrated and disgusted, he quit. After fifteen long years, he decided that he was done tilting at windmills.
Saddened by his decision to abandon his quest, he asked his wife to take a stroll with him to perhaps lift his sunken spirits. As they crossed a little footbridge along the Royal Canal in Dublin, his lightning bolt of inspiration hit; the answer to the riddle of the quaternion appeared in his mind in a single, instantaneous flash.
Afraid that he might forget it, he took his penknife and carved the equation into the side of the nearby Broom Bridge. This little eureka moment is part of mathematical folklore; in fact, in order to commemorate this momentous event, the National University of Ireland organizes an annual pilgrimage from Dunsink Observatory to the famous “quaternion bridge,” where, although no trace of the carving remains, there is a stone plaque to honor Hamilton's eureka moment.
“OK, so what's the big deal?” you might ask. Some mathematician figured out the answer to some arcane problem. Big whoop; happens all the time.
Well, no. It doesn't. At least not like it did for William Hamilton. Unlike our savant friends discussed earlier, Hamilton wasn't calculating anything, nor was he using his deductive reasoning or cognitive faculties to obtain the elusive equation. In fact, having truly given up, he wasn't thinking about quaternions at all when the formula appeared in his mind.
And here's another very important point: When the quaternion lightning bolt did strike his conscious awareness, he wasn't even sure what it all meant. As he later reported, he knew at the time that he would have to spend another fifteen years making sense of that symbolic flash. In other words, the answer appeared to him, but he then needed time to understand it. It was as if the quaternion formula came, fully developed, from somewhere beyond his own intellectual faculties, and he was left to effectively reverse engineer it.
Let's take a look at another flash of eureka inspiration.
Today, we sort of take lasers for granted. They've become commonplace, found in everything from satellites to the express-checkout line at our local supermarket. But not too long ago—in fact, until just before 1957—they were the stuff of science fiction. It was in 1957 when Gordon Gould, an optical physicist, first came up with the idea of light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation (a.k.a., the LASER). Once again, it's not so much that Gould came up with a scientific innovation, but how he came up with his breakthrough that is a lightning-bolt moment.
Gould was lying about his house over the weekend, just relaxing, when—shazam!—the lightning bolt of inspiration struck without warning. Suddenly Gould saw in his field of vision a symbolic structure of such complexity and detail that he reported being “stunned, electrified” by the enormity of his vision. And, as it did with Hamilton, the lightning bolt presented as a fully formed, fully developed schema or blueprint in his mind.
In other words, Gould wasn't lying on the sofa saying, “Hey, you know, if I were to refract light with a mirror, then . . .” No, there was no incremental or deductive thinking going on here. Instead, almost like a medium channeling otherworldly messages, he had to quickly put pen to paper and feverishly scribble down page after page of the extremely complex knowledge that had appeared in his mind. Gould would say later that he was mystified that such monumental wisdom had just sort of magically dropped into his head without his bidding. But unlike Hamilton, Gould didn't need fifteen years to make sense of his illumination; by Monday he had sketched out the particulars of laser light-theory, an innovation that he'd later receive the Nobel Prize for.
The notion that a person can have a lightning-bolt moment in the form of a short-lived peak experience was an idea first developed by pioneering psychologist Abraham Maslow, and it would go on to become an important concept in the field of transpersonal psychology.
During Hamilton and Gould's lightning-bolt peak experiences, the seemingly transcendent wisdom they received took the form of mathematical or scientific insights; yet the lightning (or peak experience) that breaks open the boundaries of human potential can have another type of manifestation as well: cosmic consciousness.
R. M. Bucke, the late nineteenth-century Canadian psychiatrist who would go on to explore mysticism and write the seminal Cosmic Consciousness (1902), articulates three types of consciousness: simple consciousness (our instinctual consciousness), self consciousness (self-awareness that allows human beings to realize themselves as distinct entities), and, finally, cosmic consciousness, which Bucke describes as a new level of awareness that's at the pinnacle of our evolution.
During cosmic consciousness, one's individualized sense of self gives way to a merging with a larger reality as dualism gives way to an experience of the “allness”—the totality—of the universe.
Here's how Bucke described cosmic consciousness after identifying common traits in individuals who had claimed to have experienced mystical states (italics mine):
Like a flash there is presented to his consciousness a clear conception (a vision) in outline of the meaning and drift of the universe . . . He sees and knows that the cosmos . . . is in fact . . . in very truth a living presence . . . He sees that the life which is in man is as immortal as God is; that the foundation principle of the world is what we call love, and that the happiness of every individual is in the long run absolutely certain. The person who passes through this experience will learn in the few minutes, or even moments, of its continuance more than in months or years of study, and he will learn much that no study every taught or can teach. Especially does he obtain such a conception of “the whole.” . . . Along with moral elevation and intellectual illumination comes what must be called, for want of a better term, a sense of immortality.
In her book Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics (1986), psychologist Marsha Sinetar refers to cosmic consciousness as the aforementioned peak experience; as she describes it:
The peak experience means that the person experiences . . . the Transcendent nature of reality. He enters into the Absolute, becoming one with it, if only for an instant. It is a life-altering instant which many have described as one in which the mind stops, as a time in which the paradoxical change/changeless nature opens up to a person. The peak experience expands the individual's field of consciousness to include everything in the universe . . .
The instant of transcendent knowing described by Sinetar is that special moment when the lightning bolt strikes, when finite becomes infinite.
By tearing down constraints and limitations imposed by ignorance, fear, or doubt, human beings with exceptional abilities or illuminations— be they savants, scientists, psychics, or mystics—help us redefine what it means to be human. But what do they have to do with Greek philosophy?
Well, Greek philosophers were some of the earliest paradigm-rocking white crows. And the mystic Greek philosophers in particular were known to have developed rather exceptional abilities of mind and body. In fact, the essence of philosophy as practiced by Pythagoras and Plato was a form of human alchemy, a transfiguration from physical to metaphysical, an evolution from finite to infinite. Indeed, for the Greek mystic, the whole point of philosophy was the transformation of the black crow into a white one.
It's these white crows—past and present—that are the harbingers of our potential. As such, they are essential ingredients in our transformative alchemy; by showing us what's possible, they allow for our latent and transcendent potential to become emergent and manifest. For that very special reason, those exceptional beings known as white crows hold the key to our future.
But before discussing that future, let's journey back to our past so that we can better understand the ground that this transformative wisdom emerged from. Let's head back in time as we meet some of these earliest white crows.
This next contemplative exercise deals with the unusual abilities of the white crows. You will be asked to contemplate on how the calendrical twins receive their information, how Daskalos healed that woman's spine, how Pat Price was able to see halfway around the world.
But before we begin, take a few minutes to do some sort of physical exercise, being sure to do only as much as your physical health allows. This could include walking, jogging, or bicycling. After fifteen to thirty minutes (depending on your health) of exercise, find a body of water to sit facing in quiet contemplation. This can be a pond, a river, a lake, or a pool. If there are no appropriate bodies of water, light a candle and meditate while focusing on the flickering flame.
Take several minutes to try and nonverbally conceptualize how the calendrical twins might have accessed calendars from 40,000 years into the future. Try and visualize how Daskalos energetically healed that woman's spine. Try and see if you can remote view like Pat Price did; in order to remote view, try and “see” with your mind the location where you are currently sitting from a bird's perspective, high overhead. Take several moments to sensorially feel what this experience may be like.
When you're done, sit for several more moments and become aware of how you feel. Now look around you; do you experience things any differently? Feel free to write down any of these initial thoughts and feelings, as writing these down will help you to process this experience.
