It is not known precisely where angels dwell—whether
in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s
pleasure that we should be informed of their abode.
—Voltaire
I had successfully avoided thinking about spirit guides and angels, at least within the university setting, until one fateful afternoon in the summer of 2003 when a new postdoctoral fellow asked me if I wanted to talk with my guardian angel.
If you typically have trouble with the concept of spirit guides, and in particular have difficulty with the idea of angels, it is worth remembering our discussion that “angels are like oysters” in the previous chapter. You can at least read about angels as I can write about oysters. In the same way that there is big difference between typing the word oyster and actually swallowing one, I am not suggesting that you swallow the idea that guardian angels are real. I just encourage you to read about the remarkable set of events that transpired in my life and in my laboratory and come to your own conclusions about them.
Remember, I am reporting what actually happened, changing the names and certain identifying details as appropriate to protect anonymity. The person I was meeting with was in his forties, with a PhD in cardiovascular physiology, who was about to begin a two-year research fellowship at the University of Arizona, which was funded by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. He had selected me to be his primary mentor. Prior to this face-to-face meeting, I had spoken with him once on the telephone. As you can probably surmise, in that conversation he had not mentioned anything about spirits or angels. To protect his anonymity—he prefers that his angelic awareness not be widely known—I will call him Dr. Jackson.
Though this was in no way related to the topic of his postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Jackson was aware that I had conducted research on life after death. He confessed that he could readily see spirits, including angels, and he claimed that one of my angels—a female—was standing in my office behind my right shoulder!
In my thirty-plus years of holding research meetings in various laboratories at Harvard, Yale, and the University of Arizona, I had never heard a claim about an angel in my office, let alone “my” angel. Yes, some mediums had claimed to see deceased spirits in my office and laboratory, but then they regularly reported seeing dead people in houses, restaurants, and university offices.
Though I was intrigued by Dr. Jackson’s angel statement, to say the least, I did not feel it appropriate to explore his purported extrasensory perceptions at that time. Our task in that meeting was to map out plans for his research fellowship, not to hold a conversation with my supposed spirit guide. However, in light of other events related to angels that were cropping up at that time—for example, I had been curiously gifted a book about the history of angels, which I had not yet read—I told Dr. Jackson that I would look forward to talking with him about angels, off the record, at a future time.
As it turned out, Dr. Jackson was going to join me and two other colleagues in a daylong trip to a research clinic evaluating a purported energy-medicine device. On the way to the clinic, I asked Dr. Jackson if he was willing to share some of his early as well as current experiences related to angels.
It appears that angels had played a central role in his life just as they did in Mary Occhino’s. Dr. Jackson even said that his earliest childhood memory involved being with one of his lifelong angels. He claimed that because of his intimate relationship with them, he was sometimes able to perform healings on family members and friends.
Dr. Jackson believes that everyone has angels that assist throughout life, that most of us have no awareness of guardian angels, and that the majority of us are blind to the intrinsic value of coming to know our angels and consciously working with them.
Dr. Jackson felt that it was safe to share this information with me. He claimed that his spirit guides were instructing him to awaken me to existence of angels, including the specific ones associated with me. Of course, I entertained various alternative possibilities, including that Dr. Jackson was delusional, that he was pulling my leg, and that he might even be a secret Randi plant—with the Amazing Randi, you never know what’s up his magician’s sleeve. However, as far as I could tell, Dr. Jackson was a successful, responsible, and highly recommended PhD scientist who just so happened to hold strange beliefs similar to those of such mediums as John Edward and Mary Occhino.
Angel Sophia’s Sudden Appearance
After returning to Tucson and before I went to sleep that night, I wondered whether it was possible that I, and everyone else, actually had one or more guardian angels. I realized that unlike the survival-of-consciousness hypothesis, which was meaningful only to individuals who have experienced the loss of a loved one and have a personal reason to care about life after death, the spirit guides hypothesis had the potential to be meaningful to all of us. If we all could potentially improve ourselves by becoming increasingly aware of higher spiritual guidance, the implications for improving our daily lives made the spirit guides hypothesis more appealing.
Starting with when I was a professor at Yale, I would from time to time “ask the Universe” a question, and novel thoughts would typically pop into my mind that often could be verified.
The first such question I asked of the Universe was, “Could you give me another name for God?” What immediately popped into mind was the name Sam. When I first heard “Sam,” I couldn’t help laughing. I wondered, was the name Sam a product of my creative unconscious, or was I possibly living in a Woody Allen movie? However, when I looked up the origin of the name in my Webster’s, I got Samuel. I discovered to my astonishment that Samuel comes from the Hebrew Shemuel, which translates literally as “the name of God.”
After carefully considering nine possible conventional explanations for why this name might have popped into my mind, I seriously entertained the possibility that while asking the Universe a question in a state of deep authenticity and genuineness, it had somehow provided me with a concrete answer that I could later verify. In The G.O.D. Experiments I confessed that I initially was reluctant to explore this potential hypothesis; in fact, I avoided asking another question of the Universe for more than a decade. However, when I returned to asking such questions of the Universe, the good answers came with sufficient regularity for me to no longer, with integrity, dismiss this avenue of inquiry.
So that night, after returning to Tucson, I decided to ask the Universe, “Did I, as Dr. Jackson claimed, have a female angel, and could the Universe show her to me?”
What happened next was unique for me—I got absolutely nothing: no names, images, feelings, or memories. The complete absence of any subjective experience took me by surprise. I went to sleep impressed with the complete failure of my request.
The next morning I happened to read an article in the magazine Scientific American about so-called censor genes. These are genes that suppress certain genetic potentials from being expressed. It occurred to me that I had been so well conditioned to believe that angels were like Santa Claus—a playful fiction and nothing more—that my mind was probably censoring any awareness of a potential angelic presence in my life, if indeed there was one.
That night, I decided to try my personal experiment again. I consciously attempted to release any mental censorship I had about angels. I asked that my mind be opened to all possibilities, and then I did something new. Instead of asking the next question of the Universe, I directed my question to my possible angel instead.
I said in my mind, “Angel, if you are here, I would love to see you and learn your name.”
What happened next was totally unlike anything I had ever experienced before or since that night. Whereas I rarely see images—I mostly think in abstract terms; even my dreams, when I remember them, are relatively flat and colorless—I experienced the appearance of a large glowing figure hovering above the foot of my bed. My bedroom has high ceilings. The spirit, or hallucination or whatever it was, looked to be at least eight feet tall.
The spirit appeared to be female, with flowing blond hair. Around her shoulders were bright lights that looked to be in the shape of wings, but they could have been reflections off her arms and body. She seemed to be wearing a whitish dress. She was smiling. She appeared to be loving and gentle, yet strangely powerful.
I asked her in my mind what her name was, and what popped in was the name Sophia.
At that moment, my rational skeptical mind kicked in—I thought something to the effect of “this can’t be real"—and the vision of the female spirit vanished. Just like that, poof, and it was gone.
I realized that the name Sophia in Greek means “wisdom.” I had never heard of an angel named Sophia. Hearing this name for an angel initially seemed as bizarre to me as the name Sam for God was almost twenty years earlier.
The next morning I checked to see if there was an angel named Sophia on angel websites. I Googled the words Angel and Sophia, and what I uncovered left me breathless. There were more than five million entries for Angel Sophia, and some of websites revealed a profound set of religious beliefs associated with Angel Sophia.
Depending upon the internet source, Angel Sophia was described as being one of the following:
1. The first emanation of the Divine and the Mother of all creation, including of all the archangels
2. The feminine expression of the Divine—the male expression of the Divine being an angel purportedly called Metatron
3. The wife of Metatron
There were also many references to writings about something called the “Pistis Sophia” and a Christian denomination focused on her.
First there was Sam, the name of God, and then Sophia—two relatively unknown big names from religious history. As I had done with the name Sam—I had asked more than fifty staff members, students, and faculty if they knew the origin and meaning of the name Sam and only one person knew, meaning it was not common knowledge—I asked a cohort of people who actually knew something about angel lore if they had ever heard of an angel named Sophia.
The first nine people I asked included Dr. Jackson and the person who had gifted me the History of Angel. None of them said that they had heard of an angel named Sophia.
However, the tenth person I asked, who happened to be visiting me from California and was an ordained minister as well as a successful corporate executive, not only knew about Angel Sophia, but a close associate of his was a scholar who had just completed a book about Pistis Sophia. I had to wonder if this was a synchronicity. When he heard how I came to discover Angel Sophia, he was inspired to contact his friend, who sent me an inscribed copy of his book.
Try putting yourself in my shoes at that time: You had a seemingly innocent meeting with a new postdoctoral fellow, and in the course of the meeting the scientist claimed that a female angel was standing behind your right shoulder and wished to speak with you.
You eventually mustered the courage to attempt having some sort of personal angel experience yourself. You had a surprising vision of a glowing white, angelic-like female and heard the name Sophia, which you initially presumed has nothing to do with angels.
You then discovered in angel lore that there really was one named Sophia, and that she was viewed in some circles as the mother of all angels.
You then conducted a small informal survey with people who knew something about angels, and none of them said they had heard of an Angel Sophia. However, the tenth person not only knew of her existence, but he even knew a scholar who had just written a book about Pistis Sophia! Talk about a chain of synchronicities.
What would you have done with this information, especially if you knew mediums like John Edward and Mary Occhino who, like Dr. Jackson, were convinced that angels were real? Dismiss the information? Run from it? Put your head in the sand?
I might well have done this, except my mind wouldn’t let me. What unfolded was a new proof-of-concept personal experimental test.
Putting Angel Sophia to a Test
I should confess that I have what some people call a disconcerting, if not bad, habit, especially at a university. I sometimes jokingly tell colleagues and even strangers that as a scientist I have developed a “disease called science.”
It is more than L.O.V.E.; it is a habit that some would say can be likened to a dependency. What I mean is that in an automatic and often uncontrollable way, when I hear someone share a belief or an experience—the L in L.O.V.E—my mind effortlessly does the following:
1. It converts the person’s belief or experience into a question.
2. The question is then turned into a hypothesis.
3. The hypothesis is operationalized, meaning the hypothesis is refined so that it can be potentially measured—the process of 1-3 reflects the O in L.O.V.E.
4. The operationalized hypothesis is then transformed into an experimental design.
5. I will typically conduct the experiment in my head as an Einstein-like thought experiment.
6. And then, if it is feasible—meaning I have the time, funds, equipment, and so forth—I will feel the strong desire to conduct the experiment. This is the progression from O to V—the verification in L.O.V.E.
Because this process is so automatic and effortless, I often do not think much about it, unless the hypothesis happens to be exceptionally controversial and it turns out that it is actually possible for me to test it—be it an exploratory investigation or a full-fledged university experiment. This is what happened following my vision and upon becoming aware of beliefs about Angel Sophia. I realized that I had the possibility to conduct an exploratory investigation testing whether some sort of spiritual being with the name Sophia was somehow connected to me. The question I had asked was whether I was brave enough—some might say foolhardy enough—to actually conduct such a proof-of-concept investigation.
As fate would have it, the opportunity to conduct such an investigation in my personal life was dropped in my lap, so to speak. What transpired forever changed how I viewed the potential existence of a larger spiritual reality and our ability to investigate and learn from it.
It occurred to me that if Susy Smith was actually watching over me, then she would probably know about my seemingly anomalous experience with a purported angel named Sophia, and she would want to help me (1) verify if Sophia actually existed or (2) establish that Sophia was a figment of my imagination, whichever was the case. At this point I had no idea.
If Sophia was my angel—she might also be an angel to many others as well, if she really existed—and she was willing to appear in my bedroom, then she would most likely know that I was a person who suffered from a disease called science, and that I would want to determine, experimentally, whether she actually existed.
Moreover, if Sophia had been watching me for a long time, she would know of my relationship with the late Susy Smith, not only when Susy was in the physical but also after Susy had transitioned to the other side. I also speculated that if Sophia had my best interests at heart, she would likely be willing to collaborate with Susy to help validate her existence. Otherwise, why would she show up in the first place?
The idea popped into my head that in principle, Susy might be able to bring Sophia to an appropriately receptive medium. I wondered about the possibility of a deceased spirit actually bringing an angelic spirit to a medium. And if Susy succeeded in bringing Sophia to a medium, would the reading potentially verify the angel’s existence?
At this point I was simply doing a thought experiment. I realized that if an exploratory, proof-of-concept investigation were actually conducted with positive results, the possibility existed for doing formal, controlled, and systematic research on the spirit guides hypothesis. But before addressing the question of whether alleged spirit guides could provide meaningful information for people individually and collectively, it was essential to determine scientifically if spirit guides existed, period. This was where I began.
A Disconcerted Medium’s Susy-Sophia Reading
As it so happened, I was scheduled to give an address presenting our latest energy-medicine research—funded at the time by the National Institutes of Health—at a conference that was being held not far from the home of a gifted research medium. To preserve the requested anonymity of the medium, I have changed his name as well as the name of the city where the reading took place. We will call the medium Harry and the city Baltimore.
Harry lived about an hour from where the conference was being held. He had previously provided exceptionally accurate information regarding Susy Smith; moreover, he claimed that Susy would spontaneously visit him from time to time. But it turned out that Harry was one of the few mediums I have worked with who neither believed in, nor claimed to communicate with, angelic beings. Harry was a fairly down-to-earth person who was known to enjoy social gatherings as well as alcoholic spirits—I know many mediums who understand how to enjoy liquid spirits as well.
I deeply respect Harry’s skills as a medium; the fact that he had little use for the idea of angels made his selection for my private exploratory investigation all the more interesting. So I called him a week before the conference and asked if I could have a personal reading with him. Harry happened to have some free time after my conference was over, and we scheduled the appointment.
Technically, what transpired was not the double-deceased version of the spirit-mediated model since Sophia presumably was not deceased; as an angel, she had never lived in the physical. However, it was a deceased-mediated paradigm since Susy supposedly brought Sophia to Harry.
When I got to Harry’s house, after expressing greetings and sharing personal kinds of catch-up information, Harry led me into the room where he conducted his readings. Though I had tested Harry in laboratory research on numerous occasions, I had never had a personal reading with him. I told Harry that I wished to hear from two beings in spirit. The first I would identify by name, the second would presumably be brought by the first, and I would not provide any information about this individual. At no time did I say, or imply, that one of the spirits was potentially an angel.
I then told him I wished to hear from Susy Smith. He was pleased to comply with this request. He shared information, purportedly from Susy, for approximately fifteen minutes. Though this information fit Susy well, most of it was scientifically useless because: (1) I had given him Susy’s name, (2) he had previously participated in research involving Susy, and (3) he had subsequently read some of Susy’s books. Since Susy was not the focus of this exploratory investigation, these factors were unimportant.
Next I told him that I had asked Susy to please bring along another individual in spirit, and that I would like it if Harry did a reading with this individual.
What happened next was thoroughly confusing to Harry, and a bit upsetting for him as well.
Harry reported seeing a very tall woman with blond flowing hair.
He described her as radiant, bigger than life, and sort of floating above the floor.
He said that he could not look at her eyes; she was very powerful.
He said he felt inadequate in her presence. I have never heard a medium speak this way of a deceased person whom he or she has contacted.
Further, Harry could not ascertain where she had previously lived on earth or how she had died.
He sensed she had been in Spirit a very long time, had an S-sounding name, and was somehow connected to me, but he could not figure out how.
He said she gave no indication that she was a blood relative, or even a personal friend of mine, yet there was a very strong emotional and intellectual bond between us that made no sense to him.
Harry not only felt inadequate in terms of his mediumship skills with this individual, but he said he even felt embarrassed to be reading her.
He said he had never experienced this hesitancy, and I had never heard a medium say that she or he felt embarrassed reading a particular spirit.
Save for my confirming that I did wish to hear from a woman, and that she probably would appear to have flowing blond hair, afterward I did not give Harry any additional feedback about his potential accuracy or lack thereof. Moreover, I told Harry that for personal as well as scientific reasons, I could not at that time give him any indication about who the woman might be or why I had requested that Susy specifically bring her to the reading.
After thanking him greatly for his time and efforts, I left him in a rather befuddled state. While driving back to town in my rental car, it began to dawn on me that what had just transpired was possibly unique in the history of afterlife, death, and spiritual research.
Susy Smith, a distinguished deceased author of thirty books in parapsychology and the apparent inventor (from the other side) of the double-deceased paradigm, had just been read by a gifted research medium. The medium claimed that Susy had brought to the reading another woman in spirit whose glowing presence sounded very much like what I knew of Sophia, the angel.
Had Susy, a deceased woman, brought an angel, in this case Sophia, to Harry?
Had Harry read an angel and not known it?
Was Harry’s personal discomfort, coupled with his inability to get standard information about the woman, like how she died, potential evidence that this spirit was indeed someone who had never lived on the earth, and therefore had never died?
Obviously, a single reading does not make for a definitive scientific test—in academic research, this would be called nongeneralizable data (you may recall our discussion of the federal government’s definition of research in chapter 1).
However, single readings can serve as beacons of opportunity, revealing what can potentially be explored and documented systematically in the laboratory.
What was I to do now?
The Birthing of the Sophia Project and Its Umbrella Voyager Program
The more I thought about what had transpired with Harry, the more I realized that experimental research on the spirit guides hypothesis was possible in principle. However, I had no research funds for conducting such experiments; moreover, I had no idea how to raise such funds. I also realized that even if I had funds for such experiments, it was professionally dangerous for me to conduct them. As mentioned previously, the afterlife research was already challenging my scientific and academic credibility.
Talk about going from the frying pan into the fire. I seriously wondered if I began conducting research on the spirit guides hypothesis whether I would risk the possibility of being fired from the university and metaphorically thrown in the academic dungeon. Though I had been a tenured professor at both Yale and the University of Arizona, I was well aware that the scope of academic freedom protected by tenure had its limits and boundaries, and I was potentially close to crossing them.
Similar to my first personal experience with asking the Universe questions, which I intentionally suppressed and successfully avoided exploring for over a decade, I avoided exploring angel-related questions for a few years—except for one more secret feasibility laboratory investigation, described in the next chapter—until a strange, purportedly angel-initiated opportunity presented itself. It appeared that Sophia is just a willful as Susy.
I wondered, was I being assisted, if not tested, by higher spiritual beings? In brief, here is what happened.
In the spring of 2006, a businesswoman I will call Suzanne contacted me through a third party, a businessman whom I will call Ed. Ed claimed that he represented a successful woman who wished to make a private donation to me and the work.
When I first spoke with Ed, he stated that Suzanne did not care what I did with the money—I could give it to the university and use it in the laboratory, or I could deposit it in my checking account and use it personally for the work. Also, Ed claimed that Suzanne did not care what topic I researched; the choice was entirely mine.
I was immediately suspicious. My questioning agnostic mind quickly ran through the spectrum of possibilities, including that this businesswoman was crazy, that Suzanne and Ed were teasing me, and/or that they were potentially secret agents of a superskeptic seeking to discredit the work. However, a little detective work conducted by my administrative assistant revealed that both Ed and Suzanne appeared to be respected and seemingly sane members of the greater Tucson business community. I agreed to meet them to explore Suzanne’s wishes.
Suzanne and Ed turned out to be interested in matters of spirituality and healing and as the conversation unfolded, Suzanne made an extraordinary, off-the-record confession. She said that she had spirit guides and regularly communicated with them.
Suzanne then claimed that a few months earlier, while she had been visiting Flagstaff, Arizona, her guardian angels told her that she should help support Dr. Schwartz and his research. I looked to Ed for confirmation; was I hearing Suzanne correctly? Ed nodded his head.
Suzanne said that her angels told her that she should take $10,000 of the profits from the recent sale of a real estate property and donate it to me, no strings attached. Suzanne claimed that I would know what part of the work most needed the funds.
Over the years I have met numerous potential donors, and some have made seminal contributions to the work. However, no prospective donors had made the extraordinary claim that they were being instructed by their angels to make a contribution and that I should use the funds any way that I wished!
I asked Suzanne if she was aware that I had a personal interest in the possibility of conducting angel research, and she said no. For the record, at that time only a few of my closest colleagues were aware of my new interest in researching the spirit guides hypothesis. Moreover, I had not told anyone, including the medium who participated in the Susy-Sophia reading, that I was pondering the feasibility of testing this hypothesis using research mediums in a laboratory setting.
Suzanne went on to claim that she had been following my mind-body-spirit research and writings for more than ten years. She said that she had attended a number of public lectures I had given over the years, and she had watched some of the television documentaries about my work. She further said that if I would sign her copy of The G.O.D. Experiments book, she would double the donation for a total of $20,000!
I was frankly stunned. I had never heard the claim that angels could, let alone would, direct someone to support research about them.
I wondered whether the prospective donor was deceiving not only me but Ed and even herself as well. Or was it possible that as John Edward and Mary Occhino were claiming, spirit guides and angels were insistent that it was essential for humanity to wake up to their existence, and that it was time for experimental angel science to begin?
As I listened to Suzanne’s seemingly earnest confession in the presence of Ed, her confidant, it occurred to me that the only way I could conceivably accept such a gift would be to use the funds to create a small university research project to test the underlying premise of the gift itself. In other words, the research project would test if (1) spirit guides, including angels, were real, (2) if they could provide guidance and direction, and (3) if this information could include guidance and direction concerning the conduct of spirit guide research.
I told Suzanne and Ed that I needed to think about her gracious offer, and that I would like us to meet again in a few days to consider a formal proposal. Even though Suzanne said that I could use the funds in any way I thought benefited the work, I explained that I wanted her and Ed to examine and potentially approve what I proposed. I further explained that I was going to request something that would honor the potential reality of what Suzanne had confessed; I would ask her to please confer with her spirit guides and angels, and see if they agreed with my plans for the funds.
We met a few days later. I shared with Suzanne and Ed that I could not, with integrity, simply accept her gracious donation based on her belief that she was following the guidance and direction of her angels. I explained that as a scientist, I did not know whether spirit guides and angels existed. However, I then told her of my set of experiences with (1) meeting Dr. Jackson and his claim of seeing one my guardian angels with me in my office; (2) my personal attempt to discover whether there was an angel connected to me; (3) my uncovering evidence on the web for the historic claim that there was an angel named Sophia—neither Suzanne or Ed had ever heard of an angel named Sophia; and (4) the encouraging results of the private proof-of-concept feasibility investigations that I had conducted to see whether it was possible to bring the spirit guides hypothesis into the laboratory.
As you can imagine, Suzanne and Ed were somewhat surprised as well as grateful. Suzanne explained that although she and her angels were not interested in being lab rats personally (and for experimental and ethical reasons it would not have been appropriate to include them), they agreed that it was time for scientists to begin formal research on the spirit guides hypothesis.
I proposed that her unsolicited donation be used to initiate formal research within the university on the potential reality of spirit guides and angels, and that we name it the Sophia Project. I further proposed that the first research explore the inspiration for the project: the premise that spirit guides and angels could communicate with people and provide guidance, direction, and sometimes protection. The plan would be to conduct a university Human Subjects Committee IRB-approved structured-interview experiment with a representative sample of people working across the United States and who functioned as professional mediums and angel communicators.
I suggested that the interview be designed to systematically explore the personal experiences of knowledgeable professionals who regularly communicated with deceased spirits and angels. And in the process of conducting the interviews, we would request that they—both the professional communicators and their purported spirit guides—offer specific suggestions for how best to design subsequent research experiments. The purpose of the interviews was not to evaluate the validity of their experiences but rather to explore in some serious depth what their experiences were. This seemed like a responsible and relatively safe place to begin the research.
In the summer of 2006, the Sophia Project was born. I hired a research assistant to work on it one day a week. It took us a year to (1) design, (2) test questions on each other to make sure they were clear, (3) submit the necessary documents to the university, and (4) ultimately receive approval to conduct the structured interview protocol. At the time this chapter was written, the interviews were almost completed, and here are a few preliminary responses from the communicators.
What kinds of information do deceased people give you?
“They are okay; they are around the living, [giving] advice for the living ... resolving issues.”
“Whatever communication needs to happen so that healing can take place—healing for both the dead person and the sitter.”
“Messages of love to the people I’m working with ... ‘I’m still around,’ ‘I’m helping you out.’ It is coming from a place of love that wants to be expressed. They want to correct any unresolved issues.”
What kinds of information do angels give you?
“Uplifting messages, healings, help with problems.”
“It is supportive information to help someone find answers for spiritual and personal growth or healing. All information is going to make a positive impact.”
“It’s always about creating the best possible life experience . . . about facilitating the process that allows people to live their bliss.”
Meanwhile, thanks to Canyon Ranch and a few visionary donors associated with the ranch, funding was eventually provided for a larger program of research called the Voyager Program. The name was suggested by Dr. Jonathan Ellerbe, spiritual program director at Canyon Ranch and author of Return to the Sacred. This umbrella research program was created to conduct “research integrating energetic and spiritual mechanisms in healing and life-enhancement.” Research on the spirit guides hypothesis in the Sophia Project falls within this broader program of questions and applications. Some of the research you are reading about here was made possible by the Voyager Project’s essential support.
Suzanne’s experience reminds us, once again, that what we are exploring in this book is not only research in the scientific laboratory, but research in the laboratory of our personal lives as well. What we are witnessing is the increasing application of the scientific method for the enhancement of our ability to both discover and manifest human possibilities that many of us—especially academic scientists—are not only unaware of but that we presume are unreal and impossible.
If there is one lesson emerging from my Sophia experiences, it is the need for humility with integrity. The science of the seemingly impossible is about to get even stranger. Acquiring new tastes may become desirable and even necessary.