Chapter 4
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COUP D’ÉTAT (origin: French, literally “blow of state”): A violent or illegal change in government. Formerly also, any sudden and decisive stroke of state policy. [More generally, an unexpected, sudden seizure of control.]—Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “coup d'état”
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If materialism is seen for what it actually is, a philosophy or theory of reality that’s very useful in many areas but quite inadequate in others, it need not be at all psychologically damaging or invalidating. It’s when it all-too-commonly hardens into dogma, into scientism, claiming to be the ultimate and final truth about everything, that the invalidation of our spiritual nature occurs and hurts us. This can happen with any philosophy or set of ideas, of course: rigidity has its costs.(3)
There’s no denying the power of the results of the physical sciences: this computer I’m typing on; the airplanes that fly overhead; the medicines that have kept me alive and healthy long after I’d probably be dead in the normal, historical course of events; and so on. I love physical science and am a happy nerd when it comes to technology, but without the meaning that spiritual experience gives life, I imagine I’d be quite depressed. “Of course, you could take an antidepressant and not worry about it,” reply the dedicated materialists, “and someday we’ll stimulate the relevant part of your brain directly, without needing to be so indirect as to use drugs, and make you as happy as you want to be.” But I very much live my life as a scientist, for whom the facts always come first, not simply as a person who wants to avoid negative feelings and enhance positive ones, and my own and others’ scientific work has convinced me that the spiritual perspective is a part of reality; we neglect and deny it at our peril.
The scientific work that shows us this (discussed in the next chapters) didn’t spring up from nowhere, of course; it began because puzzling—yet often exciting and inspiring—events happened in real peoples’ lives, events that implied something spiritual but called for closer examination. People who prefer to gain knowledge from deliberate, well-controlled experiments refer to these life events as “spontaneous” cases of “ostensible” psi phenomena, meaning they weren’t a deliberate attempt to create psi effects under rigorous conditions. Calling them natural psi events would be more accurate than spontaneous, for they had, of course, their own causes, even if we don’t know them in particular instances, just not deliberate experimental causes. There are many books collecting such events: one of the earliest great collections being the “Report on the Census of Hallucinations” (Sidgwick 1894; see appendix 1) carried out by the Society for Psychical Research, the latest excellent one being The Gift by Sally Rhine Feather (psychologist and daughter of the great parapsychologist J. B. Rhine of Duke University) and Michael Schmicker (St. Martin’s Press, 2005; see appendix 1). These natural cases are usually fascinating reading (and often sad, since they so often involve apparent psi knowing of human tragedies involving loved ones), and this book could easily be filled with them. But in this chapter I share just one such real-life event that happened to me, to give the flavor of this kind of event in some depth and set the stage for looking at the scientific evidence for the reality of spiritual experiences in more detail. I draw heavily from my own published account of this from 1989.
On February 4, 1983, I was working in my office at home on a paper I was preparing to submit for presentation at a forthcoming Parapsychological Association convention (the international professional society of those who work in scientific parapsychology; see www.parapsych.org). At midmorning I took a break to prepare some coffee. While standing at my kitchen stove waiting for the water to boil, I found myself saying the phrase “coup d’état” aloud to myself.
I repeated the phrase aloud six to ten times, finding the rhythm of the sound appealing. I didn’t know why I was thinking the phrase or saying it aloud. I had come across “coup d’état” in reading brief news items in newspapers and magazines, but it’s not a topic I’d given more than passing thought over the years or had any particular interest in, and I’d probably never said the phrase aloud before.
It’s rare for me to start saying a word or phrase aloud, much less over and over, when I’m alone. I’ve always been curious about my own psychological workings, so I was mildly puzzled as to why this phrase had popped into my head and, as it were, onto my tongue. I don’t follow international news closely and could think of nothing in my immediate past that had anything to do with coup d’états. In spite of being puzzled, I enjoyed saying the phrase aloud over and over, and started thinking about military dictatorships. I thought of cheering crowds when a coup d’état brought a military group to power and deposed a failing civilian government, and the crowd’s later disillusionment. I thought that the sound of the phrase had a stimulating, rhythmic ring of power to it, appropriate for a military dictatorship. I thought about how a military government might come to power because a civilian government was too disorganized to run things, that the military might be the most organized group in the country and thus naturally take over.
After a minute I stopped saying the phrase but occasionally thought about it during the day, but I quickly forgot the specifics of these discursive thoughts.
The next morning, when I arrived at my office at the university, one of the first envelopes in my mailbox was from a Mrs. Coudetat of San Diego!
I was immediately reminded of my experience the day before, and thought: “Yesterday was probably the first time in my life that I ever said ‘coup d’état’ aloud—it’s not a word or a concept of importance in my life—and this is the first letter I’ve ever gotten from someone named Coudetat.” Nor have I ever gotten a letter from someone of that name since, so as of 2008, this is a once-in-seventy-one-years occurrence.
Mrs. Coudetat’s letter was as follows (I’ve made some subtle but psychologically irrelevant changes in certain facts to protect the privacy of the people involved here):
“I am writing regarding my son, Robert Coudetat, who was in your altered states of consciousness class last semester. (4) I knew he came and spoke to you once, but after that I don’t think he wanted to bother you, and he didn’t really feel like approaching your assistant. He began to have very severe anxiety attacks with a variety of many symptoms: he was dizzy, he could not sleep well, and his whole digestive system seemed confused. It was hard for us to help him, long distance, and he was referred by the X Medical Facility to Dr. Y in Davis, whom he saw until Christmas. He struggled through, a fraction of his usual self.
“After Christmas he returned to Davis, and shortly after registering he returned home feeling terrible. He was diagnosed as having mononucleosis, and now he has withdrawn from Davis. He is going to a psychiatrist here in San Diego, Dr. Z, who is helping him greatly. Dr. Z says it is a ‘classic identity crisis and that Robert is very confused.’
“My suggestion for you would be that in teaching your class, you make sure that students have readily available channels for help, discussion groups, short conferences, or whatever might be needed. My son experienced extreme anxiety and fear. I myself am a student of metaphysics and parapsychology, so I appreciate very much the work in which you are engaged. But I now realize that some kinds of thoughts can be very threatening to young minds and need to be approached carefully.”
I immediately wrote to Mrs. Coudetat, sympathizing with Robert’s problems, describing sources of help available at the university, and suggesting a possible further source of therapeutic assistance in her community. I never heard any further from her, although I wrote a later letter of inquiry. I optimistically presumed Robert recovered soon after, because such cases are common among college students and seldom have prolonged consequences.
I wasn’t sure I remembered Robert’s talk with me. My altered-states class typically had 150 to 250 students in it, and many students from the class (as well as other students from all over the university) talked with me about all sorts of issues, so they tended to run together in my memory after a while. When students asked me clear questions, I usually answered them directly if I knew the answers, or suggested sources of information they could turn to. Occasionally, students were vague, and it was unclear to me what they wanted. If it seemed to be only an intellectual vagueness from not having thought out what was on their minds, I usually suggested that they think about it some more and come to see me later when it was clearer. If I felt that a student might have strong emotional disturbances (a rare occasion, fortunately), I usually suggested that he or she drop by the student health center for counseling.
Let’s take it for granted for the moment that something interesting probably happened here, something with “psychic” or “spiritual” aspects to it, and think about it some more.
Although one can never be certain about just what is and isn’t “coincidence” in everyday life events like this, given the overwhelming evidence for the existence of psi phenomena under controlled laboratory conditions, which we’ll look at in the next chapters, I personally regard this coup d’état case as a clear instance of what we might call predictive psi phenomena. The unusualness of my speaking repeatedly aloud to myself with no discernible motivation to do so at the time, the great rarity of the phrase “coup d’état” in my life, and the immediate confirmation of its importance the following morning rule out coincidence as a good explanation in my mind. I call it “predictive psi phenomena” rather than precognition (see chapter 8), because the mechanism might just as well have been present-time telepathy (or clairvoyance) as precognition, since I’m sure Mrs. Coudetat was thinking about me and her letter to me, which was on the way to me at the time the phrase “coup d’état” popped into my mind. Whether this specific instance was genuine psi functioning or actually a quite unusual coincidence, it’s similar to even more convincing cases of psi perceptions in everyday life, so the coup d’état incident is a useful basis for some theoretical thinking about psychic matters.
Why did the event happen? My speculation at the time was that it was important for Mrs. Coudetat to communicate with me, primarily out of concern for her son, plus concern for students who might be in a similar predicament in the future, and a mutual interest in parapsychology. Further, she probably accepted, to some degree, her son’s feeling that I hadn’t wanted to listen to him, so she would have a strong emotional investment in making sure I listened by writing to me. (5)
Could Mrs. Coudetat’s need to communicate have provided the motivational “power” that resulted in my unusual behavior of not only getting the critical sound of her name but also saying it aloud repeatedly, thus sensitizing me to pay close attention to her pending letter? This line of reasoning seems adequate on a commonsense psychological level to provide a motive or “force” for telepathy to occur, and is probably mostly true.
Although exploring it will divert us from getting on to spiritual matters for a while, straightforward conscious motivation is seldom all that operates in our human minds, so we’re going to take a little side trip into human minds in general, and my mind in particular. This will sensitize us to other relevant factors that may be useful in understanding the multiple psychological factors involved in the manifestation of psi phenomena and spirituality, and begin to illustrate why the application of science and psychology to spiritual matters may deepen our understanding and ability to use spirituality.
Let us first look at analytical overlay. The concept of analytical overlay was introduced for understanding results of remote-viewing studies, described in detail in chapter 7, where a designated viewer attempts to use ESP or psi ability to describe the characteristics of some distant target, sensorially isolated from him or her (Puthoff and Targ 1976). Following initial psi-mediated impressions of the hidden target, impressions that may be correct and specific, there’s often a tendency for the viewer or percipient to automatically and often unknowingly associate to, and intellectually analyze and elaborate on, his or her (hopefully) psi-mediated impressions.
If the target is a small jewelry store with a large plate-glass window that the outbound experimenter is standing in front of, for example, a viewer might start reporting impressions such as “seeing” images of light reflecting off something rectangular and shiny that’s bright and hard, and sensing that there are many things behind or associated with this rectangular thing.
So far, excellent! Our ordinary minds are seldom content with “raw” experience, however: automated parts of our mental processing—what I’ve called the world-simulation process in other contexts explaining the nature of dreaming (Tart 1987) and the “biased quality of ordinary consciousness” (Tart 1986)—function in an automatized, semiconscious fashion to make raw experience meaningful in terms of a person’s ordinary mind-set. Psychologist Ronald Shor (1959) called that automatized, background, interpretive network the generalized reality orientation, and I’ve renamed it the consensus reality orientation to emphasize how much our particular cultural upbringing influences what we think of as real and important.
So automatically wondering what these impressions mean, in this example, the viewer might find that the images remind him of a recent trip to a Macy’s department store. The bright, hard, shiny rectangle is automatically analyzed as a display window or entrance to Macy’s. This kind of automatic association seldom functions in the form of consciously thinking, “This resembles Macy’s, so perhaps it’s that,” but rather as an immediate perceptual given: “This is Macy’s.” Now linked associations, memories, and apparently relevant images of Macy’s, associative overlay, might modulate, suppress, and distort further psi reception of the actual target. The viewer might go on and describe a large building with long aisles, vast crowds, and busyness, completely losing the feel of the small, quiet jewelry store. As analytical and associative overlay increases, the salience of the original correct imagery can easily be lost, making it impossible for judges to correctly associate this remote-viewing report with the target it was intended for. Genuine psi functioning can easily drown in these kinds of noise, especially if the viewer or percipient isn’t practiced in detailed observation of her or his own mental processes enough to be able to discriminate different qualities of mental events.
I believe the associations of military dictatorships, cheering crowds, and thoughts about efficient and disciplined organizations taking over when governments fail represent analytical and associative overlay following my initial psi impression of the word “coup d’état.” In this case the initial psi impression was so unique that its correspondence to a later event wasn’t smothered by the overlay, but suppose the student’s name had been something like Coffee or Stove? An initial psi impression of Coffee or Stove could’ve easily been buried by “rational” associations to the coffee I was brewing on the stove.
In this case I was saved from letting further analytical and associative overlay obscure the original psi-relevant impression (“coup d’état”) by the prosaic fact that my coffee was ready and I wanted to get back to work. I took my coffee back to my computer and began writing again, easily pushing the coup d’état incident aside to focus on writing. It’s interesting to wonder how many psi (or spiritual) impressions in everyday life are lost because of analytical and associative overlay.
I wrote up a rough draft of this case, essentially as given above, within three days of the events, because I thought it was interesting in and of itself, as well as a good illustration of the problems of analytical and associative overlay. (There are more technical considerations along these lines in the published article from which this chapter is drawn than I go into here.) I suspected that the case might be richer than I perceived, though, so three days later, I mailed a copy to a colleague, the noted psychoanalyst and parapsychologist Jule Eisenbud (1908–1999), asking for his comments. While I don’t go along completely with psychoanalytic explanations, I always found Eisenbud’s ideas about psi phenomena provocative and stimulating (1970, 1982). (6)
Eisenbud wrote back and suggested that I consider the possibility of theoretical overlay, an interpretive bias he has often seen in parapsychologists, and apply it to the coup d’état case. The particular theoretical bias he emphasized was that parapsychologists, when psychological factors are clearly seen in psi cases, tend to interpret them as idealistically inspired by altruistic concern for others. In Eisenbud’s clinical experience, by contrast, negative motivations and desires to hurt others are far more common.
My immediate reaction was on the order of “Me? Wanting to hurt someone? Hey, I’m one of the good guys!” But Eisenbud’s suggestion clearly deserved more thought.
Psychological investigation immediately after the events with a skilled therapist is probably the best way to investigate motivations and theoretical overlays of parapsychologists like myself in these kinds of cases. This isn’t generally possible, of course, for practical reasons. I’ve spent many years investigating my own mental and emotional processes (1986), however, so while some of my memories and feelings have undoubtedly been dimmed by the passage of time, I’ll make some observations and speculations along the lines suggested by Eisenbud to illustrate a useful direction for the parapsychological and psychodynamic investigation of psi events—and this applies to our spiritual interests too! I hope this will inspire other investigators to undertake relevant self-examinations. (7)
Although I hadn’t included the preceding material (as it wasn’t clear to me at the time) in the original write-up sent to Eisenbud, I had thought of it as an additional motivational factor that might have made this psi manifestation more likely. In addition to Mrs. Coudetat’s motivation, there might have been an unconscious, unresolved concern on my part about Robert, a consciously forgotten but still active feeling of frustration that a student had wanted some sort of help but I hadn’t been able to see what he wanted and assist him. Similar situations had happened with too many students over my twenty-plus years of teaching. I generally have at least two negative feelings in reaction to such incidents, feelings that I prefer to avoid in the first place if possible, or to suppress as soon as possible if I do have them. One is a feeling of frustration that I can’t do anything useful when asked for help. This also undermines my own feelings of being a competent person. The second is some anger and feeling of being put-upon: am I supposed to be able to solve everybody’s problems about everything, especially when he or she won’t even be clear about what the problem is? Such a lingering unconscious residue might have sensitized me to psychically perceiving information coming about Robert (like getting his mother’s letter).
I believe this additional motivating factor has a high probability of being true in this case, given my general psychological knowledge of myself, even though I couldn’t specifically recall Robert’s visit to my office. Basically, I’m sometimes concerned about other people’s welfare, and as a conscious ethical value, this has high priority for me. However, I also know that I have a positive bias in interpreting events, so I may indeed be manifesting an altruistic theoretical overlay in analyzing this case. Thus some reflections on possible negative psychological factors in this case are warranted.
I’m certainly selfish and concerned primarily about my own welfare much of the time, like most of us. (Is that last phrase a defensive rationalization on my part, as well as a realistic perception?) My conscious values are such that when I see such selfish factors operating in a way that would harm others or violate my values of friendliness and altruism, though, I usually try to change my behavior to a more positive form—but I don’t always succeed. While I’ve always been interested in understanding my own motivations and the workings of my mind (1986), there are undoubtedly many instances where I’m not fully aware of my motivations.
Applying this to the coup d’état incident, I hypothesize that I may have had a continuing unconscious concern about Robert that was motivated as much or more by guilt or anger as by altruistic concern: guilt in that I have a harsh superego that expects me to succeed in everything I value, yet I hadn’t been able to help Robert, and thus, from my superego’s point of view, deserved to feel guilty; and anger in that he’d come and taken up my time, yet by not making himself clear, “wasted” it. (8)
I might also speculate that my psychic perception of the imminent and somewhat critical letter from Mrs. Coudetat constituted my own psychological coup d’état in defending me against possible guilt. In spite of the generally friendly tone of Mrs. Coudetat’s letter, she does suggest that I should have better methods for protecting students against the adverse impact of unconventional, even if valid, ideas. Realistically, I do have methods, but by my own strict superego’s standards, they can never be good enough. So Mrs. Coudetat’s letter had the potential to make me feel guilty over my possibly inadequate teaching style. But, by having psychically anticipated the arrival of her letter, my conscious mind became focused on the interesting psychic aspects of the case, using up psychological energy that might otherwise have activated guilt.
Note, too, that Eisenbud’s psychoanalytic investigations (1970, 1982) strongly suggest that psychic events are typically multiply determined rather than having a single cause. Thus, all of the above motivational considerations may be correct to various degrees. This consideration also made me think of another possible motivation for the event.
A few days before the Coudetat letter arrived, I had attempted to do some psychic healing, using shamanistic methods like those described by Michael Harner (1980) on a friend of mine who was scheduled for some life-threatening surgery. I’ve never told my friend about this activity of mine, because such activity is a very private part of my life. It would also have seemed egotistical to mention it, and I didn’t know whether my attempts would have any effect anyway. (I’m ambivalent about mentioning it in this book and do so only for psychological completeness.) I had wanted to help a friend but had retrospective doubts about what I’d done. (9)
The coup d’état incident excited me. Although I’ve been firmly convinced about the reality of psychic abilities in general for many years on an intellectual and scientific level, I still have occasional emotional doubts, especially about my own possible ability to actually use a psychic ability in a particular instance. Thus the coup d’état incident strengthened my convictions. Since my friend is strongly interested in psychic abilities and hoped his own might help him through his surgery, I telephoned him and told him about the coup d’état incident a couple of days before his surgery was scheduled. I deliberately wanted to strengthen his faith in his own psychic abilities such that they might help him pull through the operation. Now I wonder if some part of me might have helped cause the coup d’état incident so that my own faith in psychic abilities might be strengthened, and thus retrospectively potentiate my attempts at healing my friend and strengthening his faith. (He came through the lifesaving operation just fine.)
This kind of event implies that there are normally hidden, nonmaterial connections between us. I’ve looked at the possible deep psychological aspects of this particular experience much more than we’re usually able to, because I’m convinced that when we understand these motivating and shaping psychological factors more thoroughly, we’ll understand reality a lot better. And this process has also been a way for you to get more acquainted with the author rather than have me stay relatively invisible behind my store of knowledge and authority, as is more typical in this kind of writing.