You can observe a lot by just watching.
—YOGI BERRA
When you were a child, did you ever play with a crystal radio? When I was around eleven years old, I spent many wonder-filled hours listening to Long Island and New York City radio stations with my toy crystal radio set.
The words “wonder filled” do not capture the rapture and awe that I experienced as I carefully placed the little wire probe on segments of a tiny quartz crystal. I was able to discover the hot spots on the crystal that made it possible for me to hear faint voices and music coming through the headphones.
How could a little shiny rock—the quartz crystal—connected to a wire antenna tune in and amplify invisible signals that brought programs like Murray the K, a famous disc jockey of the 1950s? There was clearly more to minerals and crystals than their external structure and beauty.
Native Americans and other indigenous peoples believe that minerals and crystals have energy. That minerals and crystals can sense our energies and the energies of their environments. That minerals and crystals generate specific patterns of frequencies, which when used by a skilled medicine woman or shaman can contribute to healing and health. That these creations of nature are as alive as plants and animals. And that, moreover, if we are trained to listen to them, we can learn to communicate with them. To native peoples, rocks are not inanimate objects—they are gifts of spirits placed here for our health, education, and evolution.
Though my early experience with crystal radios awakened me to the possibility that there was more to rocks than met the eye, I treated as legend the idea that humans could actually detect specific energies or signatures of minerals and crystals. I considered Native American folklore to be just that—folklore, not fact. Until a few years ago, my interpretation of so-called crystal healings was that if they occurred, they were an expression of belief and expectation, not energies and frequencies. As far as the healing process was concerned, crystals were just another form of placebo.
The White Crow of Sensing Crystal Energies
One of my favorite quotes, as readers of my earlier books know, is from William James, MD, the distinguished professor of psychology at Harvard in the late nineteenth century. James was fond of saying, and I paraphrase slightly, “In order to disprove the law that all crows are black, you need only find one white crow.”
In the late 1990s, a young undergraduate walked into my office at the University of Arizona with a very strange request. To protect his anonymity, I’ll call him Jason. He wanted to find a way to prove to the scientific world that people could detect the energies of specific crystals with their hands. He knew that I directed what was then called the Human Energy Systems Laboratory and that I conducted research in biofield science and energy healing. He surmised, correctly, that if any scientist on campus would be open to investigating his claims, it would be me.
My first impression of Jason was that he was, so to speak, a strange bird. The possibility didn’t even occur to me that he might prove himself to be a white crow of crystal-energy detection.
His history, as he recounted it at that first meeting, was unusual. Part Hopi, he grew up among family members who claimed to have psychic and intuitive gifts, including the ability to communicate with animals, plants, and even minerals and crystals. Jason said he spent thousands of hours as a child and adolescent playing and working with minerals and crystals. He had a huge collection of stones, many of which (perhaps he would prefer it if I wrote “many of whom”) he considered to be his friends. He would “ask” individual stones if they wanted to play with him or be used for specific healing purposes. He even claimed that his cat had favorite crystals and could discriminate between them even if they were hidden from view.
Was Jason sane and well grounded? I wasn’t sure. He seemed to be an extraordinarily playful and open-minded individual. But children have wonderful imaginations; were his claims a product of lingering childhood fantasies? Or a combination of superstition plus self-deception?
Or was he perhaps recounting real events about a genuine phenomenon that could be observed and documented in the laboratory?
To test Jason’s devotion to this work, I suggested that he first produce a compendium of the various minerals and crystals he had, plus others, and carefully describe their histories in terms of purported personalities, healing properties, and human sensory effects. For example, some crystals are believed to have sedative effects, while others are thought to be stimulating.
Jason came back a few months later with a tome of organized information. No question about it, he was a hard worker, well organized, thorough, and devoted. His crystal and mineral volume was scholarly and comprehensive. The totality of information he showed me, which I thought was probably mostly fictional, frankly gave me a headache when I realized he knew most of it by heart.
He claimed that he could sense the qualities of different minerals and crystals, even if he could not see them or touch them. When I approach a scientific question, I begin at the simplest level. The conversations went something like this. I asked Jason, “Could you detect whether a stone was present or not?”
He said, “Of course. That’s easy.” Anybody can make an outlandish claim; could he back it up in the lab?
I asked, “If we placed a series of stones in enclosed containers so you couldn’t see them, could you sense whether or not a stone was present in each?”
He said, “Sure.”
“So if we built ten containers and put stones at random in five of them, you think you could determine which boxes held the stones,” I said.
He replied “Why not?” Again, this might seem like a no-brainer to him, but I seriously wondered whether he was deluding himself. Or trying to delude me.
Over the course of a few meetings, we designed and had built ten wooden boxes. They were approximately twelve inches by twelve inches at the base and sixteen inches tall. Each had a silk-cloth front so that Jason could put his hand inside without being able to see whether a stone was present. The bottom of the box was lined with silk upon which a stone could be placed. A silk cloth with little holes was secured about four inches from the bottom of the box, which prevented him from reaching down to feel whether a stone was present but still purportedly allowed the energy to come through.
One of the many questions that arose was how the minerals and crystals should be selected. You can imagine my surprise at Jason’s response: he suggested that he ask his stones which of them wanted to participate in the research. Given that Jason was the “expert,” and I wanted him to feel comfortable with the process, I said, “Good idea.” Later on, and if he succeeded with this first test, we could always test his ability to detect specific stones. We could even determine in future experiments if it really made a difference whether the stones “agreed” to participate in the research or not.
The experiment was designed as follows. A research assistant, Shirley, would place stones in five of the boxes and then set them out at random on a table in two rows of five boxes each. Jason would then be invited to enter the room, place his hand inside each box—not touching the sides of the box or the stretched silk cloth within the box—and attempt to sense the presence or absence of a stone. He could take up to a minute to make each determination. Shirley would record his responses.
After completing the ten boxes, Jason would leave the room. Shirley would then select a new random set of numbers (a random order of the numbers one through ten calculated by statisticians) and rearrange the boxes accordingly. Jason would be invited back into the room and go from box to box, making his determinations. This procedure would be repeated ten times. Since there were ten boxes and ten sets of trials, this generated a hundred trials of information.
If Jason was deluding himself and he could not in reality sense the presence of the stones, his accuracy would hover around 50 percent. Statistics tells us that out of a hundred trials, if he got 65 percent correct, his performance would be statistically significant—this is a probability level of p <0.05 (five out of a hundred), which is one out of twenty by chance. If he got 75 percent correct, his performance would be highly statistically significant—this is a probability level of p <0.0004 (four out of ten thousand), which is one of twenty-five hundred by chance.
How did Jason do? No question about it, he appeared to be a white crow. Jason averaged above 95 percent accuracy. Ninety-five percent! This is extraordinarily statistically significant, a probability level far beyond one in a million by chance. Not only did he average above 95 percent accuracy—detecting when a stone was present and when it was absent—but his performance was in the low to high nineties for each of the ten boxes.
My initial thought was, Something must be wrong here. Could the assistant be helping him cheat? Could Jason be somehow shaking the boxes? I requested that they repeat the experiment with five new stones (again, Jason was permitted to let the stones “agree” to participate). Moreover, I requested that someone else conduct the experiment. Shirley’s mother, who was highly skeptical of Jason’s crystal claims, agreed to serve as the research assistant. Driven by her suspicions, she would be watching closely to see if she could catch Jason doing anything improper. The experiment would be videotaped. A total of one hundred trials would again be conducted. Would the findings be replicated?
To my surprise, Jason’s performance continued to average around 95 percent accuracy.
We then repeated the experiment a third time. Another hundred trials were collected. The results were the same. It appeared that Jason could do what he claimed he could do.
Imagine the situation for Jason—growing up exposed to Native American beliefs and practices and accepting them as his own. Playing and working with minerals and crystals and making them into “friends.” Reaching the point where these experiences seemed second nature to him but were viewed as weird, if not crazy, by his peers and teachers. Regularly communicating with his stones. And then, this professor asks him to do an experiment, over and over, where he must blindly detect whether one of his friends is in a box or not. How would you feel doing these simplistic experiments?
Jason appreciated my need to start from the beginning. He understood my need to establish definitively that at least one white crow of mineral and crystal detection existed and could be studied in the laboratory. If there was one white crow, there were probably others. Moreover, in theory it was a possibility worth investigating that people—including you and me—could be taught to detect the presence of stones, and even the energy signatures of stones, just as people can be taught to detect the presence of fractures in X-rays, and even the signatures and particulars of the fractures.
More Crystal Experiments
Jason and I did many mineral-and crystal-sensing experiments. One of my favorites—and the most important—concerned his claim that natural crystals had stronger energies and were more “alive” than man-made or synthetic crystals.
Moreover, Jason discovered that he did not actually have to put his hands inside the box. He claimed it was easier to sense the difference between natural versus synthetic quartz crystals if he kept his hands outside the box—the wood actually served as a subtle filter that facilitated the distinction between natural and man-made.
We always used ten boxes. This time, three of the boxes contained fairly large—two to three inches long—natural quartz crystals. Three other boxes contained even larger—three to four inches long—synthetic quartz crystals. And four boxes contained no crystals. A total of a hundred trials constituted a single experiment.
The findings were basically as follows. When Jason’s hands were outside the box, his performance for natural-crystal detection fell from 95 percent to approximately 75 percent. In other words, 25 percent of the time he said there was no stone when a natural quartz crystal was present. Not as impressive, but still highly statistically significant.
At the same time, his accuracy in detecting the absence of stones also fell from 95 percent to 75 percent. Instead of reporting 5 percent of the time that a stone was present when it was not, he reported this 25 percent of the time. Not only were his hands farther from the stones—inside the box his hands were five to six inches away from the stones, outside they were seventeen to eighteen inches away—but the wood on top was serving as a subtle filter or shield for the energies.
The important question was, given these experimental conditions, what would be his ability to detect the man-made quartz crystals? What we discovered was that when his hands were outside the box, his ability to detect whether there was a man-made crystal in a particular box plummeted to 50 percent, pure chance.
In other words, we confirmed both of Jason’s claims. First, he could detect above chance the presence of a natural stone even if his hands were outside the box. And secondly, man-made quartz did not generate the same level or dynamics of energy as did natural quartz, so he often thought that a box containing a man-made crystal had no stone in it.
Presuming for the moment that this experiment was valid—and I’m convinced that it was—these questions arise: What does it mean? Is natural quartz more “alive” than synthetic quartz? Does natural quartz emit stronger and more dynamic energies than a synthetic crystal?
Is the natural quartz possibly even detecting the presence of Jason’s energies, if not his consciousness, and responding in kind? This prediction comes from what is called “dynamical systems theory”—the idea that atoms, molecules, cells, and so on exchange information and energy to various degrees. Is this a two-way street—a communication process between Jason and his crystal “friends”?
Later in this book, we’ll explore the idea that science provides a firm foundation for theorizing and documenting the dynamics of energy communication within and between all things—both visible and invisible—from the extraordinarily tiny to the infinitely large.
A Sad Yet Potentially Evidential Postscript
An unanticipated and untoward circumstance led to the conclusion that what Jason was demonstrating in our mineral-and crystal-sensing experiments was probably beyond reproach.
You may be wondering if Jason was somehow cheating, consciously or unconsciously, in these experiments. Could he have somehow fooled me, Shirley, her mother, and perhaps even himself into believing that he could sense the energies of minerals and crystals?
Not long after those experiments, Jason underwent major surgery. The anesthesia used caused him to develop epileptic seizures, and both the seizures and the medication prescribed to control them affected his cognitive function. A side effect of these complications was that Jason’s attention and sensitivity was hampered somewhat, and he could no longer interact with his minerals and crystals as he once did. He reported feeling as if he had lost contact with his earth friends.
Meanwhile, his cat continued to find the special crystals he and Shirley (who was by then his wife) hid in the house.
If Jason had been consciously cheating—for example, subtly shaking the boxes—he would probably be able to continue fooling us in experiments today. However, if his skills had been genuine—as they appeared to be—his unfortunate medical complications could have interfered with them.
Energy healers, medical intuitives, and psychics of various sorts report that their ability to receive information and practice their crafts is impaired by fatigue, pain, and illness. Like any performer practicing a complex skill—be it music, painting, athletics, or whatever—a healer must be in peak shape to practice his or her craft optimally.
I have spent a little time seeing if I could detect various minerals and crystals. My performance level thus far has been metaphorically more like playing “Chopsticks” on the piano than playing “Rhapsody in Blue” as Jason did. However, when I’m relaxed and not fatigued, I can often perform statistically above chance. The truth is, no one yet knows who the great musicians of mineral and crystal sensing are. One of them might be you.
At this point, energy sensing abilities—be they of people, animals, plants, even minerals and crystals—are relatively unknown. However, the research conducted to date is completely consistent with the idea that humans have an inherent talent to sense energy.
As we have said, everything has energy. Everything is energy. Everything senses energy. And that includes us. Our bodies contain cells that are supersensitive to energy and information. As mentioned previously, our eyes contain retinal cells that can detect single photons of light.
The apparatus exists within us to sense the supersubtle; it’s up to each of us to discover and use this apparatus to its fullest potential.
To see or not to see, that is the question.