Comes the Inquisitor

"In tribulation he will find his greatest strength and his utmost nobility."

At this point you are asking the obvious questions, but I'm afraid that some things shall have to puzzle you awhile longer.

But I will tell you this story...

I spoke elsewhere of my grandmother. Before she passed away, she was in a persistent vegetative state for many months. I was at a place in my studies where I knew that many people believed that some people had the power to heal others, not as a 'gift' but as a skill/ability. (I was not yet at the place in my studies where I knew that it wasn't always right to heal others.) I had never actually done such a thing myself, or witnessed it, but I believed that if such a skill were possible, then someone with sensitivities like mine should be able to acquire it. (Ah, the hubris of youth.) I had only a hodge-podge of knowledge, and no teacher, but a desperate desire to help my grandmother recover and thereby also to alleviate the suffering of her family who anguished as they watched her persist in this state.

Needless to say, I accomplished nothing. But not for lack of trying whatever haphazard technique I could think of when I was sure no one else was looking.

My grandmother died. At her memorial I was sitting right behind my grandfather, who was sobbing uncontrollably and unabatedly. In a moment of compassion, seeking to comfort him, I put my hand on his back. And I suddenly felt the most overwhelming sense of grief and heartbreak that I had ever felt in my young (and relatively unlived) life. At that same moment, my grandfather stopped crying.

You can say what you want about that experience (and I'm sure you will), but it was highly unlikely that what I felt at that moment was my feeling about my grandmother, to whom I was never particularly close. My grandfather, I later learned, was very much in love with her throughout their married life. Why did he stop crying at that particular moment? No one can say for sure, as he is now dead as well. I was never brave enough to ask him about it.

Perhaps you think I made too much of a simple coincidence, and perhaps I did. Or perhaps it was only the first such experience. Either way, it helped solidify my conviction that we are more connected than we think. My grandfather's suffering, and my perception that I had somehow fixed it, strengthened my need to understand how such a thing might be possible.

Likewise, witnessing what could make a difference in other instances of suffering strengthened my conviction that this research was important. In response to one such instance, I conceived of the idea that certain people might be trained to anchor and protect larger groups of people. (Okay, I had a little help on that one from the world of fiction.) Such an idea does no good if one keeps it to oneself, but without that particular experience I might never have been sufficiently motivated to discuss it or my research publicly (or semi-publicly, in an anonymous blog). Not that I've done a lot of that, as the skeptic rhetoric gets really tiring. (If you hadn't made it interesting, we wouldn't be here.) And it appears that I am not the only one who has thought of such a thing. (Ethical considerations of that proposal discussed here.)

At this point you probably think that I am rabidly delusional. :) I would be rabidly delusional if I thought that I could ever tell this story to a group of scientists/skeptics and be believed and/or presumed sane. (Not playing high-stakes poker.) But if you want to know why I'm here and how I was/am able to put so much time and energy into what I've studied, it's because my experiences have been powerful enough (to me) to make me believe that it is better to understand whatever 'forces' make such things possible than it is to languish in ignorance.