I’m sharing 36 true accounts of events in my life (recorded in the back of my Bible) that, astonishingly, so broke the widely accepted ‘rules’ of a mechanistic, space-time materialism worldview of ‘life’ that I simply had to find another way to explain them.
A true scientist receives observations and experiences as data that must fit with a schema accounting for their cause and effects. If data does not fit with the hypothesised schema, the schema is wrong or inadequate, not the data. The materialistic space-time worldview arose as a schema prior to the appearance of quantum physics and adaptive complex systems as a way to make sense of data. I offer these experiences as data that can be accounted for by people who choose to make a paradigm shift in their reasoning – from thinking in material and mechanistic terms about matter, mind, inner heart, and spirituality – to thinking in terms of dynamic patterns of relatedness as the physical systems that can birth life.
After three hundred years of the progressive dehumanisation of life by the old approach to science, this new way of thinking rehumanises life and successfully moves humanity on from superstition (with its ease of manipulation of others for power and control) to harnessing rational mind and explicit inner heart personal values into a living and healthy partnership.
4. A temporarily disabled car accelerator
My wife Marian and I live in the middle third of an old mansion in Ivybridge, South Devon, near Plymouth in the southwest of England. The driveway from the public road therefore divides into three, curving around in a steep bend and dropping downhill, so that it is impossible to see along the two other parts that join ours from either side. Care is needed. Turning space for cars is limited near our home. If visitors park in awkward places, I sometimes have to reverse up the drive from my garage and navigate the bend in reverse before doing a two-point turn in the more distant of our two neighbours’ drives. I’m good at reversing using my mirrors, so I can do that confidently and smoothly.
The more distant driveway is the one that is on a straight line in from the public road. Any cars leaving that part of the house may travel (too) fast towards the road, not being able to see anything coming up from the other two parts of the house.
One afternoon in about 2018 I was reversing as described, moving confidently and a bit too fast as I was in a hurry. Fifteen yards from the ‘blind junction’ my car suddenly lost power. It slowed rapidly, so much so that I actually looked down at my feet to check that I had not inadvertently slipped my foot onto the brake. No, it was on the accelerator pedal, so I pumped it hard, with no effect on the engine revs. At that moment, in the rear view mirror, I saw another car ‘zip’ past along the neighbour’s drive heading for the public road at speed. I stopped properly in astonishment, now applying the brake. In that position, having realised the unusualness of the situation, I tested the accelerator with the clutch disengaged, and the engine revved as usual in the way it had not done seconds earlier.
Had I continued at my intended speed, I would have been pulling out across the front of that oncoming car at that moment when it shot by. It would have hit me on my passenger’s side (left side in the UK), but the driver of that car would undoubtedly have been badly injured at that speed of impact.
I’ll comment on this unusual event after recounting another to contrast them.
5. A missed opportunity for a ‘miracle of timing’ by embarrassment
It was in 1980 or 1981, when Marian and I were living in a semi-detached suburban house in a residential street in Plympton, a suburb of Plymouth. (The semi-detached nature of our home becomes important later in the story.) We both had come from broken marriages that could not survive the pressures of work as junior doctors in hospitals. We were exploring churches together as a way to agree a firm spiritual base for our developing relationship. I had not been able to get on with churches before, but somehow knew that there was something important in Spirit-filled Christianity (not dogmatic religion) that might explain the ‘religious experiences’ I had been having. Marian had lost her former faith, but was willing to explore again with me. Thus we had ended up at Plympton Pentecostal Church as it was called then, later transforming through a variety of charismatic church affiliations.
The gathering of people as a congregation there were encouraged to respond inspirationally if they felt an inner prompting to speak out as if God were ‘moving in their inner hearts’. It was an eye-opener! I felt deeply challenged to think that I had never before known how ‘co-incidences’ of inspiration could emerge from within a body of people who felt able to speak on an inner prompting. A patterning emerged among the communications, which, of course, a sceptical observing psychologist might offer discounting explanations for, but after a few weeks we saw how they fitted with each other. On one occasion I had felt as if a heavy mantle had descended on my shoulders. I felt a need to say something that seemed out of place and even irrational given the previous ongoing events. Being unsure of myself, I resisted this inner urge, only to hear another man speak out boldly from the other side of the church exactly what had been on my mind.
But the incident in question here occurred one evening in our home.
I was doing the washing up after our evening meal. The kitchen was on the far side of the house from the shared wall with our neighbour, but anyway, the house was well built and we had never heard any sound from that side. We had had some disagreements with the single mum and her two unruly boys aged about 8 and 10, but nothing too serious. We just led different lives. While putting a dish in the drying rack I felt a similar inner prompting to the one I had resisted in church come upon me. It came with an inner understanding, almost a voice but not, except that I knew in my English language something like, “Go and knock on her door.” My immediate reaction was, “Oh no! This is madness.” But it happened again, and the sense of pressure grew more intense. To keep this short, after an inner struggle I left the washing up, walked around in the dark, and stood outside their front door. I could have rung the bell, or knocked, but all that filled my mind was a sense of dread that it would seem nonsense to her if I just said, at that time of night, “I just had a prompting to come and knock on your door!” She really would wonder who these strange people were who lived on the other side of that wall.
I ‘bottled out’. I could not bring myself to do it. Somewhat ashamedly, I went back and finished the washing up, shaking off the sense of pressure. It must have been nearly two weeks later that I happened to be talking to my neighbour about the boys. She was saying how difficult she found them without a Dad to help, and then she said, “We’re Catholic, but the boys don’t want to go to church now because they say they don’t believe in God. Just a week or so ago, the older one was saying one evening, ‘How is God going to help? Is he going to come and knock on our door, or something?’”
A pause for reflection
The material of a wall. The distance between two moving cars that are out of sight of each other. The timing of an inner prompting. The temporary interruption of cause and effect among mechanical levers and cables that materially connect my foot to the explosions of fuel that move a vehicle. The place of personal choice over the feelings that motivate my embodied behaviour…
These experiences of remote informational exchange and inner balancing are ‘context dependent’. They cannot be repeated experimentally in other contexts, although similarly ‘inexplicable’ remote informational exchanges are probably happening all the time around our globe. The only way we could know is if we ask people.
And that is the main point of connecting these two accounts.
In the car incident, neither driver ever checked out with the other what had happened. Therefore, the remote informational exchange happened at a completely pre-conscious level. It’s dynamic only secondarily emerged into my consciousness only, so opening a potential misconception that these events are an individual’s experience only. The other driver lived on without ever knowing how close they had come to death or injury.
In the neighbourly exchange that did not happen because of my embarrassment, the potential had been there for a relational growth of consciousness in a conversation, but that did not actualize. It remained only in the domain of possibility, with a diminished probability because of my internal resistance.
In the Pentecostal church setting, socially acceptable opportunities were made for people to take a risk, to check out with others conversationally if their interpretations of inner prompting had been affirmed in others or not, and to learn by experience in an organic community. My confidence and knowledge grew over the ensuing years of experience.
So here is the point.
Materialism invites an individualistic interpretation of unusual events, and discounts them as purely subjective and insubstantial. Vitalism, interpreting all of life and its unusual events as an encounter between personal souls and an impersonal life force or esoteric consciousness, is equally at risk of inviting individualistic interpretations of life’s events, as if they concern the progress only of this substantial soul towards its perfection. In that worldview, it is the material world that may be discounted as purely subjective and insubstantial. It is only through collective fellowship in trusting groups that people can see the patterning of informational exchanges between people. Much of this patterning is, I have come to believe, ongoing in a preconscious realm of probabilities, prior to their actualization into the shared life of our active participation. We each have the power of choice to influence the actualization of these dynamics. Alfred North Whitehead called it ‘prehension’. We are not passive bystanders watching some cosmic play. Individuals might be, however.