"The Sense Of Being Stared At"

There is a lot that I’m grateful to Ken Wilber and Integralism for, but I’m particularly grateful for his pointing out that there are two types of non- rational thinking.

The first type is pre-rational and can be seen in small children who have not yet learnt to think rationally. It can also be seen in adults who choose to over-ride rationality when their emotions are running powerfully counter to rational thought. Further, there are deeply traditional societies where it is customary to deny or ignore rationality to ensure that things continue as they always have, (though this is sometimes to do with keeping power and wealth in the hands of the same type or gender of people, and could be seen to be quite rational from their point of view!)

The other type of non-rationality is what Wilber calls ‘trans-rational’. Quantum physics is an example of this. Rationally, quantum physicists should not get the results they get. Nobody has yet satisfactorily explained why they do. But the fact is that they do, and these non- rational results are so reliable that quantum engineers use them as the basis for formulae and inventions that work.

It is amazing what we have been trained not to think about, and how often we refuse to believe the evidence of our own experience, because it does not fit with material rationality, as currently defined. Rupert Sheldrake, of Cambridge University, has done many experiments over the years to prove that humans and animals have ways of knowing what’s going on with others that cannot be rationally explained. He has written many books about the results of these experiments, such as ‘The Sense of Being Stared At’.

I have had many of these trans-rational experiences myself. The one that has particularly stuck with me happened a few years ago. I was doing the washing up at the time, not thinking about very much in particular when, as a complete non sequitur, I suddenly had the thought that if my parents were to die at the same time (they were both healthily alive at that point) there would be all sorts of practical problems, and all sorts of things my brother and I hadn’t got around to asking them, or telling them, for that matter. I made a note on my ‘to do’ list and then carried on.

 A few days later I discovered that, at the time that thought had popped into my head, my parents had been travelling in a car, finding themselves facing another car overtaking coming the other way at speed and in their lane. Both my parents had thought that ‘this was it’. Luckily it wasn’t, but I believe I had picked up on my mother’s emotions at that point. 

Furthermore, this wasn’t a one off situation, just a particularly dramatic one. Although we lived 70 miles from each other, and only spoke once a week on the phone, I was usually aware if my mother was in a particularly extreme mood – it would just come to me, whatever I was doing.

Of course, if you want to communicate at distance, a telephone is rather more reliable. But I do wish that more research was being done on what Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’- the information fields that seem to connect humans, and animals, regardless of distance; not necessarily as an aid to winning wars, or conquering outer space, which I believe the USA and the Soviet Union have experimented with, but more as a way of understanding the human condition.

Ken Wilber also pointed out that Freud tended to view anything non rational as pre-rational, and Jung tended to view everything non rational as trans-rational. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Wilber#Pre.2Ftrans_fallacy)  As such, both these great men  have actually muddied the waters rather, and it would be good for everyone if the difference was more clearly understood.