Miracles

If not now, when?

Maybe you’re open to the miraculous, just one day a year.

If you’re inclined to dismiss the possibility out of hand, you’re in good company. The best reason to put miracles out of your mind is that all of our planning, everything we work toward, engineering and scientific reasoning most particularly, depend on the assumption that our universe is governed by regular laws. 

Last year, I wrote about the Zeroth Law of Science. It’s hard to know how to do scientific research if you have to account for miracles.

Science is built on our experience that there are regular patterns that we can catalog and understand. Of course, there are such patterns, and some of them are as reliable as clockwork. But maybe the laws of nature are realized almost all the time, and there are occasional exceptions. 

I believe there are synchronicities that pull us toward our destiny, individually and collectively. I run into just the right person at just the right time, or the idea occurs to me just as I need it, or the resource that I need for a project comes from an unexpected source in the nick of time.

Ten years ago this week, I had reached the bottom of my finances and didn’t know what I was going to live on in the coming year. Throwing rationality to the winds, I borrowed $5,000 on my home equity so I could contribute $1,000 each to people I thought were doing good things in the world. Two weeks later, the agency that my co-author found precipitated a bidding war for a book that was yet unwritten, and by the end of the week, my share of the advance was $100,000.

These are miracles that wear a plausible deniability. Each one is unique, so there is no easy way to create a statistical ensemble from which to calculate a probability. We are left to our subjective impressions. Most people have the impression that these unexpected, life-changing events occur with sufficient frequency to warrant an explanation. But most people also won’t trust their judgment on this matter, and so we go with what the science establishment tells us — that it’s easy to misjudge because we notice the strangenesses and think about them, but we don’t pay attention to the vast majority of events that unfold as expected.

Macroscopic miracles are something else again. Things are reported that defy explanation. Something seems to defy the laws of nature, and yet we see it with our own eyes or (far more often) it’s someone else who sees it, and we have only their word to go on.

When presented with this kind of evidence, most of us will shrug and say, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” And yet, psychologists will tell us: “No, you won’t.” When an experience contradicts our deeply held beliefs, we discard the evidence of our own eyes.

I could tell you that Mark Twain said, “'Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see” — but I wouldn’t expect you to believe me. 

Mark Twain dreamed the exact circumstances of his brother’s death (in an exploding boiler room) weeks before it happened. Dean Radin recounts miracles and synchronicities in his own experience in his book, Real Magic. Elizabeth Mayer, UC Berkeley professor of psychology, recounts her journey from a thoroughly materialistic world-view to believer in psychic powers in the book, Extraordinary Knowing. Leslie Kean, science reporter for the NYTimes, talks about experiences that are beyond the edge of my personal belief system in her book, Surviving Death. The difference in Autobiography of a Yogi is Paramahansa comes from a tradition that supports such beliefs, so he reports miracles with less fanfare.

Many respected scientists around the end of the 19th century were intrigued by occult sciences. This paragraph is from an article about Sir William Crookes (1832-1919), original inventor of the cathode ray tube:

Crookes believed the psychic force to be of supreme scientific importance, and he tried in vain to interest other scientists in investigating it with him. He was snubbed by two members of the Royal Society [whom he had] invited to attend experimental séances with Home, and the same Society … rejected the paper he submitted for publication. He published it instead in his Quarterly Journal of Science, to great controversy. One of his critics charged that the phenomena he reported could not have occurred because they were impossible, to which Crookes replied, “I never said it was possible, I only said it was true.”

Here is an article by Crookes describing what he observed, including levitation of heavy objects and human beings.

Historic miracles

The best documented miracle from the past is St Joseph of Cupertino. He lived in 17th Century Italy, a time and place for which there is good historical documentation. Think Isaac Newton and J. S. Bach. He was well known in his time for a propensity to levitate, and thousands of people are said to have seen him fly. Of course, Wikipedia (and ChatGPT) will have none of this, and they report only that all the testaments to his flight are unreliable. They report this, not because they have evaluated the evidence, but because their belief system does not allow for the possibility that he was actually able to fly. I was not there, and I can report only that I am intrigued by the evidence cited in the book by Michael Grosso, which I referenced above. 

But there are countless stories of people who have done extraordinary things. There are yoga disciplines from a tradition that seeks liberation of body and mind in an ultimate flexibility. That same tradition warns that these practice will lead to siddhis as a side-effect, and that the siddhis are a tempting distraction that must be avoided. What are siddhis? They are the power to perform miracles at will. Not all the time, not exactly as intended, but with unsettling frequency. 

I know people who say that they have seen Uri Geller bend spoons without touching them. A friend tells me that he witnessed Sai Baba materialize gems in his bare hands, and that ashes which Babaji blessed had unexplained healing power. 

For me, personally, a lot of my reason for taking large miracles seriously is that there is a great deal of documented evidence for small miracles, under controlled conditions. 

I recommend the extraordinary talent of Dean Radin if you want an introduction to this subject, or if you want a deeper dive. Radin is both scientifically rigorous and exceptionally clear in his explanations. He talks about history and the current state of science with equal facility, and to top it off his writing and his interviews are delightfully entertaining. You can’t go wrong with any of his books or his Youtube interviews.

My personal miracle

Several years ago, I began bending my belief system to take seriously parapsychology, survival of a soul after death, the power of focused intention, and psychokinesis. Psychokinesis is defined as making things happen with the mind alone, no intervening physical cause. That qualifies as a miracle. I grew to the point where cognitively, I was convinced that these things were real, but on a gut level, I knew I hadn’t really assimilated the message. I wanted an experience of the miraculous in my own life. I said to myself, a large statistical improbability would be sufficient. The way my particular mind works, I thought that numbers would reach me where I live. I thought about devising experiments that would amass enough statistical certainty to reach my core with a modest investment of effort. I thought of ganzfeld experiments. I tried Sheldrake’s protocol for sensing whether someone is staring at the back of my head, but I didn’t have the patience to follow through.

In the summer of 2021, I had my personal miracle. I was on my bike, peddling as fast as I could, and an oncoming SUV, inattentive, pulled into my lane to pass and gunned the engine. We collided head-on. I’ve been unable to compute the probability of surviving such a crash because I haven’t located any other cases that were not fatal. One in a million? For me, this qualifies as a miracle. 

I had eight surgeries, four months flat on my back, and four more months in a wheelchair before I could begin teaching myself to walk. Was it worth it? To me, it was. I’m almost fully recovered now, with lingering disabilities that are quite modest. Maybe that qualifies as another miracle — no injury to the spine, the brain, or any internal organ. The blessing I carry from this ordeal is that I trust the universe to take care of me, and I lean toward a faith that there is a glorious future for humanity and life on earth — despite the tragic and tortuous path which we tread in this era of world crisis.

Eisenstein’s definition

It is not difficult to prove, logically, that humanity is on a dead-end path. Schmachtenberger reasons cogently that the means to create devastating damage have been widely dispersed, such that we need nightmarish universal surveillance and central control to prevent catastrophic escalation of terrorism. And if terrorists don’t get us, we’re still on a path to destroying the biosphere on which all life depends, due to the “tragedy of the commons”. The meaning of this phrase is that if every individual simply serves his own self-interest, taking what he needs to support his accustomed lifestyle, the collective result will be a devastated planet, incapable of supporting human life. It is unreasonable to expect everyone to “cooperate” on a vast scale to conserve our collective heritage without enforcement from a central authority, because this demands a personal sacrifice with no assurance that others will reciprocate. Hence, we’re headed for a choice between a catastrophic end to our civilization, possibly to our species, or else enslavement to dystopian global totalitarian regime.

What Schmachtenberger doesn’t consider is that we might be saved by a miracle. 

It may be that our species has been rescued by miracles in the recent past. Here is a catalog of near-misses, when the world escaped nuclear annihilation by the skin of our teeth. How many times have our species played Russian roulette with our nukes and survived? Even if you think we had a 90% chance of surviving each of these events without triggering Armageddon, there are so many of them that the aggregate probability that we survived so many times is tiny. Maybe we’ve been rescued by miracles. Some military leaders who have served as guardians of ICBM silos claim that ET is looking out for us, making sure that we don’t blow ourselves up. 

We need a miracle.

Eisenstein agrees with Schmachtenberger that only a miracle can save humanity at this point. But he goes on to ask, what is a miracle? This quote is from The More Beautiful World that our Hearts Know is Possible

What is a miracle? It is not the intercession of a supernatural being into material affairs, not an event that violates the laws of the universe. A miracle is something that is impossible from one’s current understanding of reality and truth, but that becomes possible from a new understanding.

A miracle is more than an event: it is an invitation. It says, “The universe is bigger than you thought it was.” It invites us to step into a larger world, in which new things are possible. A miracle can blow apart our world if we accept it. Indeed, sometimes we do not accept it; sometimes we relegate it to the category of “that was weird,” an exception to life, and we preserve normalcy and think and live as we always have, as if nothing had happened. When faced with an event that defies our usual explanations, we discard the event to preserve the explanation.

Today we can no longer afford to ignore our miracles. The world and its inhabitants are subject now to afflictions for which there is no cure, no hope from within the normally possible. Anyone who truly understands the magnitude of the global ecological crisis knows there is no hope, just as there is no hope for the Stage IV cancer patient, the MS sufferer, the victim of any of the legion of incurable diseases that arose in the late 20th century. Nor is there any reasonable hope for peace and justice in Palestine, or Tibet, or the prison system; nor for the resolution of any of the entrenched iniquities of our world. Long-ignored, the gathering crisis of ecology, energy, economy, and society pierces our complacency now with undeniable urgency, and we realize we have no choice but to accomplish the impossible.

And together, we will.