Resource: Extraordinary Knowing
Book by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD
The book opens with an unusual story: a valuable harp played by the author’s daughter is stolen in California. After all regular routes and police investigations lead nowhere, a dowser in Arkansas psychically locates the harp and a meeting is arranged in Oakland where the harp is returned to the owner, in perfect condition.
As Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD, prominent clinical psychologist at Berkeley, drives into her driveway with the harp in the back of the car, it hits her; “This changes everything.”
The harp changed how I work as a clinician and psychoanalyst. It changed the nature of the research I pursued. It changed my sense of what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary. Most of all, it changed my relatively established, relatively contented, relatively secure sense of how the world adds up.
As she dared to speak up, and chose to research this phenomena, she found that she was not alone. Indeed, she was flooded with accounts from medical professionals who were too afraid to reveal their own experiences with phenomena that could not be explained within their science-based profession.
The neo-natal nurse who follows inner hunches about what her premature infants need in order to survive.
Robert J Stoller, MD, professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, who wrote a paper on his experience with telepathic dreams and was urged by his colleague to put the paper in a drawer and forget about it if he “valued his professional future”.
The eminent neurosurgeon who continued his “astonishing track record” of surgical successes, but curbed his passion for teaching because he couldn’t divulge why he never lost a patient to dangerous, life-threatening brain surgery:
As soon as he learns that someone needs surgery, he gets himself to the patient’s bedside…He waits - for something he couldn’t possibly admit to surgery residents, much less teach. He waits for a distinctive white light to appear around his patient’s head. Until it appears, he knows it is not safe to operate. Once it appears, he knows he can go ahead and the patient will survive.
And so Lloyd Mayer wrote this intriguing book with the subtitle; Science, Skepticism, and the inexplicable powers of the human mind.
She asks;
What happens when you have an anomalous experience, but you’re afraid to acknowledge it? If you admit to the experience, you run the risk of being disbelieved or thought crazy. It’s a profoundly destructive conflict, one that stops us as a society from looking for ways to discover and develop new knowledge. And one that stops us as individuals from embracing our reality.
I find this book refreshing in its hopefulness that medical science might be slowly opening its eyes to these “anomalous experiences”. Indeed, since this book was written in 2007, we have seen many written accounts, even New York Times bestselling books, of “spontaneous healing”, “radical remission” and unexpected cures that cannot be explained when looking through our current lens of what the body is, how it functions and how it can be affected.
Yet the fear prevails and the currently taught, protected and lucrative approach to health persists. Lloyd Mayer posits why;
It’s difficult to parse how much our fear of the unknown has affected our ability to study it, even to conceive of it.
In the Epilogue, she speaks of the cost to her of pursuing the line of thought that the harp’s return opened to her. Instead of staying silent and pretending it never happened, content to comply with the comfort of her professional position, she stepped into a new paradigm.
I’ve opened the door to questions about reality that shake the foundations of the world as I’ve known it. The real cost of the journey has been to give up one variety of certainty. This means the loss of a familiar world that plays by the rules, in which cause leads reliably to effects we can specify, rationality triumphs in predictable ways, and we have some sense that we can gain control over our experience. Worse, the world opening up to me is too often inhabited by ideas I deeply mistrust and people who swallow every New Age fad, people whose credulity horrifies me.
I applaud this medic’s courage to look, to seek different answers and to put her professional reputation on the line. I hope that this book has encouraged many to open their eyes and minds.
Have you read it? Will you now?
Wow. Fascinating.
I loved this book and made it a cornerstone of the content of my book The Fear Cure. I have a magic story around that book. Remind me to share it privately sometime since I don't have permission from someone else to share it publicly.