Mediumship

What follows in this manuscript is the opinion of a physical scientist about the experiences of professional medium, Patricia Darrè.  I met Patricia in Paris in order to witness her claims first hand, and  I have read some of her books. In general I am extremely skeptical of mediums and similar experts of the paranormal. But, I must confess that some of them impressed me a lot due to the internal coherence of their stories, because something of what they tell resonates deeply inside me, and most of all because the experience of these persons, which is often intense and even dramatic, strongly stimulates my scientific curiosity.

There are many cases of true mediumship in my opinion throughout the history of humanity. Evidently something important is escaping our understanding about the way in which human consciousness works.

The role of science, and physics in particular is to find precise laws that govern the Universe. The physical Universe is based on phenomena that have been mostly explained, both experimentally and mathematically: observation and theoretical modeling are the basis of rational knowledge, which is not our own vision of reality, but rather the way in which the laws of Nature are written. Our knowledge is totally impersonal and is intended to describe objective facts.

The “paranormal experience” is something much different than normally controllable phenomena simply because it has a strict relation with human subjectivity, and with our consciousness.

Paranormal phenomena and mediumship and similar methods such as channeling are not controllable at will in the same way as phenomena of material reality are.  And this creates problems with their scientific treatment, but when the generators of such phenomena are represented by honest and sincere persons, it doesn’t escape the curiosity of some of us.

So far, the official scientific paradigm asserts that the realm of consciousness and the realm of matter/energy are unrelated. But statistics alone, together with several lab experiments, show that this is not the case. It might be that phenomena that are born from consciousness affect our practical life much more than we think it does.  Our ignorance of this possibility is faulty, and the science of today cannot  continue to remain avoiding it.

The reason why physical science got a sort of “alert” of such phenomena came when the science of quantum mechanics was born about nine decades ago. Its findings, whose understanding is only apparently counter-intuitive, opened a door to something that we wouldn’t have ever imagined. In particular is the quantum entanglement phenomenon, and the totally weird behavior of elementary particles, which at certain circumstances defy the laws of classical physics. Moreover, just with quantum physics, we have discovered that the observer itself inexorably affects the object that is observed.

With no doubt the entanglement phenomenon is what has impressed physical scientists more.  The synchronic behaviors of two or more interacting particles remind us very strictly of consciousness phenomena such as telepathy. From that time on some of us have increasingly suspected that the realm of consciousness strangely behaves in a very similar way as the realm of particles: that’s the reason why strong hints exist that quantum physics or some variant of it might be used to explain some very strange psychic phenomena.

This discussion doesn’t deal with the paranormal in general, but simply tries to venture forth those that are purely working hypotheses about what may happen when a medium enters into contact with the alleged soul of deceased persons. The case of Patricia Darrè is an exemplary one. The scope of this is not to claim to explain what may happen to her when she experiences such kind of contacts, but rather to launch some interpretative hypotheses that in their turn might stimulate someone, in particular some of my colleagues, and to open a door to a systematic research plan aimed at both theoretical modeling and experimental verification on this kind of “spiritual experience”.

The only possible starting point for all of this is to see what our present scientific knowledge can potentially furnish in order to guide us to an – at least partial – solution of the problem.

Of course such an attempt belongs so far only to that which is called “frontier physics”.

Differently than in the case of a physics’ standard procedure, here we cannot carry out observations or measurements directly. The only thing that we can possibly do is to offer different alternative assumptions, as it wouldn’t be honest in my opinion to maintain only one preferred hypothesis at this point. We are simply walking blind into this strange and fascinating field. Therefore, the reader will see different hypotheses or scenarios here, whose goal is to stimulate a wider analytic discussion or even testing.

There is no doubt that in venturing certain hypotheses I have also tried to look much inside myself and to examine the possible intuitions that may emerge.  After all if we really want to find gold inside a big stone we need first to take that stone and then break it in small pieces in order to find out what we are searching for. This means only one thing: daring and courage, which are probably some of the most important engines of innovative science.

There is no doubt that a possible discovery of a true interaction between deceased souls and human mediums would not only highly expand our scientific knowledge, but would mostly teach us humans something about our true nature and role in the Universe, an Universe that seems to be much wider than we ever thought.

There are some reasons why, away from our own ego, what we call “subjective experience” might be really an objective one, if we’ll be able to demonstrate that the soul is not just a transcendent entity but rather a real “physical field” that is able to interact with other similar fields and to affect sometimes the realm of matter/energy in which we are immersed.

The discussion that will follow will be mainly based on the interaction between Patricia and the alleged soul of quantum physicist David Bohm, and on the discussions that came out after I, together with other persons, witnessed a sitting of automatic writing that Patricia experienced in front of all of us, and after we heard her other experiences and read her books.
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Introduction of my Chapter (about 70 pages) in Patricia Darrè’s book (in French) . It includes  chapters by historian and journalist Alexandre Adler, psychologist and psychoanalyst Luce Janin Devillars and archaeologist Francois Leroy. With the rewriting collaboration of Youssef El-Mabsout.