by Jacob W. Glazier and Anastasia Wasko
The concept of health is one of the most essentializing standards circulating in academic and popular discourse. We all know what it means to be healthy or, rather, what we should be doing to be healthy: eat a balanced diet with nutritious food, exercise several days a week, limit your screen time – the list goes on and on. In fact, when we don’t do these things, we often blame ourselves for lacking the will or motivation to make it to the gym or to eat our fruits and vegetables. We have a tendency to individualize health, seeing it as a personal responsibility and, as a result, fail to see systemic barriers or social disparities as equally, if not more so, the source of the problem. Behind this unquestioned standard of health are forces at work with special interests and assumptions that, more often than not, go unchallenged.
Who gets to define health is undoubtedly interlinked with who gets to define what is considered normal, abnormal, or paranormal.
What does this have to do with psi? A lot. Who gets to define health is undoubtedly interlinked with who gets to define what is considered normal, abnormal, or paranormal. As Simmonds-Moore (2012) relates, there are healthy and unhealthy forms of exceptional experience, and “by further understanding the differences between healthy and less healthy unusual experiences, it may be possible to learn how to harness the healthy and diminish the less healthy” (p. 8). Indeed, to develop this more structurally and incisively, deconstructing the very standard of health, articulating how it is situated and contextual, and, most strongly, how it perpetuates its own normativity would go a long way toward inviting exceptional experiences into the conversation. What counts as health and how its conditions are established might even more radically “normalize” the paranormal.
Being healthy, to put it differently, is relative and dependent on a host of factors such as culture, geography, intersectionality, and financial and philosophical motives. To relegate the correlates of health to the individual as a function of willpower, genetics, or what have you is perhaps the trick sine qua non of capitalism and biomedicine. For instance, critical theorists have analyzed the way that self-help culture, with its drive to work on and develop the self, is necessarily interlinked with the values of productivity, efficiency, and consumerism (Lazzarato, 2014). Moreover, like-minded researchers have also argued against biomedical reductionism, evidenced in much of the literature on genetics, such that genes are only one part of a complex whole where all biological parts interact, creating a lived experience (Rocca & Anjum, 2020). This is not to say that willpower or genetics are not important, but, rather, the obfuscation and masking of how they came to take center stage is the most detrimental and unhealthy of all. Indeed, in an important sense, we, as parapsychologists, are working to heal this disease by injecting alternative models and knowledge into the normative health discourse.
Health as a concept needs its own revitalization. We can see this when parapsychologists and other allied researchers stress the importance of the body in contemplative practices (Schmalzl et al., 2014) and how embodiment and embodied metaphor better situate parapsychological research on health by overcoming the traditional dualism of the mind and body (Simmonds-Moore, 2012). Rather than reducing spirituality or the mind down to the brain, which is often the case with traditional biomedicine, parapsychologists want us to consider a more holistic and culturally attuned approach to health, evidenced in the Indian philosophy and practice of yoga (Kelly & Whicher, 2015). In addition, the importance of cultural beliefs and values is crucial to consider in cases of remembering past lives (Moraes et al., 2022) and this careful consideration guards against pathology.
The contributors to this issue of Mindfield expound on the literature revolving around health and contemplative practices. Everton Meraldi discusses the rise of research on spirituality and non-ordinary states of consciousness and urges parapsychologists to incorporate these phenomena into their own research. Annalisa Ventola emphasizes how embodied spirituality bridges the gap between the spiritual and physical with implications for parapsychology and ecological sustainability.
There are not only alternative ways of being healthy, but as Anjuelle Floyd notes, there are also alternative phenomena that go along with traditional medicine during heart transplantation, including synchronicities, near-death experiences, and paranormal memories. Bonney G. Schaub and Richard Schaub explore the use of imagery for accessing higher consciousness and spiritual development thereby enabling profound spiritual experiences and alleviating suffering. Cory Nakasue advocates that movement, sensation, and personal narrative foster physical and emotional healing and how this body awareness and re-patterning of narratives can create transformative experiences. Dan Gilhooley explores telepathic and precognitive phenomena in the context of psychoanalysis that challenge our conventional notions of self, time, causality, and the therapeutic relationship. Maurice van Luijtelaar and Renaud Evrard present their forty-fourth installment of “Articles Relevant to Parapsychology in Journals of Various Fields” with 106 articles from 99 different journals, including two conference proceedings.
We hope that you enjoy this issue of Mindfield and that it sparks renewed interest and fresh ideas on the relationship between exceptional experiences, contemplative practices, and health. Indeed, as the essays herein all say in their own idiosyncratic way, “normal” ways of conceptualizing health and the connection between the mind, body, and world remain insufficient. The denial of the possibility of psi is, more often than not, due to political reasons that remain covert and serve interests other than discovering the truth.
Kelly, E. F., & I. Whicher (2015). Patañjali’s yoga aūtras and the siddhis. In E. F. Kelly, A. Crabtree, A., & Marshall, P. (Eds.), Beyond physicalism: Toward reconciliation of science and spirituality (pp. 315-349). Rowman & Littlefield.
Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity (J. D. Jordan, Trans.). Semiotext(e).
Moraes, L. J., Barbosa, G. S., Castro, J. P. G. B., Tucker, J. B., & Moreira-Almeida, A. (2022). Academic studies on claimed past-life memories: A scoping review. Explore, 18, 371-378. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2021.05.006
Rocca, E., Anjum, R. L. (2020). Complexity, reductionism and the biomedical model. In R. L. Anjum, S. Copeland, & E. Rocca (Eds.), Rethinking causality, complexity and evidence for the unique patient. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41239-5_5
Schmalzl, L, Crane-Godreau, M. A., & Payne, P. (2014). Movement-based embodied contemplative practices: Definitions and paradigms. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 205. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00205
Simmonds-Moore, C. (2012). Introduction: Overview and exploration of the state of play regarding health and exceptional experiences. In C. Simmonds-Moore (Ed.), Exceptional experience and health: Essays on mind, body and human potential (pp. 7-26). McFarland & Company.
Lead Editor Jacob W. Glazier, PhDAssistant Professor of Psychology, University of West Georgia Jacob W. Glazier, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences at the University of West Georgia. His research revolves around critical theory, subjectivity, and exceptional experiences. Dr. Glazier’s areas of research interest in parapsychology include ecology …
The Mindfield Bulletin is a publication of the Parapsychological Association edited by Jacob W. Glazier (Lead Editor) with Anastasia Wasko (Associate Editor). It features theoretical, research, and historical articles along with columns by the PA President and PA Executive Director, news in the field, bibliographies of articles relevant to the study of parapsychology, and articles …
The contributors to this issue of Mindfield expound on the literature revolving around health and contemplative practices. In their editorial, Jacob W. Glazier and Anastasia Wasko call attention to the way that normative notions of health prescribe specific ways of being at the expense of those more conducive to exceptional experience. Everton Maraldi discusses the …
by Bonney Gulino Schaub and Richard Schaub
