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Dence Ctivity Definitive hard evidence CAUDILL that paranormal activity is for real. Impossible Realities Impossible “Caudill’s book provides intelligent and well-researched insight into paranormal phenomena, [showing that] today’s paranormal phenomena will become part of tomorrow’s physics.” —Robert Bruce, author of the bestselling Astral Dynamics SPOON BENDING AND SIMILAR LOGIC-DEFYING PHYSICAL FEATS, the ability to see things that are happening halfway around the world, healing with “energy,” communicating telepathically, knowing what will happen before it does, near-death experience, reincarnation. Do these things really happen? How do we tell what’s credible and what’s not? Impossible Enter expert on artificial intelligence and neural networks Maureen Caudill. When strange and “unexplainable” paranormal events started happening all around her, Caudill had to reevaluate everything she thought she knew. She spent years combing through and evaluating the evidence and the research, much of it from top scientists who had staked their Realities reputations on what they found. Her conclusion: with so much empirical THE SCIENCE BEHIND ENERGY HEALING, proof and data available for scrutiny, we simply cannot dismiss the reality of these extraordinary powers and events. TELEPATHY, REINCARNATION, PRECOGNITION, AND OTHER BLACK SWAN PHENOMENA READ FOR YOURSELF AND SEE. MAUREEN CAUDILL ISBN: 978-1-57174-663-4 U.S. $18.95 51895 9781571746634 Copyright © 2012 by Maureen Caudill All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit- ted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photo- copying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Hampton Roads Publishing, Inc. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Cover design by Jim Warner Interior designed by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. Charlottesville, VA 22906 Distributed by Red Wheel/Weiser, llc www.redwheelweiser.com Sign up for our newsletter and special offers by going to www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter/. ISBN: 978-1-57174-663-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request Printed on acid-free paper in the United States of America MAL 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ImpossibleRealitiesPages.indd 4 7/11/12 12:33 AM INTRODUCTION Black Swans and Other Challenges to Comfortable Reality Once upon a time . There was a great kingdom that prided itself on being the smartest, the most logical, and the greatest at absolutely every- thing. And indeed, the kingdom was rich and powerful and received lots of grant money donated from everyone important. The philosopher-king who ruled this magical land noticed one day that every time he saw a swan, it had white feathers. After consulting with his Truth Committee, he found that every single member agreed: No one had ever seen a swan with anything except white feathers. Thus, a theory was born: All swans are white. This theory was duly recorded in the Annals of All Truth for the kingdom. Once thus inscribed, it was added to every text- book in the land, so that all children were thoroughly trained in the principle—one hesitates to say “dogma”—that all swans are white. One day, a naughty little girl listened to her teacher state that all swans are white. The little girl thought about that, then she stuck her grubby little hand into the air. “Teacher!” ImpossibleRealitiesPages.indd 9 7/11/12 12:33 AM “What is it, Brunhilda?” “What if they’re not? I mean, what if all swans aren’t white?” Horrified by such heresy, the teacher set little Brunhilda to writing “All swans are white for sure” a thousand times. Brunhilda did as required, muttering all the while, “I still don’t believe it.” Fast-forward decades later. Brunhilda is now out in the wil- derness where she hears a swan honking from a pond nearby. Sneaking up on the pond, she peeks through the bushes . and sees a black swan! At that point, she knows that she has toppled orthodoxy. The point of this story is that if you have a theory that all swans are white, it takes only one confirmed sighting of a black swan to realize that the theory is incorrect. This is the state of science today. Current scientific orthodoxy holds the theory that psychic phenomena are “impossible.” With this theory held as “truth,” any claims to the contrary are ascribed to hoaxes, frauds, mistakes, delusions, or hallucinations.1 As with the theory that all swans must be white, if any single psychic skill is demonstrated proven, it topples scientific ortho- doxy that all psychic phenomena are impossible. This book is an attempt to topple that scientific orthodoxy. Please note, Brunhilda did not have to demonstrate that all swans are black, or even that black swans are particularly com- mon. To disprove the theory that all swans are white, she only needed to find a single black swan. Like many people, and certainly like most people trained in the hard sciences, I, too, grew up believing that all swans are white, that psychics were all jokes, hoaxes, and charlatans— fun entertainment, but with nothing real about them. I studied physics—as hard a science as there is—and spent a career in computer science, focusing primarily on artificial intelligence x Impossible Realities ImpossibleRealitiesPages.indd 10 7/11/12 12:33 AM and neural networks. Things don’t get much more logical and down-to-earth than that. The problem is, when I started experiencing odd, inexpli- cable effects, I had to choose from three alternatives. I could dis- miss my experiences as self-delusion, trickery, or imagination; I could decide I had lost my mind and tipped over the edge into psychosis; or . just maybe . I could have found a Black Swan. Since by most reports people seem to believe I’m a moder- ately normal, functioning adult, I do not believe I’m psychotic.2 On top of that, my Black Swan hasn’t been a single event, but a bevy of Black Swans. They’ve come one right after another. They’ve come in whole bevies, flocks, herds of Black Swans. Some have come with hard physical proof. It’s pretty difficult to throw away the amount of data that I’ve accumulated from personal experience. In fact, the experi- ences are so compelling that I’ve had to completely change my perspective about almost everything I thought I understood as orthodoxy. With that said, I also recognize that my personal experiences are compelling and convincing to only one person—me. No one else can possibly trust these experiences as meaningful evidence, because they were not generated in formal scientific protocols or under rigorous scrutiny. In fact, the only person who knows exactly what happened and what didn’t happen is me. I’m like little Brunhilda. I’ve seen my Black Swans and I know that current orthodoxy is wrong. Unfortunately, I also know that just as Brunhilda’s word about what she has seen in that pond isn’t sufficient to convince the philosopher-king to change the Annals of All Truth, my personal experiences, no matter how ardently I protest their veracity, will convince no one else that my Black Swans exist. To accomplish that, I need harder proof. And that hard proof is what this book is about. Introduction: Black Swans and Other Challenges to Comfortable Reality xi ImpossibleRealitiesPages.indd 11 7/11/12 12:33 AM In the chapters that follow, I’ll guide you through a hand- ful of the Black Swans I’ve seen. I’ll tell you why I personally believe in these Black Swans, mostly because I’ve personally experienced them. But, recognizing that you’ll need more proof than my personal stories, I’ll also show you that each one of these Black Swans is supported by an extensive array of scientific evidence. In other words, you don’t have to believe my stories. While I hope you enjoy them, and that they enliven your jour- ney, you don’t have to believe a single word I tell you about what happened to me. Instead, I ask you to believe the many scientists who have spent years of their lives and risked their professional careers and reputations to investigate the possibility that not all swans are white. Over the following chapters, I’m going to invite you to observe eight separate Black Swans. There are other Black Swans out there that I won’t discuss, of course, and to some degree, the ones I’ve chosen to discuss are those that have most intruded on my life. I could have included several more topics, but only at the risk of making this book excessively long and unwieldy. But here’s a sneak peek at the beautiful Black Swans you’ll meet in these pages. The First Black Swan is psychokinesis, more specifically spoon-bending. I start there because whenever I do a workshop, I nearly always make time for a spoon-bending exercise. People love doing it. (And, yes, in my workshops they don’t watch me bend spoons. I pass out spoons and forks and have the partici- pants do it themselves. It’s way fun.) Furthermore, it’s something people remember; it sets them up for a good time. And . well, you’ll read all about it in the next chapter. The Second Black Swan is remote viewing. This is the skill that the CIA and the military spent more than twenty years developing by supporting a group of “psychic spies.” You may xii Impossible Realities ImpossibleRealitiesPages.indd 12 7/11/12 12:33 AM think you know all about that program, and you may think you know that it was “discredited.” If you believe that, I think you may find yourself quite surprised by what the evidence really shows about the effectiveness of remote viewing.
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