Celestine ProfitsA Critical Analysis of James Redfield and The Celestine Prophesy The Celestine Prophesy: An Adventure. 1993. New York: Warner Books. By Phil Molé Chances are, you or someone you know has read The Celestine Prophesy. Since the book’s publication in 1993, it has sold at an imposing clip, catapulting its author, James Redfield, into the upper stratosphere of New Age gurus. He now occupies the same pantheon as Deepak Chopra, L. Ron Hubbard, and other metaphysical demigods of our time, commanding loyalties (and royalties) from legions of followers. All three of his subsequent books have also been best-sellers. What’s his secret? Why does his message strike a chord in so many people? The Celestine Prophesy’s appeal is not hard to understand. The story’s anonymous narrator, like many of us, is seeking the higher meaning of life. His existential angst is interrupted when a friend he hasn’t seen in years suddenly contacts him with news of a mysterious manuscript hidden in the rain forests of Peru. According to his friend, this manuscript confirms that there is a spiritual component to the world, and we’re all slowly becoming aware of its reality. Intrigued by the coincidence that his friend would appear with this information just when he needed to hear it most, he hops on a flight to Peru to learn more about the manuscript. Soon our hero is involved in a fabulous Raiders of the Lost Ark-style adventure. He and his acquaintances are pursued by priests who wish to suppress the manuscripts’ nine insights into human existence. However, astounding coincidences always ensure that he escapes and falls into the company of like-minded truth seekers who teach him the meaning of the insights. Interestingly enough, the content of these insights focuses on the coincidences themselves. He learns there are no chance events in life, there is only a synchronous journey toward spiritual truth. As we become more accepting of this truth, we trigger more of the “coincidences” because the universe is influenced by our desires. Soon, enough people will notice the synchronicity at work in their lives, and a “critical mass” of believers will be attained. At this point, the evolution of human society will proceed undaunted to a level of “higher and higher vibration” (1993, 120). In the 1996 sequel, The Tenth Insight, we rejoin our fearless narrator as he tries to stop secret energy experiments deep in the Appalachian mountains. Excursions are made into the “Afterlife” dimension, where souls are observed choosing the parents who will bring them into the world. Apparently, we all have plans, or Birth Visions, of what we want to accomplish in life, and we select our parents to maximize the progress we can make toward our goals. Best of all, our collective Birth Visions fit together into a larger World Vision that encompasses “the whole history and future of humankind” (78-79). Each of us plays a crucial role in making this vision a reality—creating an earthly paradise where the answers to all questions can be obtained intuitively, and critical thinking goes the way of the dodo bird. There you have it—coincidences, the afterlife, and thrilling connections between our consciousness and the universe—all explained in one neat metaphysical package. It is a daunting summary of New Age beliefs from the last 20 years, complete with its own hype (the jacket of The Celestine Prophesy describes it as “a book that comes along once in a lifetime to change lives forever”). The public has obviously responded kindly to Redfield’s message, but somehow, few have bothered to ask if it has any validity. It does not. Redfield’s worldview may be as bright as a glass Christmas ornament, but it is equally as hollow. Finding the Vision: The Omnipotence of Chance The crux of Redfield’s philosophy is his belief in the synchronicity revealed through coincidences. Throughout The Celestine Prophesy and The Tenth Insight, odd twists of fate help the narrator to come closer to his spiritual fulfillment. Just when it looks like his luck has led him astray, he runs into an acquaintance or a set of circumstances that brings him important information. This is no surprise to him, however, because he has learned that coincidences are not intersections of random events, but examples of the universe ordering reality into a lighted pathway toward our destinies. As Redfield himself explains in his 1997 “nonfiction” book The Celestine Vision: Regardless of the details of a particular coincidence, we sense that it is too unlikely to have been the result of luck or mere chance. When a coincidence grabs our attention, we are held, even if only for a moment, in awe of the occurrence. At some level, we sense that such events were destined in some way, that they were supposed to happen just when they did in order to shift our lives in a new, more inspiring direction (13-14). These words echo the sentiments of the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who was one of the first to propose a psychological mechanism for synchronicity. Like earlier thinkers such as biologist Paul Kammerer, Jung believed the most “meaningful” coincidences could not be attributed to chance alone, because they occur in statistically improbable patterns. But Jung went even further, explaining these coincidences as physical manifestations of our psyche on external reality. In his view, our minds come equipped with certain cognitive “plots” called archetypes. These archetypes reside deep within humanity’s “collective unconscious” and cause all of us to share certain mental patterns and symbols—such as the tales of gods and heroes abundant in mythological lore. Jung hypothesized that synchronicities occur when one of our archetypes is triggered by an external or subconscious experience. This liberates energy and causes reality to conform to the pattern of our archetypal thinking. In his words, “either the psyche cannot be localized in space, or space is relative to the psyche” (1971, 518). Redfield agrees, urging us that coincidences have a structure and purpose that can only be explained by a connection between our consciousness and reality—a connection outside our usual definition of causality. At first, many of us may be inclined to agree with Redfield, since we’ve probably had experiences pure chance seemed impotent to explain. Suppose, for example, that you are reading the paper one day, and you glimpse a phrase that reminds you of someone you haven’t seen since your childhood. A few minutes later, you read an obituary for the very same person. In this situation, we may be likely to conclude that something very mysterious has just happened to us. Otherwise, how can we explain an experience like this? Before we attempt to answer this question, we should clear up a few misconceptions regarding the statistical nature of coincidences. There are three common errors we tend to make when evaluating the probabilities of coincidences, and these errors may cause us to find significance where none is likely to exist. (1) We often fail to realize that many different combinations of events can result in the same coincidence. If we run into our old friend Hugo from our hometown in Vermont at a Steak n’ Shake in Tennessee, we may conclude that the encounter was too unlikely to occur by chance. “What are the odds of meeting him at this particular place?” we ask ourselves in amazement. But this is the wrong question. In reality, we should be asking “What are the chances of meeting any acquaintance from our hometown any place roughly 1000 miles or more from Vermont at any given time?” We would have experienced the same feeling of shock if we ran into our friend Sally at an Arby’s in Georgia, our friend Judy at a WalMart in North Carolina, or our goofy pal Gus at a cafeteria in Canada. Adopting a wider perspective reveals the odds of one of these coincidences happening is better than we may first realize. (2) Even if we know the correct probability for an event, we often misunderstand the information it contains. In his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer discusses how statistical concepts like averages and standard deviations are routinely misinterpreted by believers in the paranormal (70-71). Believers tend to look for occurrences of statistically unlikely events and use their low probability as “evidence” that something other than chance was at work. But this approach is incorrect, because statistical probabilities only describe the number of instances a particular outcome can be expected in an overall population. If a particular event (or intersection of events) has a 0.05% chance of happening during a given time interval, the odds of it happening to you or me are quite low. But if it does happen to either of us, we should not conclude that there was only a 0.05% chance of the event arising from chance, and a corresponding 99.95% chance that it happened through some other (more mysterious) means. In a population containing millions of people, we would expect to see hundreds of recorded instances of the event. As Aristotle wisely observed, it is likely that unlikely things should happen. This is the point that most believers in synchronicity, including Redfield, usually fail to grasp. One instance of an unlikely event (or many gathered by selective searching methods) is not enough to tell us that something extraordinary is taking place. Thus, it is no good for Redfield to try to convince us that more people are experiencing meaningful coincidences, as he states in The Celestine Prophesy (8), because there are simply more people in the world than there have ever been before. The number of coincidences has to increase proportionately if their probabilities of occurring remain constant. (3) We have an overactive tendency to force order on the world around us, and this tendency can lead us to misinterpret the significance of our experiences. Psychologist Stuart A. Vyse has shown that people often ascribe elaborate meanings to random events. In an experiment he and colleague Ruth Heltzer conducted, subjects were instructed to play a simple video game. The goal of the game was to navigate a path through a matrix grid using two directional keys (1997, 84-85). Half the students received points every other time they maneuvered their way into the grid’s lower right box; the other half were awarded points on a purely random basis. Both sets of subjects were then asked to describe how points were scored. Most of the students who received points on a predictable basis described the game accurately, but those in the “random point” group fared much worse. Even though their points were awarded completely independently of their chosen course through the grid, they were convinced scoring followed one or more definite patterns. This experiment teaches us a valuable lesson: Faced with a choice between order and chaos in our lives, we strongly favor the former, even if the order is nothing more than a construction of our imaginations. Now we can return to the example of spotting our friend’s obituary in the newspaper, and see how the tendencies identified above cause us to misinterpret the coincidence. This event was actually experienced by Nobel laureate physicist Luis Alvarez, who described it in a letter to Science in 1965. Alvarez noted that many people would underestimate the probability of such an event because they would focus only on the specific details of the coincidence—marveling at the odds against remembering this particular person just before seeing his obituary. However, Alvarez used estimations of the average number of acquaintances a person has and the frequency with which he thinks about them to calculate a probability for a coincidence of this type occurring. He concluded there is a 0.003% chance per year that a person will think about a person just before learning of the person’s death. We may now be tempted to conclude that the chances of the coincidence happening are still extremely low, but we’d be forgetting about the population dependency of statistics. With billions of people in the world, there must be thousands of coincidences like this happening every year. Our desire to make sense of the occurrence compels us to seek synchronistic meaning, but our efforts are misguided; there is no evidence for anything but chance behind this event. Is there any indication that coincidences are not random—that there is a an intelligent pattern behind their occurrences? Alas, there is not. Some people may be inclined to protest this statement, pouring forth emotional testimonies about the importance of truly bizarre coincidences in their lives. However, personal feelings are not a measurement of truth, no matter how passionate they are. There is just too much subjectivity involved; a coincidence is generally only considered significant by the person who experienced it. Unless we have tangible evidence, capable of being objectively evaluated by anyone, that synchronicity is real, we have no reason to believe it is. But is this really so much to ask for? Surely, if Redfield’s new approach to life is as important as his publicists claim it is, it would offer tangible proof in its defense. Explaining the Vision: A Matter of Energy As it turns out, Redfield does try to defend his synchronous vision of the wor ld by appealing to a branch of science familiar to very few of us: modern physics. He regales readers with flowery and inaccurate renderings of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, and shows us how these mysterious new scientific disciplines give us a new perspective on spirituality. Redfield is most excited about what he perceives as the holistic properties of the universe, and the way he imagines these properties are influenced by human consciousness. Throughout his books, Redfield cheers the rise of the new holism in science. We were wrong to imagine there was an objective reality outside ourselves which we could subject to cold-hearted reductionist analysis, he chides us. The universe is really a finely woven mosaic of pure energy, where all things are one. “Everything, including ourselves, is nothing more than a field of energy, of light, all interacting and influencing each other,” he tells us in The Celestine Vision (69). According to him, this influence has a kind of mystical nonlocality; its effects are instantaneous at any distance. As proof of this assertion, Redfield cites a well-known experiment in subatomic physics that demonstrates conservation of spin in a system of separated particles. Here is his description of the experiment: Perhaps most astonishing of all is that these elementary substances have a way of communicating with each other over time and space that is impossible according to the old mechanistic paradigm. Experiments have shown that if one particle is split in two, and one of the twins is made to change its condition, or spin, then the other automatically spins as well, even it is very far away (52-53). This is a rather flawed account of the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen and Bohm (EPRB) experiment. In a common variation of this experiment, a particle at rest is caused to decay into two photons moving in opposite directions. A photon is a discrete quantity, or particle of light, and can be polarized to have a particular orientation with regard to its direction of propagation. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll limit our discussion to circular polarizations. If the photon’s field vector rotates clockwise around its directional axis, the photon is considered right polarized; left polarization results from counterclockwise rotation. Since the source of the photons was at rest, conservation of angular momentum dictates that the total spin of the two-photon system must always equal zero. This condition is only satisfied if the photons have the same type of polarization. Thus, if we measure one of our photons and find it is left polarized, we automatically know the other is also left polarized, no matter how far apart the photons are. Redfield (along with a horde of other New Agers) uses this experiment as proof of holistic properties at work in the universe. He wants us to believe that a signal travels from one particle to another instantly, so that measuring the polarization of one photon immediately affects the polarization of its “twin.” But this is not the case. The polarizations of the photons were determined from the initial experimental conditions, not by the act of measurement. There is no signal propagated between the photons. The situation is a bit like the story of a mathematician named Bertlmann related by John Bell, and reiterated by Murray Gell-Mann in his 1994 book The Quark and the Jaguar (172-173). Our friend Bertlmann always wears one green sock and one pink sock. Knowing this rule, and seeing the color of one of his socks, we can deduce the color of the other one with 100% accuracy. In the EPRB experiment, the trusty law of conservation of angular momentum lets us make predictions about the correlation between the photons as easily as we can for the correlation between Bertlmann’s socks. Redfield often tells us Albert Einstein was the first to awaken us this new, holistic view of the world. “Einstein’s work was like the opening of Pandora’s box,” he says. “The paradigm shifted away from the concept of a mechanistic universe, and a stream of new discoveries began to prove just how mysterious the universe is” (Redfield, 1997, 51). A good part of this mystery, he maintains, is the unity of everything; the “interconnecting web of energy relationships” imagined to be responsible for the results of the EPRB experiment (Redfield, 1997, 55). The problem with this is that Einstein actually destroyed the idea of a holistic universe! According to relativity theory (which has survived countless tests over the years), no signal can travel faster than light, so instantaneous effects over distance are impossible. Contrary to what Redfield proclaims in The Celestine Vision, superluminous signaling would have been possible in the “old, mechanistic paradigm,” because the universe had no ultimate speed limit in this pre-Einsteinian physics. Few of the New Agers claiming Einstein as an inspiration for their holistic paradigms seem to realize this. If Einstein and relativity are right, holism is wrong. As a further irony, Redfield’s own theory is stunningly nonholistic. He insists that reductionist scientific approaches are flawed because the world cannot be broken into small parts and systematically analyzed. But this is exactly what he is doing by pawning off quantum mechanics as a complete description of reality. Explaining the entire universe solely on the basis of laws governing subatomic particles is about as reductionist as you can get. Redfield also maintains that our consciousness actively shapes reality. One of the characters of The Celestine Prophesy, describing the Third Insight, phrases it this way: The whole of Einstein’s work was to show that what we perceive as hard matter is mostly empty space with a pattern of energy running through it...Experiments have revealed that when you break apart small aspects of this energy, what we call elementary particles, and try to observe how they operate, the act of observation itself alters the results—as if these elementary particles are influenced by what the experimenter expects...In other words, the basic stuff of the universe, at its core, is looking like a kind of pure energy that is malleable to human intention and expectation in a way that defies our old mechanistic model of the universe—as though our expectation itself causes our energy to flow out into the world and affect other energy systems (42). To Redfield, this connection between mind and matter is the explanation for synchronicity. If we need information of some kind, our desire makes itself known to the universe. The universe then arranges “coincidences” in order to guide us in the right direction. This notion of a universe affected by consciousness stems from misunderstandings of the quantum mechanical phenomenon of wave function collapse. A wave function is an equation describing the probability of a subatomic particle, such as an electron or photon, being located at a particular position. If we use an accelerator to fire a beam of electrons through a slit at an array of detectors, we will get a characteristic distribution of position frequencies. These frequencies can be converted into a probability curve describing the chance of finding an electron at a particular detector in the array. The probability curve is equal to the square of the wave function, so we may say the wave function is spread out in a particular way on the other side of the slit. But now, suppose we adjust our accelerator so only one electron is fired at a time. When one of the detectors registers a “hit,” the wave function at the other detectors instantly collapses to zero. Since changing our measurement set-up changes the wave function, and measurement is usually associated with consciousness, many New Agers go a step further and propose that our consciousness, itself, has affected reality. Nothing of the sort has taken place. Wave functions enable us to make statistical predictions about large numbers of particles prepared under identical conditions, but do not allow precise predictions to be made about individual particles. Like any statistical formulas, they are population dependent. That is, they let us compute the number of instances we should expect to find a particle at specific locations. There is a certain probability associated with finding an electron at each of the detectors in our array, but an individual particle can land at any of the detectors. The situation is a bit like a raffle where all the contestants have different numbers of tickets, and consequently different probabilities of winning. Think of the contestants as analogous to the detectors in the experimental set-up just described, and the “probabilities of winning” as analogous to the probabilities of each detector registering a “hit.” If we repeated the raffle over and over again, we would get a distribution of winners corresponding to the statistical predictions we made based on the number of tickets held by each contestant. For example, if there were 200 tickets issued in the raffle, someone with 20 tickets has a 20/200 (or 10%) chance of winning, and should average 10 wins for every 100 raffles held. Yet, she may still be beaten by someone who only held one ticket (a meager 0.5% chance of winning). In fact, we should expect this outcome to result about once for every 200 raffles. The important thing to remember, though, is that once the winner is chosen, every other contestant’s probability of winning instantly drops to zero, no matter what it was before the drawing. Wave functions, like other probabilities, are mathematical abstractions—they are not physical entities, and have no tangible connection to anything in the universe (including our minds). Thus, they are not bound to obey the laws of the physical world; they change as quickly as measurements dictate. There is still no exact mechanism accepted for wave function collapse, but there is certainly no reason to think our minds play any part in it. Measurement alone triggers the collapse, either by giving us definite knowledge of where a particle was detected or by interfering in the particle’s path through space-time. As physicist John Wheeler has emphatically declared, “consciousness, we have been forced to recognize, has nothing whatsoever to do with the quantum process” (1982, 21). Redfield’s concept of a universe governed by desire is thus refuted in a rather comical way. After all, Redfield obviously has a fervent wish to prove the truth of his theory. Since reality offers no supporting evidence, no matter much he wants it, doesn’t this confirm that his idea is false? Blurring the Vision: Monkeys and Metaphysics So far, we have discussed the flawed reasoning behind Redfield’s metaphysical views. Our next task is to examine the way he uses his concepts of synchronicity and quantum reality to construct a new perspective of human social progress. A key component of Redfield’s grand new vision is the notion of reaching a “critical mass” of believers—a threshold which, when crossed, will trigger spontaneous spiritual knowledge in the entire race. Near the beginning of The Celestine Prophesy, the narrator is told that humans all over the world are slowly becoming attuned to the First Insight (about the synchronicity evident in coincidences). The number of people with this awareness is approaching a “certain level” which will be exceeded sometime early in the next century. What happens then? The Manuscript predicts that once we reach this critical mass, the entire culture will begin to take these coincidental experiences seriously. We will wonder, in mass, what mysterious process underlies human life on this planet. And it will be this question, asked at the same time by enough people, that will allow the other insights to also come into consciousness—because according to the Manuscript, when a sufficient number of individuals seriously question what’s going on in life, we will begin to find out. The other insights will be revealed...one after the other (1993, 8). The Tenth Insight, it turns out, has never even been written down—it exists solely in the Afterlife dimension. “Only when enough people on Earth sense this information, intuitively, can it become real enough in everyone’s consciousness for someone to write it down,” one of the characters declares (1996, 25-26). When I first read The Celestine Prophesy, I thought Redfield’s banter about critical masses sounded vaguely familiar. Then it occurred to me—the same term was used by New Age author Lyall Watson to describe a similar notion of instantaneous knowledge acquisition. Watson was discussing learning in monkeys, not men, however, and happened to be spectacularly errant in his conclusions. The “hundredth monkey phenomenon” Watson documented has actually become one of the classic paranormal myths of our time. The story concerns troops of monkeys called macaques studied by primatologists during the 1950s and 1960s. Starting in 1952, the macaques, which lived on several islands in Japan, started receiving “provisions” from their human observers. Sweet potatoes were among the goods presented to the grateful primates. Eventually, a female named Imo discovered that the potatoes could be cleaned by dunking them in water, such as the ocean or a nearby stream. This new practice gradually spread to other monkeys in Imo’s troop, and the researchers kept close records of how many of the monkeys knew how to wash potatoes at any given time. Here’s where Watson’s account parts company with those generated in the scientific literature (Imanishi, 1963; Kawai, 1963 and 1965; Kawamura, 1963). According to Watson, the potato washing trick spread at the expected slow rate from 1953 to 1958. But in fall of 1958, something truly extraordinary happened. All of the monkeys were now cleaning their potatoes, even monkeys on other islands! The knowledge seemed to spontaneously manifest itself everywhere among the macaques, even where geographical barriers would have made physical transmission of the knowledge impossible. All that was necessary was for enough of the monkeys to have the “insight”—group consciousness handled the rest. What can we learn from this story? If enough of us learned to dunk books like The Celestine Prophesy in the ocean, would we instantly annihilate New Age thinking everywhere in the world? Sadly, we would not, because there is no evidence for spontaneous learning events such as the hundredth monkey phenomenon. Watson grossly misinterpreted the original scientific journal articles he used as the basis of his story. There was no miraculous acquisition of knowledge for our monkey friends in 1958; only two macaques became potato dunkers that year. All of the learning followed the pattern expected for ordinary transmission of habits in troops of monkeys. Some macaques on other islands did learn to wash potatoes independently, but there is nothing mysterious about this, since the original potato washers also invented their new hygienic practice without any help. As any perusal of the scientific reports reveals, there was absolutely nothing paranormal about the spread of the behavioral trait in the macaque populations. I cannot say whether Redfield intentionally used the hundredth monkey phenomenon as the basis for his critical mass concept, or if he arrived at the idea through some other way. I can say that the notion of critical mass as a model for progress is not only unsupported by the facts, but demeaning to our humanity. Think about the following paradox for a moment. Redfield tells us there’s more to life than just the material world; there is a spiritual aspect that “responds to our expectations” (Redfield and Adrienne, 1995, 69). He feels this knowledge will empower us, since reality can be anything our thoughts demand it to be. But if this is the case, all is chaos, since my thoughts can cancel the effects of your thoughts. Redfield is now forced to introduce his critical mass concept to resolve the paradox. Borrowing Jung’s notion of a collective unconscious, he maintains that all of us inwardly share the same goals. Our subconscious aim has always been to work together to fashion society into a new Utopia. Thus, our thoughts can coexist, after all. Each of our Birth Visions fits together harmoniously into a single World Vision, and we’re now becoming more conscious of the plans we collectively have always had for human evolution. And once we reach the critical mass, we will all “wake up” and remember how to make the World Vision a reality. Our secular life, as philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel predicted, will be “the positive and definite embodiment of the Spiritual Kingdom—the Kingdom of the Will manifesting itself in outward existence” (Hegel, 442). But wait! Is it really empowering that our sole purpose in life is to remember our infinitesimal contribution to the Cosmic Plan? Is it really empowering that our thoughts can be instantly altered simply because a certain number of people think differently than we do? Order has been restored in Redfield’s world, at the mere price of our individuality and liberty. Our lives are more determined by outside forces than we ever imagined them to be, and change has been made impossible. Our personalities and autonomy have been subordinated to the Collective Mind, which will guide us to the truth. What is the truth? Anything the Mind says it is. Redfield’s vision is not Utopian—it is an Orwellian nightmare. Correcting the Vision: Give Chance a Chance In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, the hero, Billy Pilgrim, frequently finds himself in the company of aliens called Tralfamadorians. Billy’s extraterrestrial acquaintances are genuinely amazed at his poor understanding of reality. As one of the Tralfamadorians describes it, Billy often seems as if he views the world through a narrow hole at the end of six feet of pipe. He was incapable of the panoramic vision of space and time experienced by Tralfamadorians, and no matter what he saw through his eyehole, he could only shake his head and say, “That’s life” (1968, 115). To New Agers like Redfield, many of us are like Billy Pilgrim. We go through our lives with a narrow perspective of who we are and what we are doing, and we fail to see the larger picture. Beneath the veneer of everyday reality, Redfield assures us, there is a mystical synchronicity unfolding our destinies, guided by our desires. “Our personal challenge,” he proclaims in The Celestine Vision, “is to overcome the cultural conditioning that leads us to reduce life to the ordinary, commonplace, and nonmysterious” (1997, 15). But by denying chance, Redfield denies our freedom and our dignity. I just cannot comprehend how anyone can find the concept of a synchronistically-structured universe comforting. When I think of the people I care about, for example, I am most touched by the fact that they don’t have to be a part of my life. We were brought together by chance, but kept together by mutual respect for each other as individuals. Such a perspective is impossible in Redfield’s world. According to him, there was no chance involved; synchronicity was responsible for the relationship unfolding as it did. We did not choose to become friends. Our collective unconscious, through a holistic effect on reality, handled all the details. Do we really want everything we value in life to be explained in such a tawdry and deterministic way? Luckily, there is absolutely no scientific evidence Redfield’s philosophy is true. There is no mysterious non-locality in the world, and no connection between our thoughts and reality. We are, as physicist Victor J. Stenger says, just “temporary bits of organized matter” (1994, 41). Here, however, lies our liberty. We are not interchangeable parts of a holistic universe; we are individuals. If we remember this, we will gain a better vision of humanity—a vision in which our hearts and minds can truly be free. Bibliography
Alvarez, L.W. 1965. “A Pseudo Experience in Parapsychology” (letter). Science. 148:1541.
|