Are some medical and academic authorities irrationally sabotaging progress?

Change is scary. Little-understood new ideas can be especially frightening. When we’re scared, we become irritable, or sarcastic - even hostile.  And we no longer have our wits about us.

Even small changes are scary, such as learning a new computer program. Big changes, such as seeing our worldview begin to crumble, drive us nuts. When that happens, we can no longer think straight. Rational thinking has been blocked. We are "literally scared out of our wits" which becomes unbearable. Such deeply-rooted fears are unconscious and thus disguised as anger, which we then project outward as attack.

An individual with unusual abilities not yet explained by conventional science, such as Adam the Dreamhealer, tends to trigger fear in some of us and bring out irrational - that is “witless” - reactions. Society’s authorities, such as universities and medical centers with the biggest investment in traditional thinking about science and medicine, can actually sabotage open-minded science when reacting from a position of perceived threat.
 
In his books, DreamHealer: His Name is Adam and DreamHealer 2: Guide to Self-Empowerment, Adam describes various encounters with academic and medical authorities. Early on in his discovery of his abilities, he and his family consulted with a psychology department of a leading university, expecting not answers so much as open-minded interest and suggestions for further information gathering. Instead, they were greeted with close-minded skepticism and ridicule. They had expected something different from an “institution of higher learning.”

Currently, these attacks continue. The goal is to discredit Adam as well as the individuals who have practiced successfully his self-healing visualizations. Professors and department heads from major universities and medical centers are still writing inaccurate and biased opinion pieces about Adam, amazingly without having attended any of his workshops or, apparently, with only a cursory glance at his books.

Many critical statements reflect no awareness of Adam’s complete dedication to science. Over and over in his books, such as The Path of the DreamHealer: The Quantum World of Energy Healing, Adam states his confidence in cutting edge physics and biology research which is beginning to explain abilities such as energy healing.  He regularly talks about science’s growing awareness and validation of the tight mind/body connection, our connectedness to each other, and our ability to manipulate energy.

How, then, can we understand this need to discredit and misrepresent people and ideas we don’t yet understand and for which science is only beginning to give us some clues?

Perhaps one explanation is the fear reaction we as human beings have toward change, as mentioned above. I don’t believe academics, medical doctors, or the society of skeptics deliberately want to portray themselves as sloppy researchers or rigid and inflexible individuals. Yet, they often come across that way because of emotional interference in the reasoning process.

We can understand emotional interference from threat when we remember being frightened by relatively small changes and then doing something stupid. Or actually blocking out a complete paragraph which contains data contrary to our cherished opinions. So, when there is a perception of enormous threat – not only to one’s academic reputation, but to one’s entire worldview and identity itself – the tendency is to come out attacking and make irrational statements. This typical human emotional interference blocks the normal logic of which we are capable.

But consider the possibility that there is nothing to fear. Rather, we’re simply not limited by knowledge from our five senses. We’ve all experienced intuition – our sixth sense way of knowing. For example, how do I “know” that I am loved by my sister? How do I “know” I should attend a certain meeting? Is it not clear that there is more than one kind of knowing – more than derives from the five senses? Science hasn’t yet identified the specific mechanisms of intuition, but be patient, it probably will.

So it isn’t necessary to throw out unusual experiences (such as unexplainable healings) as invalid, or deny the presence of something as intangible as “love,” just because science has yet to come up with the exact mechanism of how love is transferred – or how energy is transferred. And it certainly isn’t necessary to attack the messenger of love – or the messenger of energy healing.  That response simply gives away our feelings of being threatened. It shows that we are “literally scared out of our wits.” 

Let’s keep our wits about us. There is nothing to fear and huge rewards to gain.

Doris Lora, Ph.D., a former clinical psychologist, is associate editor of the online magazine, LASpirit.com, and owner of an autobiography-editing service, Life Journey Editions. She lives in Los Angeles.