Paranormal Series #3: PSYCHOMETRY: MEASURING THE SOUL
Psychometry, the first specific form of paranormal or extra-sensory perception we will examine is defined as “the ability or art of divining information about people or events associated with an object solely by touching or being near to it.”
The American physician and professor of physiology, Joseph Rodes Buchanan, coined the word “psychometry” (measuring the soul) in 1842, a practice he deemed possible because he believed that all things give off an emanation that can be detected and interpreted by a person or instrument sensitive to such vibrations. In The Manual of Psychometry : the Dawn of a New Civilization published in 1893, he wrote: “The Past is entombed in the Present! The world is its own enduring monument; and that which is true of its physical, is likewise true of its mental career. The discoveries of Psychometry will enable us to explore the history of man, as those of geology enable us to explore the history of the earth.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychometry_(paranormal)
Buchanan boasted that his new science would embrace and eventually replace many empiric sciences. His works described precise experiments, which excited widespread interest at the time; but scientists quickly distanced themselves from his ideas, particularly when they were taken up and sometimes faked by spiritualists and occultists. Psychometry is still commonly offered at psychic fairs as a type of psychic reading or to help clients make contact with the departed.
Nevertheless, Colin Wilson states in his must-read Beyond the Occult: “Hundreds of well-documented cases leave little doubt that psychometry is one of the commonest ‘paranormal faculties’. But science continues to ignore the subject, and even serious investigators of the paranormal seem to regard it with a kind of embarrassment.” This seems to hold true even though psychometry and psychic detectives have been used successfully, although sparingly, by law enforcement agencies to crack difficult cases.
Fortunately, in the 21st Century electronic society there is no longer an argument against emanations or vibrations encoding, carrying, and decoding intelligible information, even wirelessly. The discovery of DNA’s role has confirmed that the body’s building instructions are conveyed in information packets are barely material. Quantum psychics has delved deeply enough into the nature of stuff that particle and wave (vibration) can no longer be considered separate. Any thinking modern scientist can say with Ervin Lazlo in Science and the Akashic Field: “At the cutting edge of the sciences, a new [Buchanan might argue that] concept of the world is emerging. In this concept all things in the world are recorded and all things inform one another. This gives us the most comprehensive vision we have ever had of nature, life and consciousness. It gives us an integral theory of everything.”
So, the skeptic might challenge, if there is this underlying web of connection among all things, why does everything seems so separate, disassociated and chaotic? Colin Wilson points the finger at limited human capacity, what we all experience as overload: “In order to survive human beings have to focus on one thing at a time, so we have learned to ‘screen out’ the connections.” With hundreds of channels available on TV, we watch one at a time, missing what is on all the others. That danged human egocentricity, which too easily sees the channel I am watching as the only one worth anyone’s time, reinforces the screen.
Speculation on the possibilities inherent in psychometry could continue endlessly; but does it have an immediate practical application? I believe it does. As a historical novelist who likes to visit the places I write about, I began to wonder why I could pick up so much more than I actually saw by spending a day on the Gettysburg battlefield or wandering the crumbling Byzantine walls in Istanbul. I eventually realized that such direct contact (an element in psychometry) with my subjects started the image-making engine in my mind that generated that precious original content in my novel. Here my critics will cry “Foul,” saying, “You’re just using your imagination.” Precisely my point! Contact-images-content: that’s psychometry, by any other name, in practice.
I conclude with the proud assertion, which I would not have made prior to writing this piece, that I am a practicing psychometrist, and I became one by simply growing more aware and skilled in the use of a natural ability we all have. In psychometry’s case the paranormal is already quite normal.
What say you? Join in the discussion below.
For a further introduction to this subject, here’s one suggested link: http://paranormal.about.com/cs/espinformation/a/aa063003.htm
NEXT: TELEKINESIS—THE MIND AS A REMOTE CONTROL
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Copyright 2013 by Victor E. Smith. All rights reserved.