Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:00:09 Welcome to Lessons from The Helpful Dead, where you learn that the world is not what it seems, and you are much more than you think you are. Here you'll learn about positive and reassuring messages from supposedly dead people whose main purpose is to help us find out what happens after we die, why we're here, how we got here, where we're going, and discover that you are really a powerful, eternal spirit. I'm Dan McInerney. We've been talking about psychics who while they were alive, pulled us things that support what the Helpful Dead tell us today. We'll talk about Larry Luhan, who was not a psychic, but in the 20th century he did the best work talking about the parallels between the way phys physicists view the world and the way psychics view the world. So you learn a lot by listening to what he described. While Larry Luen was not a psychic, he was indeed a healer.
Speaker 1 00:01:13 I knew him, uh, slightly during the 1970s. He was a very down to earth fellows, absolutely no heirs put on about him. He had served as a psychologist in the US Army during World War II and the Korean War. He devoted a lot of his time to the psychotherapy of cancer support, known as a healer. People would come to him for healing and he had one story that he liked to tell. A person came to him saying, Larry, if you ever need any proof that you have great healing abilities, I have the proof. I have x-rays of the severe infection in my mouth before you did the healing. And afterward, when I went to the surgeon who was to operate on me, he said there was no sign of the infection and he took these x-rays. Well, Larry felt pretty good about that until he realized after the man left that the phone rang and then he got interrupted and then the phone rang again and he had forgotten totally to do the healing.
Speaker 1 00:02:16 The obvious implication, of course, is that the man had healed himself through his own beliefs. Larry was a likable and remarkable fellow in many ways, and he actually lived to be a hundred dying only in, uh, 2020. During his distinguished career. He wrote many books and many, many articles. More important, he spent a number of years working directly with cancer patients and he also worked very closely for years with the famous British psychic, Eileen Garrett, whom we have mentioned in uh, previous podcasts. In two of his, two of his books written in the 1970s, uh, the medium, the mystic and, and the physicist was one and Alternate Realities was alternate realities was another. In those two books, Luhan tells us how psychics describe reality. During those times when they are performing their psychic feats, they tend to describe a world quite different from the one you and I recognize in our daily lives when attempting to describe the nature of reality at those times, Luhan said they all felt it was extremely difficult to describe using our language because our language is based on the quote real world as we see here, touch and smell it every day.
Speaker 1 00:03:39 A lot of what went on while these unusual people were in these states, apparently was impossible to describe. Using our language as it presently stands. Still, some common themes did become apparent. They include among other things, descriptions that said, there is no time, no space, no evil and everything is one now except for the evil part. Does some of that sound familiar with previous discussions? Remember now, these people weren't trying to prove anything and they weren't trying to make you or me believe that these points were true. They were just doing their best to tell us how they perceive reality while they were doing the things they do. In other words, if you wanted to drive down to the store on the highway and buy a loaf of bread, you would better not use the assumptions above. You'd have to move through time and space.
Speaker 1 00:04:35 And if on the way to the store someone tries to rob you and hit you over the head, you'd find it hard to swallow. The everything is one part and the there is no evil part of their descriptions. On the other hand, if you want it to peer into the future or communicate telepathically, your consciousness would be entering a reality they say, in which to one extent or another, those descriptions would apply. Now in a fascinating and intellectually sound discussion, liberally sprinkled with examples, Luhan identifies at least four different modes of being and lists the basic underlying assumptions of each. He theorizes perhaps an infinite number of realities with different root assumptions and points out that we have much greater freedom than we've ever realized to shift from reality to reality choosing the one most relevant to our current needs and purposes. Remember now, Luhan was a psychologist and at the beginning of his book, alternate Realities, he cites several very simple examples of how our senses can trick, trick us, right?
Speaker 1 00:05:53 How the world we see in terms of shape and color is greatly affected by the amount of light available distances, the atmosphere, and many other factors. The world we see and feel and hear with our five senses is just that he reminds us a world seen and felt and heard with senses, and those senses can be changed and tricked. The implication is obvious. Change the the senses and you change the world. Even if you're not a psychic. Lucian's, alternate realities book is especially significant because in it he sets up an intellectually defensible structure that solves the problem of who is right or wrong among scientists, psychics and mystics. Uh, what uh, you'll be hearing shortly is a, a grossly oversimplified summary of a logically reasoned, well-documented thought, thought process that Luhan takes us through to appreciate the extent of evidence that he brings to bear and the new connections he makes among observations and conclusions.
Speaker 1 00:07:04 You'd have to read his book. For our purposes, what is most important is the following. First, he demonstrates clearly that we don't just discover, but rather help to create and maintain the reality that we perceive. He uses dozens of examples from the way we fill in the holes when our eyes hit a blind spot on the retina and the way we perceive action on a motion picture screen when only a series of still photographs is projected there to, uh, feeling a hot object when we place the tips of a cold spoon and a warm spoon on our arm. At the same time to the way objects seem to slide, this is a good one. Objects seem to slide backward if we focus on the glass window instead of the objects outside. While a train is moving to the feeling of being held back when we try to accelerate a car that is gliding downhill with the ignition turned off, I've experienced some of those and I'm sure you have citing experiments with dice and the problems that physicists have in explaining the seeming unique contradictory realities where effects seem to come before causes and certain things seem to exist and not exist.
Speaker 1 00:08:29 He logically leads to the conclusion that there must be different valid ways of discovering slash inventing reality Through still more examples, he shows that we're much less limited in determining the reality we experience than we have supposed, including those times when we look at optical illusions like the Ruben face VAs, which looks first like two faces profile facing each other and then suddenly changes to a sil silhouette of a vaz. Next, he establishes that no one way is the only valid way to discover slash invent reality. It depends on what we want to achieve. The questions that are are valid for one mode of being the term he uses for discovering inventing reality in a particular way. Those questions that are valid for the one mode of being are not valid. Questions for another mode one may answer the question how, while the other may answer the question, why you will get into difficulty only if you apply the assumptions and rules of one mode of being to an event or issue that is governed by the rules of a different mode of being. He identified four basic modes of being that we know of, postulating. There could be many more, but he doesn't know about them. The four modes he identified are the sensory mode, the clairvoyant mode, the trans psychic mode, and the mythic mode. It will be helpful, uh, for me to go into some detail about each of these, but I won't try to do it in this session. We'll discuss those in detail in the next session. Again, I'm Dan McIn, e bringing you lessons from the helpful dead.
