Not too long ago, Reader, I rode the Southern Crescent train down the coast to Virginia to visit my friend Griffin. Some of you may recall him from my book Adventures of a Soul, the rational-thinking skeptic whose first “highly specific and astoundingly accurate” reading with my marvelous psychic Patricia Masters resonated with him so powerfully that he did an about-face and launched into a deep dive into the metaphysical, becoming a mentor of sorts to me. Griffin lives in a smallish but lively college town, and whenever I visit him, I thoroughly enjoy wandering its brick-paved streets, popping into coffee shops and antiques stores, and driving through the rolling green hills (I’ve always had a thing for cows) and scenic mountain passes at its outskirts.
But the best part is inevitably at the end of the day, when, after a simple homecooked meal, Griffin and I settle into a pair of old oak rocking chairs in his living room, his highly vocal cat, Roswell, on my lap, and watch documentaries and interview shows about things metaphysical together. It’s difficult to find friends like Griffin who have taken the time—many decades, in his case—to seriously study the topics and ideas that most pique my “wonder-lust,” topics and ideas that most of the world tends to ignore, or even mock. Topics and ideas that I often refrain from discussing for fear of being considered naive or crazy, or accused of summoning demons or doing the devil’s work . . . by those who have never bothered to take even a cursory look into these subjects themselves. As I continue my explorations into things nonphysical and as yet unexplained, I value Griffin’s companionship and camaraderie, his boundless curiosity that matches my own, and the opportunity that he provides to seriously discuss even the most way-out-there-seeming subjects, more and more.
I hadn’t brought a book to read with me on this trip. And reading an actual, nondigital book before bed has been a habit I’ve cultivated since childhood, to the point that it’s often hard for me to fall asleep without one. So on the first day of my stay, we swung by the nicely kept local library to see what their small (make that “very small”) section of offerings on the topic of spirituality and/or the paranormal might contain. “Hey,” Griffin said, as he pulled a book off a shelf and handed it to me. “Here’s one I read a while back. I think I told you about it. You really should read it. It’s kinda right in your wheelhouse, and it’s a very good book.”
I looked at the cover: Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Power of the Human Mind by Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, PhD. Then I turned to the back cover blurb.
“Elizabeth Mayer’s familiar world of science and rational thinking was turned upside down the day a stranger pinpointed the exact location of her daughter’s stolen harp in California—without ever leaving his Arkansas home. Deeply shaken, yet driven to understand what had happened, she began the fourteen-year journey of discovery that she recounts in the mind-blowing, brilliantly readable book.”
Ah, Griffin knew me well, and he’d never yet steered me wrong. I checked out the book—literally—and stowed it in my backpack for later perusal.
Once I began Extraordinary Knowing that night, in my makeshift quarters at Griffin’s, where Roswell often lounged on my tummy as I lay on my air mattress reading, I could not put it down. Mayer, a clinical psychologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, among other places, and a skeptic about things paranormal, was astonished when an Arkansas “dowser” recommended by a friend located the stolen harp . . . to the precise house in Oakland, the city in which Mayer and her daughter lived. For those new to the term, “dowsing” basically means using a divining rod, or forked stick, to locate something—though there are different ways to do it, including “map dowsing,” which the dowser in question did. Mayer used the dowser’s information to recover the harp within days. Arriving home and turning into her driveway with the recovered harp in the back of her station wagon, she writes, she had the thought, “This changes everything!”
What follows in the book is Mayer’s journey of how that incident, which, she confesses, shook her to the core as it flew in the face of everything she believed in—and didn’t believe in—started her on a quest to explore, to quote the book’s subtitle, “the inexplicable powers of the human mind.” She began to look for scientific evidence of dowsing, which opened up the door onto research into “all manner of other, possibly related anomalous phenomena” by very credible and highly credited scientists. “Of course,” she writes, “I also discovered that the world of anomalous mind-matter research is filled with shoddy research, flaky research, and research based on questions that are neither particularly interesting nor rooted in a solid grasp of science, scientific method, or scientific thinking. Yet as I delved more deeply, what most impressed me was the significant bank of well-conducted, scientifically impeccable research that imposes enormous questions on anyone interested in making sense of the world from a Western scientific point of view. I began to wonder, why had so much of this excellent research been overlooked, its conclusions dismissed?”
How Mayer discovers and comes to terms—given her training and background in psychology—with the idea that reality is not as she has been taught to believe makes for a fantastically absorbing tale. “[The experience with the harp] changed how I work as a clinician and psychoanalyst. It changed the nature of the research I pursued. It changed my sense of what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary. Most of all, it changed my relatively established, relatively secure sense of how the world adds up.”
I read more of the book each night I stayed with Griffin, and we discussed what I was reading over our morning coffee. Mayer’s explorations included Sigmund Freud’s writings on telepathy (who knew?); experiments by the CIA on remote viewing (if you’re not aware of these, Reader, prepare your eyebrows to be raised); the founding of a parapsychology lab at Duke University that later became, independent of Duke, the Rhine Research Center; studies on the power of prayer; and more. “How is this book not more well known?” I asked. Griffin informed me that he’d looked up Mayer online and found that she’d passed away shortly after its publication. Huh, I thought. A real pity. Though I was sure Mayer was continuing her explorations now, perhaps into higher dimensions from other realms.
One of my favorite aspects of the book was that, early on in her explorations, as Mayer began to share her experience with her peers in the psychology and medical world and others, colleagues and even strangers who approached her at meetings began confiding in her their own anomalous experiences and those of their patients: miraculous healings from fatal cancers; sensing the exact moment of a patient’s death and later finding it to be true; the presence of a white light, seen by a surgeon, that signaled to him that he could operate and the patient would survive . . . These individuals, she recounts, were extremely eager to share their stories, yet in many cases confessed they had never revealed them to anyone. Given their professional careers and reputations, they had never felt safe in divulging them.
I was not a professional in the world of psychology or medicine, but I understood how they felt.
Soon Mayer established, along with renowned psychologist and author Carol Gilligan, PhD, a professional discussion group at a meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association to talk about, to quote the group’s title, “Intuition, Unconscious Communication, and ‘Thought Transference.’” They asked applicants interested in participating in the group to write a letter sharing an account of an anomalous experience, clinical or personal. They were flooded with them. One therapist shared the story of her very young patient who, on the anniversary of the therapist’s brother’s death by drowning, turned to her out of the blue while playing to say, “Your brother is dying! You have to save him!” Another reported that numerous times, his patients had told him dreams that replicated uncannily recent specific events in his own life. And on and on. Nearly all of the practitioners reported how relieved they were to have their experiences considered with thoughtfulness and respect by fellow professionals after keeping them so long “sequestered out of shame and anxiety.”
In the years since the book was published, in 2007, a lot has changed: There are so many venues and platforms through which things “anomalous” are being seriously and thoughtfully considered, and often with great eagerness and enthusiasm. One need only do a search on YouTube, Reader, to find a nearly endless array of podcasts and video interview shows delving into such things as telepathy, channeling, near death experiences, remote viewing, and medical intuition. For many of us who are tuned in to such topics, it’s a time of unparalleled excitement. After all, as Mayer puts it at the book’s end, “To pursue the questions behind extraordinary knowing is to pursue a complete and free articulation of what it is to be human.”
