(copy of a letter)
Well, as I explained about the way my mind works in picking up on a new area, I may as well say that this is actually relevant to the way I do research, or would do it if not prevented, in any field.
I have always been slandered as being ‘interested’ in parapsychology in the way in which other people are. Actually I went to the SPR (Society for the Prevention of Research) under duress, because my parents, acting as agents of the collective, were putting me under pressure to support myself (‘earn a living’) as a person who no longer had any right to try to find any way of getting into an academic career.
I went there for purely financial reasons, hoping that by selling myself into degraded slavery in this way I might save a little money towards supporting myself when I returned to Oxford as a freelance outcast academic.
I knew nothing about what was going on in ‘the subject’ and I was picking everything up from scratch, but in fact I took in all the information that was going, including psychological and psychiatric, and my mind started to re-structure it, as it does, into potential fields of research in which I might be able to make progress.
My mind automatically discarded nearly everything that the ‘psychical researchers’ were preoccupied with, especially the preoccupation with spiritualistic models, survival, evidentiality, and ‘proof’.
I may say that, while I attempted to be open-minded, I have never found it necessary to invoke spiritualistic concepts when considering the reported experiences.
You said that all this fraud was designed to put people off the subject, and I agree that it is. But I did not consider people’s rationalisations as any guide to their motivation.
Those who concern themselves with parapsychology are as disinclined as anyone else to let anything potentially disturbing be found out. The fact is that some of the reported phenomena are close to issues which people find alarming.
