challenge our current knowledge. In
"Beyond Science" Epoch Times collects
stories about these strange phenomena
to stimulate the imagination and open
up previously undreamed of
possibilities. Are they true? You
decide.
A mother was writing a letter to her
daughter when her right hand began
burning intensely and she dropped the
pen. Less than an hour later she got a
phone call telling her that her
daughter's right hand was severely
burned by acid in a laboratory
accident.
A family living on a farm in upstate
New York began their day's work, but
all returned to the house later in the
morning after experiencing a strange
feeling. All eight family members felt
an intense foreboding, each without
being aware the others felt the same.
That day, in Michigan, a son in the
family died in an accident.
A woman felt a pain in her chest and
said her sister had been hurt. The
woman later found out that her sister
was in a fatal car accident at the same
time; her chest had been crushed by
the steering wheel.
These stories go well beyond empathy.
They are about feeling the pain of a
loved one at a distance, without the
conscious knowledge that that person is
suffering. When it happens between a
mother and child, it goes beyond a
"mother's intuition," said Michael
Jawer, a researcher interested in the
mind-body connection who co-
authored the book "The Spiritual
Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings
Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth
Sense" with Marc Micozzi, MD, PhD.
The first two stories were recounted in
Dr. Larry Dossey's books "Healing
Beyond the Body" and "Reinventing
Medicine" respectively. The third was
told by the late Dr. Ian Stevenson,
former chairman of the Department of
Psychiatry at the University of Virginia
School of Medicine, and quoted by
Jawer.
Dr. Dossey calls these experiences
telesomatic events. The word
telesomatic comes from Greek words
for "the distant body." He wrote in
"Healing the Mind" that such events
are usually positive. A woman who
feels a suffocating sensation, for
example, and senses that her child is
drowning may run out to the
swimming pool in time to save the
child. Sometimes, however, they can be
damaging. For example, a soldier had
his legs blown off and a loved one's
legs became paralyzed for no apparent
reason.
"They cannot be compelled to happen
in the laboratory or on command," said
Dr. Dossey, who is now retired but once
served as chief of staff at the Medical
City Dallas Hospital. Nonetheless, he
said, they command attention for two
reasons: "First, they are exceedingly
common; hundreds of instances have
been reported over the past few
decades, some of them in medical
journals. … Secondly, these cases
display an internal consistency that is
striking. They almost always take place
between people who share empathic,
loving bonds—parents and children,
spouses, siblings, lovers."
"The nub of all this, which I find most
fascinating, is the role of emotion," said
Jawer in an email to Epoch Times. "It
seems that the awareness that breaks
into consciousness in these cases is
almost always tied to a deep feeling, a
connection with someone else. It's
often an immediate family member, a
close friend, or a pet."
Psychiatrist Dr. Bernard Beitman had a
personal experience of this
phenomenon, and he coined the term
simulpathity to describe it. He felt
himself choking inexplicably, only to
later find out that his father had been
choking at the same time thousands of
miles away. Dr. Beitman graduated
from Yale Medical School and Stanford
University and he was the chair of the
department of psychiatry at the
University of Missouri-Columbia. He's
now working to establish a
transdisciplinary Coincidence Studies.
The first step in forming a clear method
of study is setting up a taxonomy, he
said. One of the categories of
coincidences he has demarcated is
synchronicity. He noted that
simulpathity is a subcategory of
synchronicity. He explained that
synchronicity literally means "moving
together in time." It is "the surprise that
occurs when a thought in the mind is
mirrored by an external event to which
it has no apparent causal connection."
Dr. Beitman hypothesizes about what
he calls a psychesphere. "The
psychesphere is something like our
atmosphere—around us and in
dynamic flux with us. We breathe in
oxygen and nitrogen and water vapors,
and we breathe out carbon dioxide,
nitrogen, and more water vapors. We
receive energy-information from the
psychesphere and release energy-
information into the psychesphere. Our
thoughts and emotions contribute to
the psychesphere and our thoughts and
emotions are influenced by it."
He is looking at the physical energy
humans emit and what kind of
receptors we may have for picking up
on this energy. For more on this topic,
see the Epoch Times article "Is There a
Physical Explanation for the 'Vibes'
You Get Off People?"
Jawer explained that veterinarian
Michael Fox, who used to have a
nationally syndicated column, spoke of
the "empathosphere." Jawer described
the empathosphere as "a universal
realm of feeling that transcends both
space and time."
"My strong suspicion is that the body
and mind are one, and mediated by
emotion," Jawer said. "The
empathosphere … may allow us to
effectively reach one another when we
are distressed—all the more when we
have a close or familial connection."
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.