I learned yesterday from the New York Times that roughly a quarter of Americans now believe in reincarnation. As I write this I pause and sink into a position that makes me feel for the moment that I am my father. Other positions at certain times makes me feel that I am my mother. Those feelings make sense to me, because I have watched my parents for so long and because my body developed from the blueprints created by their genes. But could my sense of self, or my soul, or whatever we decide to call it have resided in people or other creatures outside of my genetic lineage? If I stop to think about it, I'm not sure how that story is helpful to me. I have genetic ancestors I know nothing about. If I am going to learn about myself, it seems to me I should learn about them first.

I mention that because I happened to watch the Discovery Channel with my son after reading the Times. We watched an amazing show in which genetic archaeologists are trying to create a dinosaur from a chicken. And, as crazy as it seems, they are making progress.  It turns out that the chicken embryos start out with a longer tail than the chick will hatch with. And with some clever modification, scientists can make that chick tail longer, having more vertebrae like an ancient reptile. Same with teeth. It turns out that chicken embryos have the beginnings of teeth, and genetic manipulations can bring them back. All of this is helping to prove that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but it is also showing that ancient traits remain in our genes. A dinosaur became a chicken and may become a dinosaur all over again. Kind of marvelous.

And what about me? Like the chicken, do I contain the genetic blueprints of the creatures that came before. Could someone reverse engineer some ancient primate from my genes?  Wow!  Perhaps in my trillions of cells are the makings of billions of years of different kinds of life -- life that is capable of surviving and reproducing in all kinds of conditions. I wonder where all that information came from? My brain is packed with more knowledge than any of my ancestors or even any possible past lives. And I know virtually nothing about the incredible toolbox that created me. I can barely figure out how to use a Macintosh...

I went into Barnes & Noble the other day and bought a copy of Rhonda Byrne's new book The Power. I felt like a kid buying a copy of Playboy, not wanting anyone to see me at the cash register. I felt that way because of what we have written about The Secret and the "law of attraction," both of which I think are nonsense. Positive thinking is powerful and helpful. That's not the problem. (Read Rabbi Rami's take on The Secret on the home page.)

The new book is what Ronda Byrne has learned since The Secret, and that is the power of love. It's hard to find fault with love. And it hard to be against spending seven minutes a day wrapping oneself in love. But the idea that spending seven minutes a day wrapping oneself in love for something that one wants and then expecting the "law of attraction" to then bring it to you seems rather sad and awful. (In case you are wondering, that sentence summed up the instructions in the 142-page book.)

The Secret and I suppose The Power had a lot more resonance when the economy was booming and the bubble was building, when it seemed anyone could have anything just by wishing and putting it on a credit card. And certainly the book and the DVD made fortunes for people -- fortunes that seemed mostly to lead to lawsuits and people dying in sweat lodges.  (Gosh, I realize that just thinking about these people makes me feel sad. The spirituality of greed! Enough already!)

Meanwhile I'm in the process of editing a couple of features for the November issue. Emma Seppala at the Center for Healthy Minds and the University of Wisconsin is writing about how helping others makes us feel better. No secret there. And yet the  real science tells us something important about who we are. (Did you know that babies show helping behavior even before they have developed a sense of self?) And Allan Hamilton, my favorite brain surgeon, is writing about the battles inside our heads between greed and love. I find real inspiration in such stories -- and they help me be the person I want to be. (Should I be less judgmental? Maybe. But judgment is constantly going on in our brains as part of our basic mechanisms for survival...)

If you take a moment to think about it, the real "reductionists" are the people like Ronda Byrne who reduce life to nonsensical slogans that lead ultimately toward greater greed and loneliness. Meanwhile, real science expands and awakens us to the richness and  infinite complexity of our bodies and this beautiful world we live in.

What, in my opinion, is the real secret and the real power? Is it screaming to the world what we want so that somehow the world will bring it to us?  I don't think so.

As T George Harris told me: "The ultimate wisdom is listening."

I wanted to see The Men Who Stare At Goats when it was in theaters last fall, but I didn’t get to it until it arrived by Netflix. Wish I had seen it earlier. It’s called a comedy because they didn’t know what else to call it, but it’s not very funny. It’s a fictional story about our government very real adventures in the psychic world. What’s wonderful about the film is that it makes no firm judgment about what is real and what isn’t. Having grown up among some of the researchers involved in this, I’m not sure myself.

The real research (not depicted in the movie) began with studies of Remote Viewing at Stanford Research Institute by people including Russell Targ, who wrote for us

Close to Grace: The Physics of Silent Transmission

http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/archives/close-grace-physics-silent-transmission

 We also have fine piece from Dean Radin, Ph.D., that provides another explanation of how psychic stuff may work called:

 The Physics of our Entanglements

http://www.spiritualityhealth.com/spirit/archives/physics-our-entanglements

 I recommend reading both pieces and renting the movie.  The articles give a sense of the some of the real science.  The movie gives a sense of the craziness and evil that resulted from the military pursuit of psi. (The remote viewing research was not evil, but some of the later military work by other people was.) 

 The military aside, the ultimate problem I think with psi is that our consciousness turns out to be such a small fraction of our intelligence system.  Our brains are constantly looking for patterns and making up stories from those patterns, whether or not the patterns exist outside our own brains.

For example, on a mushroom hunting expedition, I always seemed to find the morels on the uphill side of the path, so I pretty soon I stopped looking on the downhill side -- and so I missed a lot of mushrooms. When we choose to believe our psychic "hits"  (many of which have no way of being verified)  it is really easy to see patterns everywhere -- or to see whatever we want to see. That’s not to say one shouldn’t tune into intuitions, but the movie is fair warning of the kinds of painful nonsense that can follow. Maybe I really liked it because it was about another journalist stumbling around and getting lost in this world...