Is the Human Mind "Visible" or "Tangible"?

By Tong Yun

(Clearwisdom.net) What is the human mind really like? What's the relationship between the mind and our physical body? We seek answers to these questions, while scientists are working hard to solve them. The March issue of The Journal of Parapsychology reported the latest developments in this area, showing that the human mind can cause significant changes in the output messages of electronic monitoring equipment (1).

This experiment was spearheaded by Professor Robert Jahn from Princeton University with the assistance of two German research groups (2-4). They have been conducting research on the effect of the human mind on electronic equipment since 1996. Their main area of focus is whether the human mind can change the output signals of electronic equipment without physical contact. Princeton University has successfully conducted this experiment before, where the mind was found to have a significant impact on output data when other factors are controlled.

One of the goals of this project is to repeat the last experiment to see if the results would be the same. This time, they monitored the mind activities of 227 participants. The resulting data were subsequently analyzed.

The data obtained were surprising to the scientists, as they were quite different from what they expected. In the last experiment, the existence of the mind had caused consistent changes in the resulting data. In this experiment, however, the data changes caused by the mind were scattered and limited. However, the connection between these changes and the presence of the mind is indisputable, as their strong correlation excluded the possibility of random chance. In addition, the correlation also appeared in many different parts of the data. Overall, when compared with the background signals without the presence of mind activities, the mind had caused significant changes in the output data.

The scientists also explained that, compared with the last experiment, although the external conditions appeared to be the same, subtle differences did exist. These differences included the individuals whose mind activities were being monitored, as well as their state of mind at that time.

With the development of scientific research on humans' near-death experiences, humans' understanding of the mind is also making breakthroughs. More and more scientists are beginning to accept that the human mind can exist independent of the physical body (5,6). Furthermore, if the human mind can indeed exist outside the presence of the human body, then perhaps there are also dimensions and matters associated with the existence of the mind, although science is not yet advanced enough to explore this area. As such, in order to recognize this supernormal phenomenon, humans must correspondingly change their ways of thinking and their research methods.

References:
1. The Journal of Parapsychology, March 2002 v66 i1 p. 91(3).
2. JAHN, R. et al. (2000). Mind/machine interaction consortium: Port REG replication experiments. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 14, pp. 499-555.
3. http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/Allen_Press/mind_machine14_4.pdf
4. http://www.igpp.de/english/varia/mmi.htm
5. Near Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands. Pim.van.Lommel et al. The Lancet 2001, p. 358.
6. http://www.zhengjian.org/zj/articles/2002/4/4/15146.html

(From www.pureinsight.org)

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