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276 SPIRIT AND THE MIND
Although his own research produced evidence of a free “quark”—a supposedly fundamental building block of physical matter—he now claims in a new book, The Quest for Quarks, published by Cambridge University Press, that the materialist view of the universe simply does not fit with the facts as demonstrated by experiment, and that a search for fundamental building blocks is fruitless. “It is clear that no such things exist: after quarks, there would be yet another proliferation of particles . . .Materialism is like playing with toy trains—its the best fun in the world when you’re six or seven years of age—but when you’re forty?”
Professor McCusker reports that, “Tests of Bell’s theorem8 completed in Paris two years ago have shown that the universe is not a set of separate things with empty space between them—it’s one interconnected thing, and the way things will influence one another depends on their past history, irrespective of what you think their distance apart is.” He concludes that levitation, ESP, Tarot cards and many other psychic phenomena are scientifically valid.
The field of research in human consciousness has burgeoned in the area of psi research. In 1969 the American Association for the Advancement of Science admitted the Parapsychology Association to membership in its ranks. For more than ten years the U.S. government has funded a multimillion-dollar program at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. The program involves the exploration of techniques of a perceptual ability termed remote viewing. Remote viewing, one type of psi or psychic functioning, happens quite naturally in the course of daily events to many people. It refers to the awareness of locations, events and objects unable to be perceived by the known senses, typically due to distance. As the Committee on Science and Technology reported to Congress: “Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there is an ‘interconnectedness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter . . . . The implication of these experiments is that the human mind may be able to obtain information independent of geography and time ....”9
Although Freud initially rejected psi phenomena, he reversed his opinion in his later years. He was a member of both the British and the American Society for Psychical Research. Convinced of telepathic communication between analyst and patient, Freud postulated that this was an archaic mode of contact later replaced