Maureen Hancock – medium with neuro history

Here’s another psychic / medium with a history of neurological incidents.  Maureen Hancock is a contemporary medium in Massachusetts who had several neurological traumas earlier in her life. 

At age 18 months, she got lead-paint poisoning.  Her brain swelled, she was in a coma for 2 ½ weeks, had emergency brain surgery with a shunt installed, chelation, and was in and out of the hospital for the next three years, miraculously surviving without disability a toxic exposure sufficient to kill five adults!

She had regular chelation for three years, and immediately after completing the therapy, at age 5, she started seeing and hearing full body apparitions.  Over the years, she was highly ambivalent about this and other abilities.  On the one hand, she devoured parapsychology books, but at the same time, she tried hard to suppress the phenomena and “be normal.”

Then, at age 24, she had a car accident resulting in massive face and head trauma -- a skull fracture, leaking spinal fluid, pulverized bones in her face.  She felt and heard her deceased grandmother in the car during the accident.  And she spontaneously healed – each test over the next two weeks showed further healing, and no surgery was required.  Immediately after this, her psychic / mediumistic abilities burgeoned.  She started to hear hundreds of spirit voices, and have much more psi.

From that point on, she increasingly accepted her calling to do energy healing and mediumship, and has been practicing in this field ever since.  She is now about 44 and highly successful and sought after.  There have been no more neurological injuries.

The anthropological psychologist Holger Kalweit has studied shamanism around the world.  He has observed that a person who is destined to be a shaman is often struck by various illnesses and calamities that put her / his normal life on hold for a long time, and that the tribulations only cease once the individual surrenders to the call and agrees to practice as a shaman.

In other words, the shamanic path hammers the practitioner into adaequatio!  :)

Adaequatio rei et intellectus.

"The intellect (of the knower) must be adequate to the thing (known)."  I recently learned this Medieval maxim from an article by William Braud, Ph.D. in the Parapsychological Association Bulletin (Winter 2011), and he was referencing E.F. Schumacher’s ideas from “A Guide for the Perplexed” (1978).

Braud writes, “…one’s inner eye [must] be trained and prepared to permit it to see clearly and well in the realm of psi experiences and events.”  He goes on to say that having psi experiences, and doing spiritual and meditative practices increase one’s adaequatio (adequacy, preparedness) for having more psi experiences.

I would like to emphasize that the positive practices Braud mentions are causing neurological changes as well as psychological and spiritual ones.  And I’d like to add that the less gentle path of neurological injury also may increase one’s adaequatio for having psi experiences.

So many psychics and medical intuitives had their expanded capacities develop *after* neurological trauma -- Edgar Cayce, George Anderson, Peter Hurkos, Laura Alden Kamm. How does that work, one wonders?

One theory is that psychic ability is natural and universal, but cultural conditioning makes it wither.  As Deepak Chopra says, “So if you don't have a concept or a notion or an idea that something exists, then your nervous system won't even take it in (lecture, May 1991).”  Neurological trauma might damage the neural substrate that is inhibiting psi, thus liberating psi.

It may be that damage to the brain forces the brain to develop work-arounds that are more psi-friendly, analogous to how people who lose their sight develop their other senses further than before.  It may be that neurological insult precipitates development of particular parts of the brain, such as, say, the pineal gland or the temporal pole, or causes a shift to more delta wave production.

I’m tending to think of the brain, and, indeed, the whole body, as a transceiver for identity, memory, and information that exists non-locally.  So, enhancing – or breaking and repairing – the transceiver may allow you to tranceive more.  Your AM transistor radio now picks up Radio Free Europe!

Hippocampus builds memories of the future

Research suggests that hippocampal cells fire in a particular pattern as an animal explores a novel situation, and then that same firing pattern is replayed afterwards during rest or slow-wave sleep to consolidate the encoding of that experience.  This is how we learn and remember.

A study done at MIT by George Dragoi and Susumu Tonegawa, published in Nature in Jan 2011, suggests that hippocampal cells can also be observed starting to encode a novel experience before it happens.  In other words, the brain is remembering something from the future or learning something that has not happened yet.

This prescient hippocampal firing happened during a rest or sleep period before the novel activity.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3104398/

Watch this space!

Why does neurological injury sometimes precipitate a psychic opening?  Can this tie-in be used to help both neurological healing and psychic development?

What is the neurological substrate of psychic ability?  Are there parts of the brain that are especially important to psychic ability?  What is the relationship of brain waves (beta, alpha, theta, delta, gamma, etc.) to psi?

What is the relationship between psi and  neurological disorders such as epilepsy?  To the extent that psychological disorders are also neurological disorders, how do they correlate with psi? 

To what extent are Kundalini awakening and shamanic initiatory illness neurological re-wirings?  Are most illnesses an attempt to realign to one’s true self, which naturally entails becoming more psychic and more spiritually mature?  Do most illnesses have more of a neurological element than we have realized?

Do neurological illnesses respond more slowly than other illnesses to energy healing (aka psychic healing, faith healing, consciousness / information healing, intention, prayer)?  If so, does this provide a clue to the relationship between neurobiology and psi?

Is the brain already operating psychically all the time, but a psychic opening is a leap in efficiency and capacity?  Is the putative unused capacity of the brain already being used for psi, just unconsciously?  Are human infants wired normally for great psychic ability, and culture shuts it down?

Is memory, in fact, retrocognition?  In other words, are we transcending space-time and visiting the co-extant past more literally than we have realized?

What does it mean that there is more brain injury being caused and survived than ever before – traumatic brain injury as the signature injury of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; sports concussions, “chemo brain” caused by cancer drugs, “protracted withdrawal syndrome” caused by psychotropic medication, etc.?

These are the questions I would like to explore in this blog.  Stay tuned!