What We Know Is Very Little

                                             By Leonard S. Karpman, M.D. 

Dr. Ian Carr, the mentor who taught me the complexities of congenital heart disease, had a favorite aphorism. He loved to declare with British precision and exaggerated enunciation, “What you don’t know, you don’t know.”

Take heed those among us who would declare that what can’t be proved by the scientific method doesn’t exist. Consider instead that what can’t be disproved by scientific method may well exist, even when it resides beyond the material world as we know it.

In the 1950s, a period during which I was a proselytizing atheist, I became enamored with the words of a late night talk show host. He was an admitted charlatan in his earlier years. He delighted, therefore, in exposing hoaxes of all kinds. “Humbug!” he loved to bellow.

Reports were emerging from disparate parts of the globe that hypnotherapists were able to move people back into previous lifetimes during hypnotic trances. The subjects had no waking knowledge of their previous identities. The host, Long John Nebel, was able to debunk a few. The vast majority, however, contained information about events, people, cultures, and languages unknown to the subject. Confirmation of accuracy was often contained only in basement archives of very old newspapers, unpublished university theses, photo albums belonging to strangers, or reports in languages completely foreign to the individual in question. The more doggedly Nebel clawed, the more irrefutable the phenomenon-knowledge of another older lifetime while under hypnosis.

Fifty years later, the world literature is replete with thousands of articles and tomes describing the curiosity of previous life knowledge under hypnosis. Its practical application is the tool called “past life therapy.” Traumas from prior lives are occasionally related to current fears, pains, and phobias. Understanding may ameliorate the symptoms or even be curative, or so the theory goes.

In some instances, subjects under hypnosis are able to recount not only past lives, but interludes between lives in the world of spirits or souls. Remarkably, accounts of the spirit world are so similar from a large host of unrelated subjects that whatever the source of these phenomena they gain credibility by sheer numbers and convergence. Many of the field’s collective works are written by physicians, mostly psychiatrists. Many are devoid of any religious or faith-based perspective or requirement. Many are dispassionately scientific by intent, even if they are unable to fulfill Koch’s Postulates or be proved as a theorem in Euclidean geometry. The question then is whether the brain is to the mind as a radio is to radio waves, merely a conduit that intermittently transforms what is ever present. Turning off, unplugging, or replacing the receiver does not eliminate the transmission, only the sound.

Two books seen as landmarks are Many Masters, Many Lives by Brian Weiss, M.D., chief of psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami (Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. 1988) and Journey  of the Souls by Michael Newton, Ph.D., now in its fifth edition and tenth printing (Llewellyn Publications, St Paul, MN. 2001). Both were skeptics changed by dispassionate observations.

What there is for the reading is a mountain of circumstantial evidence for life beyond physical death or mind without brain, spiritual extended families, maturation of soul, and a path toward something akin to enlightenment. It is not a product of blind faith, and it cannot be disproved by the scientific method. Whether or not any of us “believe” in these concepts, shouldn’t we, as trained healers, acknowledge that spiritual forces beyond our traditional five senses may well exist and that they may contribute to understanding and healing of our patients and ourselves? At the very least, we should not dismiss the entirety of the “paranormal” out of hand because, after all, “What we don’t know, we don’t know.” What we know with absolute certainty is very little. History tells us also that many absolutes change in time. 

Dr. Karpman is a cardiologist in San Francisco. This article is reprinted with permission from San Francisco Medicine, the official publication of the San Francisco Medical Society.