Twenty four years ago in the summer of 1982 I drove my hired car up Hollywood’s Mulholland Drive to collect Laura Huxley and take her to meet Dr. Rupert Sheldrake who had been invited to Los Angeles to give a talk about his new book The Presence of the Past. Two weeks ago I was reminded of that evening when the latest research on unexplained human abilities from the Director of the Perrott-Warrick Project found its way into the newspapers.

If you think telepathy is baloney you will be relieved to know that many scientists agree with you. But then many scientists believe in Global Warming. In both cases their belief flies in the face of the evidence and is caused by a preference to have faith in their unexamined prejudices and avoid impartial examination of the scientific evidence.

Trinity College in Cambridge has been funding Dr Sheldrake to investigate Telephone Telepathy. This is no fringe phenomenon. Three out of four people have had experiences in which they think of someone for no apparent reason and then the person calls; or they know who is calling when the phone rings before picking it up. Many people have similar experiences with emails. This is easy to test experimentally. Strange nobody has done so…until now.

Dr Sheldrake asked volunteers to give the names and telephone numbers of four people they knew well. During the test session each subject was videotaped continuously sitting by a landline telephone. One caller was selected at random by the throw of a dice. The person was then asked to call the subject. When the telephone rang the participant guessed who was calling before lifting the receiver.

The elegance of the experimental design is that the outcome of each call is right or wrong. Participants get it right one time in four if telephone telepathy is tosh. In fact the results are one time in two…45% at the University of Cambridge with similar results at the University of Amsterdam. This is Nobel Prize stuff. Tests with callers on the far side of the planet…in Australia and New Zealand…indicates that the effect does not fall off with distance. According to Dr Sheldrake ‘emotional closeness rather than physical proximity seemed to be the most important factor’.

But ignorance and prejudice know no bounds. Mind, Heart and Soul do not exist we are told. Man has a clever Brain. Consciousness is all…and only…in the head we are assured. Out come the dogmas…untested, unproven and unwavering in their certainty.

Yet talk to someone who knows what they are talking about…for which they must be familiar with the scientific research…and you will discover that no one understands very much about the nature of our minds.

Indeed the very existence of consciousness is unexplained. But this will not be the case for much longer. Consciousness Research is one of our most exciting scientific endeavours. There is accumulating evidence that brain activity is only one component in such acts as Consciousness, Creativity, Dreaming and Understanding.

Dr Sheldrake’s theoretical work postulates the existence of Morphogenetic Fields. Our minds may extend far beyond our brains and our bodies stretching out through fields that link us to our environment and to each other.

Fields are more extensive than material objects…magnetic fields around magnets and electromagnetic fields around mobile phones. Likewise mental fields can extend beyond our brains and bodies…with their structure and properties being influenced by attention and intention…and perhaps much else.

In principle there is no reason for such fields to be limited by either Space or Time…even though Gravity seems to be one field that does so in accordance with Isaac Newton’s Inverse Square Law. Tom Lethbridge’s experiments for instance have found evidence of a time-less zone between our time-space world and another time-ful zone. Lethbridge’s training as an archaeologist also enabled him to build a convincing case that ancient civilisations in these offshore islands might have understood the nature of space-time better than we do. More Nobel Prize stuff.

My failure to arrange £3000 over the summer to pack me off to Lund University for six months may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Together with the fortuitous cancellation of the Radical Consultation…I was never very keen on the idea and expected very little of it…has given me the chance to study the History of Monarchy in England. For the past few weeks my cabin table has been littered with books about kings and queens and revolutions.

What seems to have happened is that the Good Old Law was thrown out when Duke William of Normandy usurped the throne of England by Right of Conquest in 1066 and imposed Roman Legal Practice on us. In Roman Law the holder of highest authority makes the laws…and his Royal Subjects obey it or suffer the consequences.

The English Legal Tradition was reinstated in 1215 at Runnymede with the signing of Magna Carta where Conditional Power was placed in the king’s hands by the ad hoc reinstatement of the old Witan or English Council. The Social Contract between Barons and King was a written agreement rather than the oath-making of earlier times.

Since Magna Carta the English Way of doing things has had a chequered history as the English Monarchy found it necessary to navigate the cataracts and rapids of 400 years of continental Religious and Dynastic Wars.