Are they just fun parlor tricks? Spiritual gifts and miracles like the ones we read in the Bible? Demonic manifestations? Or simply mind-over-matter?

Dr. Alan Streett was on a career trajectory to be a professional baseball player when a major arm injury and a psychic healer diverted him into Seminary studies as a non-believing church pastor-in-training who got drunk on Saturday nights, preached Billy Graham sermons the next morning, and spent the rest of his time researching the paranormal!? After finishing his PhD, he had a life-changing spiritual experience and became a sincere Christian and a professor at a Christian college … and continued his fifty year long research project trying to understand the paranormal and psychic phenomena.

His interest in the paranormal was sparked by the psychic healer, who failed to restore his arm but told him many stories, recommended books to read, and got him connected to other people in that world. He became fascinated, and dove head-first into this pursuit. Over the course of 50 years, he went through four distinct stages in his understanding of that strange paranormal world.

Stage 1: he enrolled at a Bible Seminary (even though he wasn’t a Christian) and tried to integrate what he was learning about the secular paranormal with examples of the supernatural in the Bible. To him at that time, they were one and the same. It was all just neat stuff: harmless and interesting.

Stage 2: the cognitive dissonance of being a heavy-drinking non-Christian on the inside, but a Seminary student and pastor-in-training on the outside, finally triggered a mental crisis and then a profound and life-changing conversion experience. He was born-again! And on fire! And while attending a charismatic church service, he learned that the paranormal/psychic phenomena were in fact demonic! He immediately made a 180 degree turn away from that world, and completely rejected those phenomena.

Stage 3: after finishing his Seminary training and becoming a professor of Evangelism and New Testament at a Christian College in Texas, he invited a guest lecturer to speak on “Magic: real and fake.” That guest convinced Alan that, in fact, many of the paranormal and psychic things that had previously so fascinated him (Stage 1), and then terrified him (Stage 2), were actually just devious parlor tricks and fraudulent illusion. His guest even showed him how to do some of the tricks used by mentalists (“the Amazing Kreskin”; David Copperfield; Darren Brown), palm-readers, Tarot card readers … and even poker players (who read their opponents’ “tells”). And Alan started perfecting the art himself: he too was now entertaining the crowds while teaching students and church audiences that this was not scary supernatural stuff … just simple deception.

Stage 4: with his interest in psychic phenomena renewed and re-directed, he studied it from a new, more analytical perspective. He learned about brain states: the fast, excited brain waves of the beta state which provides focused concentration and the fight-or-flight response, versus the slower, relaxed brain waves of the alpha state, the relaxation response and day-dreaming. He noticed the marked similarities — the slowed breathing and intense mental focus — between the meditation used in yoga, the centering prayer used to have a spiritual encounter with God, the hypnosis used to quit smoking or ignore bodily pain, and the Lamaze classes that are taught to cope with labor and delivery. In other words, the psychic phenomena are largely mind over matter.

We then talked about how Alan’s Stage 4 understanding explains many of the things that we see happening in private spiritual practice (visions; prayer; a peaceful spiritual experience) as well as in very public healing meetings (which are predominantly geared toward dealing with a wide variety of pain and mental issues, and not so much restoring amputated limbs or correcting enzymatic deficiencies like diabetes). It also explains how athletes overcome what appear to be insurmountable barriers. For example, it was long thought to be “impossible” to run a 4-minute mile; until Roger Bannister did it in 1954, and now it’s commonplace. Likewise in figure skating: for decades no one could do the triple axel, until Vern Taylor did it at the 1978 World Championships … and now nearly all competitive skaters can do it. In the same way, this also explains how some people feel “the universe” co-operates with their wishes/needs (“the Law of Attraction”): their persistent determination has them repeatedly trying over and over until they finally breakthrough their perceived barrier and achieve their goal.

I think there’s a lot of food for thought in what Alan had to tell us.

As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …

Find out more about Alan at his faculty page, and his book at Eerdmans Publishing.

If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our collection of episodes dealing with the religious experiences and spiritual encounters.

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Hour 2: Educational Victory and Moral Confusion