Psychologist, William James, wrote "I believe there is no source of deception in the investigation of nature which can compare with a fixed belief that certain kinds of phenomena are impossible."

It was taboo to say it, and it got some people angry at Bruce Klingbeil, but he said it: "Prayer is an abundant reservoir of testable thought."

Having the words "testing prayer" in the same sentence sounds oxymoronic or impossible to a lot of people. How could a prayer be tested? Prayer is an invisible belief.

Astrophysicist, Bernhard Haisch, said, "Advances are made by answering questions. Discoveries are made by questioning answers." In the Eighteenth Century, upon further discoveries of electromagnetism which is invisible, scientists had to admit that some things are invisible that science can test.

There are technologies that are good for us and technologies that lead us into bad scenarios. Who would deny that we are living in clicking links today? We click, click, click links which have become our reality routines. Our thumbs and index fingers are getting more exercise than any other part of us. Addictive technologies, such as virtual reality games and digital devices try to hack into our brains to manipulate us to keep coming back to do more clicks. Mankind should find new exceptions to dwelling on tech all day.

Spiritual inquiry and faith require quiet time and silence for the mind to study and ponder ideas. But addictive and noisy technologies have become the enemies of faith.

John Klingbeil said essentially, "Right now Spindrift is seen as a fiction. Of the innumerable scenarios for the future, a few scenarios should have some uses of technology that indirectly support faith. In such a tech supportive scenario, Spindrift could lose its foolish label and become an important avenue for finding linkages between science, religion, consciousness, and psi." What is psi? Psi means any psychic effect. Prayer is an example of psi. How is prayer psi? Prayer claims to produce an effect at-a-distance.

What was humorous to Bruce and John Klingbeil was an encounter with two scientists. In 1983, while residing in Palatine, Illinois, the Klingbeils and Bill Sweet presented the prayer experiments and data to two scientists who were skeptics of psychic phenomena. The Klingbeils read that the two scientists expressed an interest in the claims of the paranormal in a local suburban newspaper article.

Near the beginning of the conversation, the scientists pointed out that the issue of prayer's effectiveness had been settled over a century earlier. Francis Galton, a brilliant nineteenth century scientist and statistician, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had statistically checked on the prayers for the English Royalty. Many times a day, from all over England, the populace prayed rivers of prayers and affirmed, "Long live the King. Long live the Queen." The royal family had constant prayers directed toward them. Statistically Galton found that these royal prayers did nothing to give better health to the King and his family. In fact, royalty was sicker, had more trouble in childbirth, and lived shorter lives than other groups in the English population including other aristocrats.

The scientists said that Bruce and John were a century too late. If prayer worked, the Royal Family would have faired better than others with all those thousands of people praying for them. Prayer had no beneficial effects or the Kings and Queens would have been healthier.

Apparently, generational Royal inbreeding was expected to be overcome by citizen prayers in this Nineteenth Century experiment.

Bruce asked, "What was the control group?" Apparently, every one else in the English population was the control group.

What sent Bruce into laughter was that these two 'objective' scientists said prayer had no effect before they read a single word of The Spindrift Tests or The Cathedral of the Mind written by John Klingbeil. After the skeptical scientists did read the books, they maintained that there were so many flaws in the methods used that the data was meaningless. That a working scientist checked out the Spindrift methods and concluded that the methods were applied properly was dismissed as ignorance of science.

Bruce and John laughed about the prayer preconceptions the skeptics had upfront whereas Bill Sweet was pretty upset with the scientists. This objective exchange of findings was one time when Bruce and John had shown a better sense of humor than Sweet did.

In 1982 and 1983, there was a Chicago area skeptic who thought a Klingbeil experiment with yeast was a fake or at the least the experiment didn’t follow the rules of the scientific method. He was invited to witness the experiment in Palatine, Illinois. Upon seeing it played out, he had no further comment about the Spindrift lab experiment. He did say he would get back to us after digesting the Spindrift terminology and methodology. Sweet couldn't reach him on the phone again.

The Klingbeils worked with the premise that Quality effects followed from a holy way of living and thinking. If the effects of Quality thoughts could be argued to follow a holy way of living and thinking, the effects should suggest inductively to some observers that something holy is testifying behind the effects. (See A Journey into Prayer, page 370.)

Jesus Christ stresses this view of the goodness of Quality effects testifying back to a cause in John 10:38. Jesus said, "If I do [the works], though you don't believe me, believe the works; that you may know and believe that the Father is in me, and I in the Father." (Word English Bible) Jesus Christ seems to be saying that through intellectual observation, some skeptics can apply inductive thinking to find a way to acknowledge the potential open window for a divine Cause behind the Quality effects.

Bill Sweet

Spindrift Research

Write Bill at: sweet@spindriftresearch.org

The gist of the children’s book of The Secret Garden was a place for a special girl to retreat that was unlike anyplace else. The Secret Garden was a place of pleasant sounds and isolation from society.

Some golf players come to realize that it’s partly the peace and quiet of the mental atmosphere on the greens that makes them feel good to be out on the greens.

There are fewer and fewer places for human beings to retreat. Noises and agitation pervade almost everywhere we go.

With so much noise in modern society, do we even know quiet? It’s doubtful.

During sleep there are few hours of peace and quiet anymore. We have become used to sleeping through the micro-noises around us.

I used to stand on my balcony between two to four in the morning. In the distance I could hear a freight train clicking on the tracks. This morning I asked myself, “The train is there, why can’t I hear it?” It occurred to me that there had been an increase in micro-noises. The noise level was not low enough to reveal the train that was present there. My early hours of so-called quiet had enough micro-noises to erase the sound of the distant train. My world was not the same.

I was reminded of 9/11. The best sound from my stereo system and playing my drums was during the week after the 9/11 terrorist atrocities. What was different then? No air turbulence from airplanes! Airplanes were not flying above me or anywhere in the skies of United States for a week. Micro-agitations from the sky were gone. Everything was still. What a true sense of peace and quiet that had the earmarking (pun intended) of how I remembered sound when I was a child.

Hints of spiritual reality and psychic phenomena are present in our surroundings. Could the modern noises of life contribute to hiding these realities from us? Yes. An increase in noise seems a reasonable explanation why so few paranormal phenomena get clearly through to us human beings. Our minds are full of noise.

Even with our eyes, if an image is being rattled and agitated, how can you get a clear focus on it? Not easily. We human beings have been conditioned with noise and agitation, so the deeper realities don’t get through very often to our human perceptions.

Jesus Christ recommended that human beings go into a prayer closet to pray. What is a prayer closet? A place where interference can’t reach you or interference is greatly reduced. A prayer closet is a room or chamber or area where your thoughts and prayers are secret to you, so your wavelength or frequency can’t be picked up, tuned into, and monitored by well-meaning people, or noisy spies, or those who would deliberately interfere with your thoughts.

Jesus words are, “When you pray, enter into your inner room, and having shut your door, pray to your Father, the One in secret. And your Father, the One seeing in secret, will reward you.” (Matthew 6:6)

We need places to retreat from the hustle and bustle of the noises of our increasingly overpopulated Earth.

Do blocked lives matter? Yes. It’s becoming nearly impossible to find a private place of quiet anymore to block out interference agitating our lives. But Jesus told us that we should find such scared closets or rooms. A prayer closet is a temporary way to get unplugged from interference.

When is the last time you had a few moments of quiet for your own thoughts? You are probably stumped.

Without blocked lives from noise and interference, we very rarely can hear or see the divine thoughts and wonders of Spirit that require a quiet background to be perceived. Blocked lives matter.

More about blocked lives from noise can be read at Question 7, number 4, on the FAQ page here.

Bill Sweet

Spindrift Research

A general from the Pentagon was interviewed. I believe the correspondent meant to ask him, “What is the biggest problem facing the United States?” Instead, the correspondent asked him, “What is the biggest problem facing the world?”

The general’s eyes popped open, and he said, “Population growth.”

The general added that wars will be started over there not being enough jobs and resources to support an overpopulated world. Wars over land wasn't the problem. Jobs and resources were the problem.

With all the good intentions of the United Nations, private and religious organizations to feed the children of the world, especially in Haiti and Africa, does it occur to anyone that there are too many people to feed year after year after year? “No! That is evil talk,” we are told.

We hear, “Hey, where’s your love of children? Jesus Christ said to feed the hungry and help the poor. Do you want to go to Hell by not doing it?”

When I mentioned overpopulation, two friends said almost the same thing to me. “Are you a Nazi terminator?”

Similar to the right to practice the Second Amendment (to have guns) or practice abortion (to subtract babies), people of planet Earth also say they have the right to spiral the growth of mankind until there is no place left to stand figuratively speaking.

A few countries complain, such as Russia, that they don't have enough people being born.

One of the themes of the Zombie movies is that the Zombies came into existence because the Earth was disgusted with the abuse of its resources and having too many people standing around. The Earth knew it had to ‘thin the herd’ in order for the world to continue. So Zombies emerged to trim the population.

The theme of the book, "Make Room! Make Room!," is about an overcrowded world. "Make Room! Make Room!" became the storyline for the movie called "Soylent Green." In "Soylent Green," too many people make planet Earth overheated, low on resources, and ultimately the population has to turn to cannibalism to feed the masses. As a way to manage resources and endure, reducing the amount of people grown is never considered in the movie.

In real-world terms, I saw a news report that India hasn't considered population control for its population problem.

What about when jobs, space, and resources run out? Christians know something is wrong with the shifting identities in the population and the loss of jobs, but they can’t connect the dots by having some people have less children. Why? In the Bible, Genesis 1:28, is the command for men and women to “Replenish the earth.” The Bible verse is an open canal to “Have all the children you want.” The Bible verse reads:

"God blessed the humans by saying to them, 'Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it! Be masters over the fish in the ocean, the birds that fly, and every living thing that crawls on the earth!'"

Here is the conversation stopper: “Every baby is evidence that God wants the world to continue.” Try an argument against that statement.

Additionally, most people are biologically programmed to have progeny. So the spiral keeps going until a crisis. How is the population crisis being handled now? Keep feeding people. Have telethons. Keep throwing money at starvation. Give the unfortunate clean water and food, but giving water and feeding new-born babies and their parents is endless. The population crisis grows.

At the conclusion of his HBO show on June, 16, 2017, Bill Maher pointed out that jobs for retailers and workplaces like malls are being eliminated. The people we have don't have enough work. Why keep increasing the number of people? Maher makes a practical point but is hated for it.

Why haven’t humanitarian organizations been more successful in stopping the poor from having too many children? That unspoken goal is having too much common sense.

The downside of religions that support ‘the sanctity of life’ is no thought given about turning off the spigot of babies being produced and filling the world.

Abortion is supposed to be de facto population control, but it hasn’t worked out that way. For example, abortion clinics are almost always built near poor neighborhoods.

The irony of abortion is that it was for unwanted pregnancies; keeping the population of a family under control. Instead, there are more people born where abortions are available. Someone in the United States may argue, “Oh, the increase is only because of the financial government incentives to have more children.” If that is true, why isn’t there a limit on the number of children families can have to receive financial assistance? “God forbid you from saying that out loud. There is the Nazi and hatred in you again.” Such name calling puts an end to starting a conversation about a growing crisis on the horizon.

The popping population is the ignored elephant in the room (sometimes near real elephants in India and Africa). Overpopulation in areas where resources are scarce is a topic you can’t often broach without receiving some hellfire.

There is an interesting tidbit about the elephant in the room that few acknowledge. Real elephants on the planet are losing their habitats to growing human populations. Except for zoos, real elephants will all but disappear from planet Earth. Let not population growth make them irrelephant (pun intended).

When mankind runs out of habitats for itself, will mankind begin to disappear, too? Could be. If we apply our God-given intelligence, we should find a balance with Nature.

Bill Sweet

Spindrift Research