A Ramble About Woowoo

      Not long ago, I was answering a friend's question about what I would say to the parents of a child who was dying of cancer. Having done volunteer spiritual care at UCI Irvine, I didn't have to imagine too hard what I would say. I don't remember being in that specific situation, but I was called to several potentially terminal situations and asked to comfort patients and their families. Among other things which I said in response to my friend I told her I would try to keep their spirits up, and I explained that the worst thing you could do in that situation was to make it more stressful. My friend's response was that keeping a positive attitude won't do anything to heal them in that situation, and that what I was suggesting was "woo" or "woowoo." My friend's response has been in the back of my mind ever since.

     According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, "woowoo" means "dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural, or unscientific." It's an interesting choice of words which my friend used. It's been documented and demonstrated that the more a person with an illness believes that they're going to get better, the more they "fight," the better their odds. It's a medical fact that when a person is stressed, their immune system is lowered as they go into fight or flight. The idea of trying to lower the stress level of the patient as a person sent to comfort them in order to bolster healing and improve their odds is based on hard science. And yet my friend believed I was telling them "woo."

     Over the last couple of years, I've been dong a lot of reading about the research done on subjects my friend would no doubt consider woowoo as well. Things like past lives, near death experiences, and most recently, UFOs. I would have considered them woowoo at one time too. But the research and writing which I've been reading was done by people with M.D.s and a few other letters after their names who used the scientific method over and over to observe and record their case studies, sometimes for years, and there are a lot of case studies with mountains of documentation and evidence. The one I've read most recently was written by the former head of the Pentagon's team researching and documenting UAP encounters with military service members. He only went public when the Pentagon itself stonewalled him. At first glance, I'd be skeptical too, except what can be corroborated from what he says is easily corroborated with a few Google searches, and the fact that three of the people he writes about went before Congress last year and testified as whistleblowers about the reality of UAP, and the Pentagon's long history with obfuscating, stigmatizing, and burying anything and everything about it. They did so because they, as pilots, had personal encounters with UAP, as had large numbers of their peers, and they saw these things as a threat which the Pentagon was totally ignoring and potentially risking the lives of our service men and women in the process. Congress acted on their nearly unimpeachable word.

      So, what's been rattling around in my mind is the question, "When does it stop being woo?" When is there enough evidence presented, gathered using scientific methods, to where a person would acknowledge or accept the reality being presented which may or may not contradict their own worldview? When is it enough to say "Yes, this may actually be happening, and I will have to shift my worldview." Maybe this point is different for each person, but I believe it to be a relevant question, not just to the topics I've mentioned, but for many other topics as well. From my own experience observing and listening to other people, many will go to great lengths to ignore or suppress whatever data or evidence exists that contradicts their worldview. A little gray alien with big black eyes could show up, ring the doorbell, and say "Hi!" and they still would not accept it as anything other than "woowoo."

     If experts in their fields who have spent years researching and observing these phenomena, or any phenomena, are telling you "yes, this is real," and you refuse to believe them, what would you believe? When the evidence for the "woowoo" starts slapping you in the face, will it then be enough? Having been slapped a few times myself, I've learned to keep a more than open mind the hard way. I've learned that it serves no one to deny what reality keeps leaving on our doorstep.