Marie D. Jones is the author of the acclaimed "PSIence". This book explores how Quantum Physics and New Science may explain the existence of Paranormal Phenomena. The paranormal has both fascinated and shaped both her life and her work. She is an award winning author and a Thought/Metaphysics Minister and Spiritual Counselor.
I see them as all connected on some level. These explorations of the other side of reality, what we can perceive with our five senses, are all different points along the same yardstick I call life. Religions, spiritual beliefs, metaphysics, the paranormal, and even quantum physics and science itself all share the common goal of trying to explain and understand our human experience.
Through my studies over the years, of various spiritual traditions and the paranormal and science, I’ve found so many connection and commonalities and I think everything I do now, in terms of my writing and my work, is about bringing those commonalities into the spotlight and theorizing on what they are and how they might explain our reality. I agree with physicist David Bohm’s concept of an explicate order of reality – what we see on the surface, and then the implicate order that is just below the surface, invisible yet utterly influential. And Bohm also believed in a super-implicate order – a Godlike higher order to reality. This is a scientist saying what sounds awfully spiritual. My whole life has been about bringing my love of science and spirituality together into one “unified theory” that I could live by and just might resonate with others, too.
I also grew up on Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories and love a good mystery, so it’s only natural I was drawn to all these shadowy fields of study! Life to me is about finding the clues to that bigger truth. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle, which I love, and putting all the pieces together to create the “big picture.”
How long have you been interested in the paranormal and how did this start?
It started in my early childhood. I was always highly imaginative and had lots of nightmares and bad dreams, and often claimed to see ghosts and Bigfoot and cities in the clouds. I think what I was really doing was bringing my dreams into my reality, but I honestly cannot say whether I actually did see things, or dreamt them so vividly that they appeared real. I have never mentioned this before in any interview, but when I was about 7 or 8, I had a very vivid experience of seeing a little grey alien peering at me through our garage window. Terrified, I ran across the street. But years later, and I mean many years later, when the whole “grey alien” thing really exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, I still could not be sure whether I had really seen one, or dreamed of one so vividly that my brain thought it was real.
I began reading at a very early age and devoured books, and was just drawn to mysteries and ghost stories and scary stuff, but also to anything having to do with any kind of science, and I used to sit in front of our old reel-to-reel tape recorder and make up ghost stories and scare myself witless. I just had this natural inclination to anything supernatural, and yet it would all give me terrible nightmares and I would end up sleeping in my parent’s bed every night! UFOs were always a part of my life. We had a neighbor who was obsessed with them, and he gave my dad some books, which are worth a ton of money now, about UFOs and I, of course, grabbed them and devoured them.
That interest continued throughout my teenage years, when I became immersed in occult studies and esoterica, and then as I got into my twenties I started seeking out different spiritual paths and looking at metaphysics, which really attracted me and resonated with me. Into my thirties, I began studying Science of Mind and that led to my interest in quantum physics and the role of human consciousness as a creative force.
But during my entire life, I also had this ongoing major love affair with science, from astrophysics to earth sciences to zoology to marine biology. I lived and walked between two worlds my whole life – science and that “other” world, the paranormal and mystical one, and I always felt totally comfortable doing so, as if it were perfectly normal! I never could see why science and spirituality couldn’t get together. To me, they always were. One explained the structure of reality; the other explained the essence of reality. But both were part of the same whole.
Have you had any personal experience with the paranormal/supernatural?
As a child I believe I had some “experiences,” but the memories are so vague now. As a teenager I encountered a poltergeist with a family I was close to, and later as an adult, I experienced a “pet ghost,” of a cat that had died and would continue to jump up on our bed at the same time every night, just as he had when alive. I saw an unidentified flying object in La Costa, California in the late 1990’s, an object that even with my MUFON training left me utterly speechless. It flipped end over end, with four lights on either end, and just did not behave like anything I had ever seen or read about.
Most of the experiences I have had, that have assured me of the presence of this other level of reality, involved more metaphysical stuff. Insights during meditation, having rapturous moments where I actually was at one with everything and everyone, manifesting things by using intention, that kind of thing, which of course inspired me to become a New Thought/Metaphysics minister and pursue studies in that direction. And it was these experiences that really drove home the belief that there was indeed a science to spirituality, and vice versa.
During my years with MUFON, I met a lot of people that I felt truly had a sighting or experience with something that science could not readily explain. But I also met plenty of people who were falling prey to their own imaginations. It can be very hard to try to discern who really saw a UFO, and someone who wanted to see one and made one appear by simply misidentifying something that had a simple explanation. I have always been a healthy skeptic – I believe you, now prove it to me! I even have that attitude when things happen to me that I cannot explain, like extended déjà vu, which I seem to have mastered, and psychic connections I have with people I’ve never met before, which seem to be increasing! Because of this book, “PSIence,” I have been experiencing some amazing synchronicities and connections with people that really make me go “Hmmmmm….”
Would you tell us a little bit about your work itself and of course your latest book “PSIence?”
“PSIence” is like the culmination of many different branches of study that I have been involved in all my life. Science, the supernatural, the mystical…I felt compelled to write this book that would bring all these areas together and present some common bonds and links that I and others had been finding, and present them to the world so that the dialog could continue. I am not a scientist, and don’t pretend to be, but instead I thought of myself as a reporter, reporting on the research that was being done, and adding my own two cents in when needed.
The book simply examines links between science and the supernatural, mainly in the areas of quantum and theoretical physics, but also in regards to the most cutting edge brain and consciousness research being conducted. I felt I was able to find connections to almost every type of psi or paranormal phenomena, from UFOs to remote viewing, and the book simply puts those connections on the table and asks, “what if?” I looked at the most basic laws of quantum physics, such as entanglement and non-locality, and tried to extrapolate how they might explain psi abilities or ghosts, and I also looked into more cutting edge theories like wormholes and multiple dimensions and even the Zero Point Field, which is described as a grand, ground state of energy in the Universe, and how they might be connected to paranormal phenomena, how they might allow it to happen. The book covers everything from UFOs to ghosts to energy vortices to psychic abilities and spectral creates, and then gets into the physics stuff with a basic course on quantum and theoretical theories, and then brings it all together and introduces the importance of the observer and consciousness to the perception of reality. It really covers a lot of ground, but with a sense of excitement and humor and it doesn’t get so technical that you cannot understand the concepts. I kept the math out of it on purpose!
The book took me six months to write, but years of learning and reading and research went into it. Most of the writing I had done before then was metaphysical and inspirational books, articles, and stories, and a lot of entertainment reviews. I read and review books, I was a movie and video reviewer, and I wrote scripts for direct-to-video product. I also write newsletters and have contributed to a bunch of anthologies, including several “Chicken Soup” books. I also wrote for some UFO and paranormal magazines years back, wrote UFO reports and MUFON newsletters.
I actually started off writing movie reviews, and then fiction, and I have two novels I am finishing, and am shopping a screenplay with a collaborator. But my non-fiction work seems to be taking me on a journey into other areas of science right now, and that is really exciting. Yet it always has a metaphysical, or cutting-edge, bent to it.
“PSIence” gave me the opportunity to get excited about what I was learning, and share that excitement with others, and introduce a lot of people to concepts they had never heard of, or thought about in relation to the paranormal. So much of what is covered in the book is theoretical, yet just a few weeks ago a team of physicists at Cornell University in Ithica, New York, claimed to have made a particle move just by looking at it in a lab setting, and are now going to attempt to make a particle appear in two places at once! It’s really cool to see some of my theories being validated already by science!!!
What other authors have inspired you?
Oh wow, since we are talking about non-fiction I will stick to that, because my real writing heroes are novelists! But in terms of who inspired me to dare to attempt to write “PSIence,” and my earlier book, “Looking For God In All the Wrong Places,” I would have to say the following were instrumental in shaping my understanding of the mysteries of life, as well as the hard facts. Dr. Wayne Dyer’s “The Power of Intention”; Lynne McTaggart, who wrote the one book I can truly say triggered my desire to write “PSIence,” and that would be “The Field: The Quest for the Secret Force In the Universe”; probably the most important book I’ve ever read would be Dr. David Hawkins “Power VS. Force”; everything Marianne Williamson has ever written; Shirley McLaine’s brave, bold books; F. David Peat’s “Blackfoot Physics” and “Synchronicity”; everything by Michio Kaku and Brian Greene; Nick Redfern’s books on UFOs and the paranormal; Joshua Warren; Jim Marrs, investigator extraordinaire; Ernest Holmes’ Science of Mind textbook… I read hundreds of books each year, so my inspiration comes from many sources! I truly believe every book has something valid to teach us, and every author has something valid to contribute to the big picture.
Would you detail any future work that we might look forward to?
I am finishing a book that I am writing with my father, a retired geophysicist. The book is called “Supervolcano: The Catastrophic Event That Changed the Course of Human History,” and is about the eruption of the Toba, Sumatra supervolcano over 70,000 years ago, and the population bottleneck it created that new genetic evidence proves almost wiped out humanity. Mitochondrial DNA evidence shows, according to one theory we are examining, that each and every one of us alive today is a direct descendant of one of the few survivors of Toba. We will also look at what might happen should a supervolcano erupt in our lifetime, perhaps Yellowstone or another that we feel is even more of a threat! I’ll keep that secret though. You’ll have to read the book to find out!
After that, I plan to do another book like “PSIence” that explores the deep connections between the outer level of reality, and the inner level. People have asked for a sequel to “PSIence,” but I think it will be more of an extension, or a new direction rather than just “PSIence, Part Two!” The next one will be quite different. I am solidifying the concept in my mind now.
Other than that, I plan to finally finish my two novels, both of which were written as part of the NANO competition – National Novel Writing Month, which occurs every November. Thousands of people all over the world take on the challenge of writing an entire novel in one month. You get to edit it later on your own, but the idea is to get from start to finish in one month. It’s like bungee jumping for writers – a huge and exciting challenge for anyone who’s ever dreamed of writing a novel. It’s a blast and I’ve won two years in a row, and plan to do it all over again in November. I love to write. I cannot NOT write!
Copyright ~2007~ www.true-ghost-story.com (republished here with author permission)
