Discussing the experience with other people afterwards, however, I found myself on an altogether nastier hotbed, namely the firewalking debate between self-proclaimed rational skeptics and self-proclaimed enlightened metaphysicians. The wired among you can get a flavor of this squabble by visiting Tom Margrave's attractive web site at: http:// heartfire.com/firewalk/homefire.html
The disagreement, at least on the surface, is this: The spiritual camp believes, as Tom Margrave puts it, that "firewalking is compelling evidence of the human mind's ability to interact with and alter reality in ways not yet understood by science," while the skeptics argue that our ability to walk on hot coals without getting burned can be explained by physics as currently understood, without introducing magickal mind-over-matter effects.
My initial reaction to the debate was, who cares? As far as I can tell, we all live in the same world, where it is manifestly possible to walk without serious injury over a bed of coals. By some estimates, half a million people in the United States alone have firewalked, and few have suffered worse than a minor burn or two. The evidence suggests that anyone willing to try can firewalk. And it can be a spectacular experience. What more do you need to know?
Of course, it's hard not to be curious about why walking a bed of coals doesn't hurt you when the same coals heaped up in a campfire can burn you severely. Also, people do sometimes get burned firewalking. I can't help wondering what distinguishes the experiences that cause burning from those that don't. Is it a matter of the person "losing focus?" Does it have something to do with the fire? Certainly I'd think a firewalking instructor would want to know. And it would be great to use these questions' answers to learn how to walk barefoot on a summer-hot parking lot without pain. So what do the debaters say?
The skeptic's main explanation why you usually don't get burned firewalking is that although the coals you walk on are extremely hot (between 1000 and 2000 degrees Fahrenheit), they are so light and such poor conductors of heat they can't transfer enough calories per second to burn your feet, which are cooled by a significant volume of blood. Blood is mostly water and requires many calories to raise its temperature. For the same reason, you can stick your hand in a hot oven, and even though the air in it may be over 450 degrees, it can't transfer heat to your hand fast enough to burn you. At the same temperature, however, the oven rack burns you immediately, because metal both holds heat well and conducts it rapidly.
A second skeptics' theory to explain why you can firewalk without getting burned involves variations of the "Leidenfrost" effect, which you've seen making drops of water skitter on a griddle. The idea is that rapid vaporization of sweat forms an insulating barrier on the bottom of your foot. Whether or not a barrier of steam is created, the cooling effect of foot sweat is certainly a factor worth considering, particularly since the amount of sweat might vary significantly depending on psychological state.
Firewalking enthusiasts, on the other hand, believe that you escape burning because you shift reality with your mind when you walk on fire. Tom Margrave describes an aura of life energy or ch'i that, "when energized with the additional life force activated by fear, creates in some way a protective field around the physical body." This field, he believes, "not only interacts with the physical body but with the environment as well in a way that is not yet understood." You get burned, he observes, when the focused intention necessary to sustain this protective field is interrupted by a limiting, judgmental thought. As an example, he describes thinking in the middle of a firewalk "This is impossible!" and then immediately experiencing a minor burn.
In his book Dancing with Fire, firewalker Michael Sky summarily dismisses the skeptical theories as superficial closed-minded attempts to "explain away" the transcendence of firewalking. He attacks skepticism in general as a "bad habit… ultimately of no redeeming value to the human species" and observes, "a skeptical mind is invariably a closed mind." (Might this generalization indicate closed-mindedness on his part?) As far as he is concerned, scientific explanations are completely refuted by the testimony of burn specialists he talked to, who knew of no scientific reason why people wouldn't get burned firewalking.
I can't say I wholeheartedly approve of the self-proclaimed skeptical community myself; as a long-time reader of The Skeptical Inquirer, I've noticed that some of its contributors seem to be second-tier academics of limited imagination and creativity who are not scientists themselves. Posing as skeptics has undoubtedly given them a career boost. Where true skepticism involves questioning authority, these folks seem very comfortable defending their tidy academic status quo.
But that's by no means all there is to The Skeptical Inquirer, to the scientific community in general or to the practice of critical thinking. Real science, as Sky seems to understand on some level, is grounded in curiosity and a lack of fear. It is precisely fear that usually constrains us from questioning our most dearly held beliefs. After all, supposing we turn out to be wrong? At best, being wrong means changing, which is work, and at worst, it seems to threaten an essential part of our validity. Being wrong might destroy our world, or at least all our personal importance in it. What if Jesus was not the Messiah? What if the earth is not flat? What if Newton was wrong? What if spirituality is important? What if our gurus are frauds? Let's not think about it.
No, wait. Perhaps we could have a little faith that the universe is inevitably different and more beautiful than we imagine, or can imagine. In fear, we all tend to ignore the universe's complexity, whether the subject is science or spirituality. We want so badly to know the answers already we talk ourselves into thinking we do. In the 1890s, a group of eminent scientists concluded that physics was essentially complete; nothing important remained to be discovered. They look silly in retrospect, given the advances of the last 80 years, but John Horgan, an eminent science writer, has recently revived this kind of thinking in The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. Yes, folks, now we know all we can know! Fat chance.
What burns me about the firewalking debate is a similar attitude. Very little wondering is evident; everyone's mind seems already made up. A few simple experiments could eliminate (or perhaps confirm) the two main skeptical explanations of firewalking, allowing us to move on from there. Yet, although I've heard various anecdotal accounts of temperature measurements in the coals and even of experiments on how firewalking affects brain waves, I found no indication that either scientists or firewalking enthusiasts have actually tried to confirm or disprove the skeptical hypotheses.
It would not be hard to do so. For example, you could build a crude apparatus for measuring the heat-transfer capacity of a bed of coals out of a thermocouple mounted in a hip flask full of water. Before you started, you'd weigh the water in the flask and measure the surface area of the flask side to be placed on the fire. You'd then record the starting temperature, place the flask on the coals and record the temperature every couple of seconds for a minute or so. With this data, you could plot how many calories per square centimeter per second the coals transfer to the flask (a calorie being the amount of heat needed to raise a gram of water one degree Celsius). To simulate foot sweat, you could try the same thing with a damp sock over the flask.
Now, with a reasonable estimate of how fast blood flows past the skin on the sole of your foot (I'd guess it's renewed maybe every five seconds) and an estimate of how many calories per square centimeter it would take to raise, say, a five-millimeter-thick layer of blood from body temperature to burning level (perhaps 25), you have a basis for evaluating whether the heat-transfer explanation holds up or not.
If the experiment seems too crude, the would-be experimenter could refine it. But one way or another, you can test the skeptical explanations of firewalking and from there work on understanding why people do sometimes get burned. Why hasn't The Skeptical Inquirer performed experiments like this and published the results?
Even more to the point, why hasn't Tolly Burkan's Firewalk Institute for Research and Education done so? The Skeptical Inquirer, after all, isn't responsible for the safety of thousands of firewalkers. Could firewalk leaders' self-doubt play a part? I sense among firewalk enthusiasts a fear that firewalking would be trivialized if it did not turn out to defy our paltry understanding of physical laws. The firewalkers seem to feel it's better to claim victory than find out for sure.
I disagree. Personally, I love the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow because those guys scare the shit out of me and confound what I thought was possible, without claiming to defy any physical laws. Firewalking also scares the shit out of me, whether I think I understand it or not. The skeptics might say I'm being duped by carny tricks, but I'm not; I'm playing with visceral fear. It's like jumping off a high place into water: There's nothing mysterious about it, you can watch 20 other people do it before you, but when it's your turn to step off the edge, rationality no longer has much relevance. You arrive at a "moment of truth," when visceral fear forces all your self to coalesce. No self-image you project steps off that edge or walks that fire; in that moment, it is you. Such a moment can change your life, as many people have testified.
I also resent how the argument sets science and spirituality against each other, as if you have to choose one or the other. Granted, there is a large culture gap between scientific and spiritual communities today, but I think the public antagonism between them has more basis in fear and misunderstanding than in substantive disagreement. Many rationalists certainly find the almost universal attraction of spirituality frightening, particularly to the extent it "tempts" them, so they try to invalidate it. On the other hand, fraud does exist in the spiritual community - as in the scientific - which gives the skeptics plenty of grist for their mill.
And yet, where fraud in the scientific community is generally undertaken for personal gain, I sense that many overblown spiritual claims today are made out of a sense of desperation. To many of us, it seems as if science and rationalism will banish our most important dreams unless we can "prove" the dreams to be real.
But does it make spirituality real to pretend it's science? Do we need to give it laws, doctrines, professors, priests, bureaucracy and a police force? No wonder the skeptics call that stuff pseudo-science! To me, spirituality is personal. It is real, and tremendously important, but unique and different for every individual. And, like real science, it is much more concerned with what we don't know than what we do know. In this sense, science is driven by spirituality: The striving to understand the unknown is motivated by a spiritual sense of awe and wonder at the mysteries and beauties of life.
The process of discovery that is at the heart of science looks very different before and after. After something's been discovered, we tend to see it as clear and obvious (even when it later turns out to be a hoax or misunderstanding). We "learn" it (memorize it with minimal questioning) and tuck it away with other useful facts. But what seems so clear and obvious afterwards is generally arrived at only by a long process of trial and error, during which many clearer and more obvious explanations have to be abandoned. Anyone who has taken part in this process knows how easy it is to become attached to a theory, and how hard it can be to let it go in the face of evidence, to admit that it was wrong (that you were wrong). It is precisely a lack of investment and lack of fear that makes children such wonderful investigators. They'll try anything; they're not afraid of seeming fools; they don't worry about making mistakes. Is this not precisely what we need in our spiritual lives?
A book that wonderfully illustrates the spiritual aspects of science is Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich. The author documents several years of his research on ravens in a way that reveals the process of his science, not just its results. Although he doesn't describe his motivations in spiritual terms, it is hard not to recognize the personal and internal elements of his quest.
To me, true science and spirituality are not enemies; they are part of the same process. Indeed, they share enemies: complacency, bureaucracy, certainty, all driven by fears transmuted into greed.
Both true science and true spirituality ask that you take serious responsibility for your beliefs - which includes testing them as needed. There are so many "experts" in the world today, scientific and spiritual, and we're used to giving over our minds to them. But when you believe something, you are the one who is responsible for that belief, not the authority who told you to believe it. Accepting your responsibility is both liberating and terrifying; you can believe anything you want, but you can also make all kinds of mistakes, some of which might put your life in danger (or perhaps your immortal soul). Can't it be someone else's problem?
No, life is a firewalk. Have faith; let go of fear. No one is smart enough to avoid mistakes - no matter what, we make them. At least have the fun of making your own mistakes, not someone else's. Walk that fire!
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