I came across the term "transeunce" a long time ago, in which it was posited that some outward "realities" are the result of some position or idea held in the mind of someone. The book, Crack in the Cosmic Egg, by Joseph Chilton Pearce, explored the idea that the evolution of our abilities came about by certain accidents or unplanned experiences that became known generally. I don't know that his thesis was based on only facts of history in the following example or not, but the import is there: some practice of shedding blood on fields to insure their fruition involved actually killing people or "sacrificing" them on the field. At some point, someone lived despite the practice, and from that point on, no one died from undergoing the practice, which, if I recall, involved swinging them around from thongs and hooks piercing their flesh. I think he may have made this story up, and based perhaps on the Sun Dance ritual. Sheldrake takes this idea much further, and posits that a threshhold exists in "knowers" of some thing or practice, whereby numbers of people or even animals propogate patterns into the "universal" and then that becomes picked up by people or things no matter how far away they are, or how isolated they may be from the original source. He uses examples in crystalography to prove that isolation or "first crystalizations" are extraordinarilly difficult. However, when once new compounds are crystalized, it seems from that point on crystalization becomes easier. In both examples, however poorly described here, the idea is that there is a propagation in some "medium" or by some means, that may support either an "aether" or some timelessness underlying reality. I would like to see an in depth criticism or analysis or support for this idea here and the discussion of the possibility that scientific method may not be some clean cut proposition as we are taught in our undergraduate studies. I don't know how to search for this topic on a search engine. Every effort has failed, but once we were shown a man, a chemistry teacher, who could pour caustic acids on his arms, and he was completely unharmed. It was big news on several local stations sometime in the 70s. The story indicated there was no question that the man had some film on his arms, and this was before Randi was making his name in refuting Uri Geller, so maybe the news stations were not sofisticated enough about "tricks" to catch this as a subterfuge of some kind. Assuming it was factual, it represents one of Pearce's "exceptions" that drives future changes or shifts in consciousness. Another example is the accomplishment of and breaking the 4 minute mile and how that "limit" was continuously challenged shortly after the first "exception". You get my drift.