Free Eye to Eye: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective by Don Pendleton

major schisms now, between science and religion, involve
these matters of cosmology and cosmogony—though mainly, I think,
cosmogony. But ever since men have been men, probably, there has
been this curiosity—innate, no doubt—about how the universe came
into being and how it operates.
    Early scientists (and I use the term in the
broadest sense) were also religionists. Their perceptions of
reality, then, usually became codified into a mass of
unquestionable dogma which could not be modified without doing
damage to the religious edifice—and, since most religions anchor
their influence into a good bedrock of divine infallibility, it
has been very difficult throughout most of the history of mankind
to "change the model" of cosmic reality.
    It was the church, remember, that forced
Galileo to recant his cosmological theories (though we use those
theories to this day in our explorations of space) and it was the
church that burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for refusing to
recant.
    See, there was an
intellectual "comfort" in having the earth the center of the
universe, a very special creation, instead of being merely one of
countless billions of bodies hurtling through space headed God
knows where.
    You don't have to return
to Galileo and Bruno, though, to find a very deep schism. At this
very moment, certain fundamental religionists are greatly concerned
over the teaching of evolution in the classroom; they do not agree
with the present cosmogonical/cosmological models favored by the
same scientific tradition that placed men on the moon. Some of
these people, indeed, would burn Darwin at the stake if they could
get their hands on him—but see, it's really a question of comfort
within a conditioned reality.
    Quite a few generations of
scientists since Darwin have devoted lifetimes to a meticulous
study of that area of reality and consequently could find no
comfort whatever in the reality-model of "special creation" (the
biblical version). Quite a few generations of religionists since
Darwin have kept right on reading their bible and find no comfort
whatever in evolution theory.
    For myself, I find no controversy there.
Science has not yet replaced the Book of Genesis. It has just
filled in the blanks—and pardon my ignorance, if that's the
problem, but I can see no real conflict between the two
accounts.
    So I think what it boils down to, probably,
is a few diehards who simply find no comfort whatever in the
thought that they may be descended from monkeys.
    I sort of like monkeys, myself, so...
    Actually, the evolution model does not say
we came from monkeys. Monkeys, and all the other simians, if the
model is true, descended with man from a common ancestor—which
probably means something worse than monkeys, so what the
hell...
    The only point I'm trying
to make is that a conditioned reality can be quite comfortable. We
move from one to another with the greatest reluctance, usually. The
sad part of that is the fact that most of us get our conditioning
by default—that is, from mommy and daddy and aunt julia and father
john and nbc/cbs/abc and the national enquirer etc.—instead of
sallying forth with an adventurous spirit and an open mind to see
what's really out there.
    So please do not turn from
me in disgust unless you really know where your own reality is
coming from.
    I would have given a bundle, believe me, to
have known where mine was coming from, there in the shadow of the
Eye. I am really a very ordinary guy, remember—but saddled with a
"gift" that I never asked for in the first place, and one that does
nothing but get me in trouble in every other place. So try to have
a little sympathy, please, as you watch me struggling through this
thing—and save your criticisms for the end.
    I did not know what the hell was coming down
this pike. It started as a simple "missing person" case. I get a
dozen or more of those a year—very routine, even though sometimes
very sad as well—but routine in the sense that a