Investigating Paranormal Activity
Introduction: The Mystery.
By Stuart Gordon from “The Paranormal”, an illustrated encyclopedia.
Alan: I believe this introduction is very true to form and applaud it’s content and it’s author.
Hands up anyone who doesn’t secretly believe in ghosts! Is there anyone alive who has never, lying awake and alone in bed on a dark night, sensed the presence of something else hovering invisibly nearby? Is there anyone who has never eyed the stars wonder, or who has deliberately walked under a ladder without a tingle of fear, or who has thought Friday the 13th just another day? Who has never suddenly thought about someone then unexpectedly met them, heard of premonitions that came true, or been tempted to have their fortune told by the palmist at a fair? Who never thrilled as a child to fairy tales, or to tales of ancient haunted sites? Who can claim absolute certainty that all UFO reports are hoaxes; that all Ouija-board messages are fraudulent; or that psychokinetic spoon bending on TV is just stage-magicianship?
If you are such a person, are you being wholly honest with yourself? Perhaps you just don’t want to admit that the universe is not only odd, but odder than we realise. Perhaps you need to believe that life holds no mystery at all, and that already we know everything that needs to be known. Such an attitude is understandable. For we are born, live and die alongside a mystery which, preoccupied as we are with the trials of everyday life, we forget or deny. We are encouraged to do not only out of fear of the unknown but by social and moral pressures including a prevalent scientific contempt for whatever cannot be weighed and measured in material terms. Yet despite our supposed advances as a civilisation the truth of things remains as obscure to us as once it was to Neanderthal man. The mystery remains so vast that most of the terms we use to describe phenomena beyond scientific recognition only outline our persistent ignorance and confusion.
Such terms – occult, supernatural, paranormal – suggest phenomena, experiences and events, real or imagined, beyond the reach of consensus reality or hope of scientific validation. To some they warn of madness, delusion or spiritual danger. To others they speak of essential truths we must face if we are to progress ( and survive ) individually or as a species. To those holding this latter view it seems especially important now, as we charge headlong through one of the most critical and tumultuous eras in recorded human history, that we enter regions impossible to penetrate with purely material transport. If not, the physical walls we have built about ourselves will collapse on us, as in the myths of the flood or the Tower Babel.
We pay a high price for “civilisation”. To gain it, we reject natural contact with life’s root forces. The culprit is rational consciousness. There is nothing wrong as such with this useful faculty. The problem is that, since it gained power, increasingly it interprets the world in it’s own manipulative image, denying or demonising any other process that fail to fit it’s cold definitions – such as our common intuition of the world Gaia: a living being and mystery of which we are but a ( responsible?) part. Yet no paradigm endures forever. Today, despite or because of our spoliation of the planet, increasingly people seek knowledge of the realms sometimes called “paranormal”. The uneasy sensation grows in many that for a mess of mortgage and Porche we have sold ourselves short, denying all truths that fail to fit materialist dogma. We have gone dangerously far down the road opened up centuries ago when Faust first struck his rational deal with Mephistopheles.
For these truths have not gone away. They knock in us all the time. The longer we ignore them, the louder they get. Can you hear what they say? “We’ve been here all along! We are part of you, and you of us!”
For what we call “paranormal” is not only more normal than we admit; it is normal. The paranormality lies in our refusal to admit it. Habitually we erect false barriers between the phenomena we choose to accept and those we do not. Usually we fail even to acknowledge that the choice exists. We practice a spiritual apartheid in our common conspiracy (called “society”) to agree upon a mutually convenient, fixed worldview.
This material worldview is one that helps trains to run on time, but it lacks deeper logic. It is a convention that too easily becomes tyrannical and blinding. It’s lack of logic is seen in the variance between cultures as to what is “normal”. Reincarnation is part and parcel of the ordinary Hindu worldview; to the Christian, rebirth is held to occur, but not in this world; to others, reincarnation is but a “paranormal” or superstitious theory, like a belief in ghosts? Yet again: who doesn’t secretly believe in ghosts?
Today the forward frontiers of what was once seemingly solid material science dissolve into new yet curiously familiar patterns. Chaos Theory, quantum mechanics, quarks called “strangeness” and “charm”, particles that arrive before they begin, reports of UFO entities behaving oddly like the beings once called fairies? It begins to seem as if our universe is, as our ancestors always thought, shared by intelligence identified under many names – before we denied them. And what do they say? “We’ve been here all along! We are part of you, and you of us!” Exploring the “paranormal” is about exploring ourselves. Yet before entering this world of apparently strange concepts, events, folk and experiences, it must be said that there is no real conflict between science – true science – and those phenomena called “paranormal”.
Newton and Kepler knew that. Newton sought angelic contact as well as discovering the law of gravity. And Kepler’s Laws of planetary motion were virtually an accidental byproduct of his search to prove that the planets danced according to Pythagorean harmony – the Song of the Spheres. Perhaps not one or the other but both approaches are fruitful: angels and gravity; mathematical law and the singing harmony of a living, vibrant, intelligent universe; reason and intuition; and “normal” and “paranormal”.
For calling something “paranormal” describes not the phenomenon but the point of view of the witness. Where this is preconceived and rigid, then conflict, rejection and denial arise. If the mind is open to strangeness and charm, and willing to learn, then unfamiliar sensations and confusions vie with awe, terror, delight, doubt and wonder – all experiences we knew as children….only to forget. Now why did we ever do that? Maybe, before it’s too late, we can rediscover ourselves. For we’ve been here all along, strangers to ourselves, dwellers not only on the threshold of, but within the very heart of, the Mystery.
Posted on Oct 12th 2010 by Alan.Founder/Admin. No Comments ».