5. What, if anything, do paranormal experiences mean? Are they of any value?
All our perceptions of the world are ultimately subjective – never more so than when addressing questions of meaning and value!
With that in mind, here goes….
Paranormal experiences mean that we are more complex beings living in a more complex universe than our current reductionist paradigm can explain.
At a personal level, I now feel gratitude for the tiny glimpses mine have offered regarding the diverse and probably multi-dimensional nature of our existence.
Decades of hearing other people’s stories, many of them in the peace and confidentiality of my consulting room, others in pubs, at bus stops, on holidays, in class with a great variety of mature students, chance encounters with people on trains, launderettes, etc etc, added to my extensive reading in physics and cosmology, have certainly convinced me – and I have been hard to convince, the sceptical rationalist being very strong in my makeup!– that the solid material world we think we inhabit truly is only a thin slice of a much richer and more complex multi-dimensional Reality.
Most of it is entirely beyond our ken most of the time. But there are times, neither predictable nor within our control, when some kind of Otherness appears, challenging our conventional view of what reality and/or consciousness actually is.
Their value lies at least partly in their ability to point out this truth to us. Through them, we are being invited to enlarge our world view which is currently disjointed, fragmented and incomplete.
In view of my lifelong preoccupation with the Meaning of Life, I often mildly regret the restrictions my younger self unknowingly imposed on my older and slightly wiser self in not choosing Physics and Chemistry as major school and university subjects !
But even with those limitations, and very poor spatial ability which makes certain concepts in physics impossible for me to visualise and get my mind round, I have managed to arrive at a rooted understanding and appreciation that the world created for us by our limited sensory equipment does not represent the world we live in as explicated by quantum physics.
The quantum world emerged gradually over the 20th century as paradoxical, contingent, bizarre and only partially predictable. This being the case, it is hard to understand from a rational point of view why paranormal experience seems so difficult for some people even to consider, far less to accept as valid. I spoke earlier of one of the great driving forces of humankind – curiosity. Two further ancient driving forces are greed and fear.
I can only conclude that the main reason for resolute closed-mindedness in the face of overwhelming experiential evidence is – fear.
Allowing an expanded paradigm to emerge which embraced paranormal experience by bringing both experimental and experiential evidence together, might well involve the erosion and gradual collapse of a whole way of life rooted in that rational materialism which has driven our increasingly ubiquitous Western culture since the Scientific Revolution of the eighteenth century.
However, a movement is slowly gaining momentum and influence across the world which is evolving just such a paradigm. It is bringing the insights of mysticism, paranormal experience, cosmology, quantum physics, religion, philosophy, in-depth astrology, ecology, feminism and social justice together in ways which are slowly creating a new world order.
This should in time replace the outgrown perspectives of the three hundred year old Scientific Revolution, which has vastly enlarged the scope of our knowledge, brought huge material benefits to a small proportion of humanity, but left so much destruction in its wake.
It has also failed, despite strenuous efforts in some quarters, to weaken that part of being human which has a powerful intuitive sense that we are all part of a vast reality which our five senses simply cannot map.
Along with the paradigm, given especial urgency from 2005-7 onwards as the scientific evidence of human impact on our environment has become so compelling that we can no longer ignore it, has emerged an accelerating realisation that we really are one world on planet Earth. We cannot ignore its subtle levels of interplay and balance any longer. Working on the holographic principle, the subtle levels of interplay and balance existing within the Sun-Moon-Earth system may well be mirrored at all levels within the total energy field of the entire Universe and beyond that the Multiverse.
We need to become more tuned to subtlety, to those dimensions which paranormal experience has informed us exist but which the crude measuring standards of materialist science cannot elucidate. We need to develop culturally a way of balancing the wonderful worlds revealed by rational observation and experimentation, with those equally valid but very different worlds revealed through paranormal experience. One of my favourite quotations comes from writer Gary Zukav:
"Proof of non-physical reality does not exist in the dimension that the rational mind seeks it” 24
We humans need to become bolder voyagers into the mysterious and compelling territory of ‘non-physical reality’, whilst greatly respecting that rational dimension which has taken us further into appreciating the grandeur of which we are part than our ancestors could have envisaged in their wildest dreams.
Well, maybe they did! Perhaps we are only now beginning to catch them up….
24 Gary Zukav “The Seat of the Soul” p 92
Anne Whitaker 2010 © - Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness
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