More About the Paranormal
MarmaladeHI Andrew,
no matter what otherworldly things i have experienced i can safely say they they were upper left quadrant happenings. in saying this i mean that these experiences of mine happened in my interior space. no angels physically manifested in any way in these 3 dimensions. no one walked thru my walls, no one defied the laws of physics etc. now whether it’s 3 kids in portugal having visions, or someone being abducted in downtown manhatten, i contend now that all these experiences are interior and have no right quadrant existence.
Have you been following the discussion going on in one of Julian’s blogs (here)? The relationship of internal and external has been brought up. I mentioned paranormal research there and the difficulties of the field. Specificially, I discussed Hansen’s view and linked to some detailed reviews of his books.
but nowhere have i come across objective, verifiable, repeatable accounts of any type in any of these phenomenal cases.
Hansen speaks to these issues. Objectivity, verifiability, and repeatability aren’t easily applied to the paranormal, but researchers have attempted to do so. Some are satisfied with the evidence and some aren’t. I talked about the research angle in Julian’s blog comments, but you’re experience was outside of a research situation. How are lived experiences proven? Well, very little of even our “normal” subjective experience is provable. As for the paranormal, it all depends on what kind of evidence you consider acceptable.
People have seen lights and when they investigated discovered crop circles. Crop circles are just more complex forms of fairly circles that have been observed for centuries in corollation with fairy lights. My brother visited with friends a place where orbs (ie fairy lights) were known to be common. They saw the orbs and the orbs approached the car and hovered around it. Even scientists have observed orbs, but no one agrees on what explains them.
Pilots have seen ufos and they were observed simultaneously on radar. There are a fair number of radar cases. Why is there not more evidence? For one, I’ve heard that pilots are discouraged from reporting ufos. Also, some evidence gets destroyed because people fear ridicule. Vallee started out as an astronomer but later became a ufo researcher because he personally observed astronomers he worked with destroying video evidence (here is an interview with him where he speaks about this).
Rupert Sheldrake was describing a dialogue he had with Richard Dawkins.
Dawkins: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Sheldrake: “This depends on what you regard as extraordinary”, I replied. “Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?”
(Sheldrake describes how he tried to bring up his own rearch about telepathy, but Dawkins refused to discuss it.)
but a ufo landing on the white house lawn and broadcast to the world would probably cure me of my skepticism. i feel the same way about religion. please all you theists, part the red sea today and have the decency to bring cnn along for verification
Well, that is some pretty extreme skepticism. If being “shown billions of light beings singing the most amazing song onto god” doesn’t convince you, then I doubt anything could. Plus, I’d consider your statements to be based on a less-than-useful view of the paranormal. You seem to be responding to a literalist interpretation of paranormal which isn’t the view I hold (nor that which Harpur holds). It would take some explanation to describe what I mean by literalist, but here is an interesting discussion about Harpur from the Lightmind forum:
| Jim wrote: |
Kela has mentioned Patrick Harpur here a couple of times in the past, and Susan and Heru mentioned him just recently. Harpur, like Carl Jung, Richard Tarnas, James Hillman, Arnold Mindell, et al, understands the psyche. Many people don’t.
Here is Harpur from his book Daimonic Reality:
Here is Ken Wilber from One Taste:
Do any UFO experiences represent higher realities? It’s theoretically possible that some of these experiences are stemming from the psychic or subtle levels of consciousness, and that, precisely because these people do not grow and evolve into these levels, they experience them as an ‘other.’ Instead of their own higher and deeper luminous nature, they project it outwardly as an alien form. Even if that is the case, these people are still in the grips of a dissociative pathology. … The giveaway, as usual, is the narcissism. What do people really want when they think of UFOs? What are they yearning for at the thought of something extraterrestrial? Why, they want something bigger than themselves. They want to know that, in the entire, wild, extraordinary Kosmos, there is something other than their meager egos.What Harpur honors, Wilber tends to pathologize. It seems to me that the rational, Freudian-flavored pathologizing approach that Wilber takes here doesn’t honor the way the psyche or soul actually works, plays, unfolds, grows, flows, meanders, soars, swims, lives, breathes, and develops. When Wilber asks what people really want when they think of UFOs, he is talking about what the “meager ego” wants, but he neglects to note that the experiences in question (i.e., UFO abduction experiences) don’t stem from the ego but from the deeper psyche (there is no other place they can stem from, unless they are just willful fantasies, e.g., as if someone were to fantasize about winning the lottery, and reports of UFO abduction experiences indicate that they are not mere fantasies). So it’s not a matter of what the “meager ego” wants but of what the deeper psyche wants. Speaking about the appearance of symbols of wholeness in the psyche, such as UFOs and mandalas, Jung says, “they do not invariably indicate a subliminal readiness on the part of the patient to realize that wholeness more consciously, at a later stage; often they mean no more than a temporary compensation of chaotic confusion.” This is not something that someone who elevates pre” to “trans” would say. Trungpa says:
This is why it simply isn’t skillful or useful to pathologize intrapsychic phenomena, such as UFO abduction experiences or those who have and interpret them. Such experiences are “workable situations that we mustn’t reject, and mustn’t regard as purely a regression or going back to confusion,” or as “dissociative pathology” and “narcissism.” “Instead, we must develop some kind of respect for those situations that happen in our state of mind.” Which is what Harpur, Jung, Hillman, Mindell, Tarnas, et al do. The issue here isn’t what is right or wrong or “politically correct” or incorrect. The issue is, what is most useful? What is most likely to benefit the individual who has and interprets the experience? If someone has a UFO abduction experience and they interpret it to mean that “they were physically lifted into another realm, such as an alien spacecraft,” as Harpur puts it, that’s the manure we have to work with. Calling it shit isn’t going to help anyone, is it? Saying that such people are in the grips of a dissociative pathology and are narcissistic isn’t going to help anyone, is it? There is psychic energy and psychic potential to work with here. Dismissing it by pathologizing it is like throwing manure away instead of working it into the garden and then tending and nurturing the garden and waiting to see what grows. Suzuki Roshi speaks of a similar process in terms of “mind weeds.” He says, “We must have the actual experience of how our weeds change into nourishment.” Or of how our lead changes into gold. Jung and Trungpa compare the process of intrapsychic transmutation to alchemy. Trungpa says this is “like the alchemical practice of changing lead into gold.” Mindell says:
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| Jim wrote: |
| Exactly, that’s my point: It’s not wrong to psychopathologize, but it’s kind of like calling something shit. When we call something shit, we naturally think in terms of flushing it away, whereas when we call the same thing manure, we acknowledge that we are dealing with something that, used skillfully, can fertilize and enrich the soil of the soul. To try to flush away aspects of the psyche that we don’t like doesn’t work, and as Harpur and Jung agree, when the daimonic is repressed, it often returns in the form of the demonic. |
but surely if supernaturalism exists, it’s on unemployment insurance at this time unless these angelic beings are just being really subtle and sneaky for some reason!
You really should read Hansen’s book if you’re genuinely interested in this. He writes about how the Trickster archetype plays out with paranormal experience.
Blessings,
Marmalade
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Marmalade 