Paranormal Experience
What does a fish know about the water in which it swims all its life?
– Einstein
The following stories are true and factual accountings of my experience:
My Grandmother at Woolworths
Woolworth department stores had their heyday and I suspect they were experiencing it in Denver, Colorado when I was about ten or eleven years of age. Denver had a large, five-story store back then and my grandmother took me with her for some shopping.
We went up the escalator to the third floor and saw a guy on a stage about halfway back, with a microphone, selling books. The books were astrology books.
As we approached, the man turned toward my grandmother, paused asking if she would please join him onstage. She considered, agreed, and stepped onto the stage.
He asked to hold her hands, stood silently for a bit, and then asked her a couple of names which were not quite hers, but close. Then he said, “Is your name Lola?”, to which my grandmother replied in the affirmative.
He then proceeded to tell her that my grandfather was ill, that he had a problem in the mid to lower abdominal area, that he would be having surgery – and that he would be just fine!
He then thanked her, she thanked him, and she stepped down from the stage. Pretty ordinary hucksterism it would seem and many would say that he had his henchmen in the crowd, that they had engaged her in conversation getting her name and what was on her mind. He would have learned her name was Lola and that her husband was to have surgery the next day on a duodenal ulcer.
The only problem with that scenario is that I was with her from the house all the way to the stage. She spoke with no one, because we went straight up the escalator and directly over there.
As we left, my grandmother was truly stunned by the experience – and my grandfather came through the surgery just fine.
Meditating With a Friend
Leslie and I had been practicing meditation as well as studying consciousness for awhile around 1975. We were part of a group of people exploring that aspect of our perception and the two of us decided to try meditating together.
Almost immediately, I found myself immersed in an experience unlike any I’ve had before or since. I was in a room and it was like the air itself was thick, a heavy fluid. I was floating and could move by directing myself intentionally, but in a manner of focusing that is hard to describe. It was almost like a focus of my will.
I moved around the room and examined it and then found a door to exit. I was able to move around the edge of a building and into some other areas and more rooms. It took me more effort to move than would normally be the case with imagination, though. I had to really work at it. I also noticed that everything persisted, that I could not rearrange it, only travel through it.
A few months later, we took a trip together, about five of us from our group, in Leslie’s car, going to her grandfather’s ranch in Colorado. As we got out of the car, I realized where I had been in my meditation. I had been here!
To validate the experience as fully as possible, I stopped everyone and said I wanted to describe what we would see, what the arrangement of rooms, etc. would be like, before we went in. And … I was right on the money. It looked just as it had in my meditation.
My Beliefs on the Paranormal
One succinct definition of the paranormal is “beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation.” So, I see the paranormal as simply a temporary condition. An automobile would be paranormal to someone from the 15th Century, but we certainly see it as quite normal now. Science always has things it can’t yet explain.
The most difficult things to explain are those things which are universal. If something is fundamentally woven into the fabric of experience, people have a great deal of trouble discerning it. Much of therapy is helping people realize that which is so pervasive in their experience that it becomes invisible to them.
I believe this is the case with the instances of paranormal experience recounted throughout history, that someone simply was able to see the water in which we as fish swim. Don’t get me wrong, I think hucksters abound and I don’t particularly like to discuss the paranormal with most people, because the ones who seem most interested in it are often cracked gourds. Many others tend to be the skeptics who discard ALL of this experience as crap and are very ready to attack. That narrows the group considerably with whom I wish to share ideas.
I have not come close to recounting all my experience here and most of it is of a non-dramatic and externally unverifiable nature anyway. In fact, I would say that my normal experience is simply on a continuum with “paranormal” experience and it seems that there is no significant distinction. Over the years, it has become very much integrated with what I am.
I think the paranormal is simply the base upon which the normal manifests. And, I think it is available to anyone.
This is my Friday Loose Bloggers Consortium offering on the topic suggested by our prodigal son, Ashok. In his tradition, he may refuse the fatted calf, but hopefully he will accept our glee at his return from the legal wilderness he has entered – as a barrister, not as a criminal! – for his presence and insight are always a joy! I look forward to his views on this topic as I do all the other members. I encourage you to click on their links in the list of Loose Blog Consortium members on the left!
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