Paying Attention to "The Impossible"

By -

 


Courtesy: iStock The Smoke Ghost. October 2018

Ever since I was little, I have always enjoyed watching movies and TV shows and reading books about paranormal phenomena. For one of my birthdays as a kid, I got a book all about New England ghost stories, and was obsessed with looking at the creepiest, grittiest photos that it featured. Jeffrey Kripal’s chapter from Authors of the Impossible included just the sorts of stories, theories and concepts that I obsessed over as a child. I was really intrigued by the idea that there is more to our world than what we see every day, and especially intrigued by those who frequently experience the paranormal. 

Haunted New England by Charles G. Waugh. 
Published: Yankee Books, 1988




I’ll come out and say it: I was and still am a believer!! I have heard stories from loved ones (who I consider to be reliable narrators) that send shivers up my spine, and while I haven’t seen a ghost or alien right in front of me (as far as I know), I have felt something that I would describe as a sixth sense. In class, we discussed how the five senses are arbitrary and specific to our culture, which was very interesting to me, and I am excited to learn more about how our senses play into people's everyday lives or paranormal/ religious experiences.The fact that living beings appear to have sensory capabilities that are beyond taste, touch, smell, hearing, and sight is totally mind-boggling.





It would be extremely interesting to experience a different animal’s sense even though it would probably be very overwhelming. Pets frequently seem to see things that are not there, or bark/ whine at empty corners of rooms. Maybe if we had their fine-tuned sense of smell and acute hearing, we could be picking up on whatever they are focusing on. A few years ago, I met a friend of my dad’s who had been trained in remote viewing. We were out to dinner when he told me and my family that he had used this skill to locate the exact location of warehouses filled with weapons in countries he had never been to. I was pretty shocked to hear this, and couldn’t believe it at first. Maybe TMI, but my mom and I went to the bathroom together afterwards at the restaurants, and from her stall she whispered to me, ‘Do you think he’s remote viewing us right now??”. We had a laugh about that, but I’ll never forget what he told us.


Couresy: How Different Animals See the World by Be Amazed. Youtube Video. 2018.

Many times, people are quick to dismiss people’s experiences because they say they were “imagined”. But, as Hana wrote in her blog post, we all hear things differently. And we all see and feel things differently too! So why couldn’t it be true that some people are seeing things, REALLY seeing things differently than everyone else? I just think it’s not something that we should rule out or ignore, just because it can’t always be replicated in a lab. I feel for the alien abductees who lost their jobs, reputations, and friendships, and more because the public didn’t believe their story. I can understand why people would be skeptical and doubt these stories, but the exiling is too much! I think that people who have had these run-ins with the paranormal should be listened to, especially in circumstances where the person has nothing to gain, and everything to lose from sharing their experiences.


I’m unaware of any major advancements since his book was published, but Kripal describes how the paranormal has hardly been given the chance to be seriously acknowledged in academia. Of course, there are many scholars and researchers who have studied this topic, but I am certain that much more could be known today if it was not so heavily ridiculed. Our class discussion about UFOs being from other dimensions was a theory that I had never heard of, and it lead me to wonder about all the other theories that exist (but that I haven't learned about) that could be explanations for paranormal

So many people have had experiences that they simply cannot explain, and as E.R. Dodds explains, a paradox has existed since the ancient world, and probably before then as well: “it is difficult to either ignore the evidence, or believe it”. (Kripal, p.10). I resonate with this statement, but I believe that people should be more open to belief. Is it hurting anyone to think with an open mind and challenge what we think of as being in the realm of possibility? All in all, I really enjoyed this reading, and being able to hear about people’s paranormal experiences excited my inner child. I wish that I had the vocabulary to describe the sixth sense that I have felt before, but I can definitely say that it is an emotional thing to experience.


Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausFebruary 15, 2022 at 7:06 AM

    You should definitely read all of Kripal's Authors of the Impossible - you'd love it! The last author he discusses, Bertrand Meheust, who writes mostly in French, has a web page in English here :http://bertrand.meheust.free.fr/index_en.php. He's worth following to keep up to date on what's going on in the critical study of paranormal activity.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The most primitive sense

By -
Image
Smell the Flowers by Kirsten Star Smell, to me, is the most primitive sense. When most mammals are born, they immediately can recognize their mother’s smell and form an attachment to that smell. Mammals like puppies are almost entirely limited to only the sense of smell until they develop more of their other senses. The sense of smell also becomes the most primitive when considering humans and the phenomenon of perfume. For years, humans hunted certain animals for the purpose of obtaining the musk produced in the anal gland. This musk in small doses can act as an aphrodisiac when put into a perfume even though it has incredibly primitive origins. Though most of Western culture has an aversion to smells considered gross or undesirable, the wealthiest of women are still willing to pay heavy prices to spray a smell once obtained from the anal glands of other animals. The sense of smell is not something that humans can control and adjust but rather it is only changed by evolution over
Read more

Cannibalism and Symbolism

By -
Symbolism plays an important role in religious ceremonies because people cannot have the divine being where they want him all the time. So they start creating ways to be in touch with God. Such as in Christianity, eating bread is symbolized to be eating God-made flesh. There are similar rituals in Judaism where they eat the food of God. A big difference between taste and the other senses is that the object that is being sensed is internalized, whereas all the other senses use an external sensation. Taste cannot extend anywhere like the other senses can. This allows the humans to have no barrier between the divine (symbolized as food) and themselves. This is the closest they can get to God, but internalizing Him.  This thought of getting the closest they can to someone by ingesting and gaining power from it led my mind to wander to the thought of serial killers that also happen to be cannibals. I know that it might be a stretch, but there are some similarities. I als
Read more

Wrap-Up Post

By -
Image
Alright, let’s tie this up in a nice little bow. I genuinely did not know what to expect coming into this class. The extent of my knowledge of the senses comes from elementary school when we had to make it a little song to get the information through our tiny heads. Beyond that, everything seemed pretty cut and dry. We have five senses. We need to use all of them to survive. It’s as simple as that. I did not know how there was enough to talk about the senses to fill an entire college course, especially one specifically regarding the relationship between the senses and religion. But the fact that we were barely able to fit all the content in before the semester ended proves just how wrong I was. Let’s talk about why that is and what some of the things I learned were. First off, even the most basic assumption about the senses, that there are five of them, was questioned immediately. The sixth sense may not have been as clearly defined as the other senses, but there was certainly a lot to
Read more