Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness: Job Done!
November 6, 2010
“Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness:a sceptic’s take on paranormal experience”
is now published in full, after appearing as a serial for most of 2010. The memoir has been laid out on this site in a form which is easily accessible for people who wish to ‘dip in’ to the various true stories, as well as for those who wish to read the whole book. The whole sequence is set out via sections 1-16, as listed in the black panel above.
It has been important to me that I have told those stories, partly to ‘make peace’ with many very unsettling experiences for which the contemporary reductionist paradigm has no satisfactory explanation. As a stubbornly sceptical (in the open-minded sense of the word!) rationalist, whose spiritual life and occasional but persistent paranormal experiences did not retreat as a result of being ignored, I finally decided that the way forward was openness.
Carl Gustav Jung
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
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What I have presented in this memoir is a range of my personal experiences which many other people have also had, as part of the whole experience of humanity down the ages – but which most conceal, for fear of being thought mad or deluded. I no longer harbour that fear. (And my nearest and dearest find me boringly sane, if mildly eccentric….)
My hope is that my openness will help people in a similar position to be more open themselves – and to feel less peculiar as a result. As a famous scientist once observed – we live in a universe which is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we CAN suppose.
So – do read my stories, and my reflective musings on what their function and meaning may be. There is an extensive and interesting booklist to help you in furthering your own explorations.
As long as I am given a credit for my work, and there is a link included which takes the reader back to my main site Writing from the Twelfth House, I do not mind any of this material being re-published, unedited, on reputable sites under my name and URL. I would appreciate those readers who find this material valuable, and wish to tell their friends and networks about it, passing the site link around.
Nor would I be offended if any prospective publisher were to approach me with a view to giving “Wisps….” an airing in print!
Thanks again to those readers who left comments and sent me supportive emails. I have found this most affirming. Please do continue to let me know your views and reactions to the material in this book.
email: info@anne-whitaker.com
Writing from the Twelfth House by Anne Whitaker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 UK: Scotland License.
Based on a work at www.anne-whitaker.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.anne-whitaker.com.
Reality’s lenses: science, spirituality and the paranormal dimension
October 27, 2010
To read previous installments, click HERE
6. Books: some doorways to the Source
Although it may seem unusual to offer a booklist at the end of a memoir, I decided to do so for the particular benefit of those readers who may just be embarking on an investigatory journey of those dimensions I have been exploring, and are looking for accessible and inspiring reading to start them off. I have confined my recommendations purely to selecting a few personal favourites from my own reading since 2002.
“ The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives ” I found to be a succinct, accurate and invaluable guide to – Worldview, Science, Spirituality and Esoteric Thought, Psychology, The Paranormal, Medicine and Health and Society, Environment and Technology – to use Stuart Holroyd’s own categorisation of his very useful reference book. At the end of it is an extensive and wide-ranging bibliography which will further advance the journey!
Archie E. Roy is the Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Present member and past-President of the UK’s Society for Psychical Research, also the Founding President of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research, he is an internationally known and respected psychical researcher. His two books included here will provide those seeking thoroughly researched case material on various facets of the paranormal with all they need to come to their own conclusions.
The booklists and references given in Professor Roy’s books, as well as offering a broad spectrum of contextual literature, give entry to an immensely well researched and detailed body of international evidence, validating the existence of paranormal phenomena, which has been accumulating world-wide since the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 in Cambridge, England, UK by a group of eminent Victorian scientists and academics.
Enjoy your reading!
- Considering the Meaning of Life – Mediaeval style
www.jillrogoff.com/education.html
Medieval woodcut; from Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens, published in Augsburg about 1475-6
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Abram, David “The Spell of the Sensuous”
Armstrong, Karen “A Short History of Myth”
Benson, Herbert “Timeless Healing”
Berry, Thomas “The Great Work”
Cranston, Sylvia & Williams, Carey “Reincarnation”
De Duve, Christian “Life Evolving”
Dillard, Annie “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”
Dossey, Larry “Healing Beyond the Body”
Eliade, Mircea “The Sacred and the Profane: the nature of religion”
Friedman, Norman “Bridging Science and Spirit”
Grof, Stanislav “The Holotropic Mind”
Holroyd, Stuart “The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives”
James, William “The Varieties of Religious Experience”
Jung, C.J. “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”
László, Ervin “Science and the Akashic Field”
Lorimer, David (Editor) “The Spirit of Science” and “Science,Consciousness & Ultimate Reality”
McTaggart, Lynne “The Field”
Moody, Raymond “Life before Life”
Morse, Melvyn M.D “Parting Visions”
Roy, Archie “A Sense of Something Strange” and “The Archives of the Mind”
Russell, Peter “From Science to God”
Sheldrake, R, McKenna, T & Abraham, R “Chaos, Creativity, and Cosmic Consciousness”
Smith, Gordon “Spirit Messenger” and “The Unbelievable Truth”
Swimme, Brian “The hidden heart of the cosmos”
Targ, Russell & Jane Katra “Miracle of Mind”
Tarnas, Richard “The Passion of the Western Mind”
Tilby, Angela “Science and the soul”
CONTACTS
As a spur to developing the reader’s own perspectives on the new world-wide paradigm emerging, out of the many contacts which could be listed I feel that the Wrekin Forum UK provides a major point of entry to become ‘part of a world-wide movement towards personal and planetary transformation at a time of major social change’ as their mission statement puts it. To explore the range of resources and contacts which Associateship provides, email
info@wrekinforum.org,or phone 01452 840 033.
Website : http://www.wrekinforum.org/wrekin_forum/
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600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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What is Reality? Can reductionism really tell us?
October 20, 2010
To read previous installments, click HERE
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.
Meaning of Life? The answer at last....
http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/s/spiritual_leaders.asp
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….
TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
24 Gary Zukav “The Seat of the Soul” p 92
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900 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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Quantum physics, astrology and paranormal experience: why not?
October 14, 2010
To read previous installments, click HERE
4. Why do we have paranormal experiences?
My impression as a reasonably well-educated, well-read and thoughtful person is that one of the main forces by which human beings have been driven throughout our relatively short tenure on planet Earth is – sheer curiosity.
Trying to enlarge our perspective to encompass that which we do not understand, or know how to use – eg fire, so that it can become an aid to our survival and/or an addition to the joys of living – has led us to the complex, sophisticated and comfortable way of life to which those of us living in the West have grown accustomed. We are now going to have to channel our curiosity in the direction of surviving the consequences for our planet of that very lifestyle, which has begun to consume us all….
From this perspective, it may be that the purpose of paranormal experiences – since the eighteenth century dawn of the Age of Reason – is to challenge our curiosity to take us beyond the world of the evidence of the five senses, which conventional science tells us is the only world that exists, into an understanding and appreciation that reality, whatever it may be, is vaster, richer and more complex than our Earth-bound brains are probably ever capable of comprehending.
Some paranormal experiences can be deliberately induced by going into meditative or trance-like states. For example, whether one believes or not that mediums relay information from the ‘Other Side’ via the communicative spirits of those who have died, there is no doubt that the phenomenon of mediumship exists, through which information can be transmitted paranormally. This has been comprehensively researched and thoroughly documented for well over a century.
However, even the best mediums have occasions when, try as they might, the ‘Other Side’ is simply not co-operating. Even although humans can induce states favourable to the paranormal manifesting itself, there is no guarantee that it will.
Other paranormal experiences simply descend without warning. This has been the case, for example, with every single one I have ever had. Far from trying to induce such occurrences, had I known how to block them I certainly would have done so! Life in its ‘ordinary’ register is quite complicated enough, in my view, without seeking to make it more so….
There is undoubtedly a ‘tricksterish’, tantalising, highly unpredictable element to paranormal manifestations across the board. This is one of the many reasons why the measured, sensible, thorough and logical procedures of reductionist science simply cannot fully come to grips with the paranormal.
Furthermore, although such experiences are common enough to be provocative of a range of responses from outright credulity to outright, rage-filled denial, vast swathes of the population across the world have never been troubled by such occurrences. I am sure not to be the only person to think at times that, as Shakespeare so memorably put it in King Lear:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods…” 21
Provoking our curiosity by tormenting our species, unpredictably but persistently, with experiences clearly outwith our current common consensus of what reality is, strikes me as a pretty good way of enabling the evolution of human consciousness at this stage in our development. Whether one considers that this provocation is driven by blind chance, or by some form of divine teleology, is a matter of opinion or belief. How could one ever prove it, one way or the other?
From a personal point of view, the drive to understand why we are here and what our lives are for, allied to a profound curiosity about just about everything, has certainly powered my journey through life. I am basically a rational pragmatist in my approach. But I got to my fifties, a time when anyone with any reflective capacity begins to look back at their life experiences and patterns, in an attempt to make some sense of it all.
I had to face the fact that a series of experiences had accumulated over the course of thirty years which I had largely kept to myself. Why? Because they did not fit the parameters of what our culture defines as normal. But memories of these experiences did not go away because I had tried to ignore their existence. They simply lurked, permanently provoked by my refusal to attend to them.
Furthermore, a career I had never aspired to in my wildest dreams, ie that of being a professional astrologer, had been correctly predicted for me in my twenties – following a chance encounter with a complete stranger – when I was not at all receptive to, or welcoming of, that type of information.
My first Horoscope
Through my studies of astrology I discovered a universe replete with correspondences, and saturated with meaning. I embarked on those studies for one major reason: the notion that you could read the significant patterns of a person’s life from marks on a piece of paper set my innate curiosity, and my rational pragmatism, a challenge I simply could not resist.
By deciding properly to investigate a subject which I couldn’t believe could have any value, but which in practical terms had demonstrated great accuracy about me and my life, I opened up a great adventure for myself and for many students and clients who joined me on the road. Dismissing the whole thing, with the kind of closed minded fundamentalist prejudice which gives true science a bad name, would have closed the adventure down before it ever began.
The conclusion I came to, long before my 2001 health collapse stopped my
career in its tracks, was that astrology is another form of physics, revealing as quantum physics does the dance of universal energies of which we are all part. But astrology causes grave offence to conventional minds, by moving from mapping the movement of patterns of energy through space/time within our solar system – via mathematical calculations no astronomer could fault – to ascribing meaning to those patterns….
Another reason for psi/paranormal experiences may be that, especially in some cases, they compellingly demonstrate the relationship between the micro world of individual humans and the macro energy field of which we are all part.
The intuitive experience of mystics through the ages and the experimental data of contemporary scientists converges in the understanding that all things are connected, each tiny particle part of and interacting with the One, – or the Quantum Vacuum / Zero Point Field if you prefer the terms of quantum physics.
On surveying all my paranormal experiences, there are three which stand out as the most powerful.
These are the first, in July 1970 when I was visiting my paternal grandparents’ grave for the first time. From this arose an experience of universal grief at the pain of the human condition, channelling through the personal. (Part Four: Grief – personal and collective (i))
Then there was the mystical experience I had in autumn 1971, newly in love and responding to the timeless sound of the pipes in a beautiful natural setting at dusk, making me feel a blissful, fearless part of all Creation. (Part Six: Mystical Experience)
And most recently, in September 1999 the seeming attempt by my mother-in-law’s spirit to communicate something of great urgency for her to my husband, startled me even more by giving rise to the collective ‘babble’ of apparent spirit voices attempting to use me as their channel. (From the Beyond: Mediumship (v) )
Their collective nature is what makes those three so striking. 22
At the time one is too caught up in the power, drama and sheer unexpectedness of such events to have any perspective at all. It is only on reflection – and I have reflected on those episodes intermittently for a very long time – that the full impact of their very strange, alien and disturbing nature registers, and the ‘why me?’ question arises. The only answer I can come up with after thirty years is ‘why not me?’.
(My horoscope provides me with a very clear answer, symbolically. But you wouldn’t want to know about that, now, would you?!)
I am left with the somewhat unsettling sensation that my small person, for reasons entirely beyond my ken, functioned briefly in those episodes as some kind of collective instrument. Despite the unnerving nature of two out of the three, and their disturbing effect, they also left me over time, especially through the mystical experience which was a great comfort and inspiration, feeling clearly that I was a tiny but unique part of something vast.
This feeling, despite all my struggles with a naturally sceptical bent, has never left me. I have thus been able to draw on it for comfort in some very bleak and painful times in my life. It has also helped me to come to terms with one of the central paradoxes of all our lives : “I am special, and I am not.” At every level in nature, the minute can provide us with glimpses of the vast – in which everything, no matter how small, has its unique part to play.
Those experiences, which I have come to regard as precious, have shown me that, as journalist Lynne McTaggart, author of ‘The Field’ (2003), puts it:
“We are not isolated beings living desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe. What we do and say is critical in creating our world. You are and always were part of a larger whole.” 23
TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
21 Act 4 scene.1, line .36
22 These three are the only ones so far which I have submitted for publication: all have been published in the UK and the USA..
23 Lynne Mc Taggart’s ‘Living the Field’ course – on cutting edge science and spirituality – Lesson One p 4
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1600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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Paranormal intrusion: a step beyond reductionism?
October 9, 2010
To read previous installments, click HERE
3. What causes paranormal experiences?
It is important to emphasise that I was what one might call sound in body and mind at all times when those experiences occurred!
I had no mental health problems, and was leading a productive life, holding down responsible jobs and earning a steady living, with normal relationships and friendships.
It would thus be inconsistent with the overall conditions of my life to put any of my paranormal experiences down to mental health difficulties, which can produce delusions or psychotic episodes. For five years during the 1980s, I worked in psychiatric hospitals as part of a mental health team, so am conversant with the conditions which can trigger mental illness and what its manifestations can be.
I do not know the primary cause of paranormal experience any more than anyone else does. But I have come to some conclusions regarding the more obvious, immediate triggers by reflecting on my own thirty-seven experiences and finding that almost all of them, and in particular the most dramatic, had clearly identifiable common factors.
Those were that I was in transitional states in my life and/or away from home in the UK, or abroad in unfamiliar environments. In Part Five: Mediumship – Lagos, Portugal 1992 and Funchal, Madeira 1999 - I had additionally been under considerable stress prior to departing on holiday.
Intriguingly, eighteen of them, and the vast majority of the ones I experienced as the most powerful, occurred in the autumn. Perhaps as the light of day recedes in the Northern hemisphere, the light of rational consciousness weakens, making the intrusion of other types of consciousness into one’s ‘normal’ reality more possible….?
Under these circumstances in which my ‘normal’ context was disrupted, it
would appear that I was therefore more susceptible to ‘jumping’ or eliding from one state of consciousness to another, where I crossed ‘normal’ boundaries and experienced states or events which according to the canon of reductionist science, could not have happened.
It is interesting to note that of those manifestations which could not have happened, over half of them were witnessed or shared by my husband Ian, one of the most reasonable and rational people one could imagine.
In reflecting on what consciousness, apparently capable of level and shape-shifting, could possibly be – not a question which the best minds in history have ever answered either! – I have come to the view, based on reading and experience, that consciousness is a property not of the human brain, but of the universe as a whole:
Shape-shifting : solar neutrinos
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/3474/full
and there are, as Stuart Holroyd so succinctly puts it:
“….different experiential realities….accessible to different states of consciousness”16
The whole of our history past, present and future is in some way which we do not yet fully grasp, part of this universal consciousness. Quoting Ervin Laszlo again:
“….At the cutting edge of the sciences, a new concept of the world is emerging. In this concept all things in the world are recorded and all things inform one another. This gives us the most encompassing vision we have ever had of nature, life and consciousness….”17
The ancient concept of the Akashic Record states that there is a “cosmic reservoir of information and memories”18 storing records of everything that has ever occurred, which can supposedly be accessed by gifted psychics, for example Edgar Cayce, the ‘sleeping prophet’.
Technological sophistication has now evolved to the point where anyone on Earth with a computer and a phone line, broadband or WiFi can very easily, via search engines, access a vast range of information which is being added to with every second that passes, all over the world.
We cannot see, taste, touch, smell or hear the specific energies which hold this information, or perceive its location. But it is there, and ‘real’, albeit within a non-sensually detectible reality.
As our consciousness slowly evolves and our technological capacity widens and deepens, we have historically created metaphors and paradigms through which our perceptions of higher realities can become more sophisticated and comprehensible.
Perhaps the computer and internet revolution of the last decade or so has provided us with a tiny ‘chip’ as it were, upon which the light of developing scientific consciousness can be focused to provide us with a more up to date view of the vast hologram which is our universe and/or Multiverse?
Many other people have also realised the similarities which exist between the paranormal concept of the Akashic Record, and the scientific fact of the internet information bank, easily accessed with the right apparatus.
Within this large context, the human brain can be seen as functioning as a kind of radio, tuning in to different levels and states of consciousness. What we by common consensus call ‘reality’ is the level to which our brains are tuned in the ordinary course of things on planet Earth.
But there are times, in my case usually caused by disruption to my ‘normal’ life pattern, when the tuning ‘jumps’ or elides into a level or levels which connect us with those kinds of experience which are regarded as impossible from the perspective of the prevailing materialist paradigm.
A wonderful example of this type was featured in the journal Self & Society in 2002. It occurs in a fascinating article titled “A RELUCTANT MYSTIC: God-Consciousness not Guru Worship” by John Wren-Lewis. The author describes how, at the age of nearly sixty, retired and with a distinguished career as a scientist behind him, he had spiritual consciousness “thrust upon me….without working for it, desiring it, or even believing in it.” 19
Science and Non-Duality conference October 2010
featuring John Wren-Lewis
http://www.nonduality.com/dazdark.htm
It was 1983. The author was in Thailand, in a hospital bed, hovering between life and death, having eaten a poisoned sweet given to him by a would-be thief.
What happened next, a ‘near death experience’(NDE), he describes as follows:
“I simply entered – or rather, was – a timeless, spaceless void which in some indescribable way was total aliveness – an almost palpable blackness that was yet somehow radiant.”
His return to life, as the medical staff gradually won their battle to save him, was not in any way accompanied by the typical NDE’s classic sense of regret or loss at having to go back to the world of the everyday. It was, in fact, “nothing like a return….more like an act of creation whereby the timeless, spaceless Dark budded out into manifestation”. Furthermore, the experience was “indescribably wonderful.”
Moreover, this heightened awareness did not leave him. A permanent shift, without any effort at all, into what he calls “God-consciousness” caused him to do further reading and research beyond accounts of NDEs into the “once-despised world of mystical literature and spiritual movements”.
But he rejects the notion held by experts in many religious traditions that the path to God-consciousness, or Enlightenment, or Nirvana, or Oneness requires years or even lifetimes of intensive spiritual effort. After all, he’d been handed “the pearl of great price on a plate” without ever seeking it, and found God-consciousness to be quintessentially ordinary and obvious – a feature emphasised by many mystics.
In his case, as in my own, his ‘normal’ life was disrupted at the time of that experience. He had just retired, was abroad, and was poisoned to the point of death.
This intriguing case shows that even atheistic scientists can be pitched from the only reality they think exists, into a dimension outwith ‘normal’ space and time whose eternal existence the mystics of the world have affirmed and documented orally or in written form for milennia.
As the atomic physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer wisely puts it :
“These two ways of thinking, the ways of time and history and the way of eternity and timelessness, are both part of man’s efforts to comprehend the world in which he lives. Neither is comprehended in the other or reducible to it. They are, as we have learned to say in physics, complementary views, each supplementing the other, neither telling the whole story.”20
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TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
16 ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 16
17 ‘Science and the Akashic Field An Integral Theory of Everything published by Inner Traditions 2004, p 154
18 ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 79
19 Self & Society Vol 29 Number 6 Feb-March 2002 Issue, pp 22-24
20 Stuart Holroyd ‘The Arkana Dictionary of New Perspectives’ published by Arkana (Penguin Books Ltd) 1989, p 154, quoting from Lawrence LeShan’s book ‘The Medium, the Mystic and the Physicist’
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1400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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Multi-dimensional realities: enter the paranormal!
October 1, 2010
To read previous installments, click HERE
2. Paranormal experiences: where do they come from?
My view is that we exist as ‘droplets on the wave’ of a vast sea of universal energy which is present everywhere always. Humans could be envisaged as minute packets of energy flashing in and out of existence, contained within the universal matrix. Space, time, matter and energy which allow us to conceptualise our world according to the five physical senses, are features of the dimension in which we think we have our total existence. But this material level is one thin slice of a much more complex multi-dimensional reality.
How complex, has just been theoretically revised yet again! The latest thinking from physics, via M-theory, had been that there may be up to eleven dimensions in all. However, since March 2007, things have taken a newer twist, as mathematicians have revealed, for the first time, the internal secrets of one of the most complicated symmetrical structures ever studied. This 57-dimensional shape, known as E8, has long intrigued academics since it was first devised in the 19th Century. It is suspected that its symmetrical properties might be intimately linked to underlying patterns in creation in some way.
E 8
As reported in the UK’s Sunday Times on November 18th 2007, independent physicist Garrett Lisi “astonished the scientific world” two weeks earlier when he announced he might have found an answer, via contemplation of the newly revealed mathematics of E8, to the great problem which has defeated scientists including Albert Einstein: that of creating a grand theory of everything. It appears that Lisi’s theories are being taken seriously by the heavyweights of the scientific community. As the Sunday Times’ Steve Farrar so eloquently put it:
“ If Lisi’s calculations are correct, the intimidating beauty of E8 could be the key to uniting all of the fundamental forces and particles in the universe. Science would have an overarching explanation for why the cosmos is the way it is for the first time.”
(Much is made in the article of 39 year old Lisi’s informal career as a surfer and snowboarder. He lives in Lake Tahoe, where California and Nevada meet in the beautiful Sierra Nevada Mountains. It is clear that the beauty and grandeur of Nature inspires his tireless scientific efforts.)
So there you have it! We may have between eleven and fifty-seven dimensions to play with – which, to quote William James again,
“…. must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; …. although in the main
their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points……the total expression of human experience, as I view it objectively, invincibly urges me beyond the narrow ‘ scientific ‘ bounds. “ 15 (my emphases)
My long time view has been that since paranormal phenomena undoubtedly exist, but cannot be encompassed by the terms of reference of ‘ordinary’ reality, they must take place somewhere, in some space created by the intersecting – for reasons and by mechanisms at present unknown to us – of other levels or dimensions of reality with the material plane on which we live, move and have our being for most ordinary purposes most of the time. I found it hugely helpful to hear Professor Carr express this as his view in his 2007 lecture. Ordinary reality, as he put it, is “a mere slice of a higher dimensional Reality”.
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TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
15 “The Varieties of Religious Experience” (1902) Modern Library Edition New York 1994, pp 563-4
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600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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Paranormal experiences: the cost of openness
September 22, 2010
1. Paranormal experiences: the cost of openness
In November 2007 I attended a lecture by David Lorimer, Director of the Scientific and Medical Network, a leading figure in the growing movement toward reconciliation of the perspectives of science with those of religion and spirituality. He talked about the challenges of “going public with private knowing” regarding experiences of a paranormal nature and what the cost of such disclosure can be, especially in the field of mainstream science, eg losing credibility amongst your peers or getting your research funding cut off.
But he also talked about the cost of keeping such knowledge private – thereby “cutting oneself off from a key way of knowing.”
Both those statements struck a powerful chord with me; via this serialised memoir I have been acting upon the first, and have found in relation to the second that making peace with my ‘Other’ side has certainly, in recent years, given me access to interior levels of inspiration and assistance when I have needed all the help I could get in coming through a prolonged and at times frightening ordeal reasonably intact.
I hope at some appropriate future point to write about the inner experiences I had during the years 2001-6 (after which they largely ceased) which – this time around! – I recorded in detail at the time they were occurring.
In the meantime, back to the questions raised in the Introduction to my account of thirty years’ worth of intermittent and unpredictable paranormal experiences about which you have just been reading in this serial. Where do they come from? What causes them? Why do we have them? What, if anything, do they mean? Are they of any value?
"Science and the Akashic Field - An Integral Theory of Everything" by Ervin László
http://www.amazon.com/Science-Akashic-Field-Integral-Everything/dp/1594770425
Human beings have been asking – and attempting to answer – these questions ever since the evolution of our consciousness, our social development, and the flowering of spoken language and especially writing led to the capacity to perceive ourselves as distinct from the natural world of which we are part. This separation – underpinning the whole of western civilization – has led us to levels of intellectual and technological achievement which have revealed, especially in recent years with the voyages of the Hubble telescope, the staggering immensity and grandeur of the Multiverse we may well inhabit.(12)
It is truly astonishing that such minute creatures as humans, on such a tiny and apparently insignificant planet as Earth, should have achieved this. But the cost of this achievement is now being spelled out daily both in print and in observed reality right across the globe, as we wrestle with what our options may be in the face of apparently accelerating planetary disaster.
However, there are still indigenous cultures remaining sufficiently intact, despite the depredations of western materialist society, that they retain their sense of ‘unbroken wholeness’ with the natural world to such a degree that it wouldn’t occur to them to ask those questions.
A good example is offered in scientist Lyall Watson’s book “Gifts of Unknown Things” in which he describes with eloquence and humility his time spent on one of the thirteen thousand islands in the Indonesian Archipelago to which he gave a fictitious name – Nus Tarian – in order to protect the islanders’ way of life. These people have the ability, astonishing to us but normal to them, to communicate with one another in ways which we would call paranormal.
Against this background of the same questions having been asked over centuries, and of those for whom such questions are irrelevant, I feel almost silenced. Leading me to speak out is my conviction that each individual’s honest witness to their unique experience is still a worthwhile, however small, contribution to the slowly evolving process of consciousness during the particular time in which they are living.
Science as it develops should be able eventually to come up with a paradigm which contains and explains many levels from the mundane to what is currently described as the paranormal. This is a view shared by many, including influential people like the physicist Bernard Carr who is Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at London University and a recent past President of the Society for Psychical Research of which he has been a member for some thirty years. In researching a context within which to set my own wide spectrum of psi experiences, (13) I have found his perspective particularly helpful.
In a November 2007 lecture given to the Scottish Society for Psychical Research at Glasgow University called “Can science accommodate psychic experience? ” his answer to that question is a qualified “Yes ”. But he considers that there is a major barrier to be overcome: those who consider only experimental evidence, conducted under strict laboratory conditions, to be valid, clash with others who find well-researched experiential evidence to be of at least equal worth.
His view is that psi/the paranormal links those two poles, being part of a whole spectrum of well reported and documented human experience ranging from our fairly common ‘gut feelings’, through telepathy and clairvoyance, all the way out to the uncommon oceanic experience of mystical union with the Divine. This experiential range is seen as being outwith the remit of experiment-based materialist science, belonging more to the realms of parapsychology and transpersonal psychology.
I am with Professor Carr, and others like him, in considering it simply not good enough to dismiss a vast range and depth of human experience, by now extensively and meticulously recorded by people of integrity(and – often – prominence in other fields) over several centuries, simply because it does not fit into the reductionist model and therefore cannot be proved by its experimental methods.
This dismissive approach is not consistent with either open-mindedness or humility. Besides, I for one have found it enormously helpful and supportive over the years to read reputable, well researched and documented accounts in which other people have had similarly disturbing and unsettling events happen in their lives. These accounts made me feel less alone – and less peculiar!
Regarding questions concerning the cause, meaning and purpose of my own paranormal experiences, I am very aware of the limitations of a personal memoir – not the place in which to embark upon a greatly detailed discussion. However, it has been a very useful exercise to write up those thirty-seven episodes. Having done so has enabled me to consider them in a more focused way than I ever could when they were sitting, awkwardly, in a dusty corner of my memory banks.
Decades of intermittent reading, discussion and reflection, inspiration provided by the books I have read in the last five years and included in the booklist, combined with personal experience and observation, have all created the perspective which follows: for what it is worth, here are my thoughts!
However, I should preface them with the wise words of philosopher, scientist and nominee for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, Ervin László:
“….Nearly two-and-a-half thousand years ago Plato recognised that in regard to ultimate questions there can be no certainty; the best we can do is find the most likely story….” (14)
TO BE CONTINUED
Footnotes
12 The multiverse (or meta-universe) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes, including ours, which together comprise all of reality. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes. Multiverses have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, philosophy, transpersonal psychology and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. The specific term “multiverse,” was coined in 1895 by psychologist William James. from Wikipedia.
13 psi : umbrella term used to designate a range of paranormal phenomena both mental and physical.
14 ‘ Science and the Akashic Field An Integral Theory of Everything’ published by Inner Traditions 2004, p 154
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1300 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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“Dazzling Darkness” An open-minded sceptic sums up
September 9, 2010
“Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness – a sceptic’s take on paranormal experience”
has taken all my remembered paranormal episodes, presenting them in a manner which I hope will strike my readers as honest, open minded and by no means lacking in humour. When you have read through them, I anticipate that you will have at least one or two episodes of your own, or stories shared, to bring to my reflections in this conclusion, “An open-minded sceptic sums up” which will be published over the next few weeks in six sections.
These are the questions I will be addressing:
Where do the experiences I have related, which are not uncommon, come from?
What causes them?
Why do we have them?
What, if anything, do they mean?
Are they of any value?
Wisps....
I would like to stress at this point my lack of desire to “do” anything more with these experiences than make peace with them, via an openness which may help other readers who have had similar intrusion into their lives to do the same. I don’t wish to train in mediumship, or “develop my psychic gifts” as has often been suggested. Nor do I want to encourage anyone else to do so.
My pragmatic view is that we should deal with whatever comes our way in life as best we can, no matter how strange some of it may seem. I have found it helpful – after a lifetime of concealment – to write down and be open about the strangest experiences which came my way between my early 20s and my early 50s. There is more to write about, already recorded but not yet processed.
However, to paraphrase that great psychologist and mystic Carl Jung, unless the Unconscious presents itself to us, we should not go knocking on its door. “There be dragons” – and I find “ordinary” life sufficiently complex and challenging not to have any desire to go looking in extraordinary realms. I fully realise that not everyone who has an interest in the paranormal shares this viewpoint.
Do continue to follow “An open-minded sceptic sums up” as I lay out some reflective musings, bringing in a range of viewpoints especially from the open-minded end of the scientific community. And do let me know what your reactions are, either by email or by direct comments posted on the site. Many thanks to those of you who have already done so!
Wisps....
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400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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And now for something a little different….
August 19, 2010
Top Paranormal Blog 2010
I am delighted to let my readers know that “Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness” has just been voted “Top Paranormal Blog 2010″ by the Online University. Thank you for all your generous support thus far, via your interesting emails and comments – it is great to hear of others’ experiences as well as offering out my own. And click on the above links to find out more about other award-winning blogs.
With Telepathy( iii), this account of my personal paranormal experiences concludes. However, don’t go away! The next stage of this memoir consists of a long-ish, and I hope stimulating, reflection on what causes such experiences, where they come from, why we have them, and what value they might have.
Do keep reading – and commenting! Another post coming up in the first week of September when I return from holidays.
Me and Uri Geller – at a distance!Telepathy (iii)
August 13, 2010
Home, Glasgow, Scotland, 1980s: a fishy business….
Any memoir concerning the paranormal would surely not be complete without mentioning that great Israeli showman,Uri Geller! (i) I am pleased to conclude by offering my own Uri Geller story, albeit very second hand….
Uri Geller - 2009 pic
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uri_Geller)
We were having a quiet Saturday night at home, telly-watching. I can’t remember the year; it was probably the late 1980s, when Uri Geller the Israeli spoon-bender was frequently in the media. On this occasion, Geller was on the TV, doing a mass telepathy experiment.
In a studio with a member of the public, Geller gave him a pen, paper and an envelope. He then asked his subject to draw a simple image on it – the first thing that came into his mind – put it in the envelope, seal it and hand it to Uri. It was not possible for the audience at home to see what was being drawn.
Uri Geller then held the sealed envelope up with a flourish, inviting the nation to guess what the image was.
“It’s a fish” I said to Ian.
Geller opened the envelope – it was a simple drawing of a fish.
“Good heavens, I’m married to a seer!” exclaimed Ian.
“Pass me another chocolate”, I replied.
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(i) ….from Wikipedia
Uri Geller (born 20 December 1946) is an Israeli paranormalist living in England; he is well known for his trademark television performances of spoon bending and other supposed physical effects. Throughout the years, Geller has used simple magic tricks to achieve the effects of psychokinesis and telepathy. Geller’s career as an entertainer has spanned almost four decades, with television shows and appearances in many countries.[1] Geller used to call his abilities “psychic,” but now prefers to refer to himself as a “mystifier” and entertainer.[2]
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With Telepathy( iii), this account of my personal paranormal experiences concludes. However, don’t go away! The next stage of this memoir consists of a long-ish, and I hope stimulating, reflection on what causes such experiences, where they come from, why we have them, and what value they might have.
Do keep reading – and commenting!
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400 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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