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Wisps....
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Wisps....
How do you react when someone you don’t know tells you that a career shift – to a sphere which you have long dismissed as not worth investigating – awaits you in seven years’ time ? What do you tell your friends and family when this turns out to be absolutely correct? What do you do when life continues to present you intermittently with experiences which don’t fit any of the sections in your mental filing cabinet?
In Anne Whitaker’s case, you say very little to a few trusted people and carry on with life, hoping that in time such experiences will stop and memories of past ones will simply fade away.
However, the memories remained and the experiences continued: intermittent, totally unpredictable, unsought and unwanted. Then, forced to give up work for several years after a long family crisis resulted in energy burnout requiring a great deal of rest and retreat, the author of this book simply lay on the couch with her laptop and wrote out all the experiences which had lurked in her memory banks, refusing to be forgotten, for over thirty years.
Ideally, mid life is a time of making peace with who we are and what our lives have been. Her health crisis provided Anne Whitaker with a precious opportunity to do just that. Facing and coming to terms at last with her ‘other’ side through writing this memoir was an important part of the process of rest and eventual recovery.
But she didn’t write the memoir purely for her own benefit. She has spoken out in order to support many other people who have also hidden their experiences:
‘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.’
Mere mention of the paranormal is sufficient to provoke a range of responses from outright credulity to outright, rage-filled denial. Conventional science is dismissive, looking for results via the experimental procedures of reductionism and not finding enough to convince.
But there is a huge body of experiential evidence, meticulously gathered and recorded over centuries by many reputable people worldwide, which points to the probable existence of dimensions of reality beyond the perceptual scope of our five material senses.
Read Anne Whitaker’s accounts of her experiences of atmospheres, dreams, ghosts, mediumship, mystical experience, poltergeist phenomena, prediction, premonitions, reincarnation and telepathy.
Consider the wider context within which she sets them. Appreciate her respect for the gifts of rational science, as well as her eventual acceptance of the reality of the paranormal and appreciation of its value to us too.
Read some of the books she suggests which have inspired her. Then record or relate your own ‘strange’ experiences, and help to bring a much feared and misunderstood dimension of everyday human life into the public domain.
We need to create a more balanced world than we currently have. Contributing to integration of the rational and the non-rational is a good place to start!
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600 words copyright Anne Whitaker 2010
Licensed under Creative Commons – for conditions see Home Page
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