Paranormal Is Perfectly Normal: Give Your Innate Instinct a Chance

Recent polling shows that 83 percent of the American population have experienced paranormal phenomena

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“We hide from our own deepest identity when we postulate that consciousness is extinguished with the death of the body- resulting in a severe gap in our capacity for self-knowledge.” —Jefferey Mishlove, psychologist and parapsychologist

As an admirer of science and constantly intrigued by its many achievements, I am also a being with my own spirit which, “scientifically” speaking, makes me and all of us spiritual beings first. The early science of society considered most things mythical, until universal experiences of evidence such as the existence of gravity, a heartbeat, etc., turned things upside down, putting the chaos in order. From Galileo’s discoveries to Einstein’s theories, society came to open up and broaden its mind more and more.

Now it is a common belief that “scientism” isn’t the same as science, as the former doesn’t look for the truth but sadly goes in the opposite direction.

Scientism is an unquestioned faith in a materialistic worldview, which was conducive to the development of modern technology, and was thought to provide us with explanations about everything. But in reality, we are far from recognizing (let alone explaining) numerous phenomena that we can see but cannot define—consciousness, for example.

There is no denying that we have come a long way with the understanding and acceptance of mental processes. Even so, to say that we are miles away from cracking the actual depth of human consciousness would be an understatement.

Recent polling shows that 83 percent of the American population have experienced paranormal phenomena. The instances of near death experience, synchronicity, apparitional experience, postmortem survival and reincarnations are simply uncountable and undeniable. But because it is unexplainable, these extrasensory perceptions are conveniently labeled deluded or even “unscientific”—which is apt, as these phenomena are, in fact, beyond science.

The Father of American Psychology

Perhaps a more holistic view of experience could lead to more understanding.

For example, when someone suffers from an illness, in order to understand the problem from its root, the first thought is generally “diagnosis.” But what if there were no known in-depth diagnosis for that particular occurrence, as it’s universally labeled to be false?

William James, also known as the Father of American Psychology, in his constructive attempt at creating a link between phenomenology (studying the meanings things have in one’s experience ) and experimental science (acquiring knowledge through direct observation) put forward “radical empiricism” which holds that “reality consists not of subjects and objects (mind and matter) but of pure experience.”

According to James, “the whole human experience is the legitimate domain for Psychological investigation. This is in contrast to the tendency of certain schools of Psychology, such as structuralism (study of mental experience through investigation using a systematic program of experiments), to define the subject much more narrowly.”

From being the first educator to offer a course in Psychology in the United states of America, to being criticized for placing too much emphasis on bodily feelings, William James’s theories have contributed to the field more than any other leading thinkers in the late 19th century. After being heavily criticized and rejected for his belief in “free will,” James’s work is still considered influential in the world of psychology.

The Astonishing Hypothesis

Such a holistic view led to the “astonishing hypothesis” of consciousness.

Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, along with James Watson, is famous for the groundbreaking discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. During his research, Crick was driven by two unsolved problems in biology:

1. How molecules make the transition from non-living to living, and
2. how the brain makes a conscious mind.

In 1994, the brave scientist wrote a book called “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” sharing with the world a refreshing and truthful scientific attitude. In the video below (1995) Crick acknowledges religious perception of the “living” and “dead,” with a curious pursuit of exploring the same while accepting scientific limits

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRIAnxt75ps

“ ...if your brain dies then essentially you as a person would be considered dead, whereas the more conventional & often the religious interpretation is in some sense some immaterial spirit survives..” —Francis Crick

Researchers Play the ‘Subject’

The summer of 2005 for clinical psychologist Brendon Engen was metamorphic when he was told through a trance-channel that in one of his previous lives he had been the young disciple of the Stoic philosopher and dramatist Lucius Anneaus Seneca. He was also told that Seneca’s “present incarnation” was Jeffrey Mishlove, that this centuries-old relationship would re-manifest to fulfill something of “karmic significance.”

After corresponding with Jeffrey Mishlove, Engen and Mishlove came to acknowledge their common interest in paranormal experiences. Together they wrote the paper titled “Archetypal Synchronistic Resonance: A New Theory of Paranormal Experience.” In this paper the authors admit to the limits of the topic of paranormal encounters, along with its own theoretical and philosophical issues, are more complex than what commonly appears to us at first glance. In addition we are also reminded that “attributing meaningful connections to what are in fact intrinsically meaningless coincidences is a lamentable, even potentially dangerous error of judgment.”  Yet, they manage to offer criteria to separate the two.

As a matter of fact, Mishlove himself, following a life changing dream involving an after-death communication with his uncle Harry, had made a radical decision to switch his major from criminology to parapsychology which “raised some eyebrows.” To this day, Mishlove happens to be the only person to receive a doctoral diploma in parapsychology (from University of California, Berkeley in 1980) ever awarded by an accredited American university.

In his sincere attempt to make paranormal behavior and extrasensory perceptions more widely accepted, Mishlove, with a grant from the Bigelow Institute, recorded his research called “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death.” (pdf)

In this insightful paper, Mishlove explores a number of cases of paranormal experiences across the world. Recording various instances of near death communication, extrasensory perception, and psychokinesis from individuals while also discussing works of practitioners of hypnosis, meditation, yoga, out of body travel, lucid dreaming, spirit mediumship, entheogenics, and other sciences, Mishlove concluded his paper by saying “Modern civilization is paying the price for ignoring postmortem survival—and favoring the view, expressed by Marvin Minsky in the Introduction, that Human beings are no more than sophisticated machines.’

References

https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/mishlove-beyond-brain.pdf

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.562992/full#fn005

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/#:~:text=Literally%2C%20phenomenology%20is%20the%20study,things%20have%20in%20our%20experience