Why I talk about the paranormal

Bruce Charlton has an important new post up: "Belief in the supernatural/ paranormal/ occult phenomena." He begins thus:

I don't know how unusual it is; but I find that I combine a firm belief in the reality of many supernatural/ paranormal/ occult phenomena; with an almost 100% reflex dis-belief in the objective reality of nearly-all specific examples of these phenomena, by nearly everybody.  

So, although in principle I am convinced of the reality of - in no particular order - telepathy, ghosts, miracles, synchronicity, personal destiny, magic, purposive personal evil (demons), angels, fairies... Nonetheless, I am very sceptical of the objective truth of almost every single report of such things I have encountered. 

Even among people whom I respect and trust; I find I often do not believe the specific truth of what they say or write...

"I don't know how unusual it is" -- not unusual at all, I would wager. I assume that most people can easily understand and sympathize with Bruce's stance here, and that most of us probably share it at least to some degree and with respect to some phenomena. It's obviously somewhat paradoxical, though. On what grounds does one assent to a general truth -- or what does it even mean to say that one so assents -- if one rejects every one of the specifics on which the generalization is based? If there is no x such that I believe x to be a genuine instance of telepathy, for example, why would I say I have "a firm belief in the reality of" telepathy?

Bruce emphasizes his skepticism of reports of the paranormal, so one possibility is that his firm belief in various phenomena is based entirely on his own firsthand experience. I think this is unlikely to be the whole story, though, since there are so many different phenomena in which he believes. It seems highly improbable that he personally has seen ghosts and angels and fairies and miracles and so on through the whole list.

We could also note the qualifiers he uses -- "almost 100%," "nearly-all," "nearly everybody" -- and infer that for each category of phenomena on his list there exists at least one specific instance in which he firmly believes, and that -- since one well-authenticated ghost is all it takes to establish that ghosts exist -- it is on these exceptional cases that his general beliefs rest. I doubt this is the case, though. If asked, for example, "Which ghost stories do you find uniquely convincing?" I assume he wouldn't have any to point to.

Another possibility is that the firm general beliefs are logical inferences. For example, each and every one of my beliefs is, by definition, something that I believe to be true. Nevertheless, at the meta level, I recognize my own fallibility and am therefore firmly convinced that some of my beliefs -- a great many of them, in all likelihood -- are in fact false. A general belief in "miracles" can be similarly grounded: Given the fallibility of our knowledge, it is virtually certain that some phenomena we consider to be impossible are in fact possible and do occur, and these are what we call "miracles." For more specific paranormal beliefs, though, this doesn't seem to work. From what general principles could one derive the likely existence of ghosts, say, or of fairies? I don't see how such beliefs can be anything other than empirical.

It's possible, then, that stances like Bruce's are inherently unstable and that this can only be resolved by persisting in one's folly one way or the other. During my atheist years, I found myself in the opposite but equally unstable position of "officially" not believing in anything supernatural while at the same time believing in practice in certain specific instances. I would often find myself saying things like, "Of course I don't believe in omens, but this is pretty clearly an omen." In the end I came to understand this as a sign that I was not being honest with myself about my own beliefs. My attempts to rectify those discrepancies -- particularly with regard to "free will," in which I purportedly disbelieved -- precipitated my eventual reconversion to theism and a supernatural worldview.

⁂

Coming back to Bruce's post, he writes of those who claim paranormal experiences:

And indeed; to my mind, across such people, they have said and written a vast range of incompatible and often incoherent things. If I tried to base my life upon believing the specific information (facts and understandings) of even those relatively few sincere persons who I respect and trust - I would nonetheless be building my faith on a seething mass of sand, rubble, and water - not on solid rock!

I agree with this. We cannot base our beliefs or lives on anything as slippery as the paranormal. That is, we can't believe something simply because it was allegedly communicated by an angel or a miracle or a synchronicity or whatever. We have to judge content from such sources the same way we judge any other content. I discuss this in my post "Who or what is the ultimate spiritual authority? (a Mormon perspective)." As is well documented on this blog, I learned this lesson the hard way after making some extremely confident predictions about the outcome of the 2020 election based on synchronicity alone -- some really extraordinary synchronicities, I must say, most of which were objective and publicly verifiable (meaning the fact that there were such synchronicities, not the correct interpretation of the same) -- but the predictions failed.

I've been quoting John Dominic Crossan on this for decades now:

Altered states of consciousness, such as dreams and visions, are something common to our humanity, something hard-wired into our brains, something as normal as language itself. They were recognized as common possibilities in the early first century, and they are still recognized as such in the late twentieth century. And only when their human normalcy is accepted can a proper response be offered. That response should not be, We deny the fact of your vision. It should be, Tell us the content of your vision. And then we will have to judge, not whether you had it or not, but whether we should follow it or not.

The distinction Crossan makes is an important one, one which perhaps tends to be blurred by Bruce's ambiguous language about "believing in the reality of the phenomena." Questioning whether someone in fact had the experience they claim to have had is entirely different from questioning the conclusions they draw from it.

I generally suspend judgment on the correct interpretation of paranormal experiences, including my own, to a degree that sometimes annoys others. When otherwise trustworthy people report the fact of a paranormal experience, though, I mostly believe them -- "mostly" because of the danger Bruce identifies in the following quote from his post:

This is why I try to refrain from ever communicating my own such experiences; because I know that they will be unconvincing to others, that there are many alternative mundane explanations, they can be explained-away or else my own honesty and competence will be rejected - and therefore in making such communications I feel an almost irresistible temptation to persuade, exaggerate, distort - and I assume others do also.

The temptation he mentions -- to "photoshop" one's experiences a bit in order to make them more presentable -- is very real and very hard to resist. I make an effort to be strictly factual in my reports, but everyone should definitely take them all with large quantities of salt. Paranormal experiences are so slippery that articulating them at all inevitably involves distortion, and much of this will be, even with the best of conscious intentions, motivated distortion.

⁂

My policy is, obviously enough, the opposite of Bruce's. I do try to communicate my paranormal experiences, and in fact for some time now this blog has consisted almost entirely of reports of synchronicities, dreams, visions, and such, with more discursive posts like the present one increasingly few and far between.

In doing this, I am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I don't generally draw firm conclusions from my own experiences, let alone try to push those conclusions on others. My primary concern is simply to normalize the paranormal. To quote Crossan again, "only when their human normalcy is accepted can a proper response be offered" -- because paranormal experiences absolutely are a normal aspect of the human condition. Quite a few people have shared theirs with me -- but nearly always in confidence, on the understanding that I will keep my mouth shut (and I do). I've been there, and I sympathize, but at the same time, how much progress can we make in understanding such things when everyone is too embarrassed to compare notes? Embarrassment is fear, and fear is the mind-killer.

If we report our paranormal experiences, the reports will inevitably include distortion. If we systematically avoid talking about a whole area of experience, though, that's an even greater distortion. And if we coyly hint that we have had paranormal experiences without giving any specifics -- the old Mormon trope of "I know by experiences to sacred to relate" -- well, that path has its own temptations and corrupting influences. As always, "playing it safe" is not really one of our options.

⁂

To end on a synchronistic note, earlier today, as I was thinking about Bruce's post, a quote from William Blake came to mind -- from The Ghost of Abel -- and I looked it up:

To Lord Byron in the Wilderness: What doest thou here Elijah? Can a Poet doubt the Visions of Jehovah? Nature has no Outline: but Imagination has. Nature has no Tune: but Imagination has. Nature has no Supernatural & dissolves: Imagination is Eternity.

It came to mind because of the theme of "doubting visions," and also probably because I've recently been reading, thinking about, and dreaming of Lord Byron. After looking it up and reading it, though,my main impression was the emphasis on the value of imagination.

Before looking up the Blake quote, I had been reading Section 124 of the Doctrine and Covenants, which is quite long. After rereading The Ghost of Abel, I returned to Section 124 and soon encountered this passage:

And he shall be led in paths where the poisonous serpent cannot lay hold upon his heel, and he shall mount up in the imagination of his thoughts as upon eagles’ wings. . . . Therefore, let my servant William cry aloud and spare not, with joy and rejoicing, and with hosannas to him that sitteth upon the throne forever and ever, saith the Lord your God (vv. 99, 101).

Is this the only positive reference to "imagination" in all of scripture? I think it may be -- and it's in reference to "my servant William" and is closely followed by an injunction to "cry aloud and spare not" -- i.e., to speak up and not hold back.

I took this as synchronistic confirmation that, whatever path may be right for other people, I at least should continue to speak openly about these things. To me it seemed like a message from the sync fairies -- though I quite understand if you, reader, reflexively doubt that.