If I had never traveled the maze of my own uncertainty, never been cast as the embodiment of the controversy I hoped to resolve, I might have lived a simpler life. But the questions I faced might have been much the same. In the end, those questions have as much to do with our humanity as our perceptions of the paranormal. How do we truly intuit anything? When somebody demonstrates evidence of "knowing" something in a way that isn't presently understood, the knowledge may come by inference, a lucky guess, or subtle and unconscious cognitive cues. But even when someone gains access to information in ways that seem inexplicable, it doesn't make the person a psychic standing apart from the rest of humanity. It doesn't confer magical abilities, or mean the information is right in every way.
My wife, after all, didn't die.
At the time of this publication, Keith Harary, Ph.D., was a research director of the Institute for Advanced Psychology in Portland, Oregon, focusing on cognition and altered states of consciousness. His book, Who Do You Think You Are? Explore Your Many-Sided Self with the Berkeley Personality Profile, is published by Plume.
