We Have Seen the Paranormal . . .

It is the term, "paranormal," itself that makes me want to step away from the conversation. A number of my more enlightened colleagues often remind me that it is only a word that has come to refer to a particular variety of seemingly inexplicable experiences. If you have ever had a premonition, believed you were perceiving something far beyond any easily explicable perceptual range, or heard something unexpected going bump in the night that appeared to defy any rational explanation, then the paranormal label has come to apply to all such experiential phenomena. It is not, in itself, any attempt at an explanation. It is rather an attempt to say that any seemingly ordinary explanation is at least not especially obvious.

The problem, however, is that it really does sound like an explanation. How is defining a particular set of experiences and/or phenomena as "paranormal" any different from calling it "supernatural?" There is normal and there is paranormal. There is natural and there is supernatural. It all sounds pretty much the same to me. They are words that contradict themselves by referring simultaneously to both the natural and normal world and something else that somehow occurs within that realm yet also lies beyond it. It is like saying that anything that happens is, by definition, meant to happen. It may be a comforting or disturbing thought, depending on the situation, but it can't be disproved and doesn't make anybody feel any better or really solve the problem.

If any experiences that apparently can't be explained according to the laws of physics and perception as we currently understand them are, by definition, paranormal, then we might as well also relegate those experiences to God's Will or Satanic Forces, or write them off as being merely synchronistic, if not purely random, and leave it at that. The problem is that we haven't yet come up with a more useful line of terminology - in part because such concrete terminology is also pending a better explanation of the actual basis for many of the seemingly inexplicable things we are experiencing. I have used the term, "extraordinary experiences" in my own writing on the subject. Another colleague called such experiences, "exceptional." The problem is that they happen so often and to so many people that they may seem extraordinary or exceptional to the individuals who experience them, but they are not beyond the familiar range of the entire vast and general compendium of relatively commonplace human experiences. They are common enough, in fact - at least in their general characteristics - that they require both an appropriate term of reference and a definition.

The renowned psychologist, William James, wrote about The Varieties of Religious Experience over a hundred years ago in his seminal book by that title and was one of the founders of the American Society for Psychical Research. We may be reinventing terminology, at some level, but we are also trying to put a more secular edge on the kinds of experiences James was describing. When you add the word, "religious" to the terminology, it opens up a bigger can of worms, but many so-called "paranormal," "extraordinary," or "exceptional" experiences have had an undeniably powerful impact on the religious point of view of those who have had them.

This is not the moment to begin to discuss what I think of the term, "parapsychology," but I'm sure you can guess. An Englishman I once encountered at a pub near Stonehenge told me that he always thought a parapsychologist was a psychologist who jumped out of an airplane. The term is useful to a certain, limited extent, but that first leap is a big one.

If we truly do mean to suggest that it is possible for some things that occur within the natural world to simultaneously exist on some other plane that is beyond, outside, or past the boundaries of the tangible universe in all of its dimensions, then we are taking an anthropocentric view of the structure of reality. I consider it far more likely that our own perceptions will turn out to be the culprit - not only because many of the things that go bump in the night often really do turn out to be the sounds of someone falling out of bed in the upstairs apartment, but also because we do not yet know absolutely everything about the ways in which we both perceive and fail to perceive the natural world - and a great deal still remains to be discovered about the way things work. Should those revelations ever begin to emerge from deep within our limited perceptions, then such an experience literally would deserve to be defined as extraordinary. It is conceivable that many of the experiences we have currently defined as paranormal may only be glimpses of the natural world as it exists behind the curtain of our own perceptions.

Whenever our experiences begin to appear to us as paranormal, supernatural, exceptional or extraordinary, then we might wish to consider what their appearance might potentially suggest or reveal about our own very limited perceptions. It is not that there is anything mundane about the human mind, or anything necessarily simple about the nature of reality. It may only be that we have seen the paranormal and it is us.