WHY PEOPLE DON'T UNDERSTAND THE PARANORMAL

In my 30 years as a newspaperman, I found that no rule is as important as the first rule of journalism: "Assume nothing!" I quickly learned -- and later taught reporters who worked for me -- that a careless statement or poorly researched "fact" can destroy lives and damage entire communities, states or even nations when published in a newspaper. And I fired more than one reporter for taking that dictum lightly.

In my 40 years as a paranormal investigator, I very early on was struck by the idea that "assume nothing" also should be the golden rule of probing the unexplained. But even the most eminent paranormal researchers today -- with a few rare exceptions -- seem to me to be loaded down with assumptions that neither they nor anyone else seem to question.

Because of this, the vast majority of people who research this subject -- and set themselves up as experts -- are, in effect, locked into a small, dingy room full of assumptions, old ideas and narrow thoughts. They are like inept astronomers who insist on examining the heavens with binoculars instead of the readily available Hubble Space Telescope.

The arch-assumption is: THINGS ARE WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE. Because we assume that all real knowledge can be gained only through our five physical senses, we assume that the world is as it appears to us. Things are essentially material, with energy thrown in as a means for matter to change. Matter and energy are both governed by predictable laws. Our standard, day-to-day science, based on this same arch-assumption, appears to back all this up.

BECAUSE THINGS ARE WHAT THEY APPEAR TO BE, they must have a logic that coincides with human motivations and world-view.

Ghosts must be spirits of the dead who live on in some "spirit world." What else could they be? Flying saucers must be spacecraft from another planet. What else could they be? Sasquatch and other "cryptids" are perfectly physical but just really, really hard to find. And, of course, none of these weirdities are related. How could they be? We moderns pigeonhole everything and everyone into specialties and categories to fit our cramped view of the world.

The assumptions continue. For the paranormal to be "proven to modern science," we must strain and sweat to make it fit the physical laws we assume explain everything. Barring that, we assume that there must be such laws that we simply don't know about yet.

We assume that every being we can't see is a "spirit" - a being without a physical body -- that lives "on the other side," where there must be a whole world of spirits. What else could it be?

We assume that when the thing in the Ouija board spells out that it's Uncle Harry from the great beyond, it really is. When the medium leads a seance and pronounces that Lord Bingbangboom, Spirit King of the Planet Gumby, is his or her "guide," everyone, including the medium, buys it. Why would spirits lie?

When we hear footsteps trotting down the hallway with no apparent physical presence to make them, we assume it's the ghost of the guy whom the neighbor told us slipped on his kid's marbles in 1928 and broke his head. Or something like that.

Dr. Fred Alan Wolf, the distinguished physicist, once pointed out to me that if people constantly live by a certain set of rules or a certain point of view (in other words, by a certain set of assumptions), they create a quantum bell curve, and that's how the world will appear to them. But "when you do and experience extraordinary things" like shamans or open-minded, clear-of-assumptions paranormal investigators, all that changes.

Drop the assumptions. Clear the mind. And the universe -- the multiverse -- opens to you, with the paranormal -- in a whole new light -- as your guide. How do you do that? Not easy. Very, very non-comforting. But, if you can handle it, it's the first step to liberation, knowledge, understanding and peace. How?

SHUT UP.

Shut up, listen, and let the "haunted" site teach you. You'll find that the whole planet is "haunted" - that the paranormal is completely normal, that it does NOT abide by human standards nor bow to human science. And you'll find that the paranormal opens the door to many, many worlds -- some like ours, some very alien, many just as physical, but most with very different laws of physics -- and that our whole universe is only a microscopic part of an ineffably vast whole.

Shut up, listen, and forget the seance room, fireside ghost stories, 19th century spiritism and the flat-Earth theory. Unless you're prepared to admit that clothes, cars, trucks, houses, streets and whole villages, and physical characteristics like voices, can be spirits too, you'll notice that ghosts are not what they appear to be.

Shut up, listen, and know that we have deadly enemies and powerful friends throughout the muliverse. Know that you can have profound experiences of love or horror across the boundaries of these worlds.

Shut up, listen, and travel through time.

Shut up, listen, and know a multiverse of other universes.

Shut up -- JOIN UP -- and learn to control whole worlds.

Shut up, listen, and see what life truly is.

Shut up, listen, and know God.

Forget the assumptions and LISTEN, and this is what the paranormal can do for you and for all of us -- or to you and to us.

Why is this so important? Because understanding the paranormal and, through it, the multiverse we live in, has implications for EVERYTHING we believe about God, ourselves, our science, our world, our relationships with others, and our destinies.

Because even WE are not what we appear to be.

That's why I always say, "Explaining the paranormal is not the problem. It's handling the explanations.

Welcome to the first day of school

This site was last updated 06/11/11