An Introduction

Three generations of my family have lived in the house I currently reside in.  My mom used to tell me that when she was little, she would wake up in the middle of the night and walk out into the kitchen and see a line of what most of us would deem "shadow people" marching in perfect file into the other room.  When she turned around to see where they were coming from, they were coming from the guest room where my great grandmother had died.  She said that this happened for about three years, every single night.  One day it just mysteriously stopped.

From very early on in my life, I had been interested in the paranormal.  I was raised by my grandmother, and she would take me to the library on a weekly basis.  I would always check out books on ghosts, UFOs, or demons/satanism.  I know, I was a strange kid.  I was just always fascinated with what goes on after we die.  I remember what I thought was my first ghost sighting.  I was 16, and like every Saturday during the summer since I was 10, I would mow the entire two and a half acre lawn that our house sat on.  Strangely, there was one particular time I swear I saw a lady standing in the second floor window of our garage, just peering out at me. In college, I had all sorts of unexplainable encounters in a particular apartment that I lived in, knocks, shadow figures, strange dreams, and waking up without being able to move while a strange light hovered over me that looked seemingly like a person.  Two years ago, I was walking in a grave yard when all of the sudden we began to hear chattering and cackling all around us.  As we ran away we saw a white pulsating orb floating in a bush.  It was terrifying.

However, I can honestly say that I never experienced the paranormal until this year.

"How could you ever think that!" you must have thought.  Well, in the coming weeks I'll explain.  In fact, what  I hope to do is to critique every single little thing we do in the field, from psychics to evp sessions, even investigating in the dark.  Seriously, I plan on making the readers out there reexamine every thing that they do.  I ask you to keep an open mind and not just reject everything I write just because "no one can tell you what you have or haven't seen."  I promise to challenge you.  However, I don't want anyone out there to just take everything I say and believe it 100% either.  St. Augustine said "There is no one alive that has ever been more than eight tenths correct in his thinking."  Meaning that at some point I'm wrong about something.  What I want you to do is read what I say objectively, suspend your own biases temporarily, examine the evidence I've put forth, and make a fair judgement.

Besides, it's through questions that any of us can ever approach or even understand truth. Ramana Maharshi always felt the path to Enlightenment starts off in asking the question "Who am I?". Niels Bohr asked, "How can an electron move from point A to point B, but never go in between the two points?" Questions open us up to what we previously didn't know, and they're the only way to get to the other side of the unknown.

So why don't we ask questions in the paranormal field that target the very core of our beliefs? Because asking questions opens the door to chaos, the unknown, the unpredictable. Are you really willing to receive an answer you may not like or agree with? What if the answer isn't something you want to hear? It is questions which changes our directions in life, which opens us up to a new realm of understanding.

We aren't alone in this pursuit of knowledge however. People have been asking questions for thousands of years. There have always been those who have gazed at the stars and wondered of the vast mystery of it all, or who looked at the way people around them were living and thought "Isn't there more to life than this?"

The ancient Greek philosophers were among the first to discuss questions of such a profound nature. Socrates and Plato asked "What is beauty? What is Goodness? What is Justice? What is the best way to govern a society? What is truth?"

People with scientific minds have always asked questions. How does it work? What's inside? Are things really the way they seem? Where does the universe come from? Is the Earth the center of the solar system? Aren't there laws and patterns that underlie what happens in daily life? Whats the connection between my body and my mind? For the great scientists of history, these questions elicit a passion to understand that goes way beyond curiosity, they needed to know the answers!

When Albert Einstein was a boy, he asked himself "What happens if I'm riding my bicycle at the speed of light, and I switch on my bike light, will it come on?" He nearly drove himself crazy asking himself that question for ten years, but out of this pursuit came the theory of relativity. He rejected the majority of Newtonian Physics and embraced the truth that he discovered.  In fact, for scientists today, old school Newtonian Physics looks preposterous, but at the time it was considered idiotic for anyone to think otherwise. This is the great example of asking a question and hanging with it for years, but when Einstein got his answer, he emerged with a completely different view of reality.

One of the great things about science is its assumption that what it thinks it knows today will probably be proven wrong tomorrow. The theories of yesterday have served as platforms to climb higher, as Sir Isaac Newton meant when he said "If I have been privileged to see farther than others, it's because I stood on the shoulders of giants."  If we are going to consider the paranormal field a science, then we need to take this thought process with us.

Pondering questions is a wonderful way to exercise your mind. When was the last time you took your mind on a wild ride of mystery? Tried to get to the other side of Infinity? Asking questions has enormous practical value, it's the gateway to change.

Want a sample of what I have up my sleeves then?  Let's ask a question, about the most "basic" and important thing there is.  "What is reality?" We endorse the reality that our eyes give us. Most people (especially in our field) think reality is what our senses project to us. And, of course, science has gone along with that view for 400 years: If it is not perceivable by our five senses (or their extensions), it's not real. If I asked you to prove to me that the screen you are looking at exists, more than likely, your response would be " It exists because I'm sitting here looking at it." Again, most people define reality as what is observable.

But even this "reality" appears one way when we look at it with our eyes, and another if we look more deeply into it with a microscope or an atom smasher. Then it becomes totally different, unrecognizable. Have you ever seen a galaxy? When you look at it, it looks like a swirl of light, but obviously you know that the galaxy really doesn't look like that, it's billions upon billions of stars close together and tightly packed. The swirls are simply composed of dots which are so bright that they give off the fleeting suggestion that the galaxy is actually a swirl. In actuality, we know that the galaxy is mostly made of space, with the stars here and there being the exception.

Consider this, when you look at your own arm for instance, you obviously think it's solid, correct? But what else do you know about your arm? We know that the arm is actually made up of billions upon billions of atoms. We also know that between the protons, electrons, and neutrons that there is mostly space, and we know that there is a great amount of space between atoms. In reality, the arm isn't so solid, is it? Again, tell me how you know your computer monitor exist, and really, what are you looking at?

And what about our thoughts? Are they part of "reality"? Take a look around right now. There are windows and chairs and lights and the ominous screen that you are reading this on right now. You probably think they are real. All of them preceded by an "idea" of windows and chairs. Someone imagined those windows and chairs and created them. So if the latter is real, is the idea real as well? And what about emotions, are they, real?

Having not come up with the answer to "what is reality?" humanity seemingly turned to the lab and tackled a simpler aspect. We abandoned Philosophy and Metaphysics and focused on Science and the Physical world, the world around us, and sought to learn what it was made up of instead of what reality was.

It was the Greek philosopher Democritus who first had the idea of an atom, "Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." And that was a great place to start... So out came the electron microscopes and atom smashers and cloud chambers, and we big people peered into the world of little things.

Now when you went to school, you probably were shown a model of an atom, with its solid nucleus and orbiting electrons, and you were probably told "Atoms are the building blocks of nature." Unfortunately, due to quantum mechanics, it just isn't so.

It turned out that those solid little atoms, in their neat little orbits, were really just energy packets. Then it was discovered they're not really energy packets either, but momentary condensations of a field of energy. Of course, every atom consists almost entirely of empty space, so much so that it seems a miracle that we don't hit the floor every time we try to sit down on a chair. And since the floor is also mostly empty, where would we find something "solid" enough to hold us? The kicker here is that our bodies are made up of atoms too!

And now currently, quantum physics tells us that the so called "empty space" within and between atoms is not empty at all. In fact, it's so lively with energy that one cubic centimeter, contains more energy than all the solid matter in the entire known universe... So what did you say Reality was?

Long before the early Greek philosophers the sages of India knew that there was something important going on beyond the realm of the senses. Hindu teachers thought that the world of appearances, the world we see with our senses, is maya, or illusion, and that something underlies this material realm, something that is more powerful and more fundamental, more "real" even though it's completely intangible. Christianity speaks of heaven being more real than our current existence. The Apostle Peter spoke of this life as fleeting, as mist dissipating from our mouths. The higher reality of the supernatural seems more fundamental than the lower material universe according to most religious accounts.

Interestingly enough, this is precisely what quantum physics is revealing. It suggests that at the core of the physical world there is a completely non-physical realm. There is a debate split up into three separate but seemingly equal camps about what this realm is. Some say it's simply information, others say probability waves and the third camp say it's actually the same makeup of consciousness.  How interesting of a discovery would that be for the Paranormal Field if the third camp was proven correct?

So again the question stands, "what is reality?"  If in your mind the question still stands, how can you be absolutely sure about anything?  If we always think we know the answers to this field, how can we ever grow? A university professor visited Zen master Nan-in to inquire about Zen. Instead of listening to the master, the scholar kept going on and on about his own ideas. After listening for some time, Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full, and then kept on pouring. The tea flowed over the sides of the cup, filled the saucer, spilled onto the man's pants and onto the floor. "Don't you see the cup is full?" the professor exploded. "You can't get any more in!" "Just so," replied Nan-in calmly. "And like this cup, you are full of your own ideas and opinions,. how can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?" Emptying your cup means making room for questions. It means being open, reconditioning ourselves so that we can accept, for the time being, not knowing. Out of that, a greater awareness will dawn.

Interested? I hope so. Just keep checking back every Monday and by next week, I promise to actually discuss something Paranormal. At the very least, I think you will be challenged. I look forward to your critiques.