As I said in the introduction, I started looking into all
this because I've had a couple of remarkable experiences in recent
years, and I became convinced that there is more to reality than meets
the eye. In this chapter I would like to discuss a few of those
experiences. Where they involve other people, I'll be a little
unspecific about their identity, since I'm writing about this without
having consulted them about it.
I am not trying to 'prove' anything with this. These are my
experiences and, as I have pointed out the previous chapters, they
are part of my subjective reality only. I'll try to describe
them as well as I can.
You might have heard about the human aura, the normally invisible
field of 'life force' that is supposed to surround us all. It's
also called the Human Energy Field, or HEF for short. Healers can
work with it. But there is no 'hard' scientific evidence that a Human
Energy Field really exists, and very little is known about its nature.
(Kirlian photography seems to show a field of 'life force'
around living tissue, but this effect may also be caused by other
factors.)
I didn't know anything about the HEF when I had my first
experience with it. I had heard it mentioned once, briefly, but
that was all.
When I received a healing treatment for the first time, I was rather
skeptical. I was suffering from a number of vague symptoms and a general
feeling of illness at the time. A friend of mine told me what a healer
had done for him, and I decided to give it a try and see what happened.
Frankly, I expected to be disappointed, although I tried to keep an open
mind. It would take some tough convincing to make me accept any of it as
real.
So I called this healer and made an appointment with her. (She turned
out to be a wonderful woman, and I think of her as a close friend
by now.) At the time, I understood little about the treatment she
gave me. It involved little physical contact: most of the time she
would hold her hands about two to four inches from my body and move
them around a lot. It was a very strange sensation; I can't really
describe what it felt like. She also told me about various points on
my body that I needed to massage twice a day. Was this going to benefit
me?
I noticed the results of the treatment that same evening. I was
amazed to discover that my breathing pattern changed and I was
able to get more air into my lungs than before. Also, I
noticed how my body (and especially my legs) felt much more
sensitive. I could suddenly feel my own heartbeat, something I'd
never felt before. I could feel the blood running through my
veins, I felt how my body sank into the mattress when I was lying
in my bed. I was able to relax more completely. I had more energy,
and in the weeks that followed I grew healthier.
I had never felt anything like that, and I had never known that I
missed it. All of this as a result of a treatment that barely
involved touching the patient.
Yes, I know about the 'placebo effect', and I know what it can do to
a patient that really believes that a treatment or medicine
will cure him. But I also know its limits, and I don't believe that it
explains all of this.
Later I looked into the theory behind a few aspects of auric healing. I
learned a little about the human aura, and about how a healer may
work with it to release energy blocks inside the body, or to
diagnose problems in either the body or the mind. I didn't (and don't)
understand all of it, but I found that almost everything that I read
confirmed my own experiences.
I can now feel the aura that surrounds the human body. It's quite
easy, really, but most people just never try it. I have also seen
it a couple of times, but that's something I can't control yet. To
me, it looks like a golden haze, sometimes swirling, or shimmering
like the air above a candle flame.
Yes, I know about optical effects on light/dark borderlines, and I
know about retinal aftereffects. I have also experienced these,
and they look quite different.
I can't say that I completely understand the human aura. I can
feel it. Sometimes I can see it. I have experienced what a healer
can do with it. I also realize the complete lack of scientific evidence,
but I am convinced that it's there.
I would like to know more about the nature of the Human Energy Field.
To me, from an engineers point of view, it seems possible that
it is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Our nervous system transmits
and processes data through a combination of chemical reactions and
electrical activity. Since this electrical activity should have
a corresponding electromagnetic component, this might
explain the human aura. However, in that case we should be able to
prove the existence of such a field with measurements. I hope to be
able to do some tests in a shielded room someday. I consider this
a very interesting phenomenon, and I feel that we need to know more
about it.
Clairvoyance is a rather elusive concept. I know of a few
cases (all involving missing persons) that police officials are
said to have solved with the aid of a clairvoyant. Quite a few research
projects on paranormal phenomena have been conducted, but none of those
have produced conclusive evidence that clairvoyance is a reliable or
even reproduceable phenomenon.
I remember two occasions that convinced me that there might be
something to clairvoyance. The first one was when a career
opportunity was predicted to me. I was wondering at the time
about whether or not to quit my job, and I discussed this with a
friend. (I knew very little about clairvoyance at the time.)
"Hold off the decision", she told me, "because a new
opportunity will be offered to you, just under six months from
now." I made a note in my appointment book at the predicted date,
reasoning that it was excellent material for a 'wait and see'
test. After a few weeks I forgot about it.
I was reminded of the prediction exactly 24 weeks later,
when I wrote down an appointment in my agenda and found my
note on the same page. At the appointment I was offered another
job.
The second occasion was entirely different. I was in the middle of
a relaxation exercise. It was the kind of exercise where you
imagine yourself to be in a situation where you feel confident and
relaxed. That didn't quite work for me. I had insufficient control
over it, and what I imagined resulted only in stress and
fear.
I said nothing about what I saw in my imagination, and I don't see
how anyone could have known about it. But afterwards, a friend
(the one who made the prediction I described above) explained to
me not only why I saw what I did, but also what I had been
seeing. She specifically mentioned details. Details
that were the product of my own imagination, that existed only in my
mind, and that I hadn't mentioned to anyone.
We all know how we can 'see' things by imagining them. Some people
are more visually oriented than others, but we all know what it's
like to 'see' something in our imagination. The first time I
experienced possible clairvoyance, during a family visit, was much
like that.
We were talking small talk over coffee. If I remember correctly,
the subject was the housing shortage that followed World
War II. My mother said that even schools were short on
classroom space when she was a child, so that they sometimes had
to use a nearby attic for a classroom.
As she mentioned this, I suddenly saw this attic in my mind. The
picture was unusually clear and vivid, much more so than when I
try to imagine something. (I'm not really a visually oriented
person.) I saw the heavy, oak beams that held up the roof. I saw
the sunlight slanting in through the dirty windows, the rough
wooden floor, and the low, wooden benches that were standing in a
square in a corner of the attic. I saw the spiral of stairs
leading up to the attic, and the white iron rail that ran along
the side. It was a flash that lasted perhaps a second or two, no
more, but I could remember every detail of it.
When I asked my mother to describe the attic, her description
matched what I had seen in every detail. Later we talked more
(about the construction of the benches, for example, and about the
exact location of the stairwell) and again every detail matched.
(Although she could not remember what the rail along the stairs
looked like, and what color it was.) It was an impressive, if
somewhat scary, experience. Logic told me that this couldn't possibly
happen, and yet it did.
There have been other occasions when I found that I knew things that I could not have known. Like the time when a friend of mine had lost a document, and I suddenly knew, without having been there, that it was on the floor under the bed. Or the time when an acquaintance mentioned a large copper vase that he had inherited from his parents. He didn't say what it looked like, but I suddenly 'saw' it in my mind, and when I made a drawing of it, he was surprised and asked me how I knew.
I wish I had an answer to that question, but I don't. This is
something that I don't understand, and all I know is that I can't
control it, let alone reproduce it.
I don't consider myself a clairvoyant. I can't even begin to
understand what caused me to have these 'flashes' (for lack of a
better word). But when they occurred, the clarity and accuracy of
details was almost scary.
Yes, I know about suggestivity, and about how old memories can
suddenly surface and be mistaken for new information. I know about
the 'observer effect' and about misinterpretation. I know about cold
reading (a technique to convince people that you know all about
them, just by interpreting their body language). I have considered
coincidence, and I realize that a few occasions when descriptions
happened to be correct are not enough to prove anything.
Yet I haven't managed to convince myself that this is just coincidence, or that I'm fooling myself and that I'm looking for a link that isn't there. At the moment, I just don't know. I'll take things the way they come, and maybe one day I will understand what's going on. Until then, I am reluctant to draw a conclusion.
There is much more. I have felt the energy given off by a psychic
(a sensation very much like a powerful electrostatic charge). I
have seen how several people in a group were asked to think
of a random subject, and how they came up with identical subjects
several times. I have measured the electrical resistance of the
skin during treatment by a healer, and seen it vary wildly,
far beyond the limits that I have ever measured before. I have
experienced peculiar sequences of events that, in my opinion,
deviate from what I accept as normal coincidence. (For example, on
several occasions I was called by a number of people in a row, all
unrelated, who gave me the same advice in almost identical words.)
I also keep meeting people who report similar experiences, and describe
identical effects that those experiences have on them. Their
stories are remarkably similar.
There is much, much more. Perhaps as a result of this, I find that
I'm looking at the world through different eyes. I see details that used
to fade away in the background. I have noticed that the world feels
different. When I stand close enough, I can feel the difference between
a living tree and a dead one. When I encounter people, I can often
feel their emotions (especially when they're strong) before they even
have said a single word, or before I have even seen them. I have noticed
that there is a different feeling of life to each single plant,
animal, or person.
Lately I have noticed how the earth is teeming with life, and I can't
understand that I have always overlooked the intricate details that I am
seeing now.
All of the above is anecdotal, and none of it proves anything. I don't
even know how to reproduce any of it, so I'm not about to assume
that I have found a general principle. The above is just my own
subjective experience. But I feel that it should be possible to
explain it, given enough data, and I will keep trying to find
explanations.
I'm not looking specifically for a certain type of explanation. If
you look hard enough for a rational explanation, you will surely
find one. If you look hard enough for a mystical explanation, you
can be equally sure that you will find one.
If there are two explanations for a phenomenon, both based on the same
absence of hard data, it becomes largely a matter of taste which one you
accept. That may be why skeptics and mystics have been fighting
over the issue for years without any noticeable result.
I do, of course, have a few hypotheses about Man and the universe. Who doesn't? Someone might believe that Man and the universe were created by God. Or that everything came into existence without reason or purpose, just as the result of a totally random and meaningless process of nature. We all have our ideas, equally unfounded and unproven, about the origin of Man and about the answer to the question of Life, the Universe and Everything. I'm no exception.
So what do I think? I think it is quite possible that there are
more than three dimensions of space, and that higher dimensions of
space are inhabited by higher-dimensional creatures. It could very
well be that we are in fact three-dimensional manifestations of
higher-dimensional entities.
Suppose that's true. Suppose that we, as human beings, have
'extensions', so to speak, into a higher dimension. Suppose that
we are able to communicate with each other through this higher
dimension, without being conscious of that process on the physical
(i.e. three-dimensional) level.
If that were true, it would explain a lot. It would explain
clairvoyance, channeling, telepathy, prescience and a whole range
of other paranormal phenomena that I haven't discussed here.
I think it could very well be possible that Man shares a collective consciousness (perhaps the 'collective unconscious' as suggested by Jung). Such a consciousness would exist outside our normal sphere of observation, and interact with us on a subconscious level. We don't know where an idea comes from, we can't explain a hunch. Suppose that there is indeed a collective consciousness, a gestalt, that interacts with us to provide this kind of information?
Personally, I do not believe that we appear out of nowhere when we
are born, or disappear into nothing when we die. Have you ever
taken a good look at a newborn baby? Have you ever compared two newborn
babies? There is no such thing as a tabula rasa!
People are not born empty. They are born as fully functional, if
not fully grown, human beings. The 'blank slate' isn't blank at all.
The first chapter of our life is already written upon it when we are
born.
The human mind is more complex than anything else that we
know. I can't conceive how something that complex could appear
out of nothing, as the result of a random process, over and over
again.
Suppose, instead, that we are and remain a part of this postulated
collective consciousness? Suppose that we 'split off', so to
speak, from this collective consciousness when we are born, and
that we return to it when we die. I admit that it would not explain
where consciousness came from in the first place. But to me
this idea makes just as much sense as any other possible explanation
that I have heard, and more sense than most.
And who knows... Suppose that such a collective consciousness
exists. Suppose that it possesses the sum of human knowledge and
experience. Suppose that it consists of all human minds in past,
present and future.
Suppose that we have personified that consciousness and called
it God.
Yes, I know. It's a lot of supposing, and it also gets rather
mystical, which is quite unusual for me. I'll freely admit
that I do not have one little bit of hard data to back up all
those assumptions.
But then, do I need any? Because they're just what I have called
them at the beginning of this chapter: my own subjective points
of view. They're mine, they're personal, and they're no more (or
less) valid than the points of view of anyone else.