Paranormal phenomena and spirituality

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Let’s begin with some terminology. The word spirituality is common to all of us.
And yet, it has a variant that has a very different connotation. There is spirituality and there is spiritualism. Like we have materialism.
So there is spiritualism. So, spiritualism refers to the notion surrounding the existence of spirits. Now, again, the word spirit in this context of spirits is used to refer to disembodied beings, ghosts and other such beings who exist at different levels of reality and who may communicate through some means.
So there is spiritualism, which refers to the system of thought, which holds that such spirits exist and which study such spirits. So spirituality is different from spiritualism in the sense that spirituality focusses primarily on life’s non-material side, but not necessarily in the sense of disembodied existence, not so much of ghosts and spirits, but just the fact that we are not just material beings, but that there is a non-material spiritual side to us. So, the word spirituality has quite a positive connotation in today’s world.
But spiritualism has certain levels of negative connotations. And understanding this is important when we move towards paranormal phenomena. Actually, again, the word paranormal is not the best word because the paranormal, the so-called paranormal phenomena are often normal for many people.
Many people have actually experienced what is talked about in these paranormal phenomena. And so the word paranormal is used by the academy, especially by mainstream science to refer to those phenomena that are not explainable by the current scientific knowledge or the current understanding of the laws of physics. And we will discuss what these paranormal phenomena are and whether, so paranormal phenomena in that sense are actually not so abnormal.
Many normal people have experienced them in the normal course of their lives, but still the nomenclature remains. And since that is the mainstream nomenclature, we will use it here. So, paranormal phenomena themselves do not comprise spirituality directly because the word spiritual as is understood in the Vedic tradition refers to a particular category of reality.
So, firstly, the Gita s ontology categorises matter into two fundamental categories, that is, categorises existence rather, bifurcates existence into two fundamental categories, that is matter and spirit, the material and the spiritual. And thereafter, the material is further classified into two categories, that is, gross matter and subtle matter. And most of what is called as paranormal actually falls in the category of subtle matter, not in the, it happens through the functions of subtle matter, not so much the functions of spirit and thus it is not intrinsically spiritual.
What this means is that actually the paranormal phenomena, they themselves do not comprise spirituality, but they point very persuasively towards the existence of a realm of reality that goes beyond the gross material. And by pointing to this reality, by highlighting this reality, it can open people s minds to considering the idea that there is more to reality than gross material reality. There is more to reality than what is to be understood, what is understandable by the laws of physics as they are understood today.
So, Charles Tartt is a prominent scientist who has studied the paranormal for over 6 to 7 decades of his life and he has written a book called The End of Materialism and in that book he refers to among the whole galaxy of phenomena that fall under the rubric of paranormal, he highlights five, calling them the big five and they are telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and psychic healing. So, we will just get an introductory understanding of all of these. We may focus on one of them in a little more detail and we will move forward towards understanding further the implications of analysing these phenomena.
So, telepathy, the word tele is very common in today s world. We have television or what we call in short as TV, is vision is to see. So, television refers to that technology or that methodology, that apparatus which enables us to see things which are far away from us.
So, we have telegram which is now uncommon. Now we have emails, but in the past when people had to send some messages very urgently, they would send telegram. So, basically it is a message that comes from a distance.
So, telepathy refers primarily to communication between minds. So, for example, a person who may be significantly away, at a significant distance away from another person, that person may decide that I want to communicate with XYZ and may start thinking about that person and start thinking about transmitting a message to that person. Now, they are not using emails or cell phones or any technology that is known to modern science and this person decides to say something and then the other person just comes to know about it.
So, Dr. Ryan among many others has studied this phenomena scientifically. In fact, all these phenomena have been studied scientifically and we will come back to the study of telepathy a little later once again. But telepathy basically means that messages being communicated from one person to another directly from the mind to the mind without any technology that is known or understandable today, with today’s conception of matter and physics.
The second is clairvoyance. Clairvoyance refers to the capacity to see that which is not possible to see with normal vision. So, for example, people who are clairvoyant, they are able to, if we give them a closed envelope and even without opening the envelope, they can tell what is written inside that envelope.
Or if a closed book is there in a bookshelf in a library, they can tell what are the contents of the book. So, whereas telepathy involves the communication of thoughts, what is inside the mind of a person gets known to somebody else at a different place. In clairvoyance, what is happening at some other place or what is written at some other place that is seen by the clairvoyant person.
So, clairvoyance is more about, we could call it extended vision, vision that is extended physically so that one sees what is not possible to see normally. But it refers to things which in other circumstances could be seen with one’s eyes. So, if the envelope had been opened, then the person could have read the content.
But thoughts inside a mind cannot be known at all unless they are verbalised. There is a difference between telepathy and clairvoyance, knowing of thoughts and knowing of visible content without seeing that content. Then the third kind of paranormal phenomena or psychic phenomena as it is called is precognition.
Now, the word psychic is often used to refer to these phenomena and again the word psychic has got many connotations, most of which are not always charitable. So, for example, when a person is very mentally disturbed, when a person is almost behaving like crazy, we may say this person is psychic or this implies that the person is no longer in control of one’s mind. So, the word psychic often has strongly negative connotations.
The word psyche is often associated with the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and that has led to the situation where the word psyche often has, it simply can in a non-judgemental sense refer to the mind, but it refers to many other things because of the connotations with which it has come to be associated. But in paranormal studies, without any negative connotations, the word psychic is simply used to refer to phenomena that point to the mind and it can be explained primarily in terms of the mind. Now, another word used in this context is also PSI, psi.
So, it is at one level, it is the 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and this is used to refer to paranormal phenomena of faculties collectively. Phenomena is the event that happen and faculties are the abilities that some people possess by which they are able to perceive this phenomena. PSI can also refer to the psychic force that is said to manifest through these.
That means, if we consider a particular understanding of PSI, then it can refer to that there is a mysterious force which is there in the universe which make these things happen and so there is that force, there are the events which happen because of this force and there are certain, this force and the event that happened because of this force is not accessible to everyone. So, there are some people to whom it is accessible and so the faculties that they have which make it accessible to them, that can also be referred to as PSI. So, either way, the important thing is to recognise that going beyond semantics, that there is a whole world that is existing, whole world of perception experience that exists beyond the world as is known to us through our normal experiences of the world as understood through the laws of physics.
Now, moving on to from clairvoyance to precognition. So, precognition is to know. Precognition is to know before.
So, this refers to certain people s capacity to know certain things even before they happen. Now, in the world s literature, often in the world, especially ancient literature, there are often references to oracles and prophets who talk about things that have, things that are going to happen in future and quite often their oracles or their prophecies do come true in due course. Now, when these are described in literature, even if this literature is purported to be history, today s modern mind often dismisses them as just myths, as embellishments on whatever historical might be there in that story and thus they are not considered to be real.
But this is known to have happened, this is known to have been observed by people. So, for example, a person might be able to see something that is going to happen in the future. And this is not as abnormal as we may think.
Sometimes when we are about to go somewhere and we get a strong gut feeling, no, we should not go at that time. So, we decide that we will not go and then we find say, we are going to go by a particular train and the train meets with an accident. Now, we may not have precisely predicted the accident, but we just got a gut feeling that, no, I should not do this.
And why I should not do this, we may not be able to tell specifically, nor might we be able to give a clear understanding of the source from which that feeling came. But it is just a gut feeling that came and we acted on it. So, for some people, what we call as gut feeling becomes much more clear and crystallised.
These are the people who can exhibit precognition. So, they can tell, at least to some extent, what is going to happen in the future. Now, the Vedic texts sometimes talk about some sages being trikalajna, knowing past, present and future.
This precognition is not exactly that. Precognition usually refers to the capacity to know certain things about the future. And the way we know these things is by some force that one oneself does not know what, how it happens or why it happens or from where it happens.
One just knows that it happens. Now, so, for example, so, precognition is something which we may experience. So, for example, Dr. Tartt in his book End of Materialism, he gives one of his own experiences.
Once in 1973, on February 4, when he was working in his office, he took a coffee break. And while he was preparing the coffee, he found himself repeating the word coup d’etat. A coup d’etat is a word which refers to especially a political move, which involves overthrow of political power.
Now, when this came up, he was puzzled. Why am I referring to this again and again? He thought about it, found the sound of the word appealing and repeated a few more times. And then he stopped verbalising it, went back to his work.
He thought about it a few times again, briefly. And the next day he found in his email inbox, a mail from someone named Mrs. Coup d’etat. And she was writing to him with great concern about her son, who had gone into an altered state of consciousness.
And she was consulting him about it. Now, the important point is that he had never heard before that coup d’etat was also a name of a person. And he had never thought of that word coup d’etat.
And while he was thinking of that word coup d’etat, coincidentally, that was the time when this woman, she after deliberating for a long time whether to write to Dr. Tartt or not, she had finally decided, thinking about him, wanting to give a message to him, she finally wrote the message. So, she was very concerned about the well-being of her son. And out of that concern, she wanted to, because her son had seemed to have gone into an altered or disturbed state of consciousness.
And since her son had earlier attended a course on altered states of consciousness that Dr. Tartt had conducted, and that could possibly have been a trigger for him to seek altered state of consciousness and to thereby become disturbed from normal consciousness. So, she was concerned by all this and she felt that she should write to Dr. Tartt. But then she was hesitant whether Tartt will get the mail, try mail, respond to the mail, read the mail or not.
And as she was thinking about him, wanting to convey a message to him, that was a thought time when the words coup d’etat, coup d’etat, coup d’etat started coming in his mind. He started verbalising them without any background, without any reason. So, this I gave as a simple example, to illustrate the point that coup d’etat is not all that radical or uncommon, that, sorry, not coup d’etat, precognition.
It is not all that radical or uncommon. It does happen for all of us in some small ways, and for some people in fairly big ways. Now, beyond that, there is also psychokinesis.
Psycho refers to the mind, kinesis refers to the, like we have kinetic, kinetic energy means there is the energy which brings about motion. Kinetics is the static, there is static physics and there is kinetic physics we could say. Kinetic physics refers to the study of matter in flow.
So, it is a, serious deliberation whether how all these researches, how all these findings, they can be used to boost our spiritual understanding and we could understand. So, in general, psychokinesis refers to the capacity of some people to move things physically by the power of the mind. So, for example, it is well known that some people can say bend spoons just by looking at them.
Some people are known to even be able to lift weights by just looking at them. So, psychokinesis, the capacity to get things into motion just by the power of the mind. Now, we may even find some videos about such phenomena on YouTube and some people may have some extraordinary capacities to do such things.
So, psychokinesis refers to this capacity that the mind is able to influence matter, especially in terms of getting it into motion and then there is psychic healing where some people just by the power of their thoughts are able to heal. Now, psychic healing has been extensively researched and Dr. Michael Cremo in his book Human Devolution gives many scientifically well-documented cases of people who were declared to be medically incurable and they may have had some structural damages to their body, their hand might have been burned and scarred completely or they might have some even severe internal damages to the tissue, they may have cancer and they do a particular thing such as say bathe in a lake considered sacred and by that bathing they seem to be cured, they seem to actually become better, they seem to have recovered fully and not just seem to in the sense that the seeming is only about the cause in terms of effect. When the doctors treating them saw them they called it a medical miracle, how did this happen? This particular disease is considered to be incurable and here this person is cured and fully cured.
So, now in this case what is the psychic part? Is it simply bathing in that particular river? No, it is bathing in that river could be the one case but it is often not everybody who bathes in that river gets cured. It is often a matter of faith, it is often a matter of prayer, it is a matter of attitude of the mind which takes place and these are one kind of psychic healing but more common is that some people who are known to be religious or who are known to be mystics, not just religious, those who are known to be mystics, they are capable of doing things. Say for example, some sick people come to them and those sick people are told to just have faith or do something, some specific ritual, say carry some sacred ash with them or apply some marks on their body and they get cured.
Now those marks or that ash itself does not have the power and sometimes there is nothing, just a person meditates and maybe envisions in the mind that this person’s injury be cured and the person becomes cured. Again, this is an introductory talk, so we will not go so much into the scientific evidences, the researches that support these things. Those interested in this can look at, as I mentioned two books, Dr. Cremo’s Human Devolution and Dr. Tartt’s The End of Materialism.
There are well-documented researches and papers which deal with this issue and those can be studied. The purpose of this talk is primarily to give a introductory overview and then to offer an explanatory framework for making sense of these things. So, you may wonder how does this happen? Now, as I started talking about the Vedic or the Gita’s framework for looking at reality and that is tripartite, there is matter and spirit fundamentally and matter is divided into gross matter and subtle matter.
And modern science largely studies gross matter, it does not study subtle matter. So, there are ways in which the powers latent in subtle matter can be tapped and one of those ways and some of those ways are what are being glimpsed through this big five, telepathic clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and psychic healing. So, in the Vedic parlance, if you look at the broad gamut of Vedic literature, especially the Puranic and the Itihasic literature, there we will find the description of the concept called Siddhi or Yoga Siddhi.
So, these are mystic perfections and they involve being able to manipulate matter in extraordinary ways. So, for example, the 11th Canto of the Srimad Bhagavatam, the Uddhava Gita talks about eight primary Siddhis, that is, for example, Prapti Siddhi, where one can, one decides, okay, dates are very delicious in the Middle East and one just sits over here and simply seems to stretch the arm and get some delicious dates from the Middle East. So, this is, we could say at one level, some kind of psychokinesis.
So, we could have a whole class where we could correlate the Ashtasiddhis with the Big Five of paranormal phenomena. But more important than this such semantic correlation is the substantive correlation. That means, semantic correlation means, okay, okay, what is called Prapti Siddhi in Vedic parlance? What will it refer to in modern science? Will it be psychokinesis? Will it be clairvoyance? So, these are things which you can do some correlation.
But let’s not get caught in names right now. Let’s focus on principles. So, such capacity for Siddhis is actually not considered a spiritual attainment.
In fact, it is usually considered to be a distraction from spiritual attainment. Because those who have such capacities, those who have such Siddhis, they are, because they can do something special which others can’t do. So, people in general become fascinated by them.
And these people also may become proud of their abilities, infatuated by the popularity which comes from their abilities. And thus, a popularity may become a distractor for them from their spirituality. So, the important thing is, if we consider Patanjali Yoga Sutra also, Patanjali Yoga Sutra doesn’t focus so much on acknowledging, it acknowledges these Siddhis, but then it doesn’t dwell on them elaborately.
And the overall tenor of the book and the explicit writing of most yoga commentators, it highlights this point that such yogic Siddhis are considered to be distractions in the spiritual path. They are considered to be distractions from Samadhi and distractions which need to be resisted. They will offer one to popularity in this world, but they will deprive one of spirituality.
Now, with the cultural context changing, it’s possible also that in today’s world, that some people may get so caught in such mystic phenomena, in the paranormal phenomena, that they may spend their whole life trying to replicate those phenomena, trying to evaluate those phenomena. But the Gita’s focus is not on evaluating or replicating these phenomena, so per se, but on understanding what these phenomena mean for a proper appreciation of reality, of the nature of reality. So, while bifurcating reality into bipartite or tripartite levels, so that means either matter of spirit and then gross matter, subtle matter and spirit, while doing this kind of bifurcation, the important thing is that, so the thrust of Yoga is not on manipulating matter, but on transcending matter.
And thrust of Bhakti Yoga is not just in transcending matter, but on connecting with the source of matter and spirit, that is the Supreme Lord. And the Supreme Lord is at the end of the Bhagavad Gita, referred to as Yogeshwara. Bhagavad Gita talks about Yoga extensively.
In fact, it’s a Yoga text. And it, the colophon at the end of each chapter of the Gita, योगशास्त्र तः दितियो अध्यायः तः नौमो अध्यायः तः एकादश्यो अध्यायः Yogashastra comes every time. So, it’s a Yogashastra and it’s significant that it concludes with Yogeshwara that the So, it’s assured that on the side of Arjuna will be will be that Lord who is the Lord of Yoga.
He’s the Yogeshwara. And by being with him, by working on Krishna’s side, he’s sure to attain victory. So, Yogic powers may give us access to certain mysticism, certain mystical powers, whether they be what a PSI has discovered or whatever else it might be.
But by understanding the spiritual knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita, by connecting with the Supreme Lord, one can get the ultimate destination. One can attain life’s supreme perfection. That is what we all should aspire from.
And that is what the Bhagavad Gita offers us as life’s ultimate perfection. So, if we have interest in these paranormal phenomena, we can study them and we can talk about those people who are excessively sceptical about life’s spiritual side to get them to open their minds that there is more to reality than gross matter. And there is subtle matter.
But our focus is not on subtle matter. Our focus is on spirit, on the spiritual dimension of life. And for some people, these paranormal phenomena can become like a useful stepping stone to ascend towards life’s spiritual reality, to exploring it, experiencing it and relishing it.