Querying the Supernatural: What Say You?

Ghosts

Ghosts are fascinating apparitions, expressed (some contend) visually – either to the seer alone or several people at once – or through another sense: a rush of cold air in a closed room, strange, unexplained voices or noise, a sudden strong smell, or objects flying without discernible cause. Hospice patients, near death, frequently report seeing deceased loved ones appear at the bedside. Witnesses do not see the apparition, but the dying person does and usually it is very real and incredibly comforting to them.

IF ghosts exist, it could relate to some disturbance in the energy field associated with the place of the sighting. If a person happens to enter the field - any person - and conditions are sensitized to react, the ghost experience will manifest, visually or otherwise. Conventional thought is that a highly charged event occurred to the ghost at or near the physical setting: a cruel and horrendous murder, a separation or love lost with great emotional trauma, or some other catastrophe perhaps involving unfinished business. Is the ghost trapped between dimensions, held prisoner by fate? Such was the agony of the protagonist of the movie Ghost.

I did have one supernatural experience when I was about 11 years old. Asleep in my bedroom, a bright light intruded so intensely it woke me up. A figure in a white robe stood by my bed. I trembled so much from fright I didn't know what to do. I Reached for the hem of the garment as I tried to look up at the face of this being, but the light was so brilliant and blinding I was unable to distinguish any features. I quickly looked away. When I again marshaled my courage and tried to look, the figure was gone. I sat by the bed, fully awake, shaking for the longest time. I told myself that night to remember always that this was real - not a figment of my imagination – because I knew instinctively, in adulthood, I would question the veracity of this experience.

Was this a ghost? Was it an angel? Was it Jesus? I don't know...but the experience was real and it actually happened to me. Is it any less authentic given that I am at a loss to explain it after all these years? I think not.

What Of Telepathy?

I have personally experienced mental telepathy. I was a psychology student and, with a group of other students, we decided to experiment with telepathy. Alone and standing apart from the others in the group, I drew an abstract figure on a note pad. A person in the group, about 15 or 20 feet from me, had pad and pencil at the ready. With no verbal communication and my hands shielded from view I projected to that person a mental picture of what I was drawing and silently repeated over and over a description of the figure. When he indicated he had finished his own drawing, I drew a second abstract image in the same manner and then a third. Then we all gathered together to compare his drawings with mine. Imagine how astonished I was to look upon a close approximation of each image I had been projecting telepathically. The "receiver" tended to "double" my image! For example, I drew a half circle, closed with the letter "S". The other student drew a full circle with the letter "S" dividing the middle. No tricks. No secret text images (back then we didn't have cell phones). Absolutely no question ln my mind but that we had communicated telepathically.


Query

So what accounts for the supernatural? Pure science surely refutes any such expression as valid. How can these experiences be subjected to empirical test, irrefutable scrutiny?  But science does seem to be toying, rather seriously, with concepts that approach the fantastical. Think quantum science. Think parallel universes. Think sub atomic particle transfer from one site to another through space. Think alternate reality.

What say you?