Paranormal Activity

Last night while driving home after dark I saw a row of lights overhead that seemed to be hovering. It was an airplane slowly descending for the airport nearby. But it seemed to be going so slow it was startling to me that it kept huffing forward and didn’t just fall out of the sky. I know from my travels that there’s a huge amount of mass there with all the metal and luggage and people on board. How do planes stay up there like that? Actually, it’s just a matter of physics… which most of us hardly understand so that ultimately becomes a matter of trust when you're one of the passengers.

The same with ocean liners and cruise ships. Look how massive these things are, yet instead of sinking they float. How does that work? The answer again is physics.

We don’t really have to understand physics to appreciate its benefits. Air transportation, cruise ship vacations, space travel… the scientists of our world have done the hard part, and we just appreciate the outcomes.

There are a lot of mysteries in the world. Why is some matter alive and other matter not? Where is the line between living and non-living? Even simple things like intelligence… where is the line between thinking and and non-thinking beings? For example, humans have a brain, so do dogs, and on down the chain till certain living creatures seem non-thinking but react to stimuli.

What about black holes? Who can understand that mystery? And all the mysteries surrounding UFOs. The stories are endless. What do all those testimonials of inexplicable lights amount to? What’s really under wraps in Area 51?

When I was a kid my grandmother had quite a few books about some of these things. There was one called Stranger Than Science (or something like that) which I read more than once. It had stories about mysterious sightings that were explained away as swamp gas and other natural phenomena, but came with too many unanswered questions.

My grandmother’s interest in these things was in part due to an out-of-body experience she’d had while on the operating table after a stroke. She hovered over the room and watched what she believed was twenty minutes of a surgery, doctors and nurses animated and fully engaged. The experience led to a quest which included read books outside the norm by people like Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and the Edgar Cayce Institute.

While in college she and I used to talk about these things in great detail. She shared with me papers about the remarkable mysteries of the Great Pyramid and stories about research that the Soviets were doing on psychokinesis, mind over matter.

These were undoubtedly some of the reasons I became interested in paranormal activity at an early age. What were the limits of mind power? How much have we lost through lack of its exercise?

I myself had an out-of-body experience once in which I, in an inexplicable way, was transported to another part of the campus when in college and overheard a conversation. I've known a few others with experiences not possible to explain with our normal scientific approach to things. Crackpots? I don’t know.

Anyways, these experiences and others which I don’t have time to detail here are part of the background for many of the short stories recorded in my two volumes of short stories titled Unremembered Histories and Newmanesque. There’s more to life than you can probably imagine. Modern scientists spend lifetimes trying to grasp it. Instead, I point to the cloud of unknowing and invite readers to climb the stairway. Or something like that anyway.

Make the most of your day. And take a minute to see if you can lift something heavy with your mind.