In this blog's Topics list, you will now see a new item called "Mysteries of Life".
The sorts of topics
to be included and discussed in my Mysteries of Life section are those that
deal with aspects of the "paranormal".
Some will disparage and dismiss these topics as new age, mystical, pseudo-scientific,
hocus-pocus, fantasy, or otherwise just absurd within the modern
scientific and rationalist worldview. I
understand that reaction and that skepticism, and am quite sympathetic to it. Skepticism is a necessary part of any rational thought.
I don't subscribe to conspiracy theories, organized religions, cults, magical thinking, or other non-rational and unscientific belief systems. I am a strong believer in reason, logic, and the scientific method, which over the past five hundred years have given us a powerful set of tools for evaluating, testing, proving and disproving ideas about the reality we inhabit, through a process of repeatable and peer-reviewed experimentation.
With that said, though, I have occasionally stumbled onto well-documented facts and events, and even had a few personal experiences, that challenged aspects of the scientific and materialist consensus as well as my own beliefs, and raised disturbing questions that are not easily explained by our current understanding of "objective" reality.
Two such evolving stories that have particularly caught my attention in recent years are the strange reports of many young children around the world who appear to have detailed and often-verifiable memories of recent past lives; and the newly-rehabilitated status of the UFO phenomenon, which had been denied and ridiculed by the U.S. government for three generations, only to be suddenly acknowledged and confirmed a few years ago by that same government, after the New York Times reported on a series of encounters between UFOs and a U.S. Navy carrier task force that were witnessed and recorded by many of the pilots, officers and sailors who were there when it happened.
After starting down this road, I also noticed that once I had begun to delve into the history and scientific study of these two particular areas of investigation, I soon discovered other types of curious phenomena and widely reported psychological and paranormal experiences that seemed to be similar, or at least somehow related.
One possibility to explain this proliferation of weirdness is that once you head down the rabbit hole of giving any credence to the paranormal, you'll inevitably be drawn deeper into it, much like other forms of irrational belief and madness. But it is also conceivable that there are real common threads or unknown forces involved in many of these unexplained mysteries. These perceived similarities between different paranormal phenomena often seem to suggest the same need to probe our limited understanding of the true nature of our human minds (as distinct from our brains), and our consciousness and perceptions.
For example, I recently discovered that the phenomenon of the Near Death Experience (NDEs), when studied in a scientific manner across a large data set of patient reports, raises many of the same sorts of age-old questions of mind, body and soul, and of space and time, as are found in attempts to understand the meaning of accounts of apparent reincarnation, or of UFOs and reported alien encounters.
Meanwhile, some of our contemporary physicists, still looking for a grand unified theory of existence, suggest with increasing frequency that quantum physics, and its postulation of an endless multiverse determined by consciousness, choice and observation, may offer explanations for some of the paranormal phenomena that have been reported recently, and throughout most of recorded history for that matter. What are we to make of that?
It may be that none of these questions can ever be convincingly answered, explained or proven. I'm very open to that possibility. But the process of documenting and cataloguing strange facts and events, the study of puzzling and often traumatic or transformative experiences many people have reported that don't seem to be "normal", and the search for greater knowledge and understanding of these odd phenomena, is still intriguing to me.
Therefore, I will occasionally report on good books, movies and TV shows by and about people who are exploring "mysteries of life" from a scientific and academic perspective. The more we can know about what's really going on in these lives, minds and world of ours, the better, don't you think? And besides, it's fun! Who doesn't love a good eerie mystery?