These are all great comments. I'm going to pick things apart in no particular order and see what spills out!
Thanks. I'll check it out.
How would you explain the ability of some humans to have knowledge which defies the normal constraints of space and time? I was reminded of passages from the book,
, by Colin Wilson (well known author of
The Outsiders).
In 1964 an experimental psychologist named Lawrence LeShan became increasingly interested in the way the mind can influence the body and decided — with some misgivings — to study the evidence for extra-sensory perception. This was out of sheer conscientiousness, for his training as a scientist had convinced him that it could not exist. ‘I was fairly sure that I would wind up trying to figure out how it was that serious men like William James, Gardner Murphy, and half a dozen Nobel Prize winners had been deluded into believing such nonsense.’
Careful study changed his mind ... (examples are cited) ...
The comparison of many such ‘illuminations’ with the descriptions of ‘psychics’ like Eileen Garrett, Rosalind Heywood and Phoebe Payne finally convinced LeShan that both the ‘medium’ and the mystic experience the same abrupt shift of viewpoint so they find themselves looking into another world. It might be compared to a man sitting in a boat looking at the surface of the ocean, who suddenly plunges his head beneath the surface and sees an entirely new world down below. And for some odd reason beyond our understanding, this paranormal world below the ‘sea’ is timeless, so that events in the future or the past can be studied just as easily as the present. This is one of the most basic statements of all the mystics: that time is somehow an illusion. And this, LeShan thought, must be the ultimate solution — the only solution — to the mystery of precognition. Of course the statement that time is unreal strikes most of us as nonsense — the philosopher G. E. Moore thought he had disproved it by pulling out his watch — yet if there are really people who can foresee the future then our commonsense view of time as a one-way street must somehow be wrong.
And that's just the first chapter, part of it at least. I'm not denying that most of us perceive linear time as an absolute. What I am suggesting is that we do not realize that our "present moment" experiences causality from what we would call "the future" in ways we cannot comprehend. That's all I got time for now. A good, clean argument is a meditative learning process!
As an aside, an "official review" of
Beyond the Occult had this to say:
"Novelist and mystic Wilson is probably the wrong person to write nonfiction examinations of the occult. The part of the occult that purports to be scientific (e.g., parapsychology) requires the ability to think like a scientist and to evaluate evidence. Instead, Wilson gives many nice anecdotes, all of dubious value scientifically. These he "supports" by offering quotations from fringe scientific sources, never mentioning that most scientists don't accept them. Because there are many popular misinterpretations cited in the bibliography, Wilson's narrow speculations are ultimately built on sand. His work would have been less spectacular, but more deserving of attention, if he had based it more solidly on established facts. He writes well, and may hold the reader's interest, but what he says will do little toward unifying the occult as a serious scientific subject."
- Gordon Stein, Univ. of Rhode Island
