Rejecting or Believing the Paranormal

Posted on October 12, 2007
Filed Under Society, Spirituality, Consciousness |

The Development of Higher Senses Why do some people openly accept the “paranormal”, whilst others willfully or bemusedly reject it? I have noticed something very interesting with spiritual and self development, that appears to create a divergence on this very subject. What do I mean by that? Well - it seems to be like this; depending upon an individuals perspective, their path of spiritual development takes them in a number of directions.

On the one-hand for many people, their spiritual development is about becoming a more well-rounded person, and being more in-tune with their inner self (and perhaps their spirit and soul) - as well as the people around them. But for many other people, spiritual development brings about an awakening of our higher-senses - such as intuition, empathy, clairvoyance etc.

The divergence I have noticed is that that the former group usual will not accept the possibility or existence of these higher senses. And at this point in my own development, I have to question why that is. Why does a person who is open to the possibility of “the spirit” refuse to be open (or sometimes even discuss) something like telepathy for example?

Paranormal experiences are about conditioning.

As I mentioned in my post on Awareness Development - spiritual development comes about through the breaking down of our conditioning. Eventually the removal of our conditioning leads to a greater awareness of our own being, and of reality itself. This is because what we see, and percieve is directly influenced by what we think and believe. This naturally swings both ways on the acceptance or non-acceptance of the subject, but more on that shortly.

There have been a number of wonderful experiment done on the nature of our perception. Our brains process what we see in the world, and “filter” our vision so that our brain can understand it. When we look at the world, the image that hits our retina is upside-down. The brain then flips that image up the correct way again. In these experiments people wore lenses that flipped the image upside-down before it got to the brain. Therefore everything appeared upside-down to people. But after a few days, the brain “corrected” the vision, and flipped the image back up the other way. This is because the brain is used to seeing the world in a certain way!

Conditioning affects us in exactly the same way. The stronger our beliefs on something, the greater those beliefs will effect our perception in very literal ways. If we believe something isn’t possible, then to all intents and purposes we will never see that thing occur. By the same token when we strongly believe in the possibility of something, we can see it manifest in every random or general event.

Do we automatically associate the paranormal with “crazy” TV Shows?

This is where conscious thinking comes into play. It allows us to develop our awareness so that we can learn to understand whether or not our belief and conditioning is influencing our perception. In nearly all ancient traditions this is exactly what was done in their forms of spiritual development. The breaking of our conditioning - not in favour of another form of conditioning - but rather to be replaced with a conscious awareness of ourselves and our environment.

It is this lack of conditioning which awakens our higher-senses, because we stop pre-judging the information that arrives into our brains, and instead consciously consider it in all its possible aspects - and what we believe only forms a part in that conscious consideration.

Of course - the above statement is often countered with the idea that it is still just another belief, or just an opinion. That is understandable, because the notion of a person accepting something different to what they believe, is very hard for many people to grasp. We are too conditioned with the false idea that a person cannot step outside of their own beliefs. But the fact is, if a person so desires, they are quite capable of believing in nothing, or conversely believing in everything. Why is it not also possible for a person to believe in everything and nothing? It is only our conditioned linear, one-tracked mind that repeals against the possibility of accepting two or more contradictory thoughts.

An open mind.

All that said however, I am not saying that everyone has to accept this. What I am saying however is that if you are on a path of self and spiritual development then you should surely be learning to question yourself on why you accept or reject anything.

Yet in many cases this consciousness awareness of ones own acceptance / rejection, doesn’t appear to be what is happening when it comes to the subject of higher-senses or what is often considered “the paranormal”.

Perhaps it is partially because these subjects exist on the fringe, and are often the focus of “half-baked” TV shows. Or the study of perceived lunatics, hippies, psychedelic lovers and so forth. But then consider this. These people lack the same conditioning of the “average” person, yet their wacky or wiggy behavior is automatically associated with the subjects they discuss.

In the mind of the individual looking at these groups, the strangeness of the subjects has automatically been associated with the groups themselves. Yet this automatic association is rarely seen as a reflection on the observer.

In the end, it seems that no matter how aware or intelligent we think we are - there is a line of possibilities that we are not prepared to cross. And for many, that line is a lot closer than they perhaps realize.