Communications III: People with Paranormal Talents

When we hear about people with paranormal gifts, can we say that they “communicate with the beyond”? I’ve had a few (fewer than five) unambiguous experiences of telepathy. In these experiences communications reached me, but invariably from living people, thus persons alive and well in the ordinary physical order. I’ve had one unambiguous dream of the future, reported here. Its content dealt with a future event in my ordinary life. Nevertheless—but stretching the concepts quite a bit—I include the experiences of people with paranormal talents as pointing at the beyond, not necessarily in the sense of communicating with it but in the sense of entering it temporarily in some way in order to recover information useful in this dimension.

What do I mean by such people? I include psychics and saints of a certain type, specifically those (of the latter) who’re able to heal, see the future, and read minds. In this category I also put people in whose vicinity strange things happen beyond healings: they can find lost things; they appear somehow to arrange things so that problems are solved; etc. The powers of these people range from relatively low to rather spectacular; some few are able to control them better; these individuals can also hide them at will. Saints with gifts are most certainly functionally psychics; they are called saints because they stem from intensely religious cultures or subcultures; they also tend to assign their gifts to supernatural agencies. As do some psychics, of course. I’m sure that we are dealing here with a clustering of experiences that arise everywhere. The interpretation of these experiences—by those who have them and by society—are culturally determined. Cultures in which concepts like “psychic” or “saint” have no currency have their own labels. But descriptions of these people match those found in the West.

Are these people real—or are they faking? I’ve no doubt that they are real. The only reason some few charlatans pretend to have powers is because such powers exist in others and collective knowledge and memory testifies to their deeds. You’ve got to have the real before the imitators make their appearance. Of course they are present—and a good thing too. What would the skeptics do without them?

Problems surround this field. Psychic powers are rarely if ever under the full control of people who have them. The weaker the power the more stochastic it is. In the exercise of these powers, the counterparties involved also need some kind of talent. Even the great healers cannot heal everyone. “Faith” must be present. But faith in this sense is itself a paranormal power, not just a strong thought that willfully asserts: “I believe. I do!” These matters unfold beneath the level of rational mentation. For these reasons psychic detectives, to use an example, do not invariably solve every crime. If they did, such detectives would be in very great demand and pull down very high salaries. But that some psychic detectives, in some instances, do solve hopelessly deadlocked cases is also true.

The presence of such people in the population and the exercise of these powers, when they do work, do seem to me to substantiate the hypothesis that it is possible temporarily to step out of the physical order, temporarily to gain visions from another perspective, and (and especially in the case of healings) bring energies to bear that can produce “miraculous” effects. If you assume, as I do, that two orders are involved, one placed above the other but each one governed by real laws of the universe, then the term “miraculous” loses its sense of “arbitrary intervention by agencies” out of this world. My own interest in these matters is strictly limited to understanding. I don’t seek such powers and all that is imagined to go with them. Most of the people who have such powers in much greater measure than the ordinary human could probably tell you all the hardships that go with a talent that “bloweth where it listeth” as John’s Gospel speaks of the spirit, as of the wind, in 3:8. What I conclude from the presence of these people with paranormal talents is that we are living on the edges of another order; we are generally shielded from it (understood either positively or negatively), but certain arrangements in our make-up permit us sometimes to act from or with the aid of phenomena accessible there.

Now a comment or two about the specific concept of “communications.” In the case of psychics generally, one does not encounter the claim of communications with spirits. Whatever range of the beyond the psychics reach, it is not evidently populated by spirits. The saints, to be sure, experience visions and communications with transcendental figures, but the content of these messages is almost always of a moral or theological portent. There is one famed exception. It is the case of Emanuel Swedenborg, the eighteenth century scientist-seer who claimed to have visited heaven and hell, to have held converse with the angels, indeed to have communicated with the departed. Swedenborg, however, is a very special case and requires separate consideration.