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Nov. 14, 2005 If you have had a few private experiences which you believe to be mystical or paranormal, as, for example, premonitions, déjà-vu, prophetic dreams or clairvoyance, and they have helped you with your personal life or your understanding of the nature of things, good for you! But if you go online bragging about being a psychic or a mystic, you should be able to demonstrate. Serving up a lot of idle accounts of supposed paranormal abilities, extrasensory perceptions or ghosts without any ability to present credible evidence doesn’t make sense. Basically, it’s put up or shut up. Anyway, below I offer some ideas about how such notions arise. In my younger days, I knew quite a few people who were involved to one degree or another in mysticism and cultivation of the paranormal. In the bohemian environment in which I had the occasion to dwell for several years, one is likely to meet all sorts of people with a great variety of claims: people who call themselves witches and wizards; people who claim to have extrasensory perception; people who leave their bodies or transcend reality or see the “white light”; astrologers and fortune-tellers using tarot cards, star charts, I Ching and Nostradamus; prophets, sibyls, augurs and oracles; phrenologists; numerologists; messianics and mind-readers; Rosicrucians and Theosophists; and so on. Although many of these people were young, there were older ones too. I even had one who called himself the “Prophet” try to levitate me in his church in Chicago. Some of these people were part of the drug culture. They used mescaline, peyote, LSD, psilocybin and other “psychedelic” drugs. But many were not. Others were quite obviously mentally disturbed. I recall one man who claimed to be “king of the solar system”. Their world is a beautiful and terrible world where everything is dramatic, magnificent and cataclysmic, but false. Sometimes they are caught up in galactic conspiracies or wars of the worlds that do not exist. They converse with the long dead, talk about the “Age of Aquarius”, hold seances, read the Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Jewish Kabbala, the Urantia Book, the Dao De Jing, the Mahabharata and the Upanishads. In the same vicinity at the same time, there were other people who were busy with other thiugs, like trying to advance their careers, getting college degrees, trying to learn mathematics or chemistry, write reports for school, land good jobs and find good apartments or buy houses. Their world was far less dramatic. You might say that it was uninspired, pedestrian, plebeian and prosaic. They weren’t communing with their ancestors in the stars or poring over the ancient Hindu and Buddhist texts. They might be struggling with a textbook on accounting, physiology or geology instead. They weren’t trying to derive supernatural powers from some seance or ritual; they were setting up bank accounts and getting licenses. My first wife, whose name was Lori, was definitely a member of the first category. This was so long ago that I cannot even remember whether she had attended college for any length of time, but one thing was certain, and that was that she had absolutely no intellectual ability. She was Jewish by ancestry, but did not practise Judaism. She could recite some Jewish prayers in Hebrew, and often dropped Yiddish expressions like, “Oy schlimmazel” and “Oy veh’st mir”, but she didn’t really speak either of those two languages or any other foreign language. Her ability to do arithmetic was as close to nil as humanly possible; she could divide, multiply, add and subtract numbers of one or two digits. Her spelling was deficient; she would spell ‘running’ as if it were ‘runing’. She took absolutely no interest in history, geography or science, not even in current events. She did like art, and even painted herself in the geometric style of Piet Mondrian, who was her hero. She liked music too, but not the kind I like, that’s for sure. She doted on Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary. She liked to go to nightclubs for cocktails, and showed a preference for Jewish comedians, like Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman and Lenny Bruce. She did no sewing or needlework. Actually, most of her friends were in the second category that I mentioned above, college types, go-getters, people with clear, analytical minds, but Lori was a laggard in her peer-group. She shunned everything that required serious study or discipline. But she was well-known in our milieu as the unofficial “chief mystic”. She was into everything. She was into Yoga. She was into Zen. She was into Native American religions. She was in the Rosicrucians. She was into astrology. She was into the Kabbala. She was into biorhythms. She was into handwriting analysis. She was into psychoanalysis. She was into health food. You name it, she was into it. Her predilection for fads possibly mirrored her fickleness as a spouse. The last time I saw her she was on her fourth husband, and sounded as if she was about ready to get divorced again. As I look back, I feel a little sorry for her. In addition to being flighty and backward, she was of only mediocre appearance. I think her fondness for the paranormal and the mystical may have been as escape for her from a reality in which she was making a poor showing. In the little theatre of magic that she set up in her imagination, she became an important personage and an earth-shaker. If she had been a raving beauty earning top dollar as an executive or lawyer, she’d probably never have had a mystical notion in her head. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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