The Need for Serious Review of Other-Worldly or Supernormal Experience

It is convenient, and perhaps comforting, to simply deny reality to experiences that people have, rather than to grapple with the implications of those experiences. We stick convenient labels on certain phenomena and believe by doing so, we have understood and defined those phenomena. Delusion, hallucination, mental illness, drug-induced visual or auditory confusion, traumatic triggering of complexes, physical brain damage, confused dream interpretation, PTSD, breakdown of body chemistry in near-death events, — there are countless ways we discount experiences that people have. Nonetheless, reports of extraordinary experiences abound, world-wide, throughout human history and, while some may be explained by the convenient definitions we have invented, many of them stand as inexplicable based on the blindered approach we take to understanding them.

There are well documented cases of a sibling or other family member having a distinct experience of being visited in a dream state by a relative at the exact time of death of that individual many thousands of miles away, such as occurred with individuals who took part in World War I in Europe with their relatives elsewhere.

Sigmund Freud tried to disentangle the experiences and symbolic meaning of dream sequences of his patients. He was limited however by his approach of trying to tie everything back to some kind of past event or experience rather than determining whether there was some larger or broader explanation for at least some of the experiences recounted to him.

C.G. Jung took the investigation much farther as he explored his own experience along with those of his patients. He eventually concluded that certain images or symbols were part of a collective unconscious that was a repository for archetypes that were experienced by large numbers of people and thus, could not be dismissed due to individual trauma, physical damage or imbalance. In his posthumously published Red Book, he described not only his own experiences, but created extensive drawings depicting some of the forms, beings and symbolic representations he himself experienced. His family resisted the publication of this work with the fear that it would detract from his legacy; however, it is now quite clear that the Red Book is an important work in Western psychological research and actually enhances the position that C.G. Jung has in Western psychology .

In some cases, visions or experiences become the basis for a religion or teaching, and those who return with those experiences and communicate them can become guides, leaders or spiritual healers or shaman. The ‘vision quest’ is a methodology developed to actually gain a supernormal experience and be able to learn from it.

When we recognise that such experiences, whether categorized as ‘misguided’ or ‘guided’, are a common heritage of humanity and are widely spread across all times and societieis, we can no longer simply dismiss their occurrence with an attempt to limit or pigeonhole the experience without deeper investigation and insight.

Sri Aurobindo observes: “This has always been, put into its most generalised terms, the normal range and character of other-worldly belief and experience in all periods of the past of the race; names and forms differ, but the general features have been strikingly similar in all countries and ages. What exact value are we to put upon these persistent beliefs or upon this mass of supernormal experience? It is not possible for anyone who has had these contacts with any intimacy and not only by scattered abnormal accidents, to put them aside as mere superstition or hallucination; for they are too insistent, real, effective, organic in their pressure, too constantly confirmed by their action and results to be so flung aside: an appreciation, an interpretation, a mental organisation of this side of our capacity of experience is indispensable.”

Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Hidden Forces of Life, Ch.6 Hidden Worlds and Evolutionary Forces, pg.139