I’ve been thinking about this thread all day. Whynot, Xan, Flipper as well as DFP were brave indeed. While there shouldn’t be a thing wrong with saying “such and such happened , l did thus and so and this is what followed”—there is plenty of pushback to saying anything even when there is ready admission that we don’t know exactly what is going on.
One of the problems in discussing these experiences is avoiding these old worn out triggers, these words that have been laughed in boogie man stories.
When I got the chance this evening, I found this very useful article about ethnography that let me reconsider my own experience of usual events. Ethnographers who had to decide what to do about the “paranormal” experiences of peoples they studied and in reading this scholarly treatment of their own research l decided they provided a way for me to be more relaxed about my own strange experiences . There even is a phrase, a more helpful name they give this phenomenon: subjective anomalous experience .
Psi and the Universe
Writing at the dawn of the twentieth century, the philosopher and early pioneer of psychology, William James, summed up what I consider to be, potentially, the most important contribution of the anthropology of consciousness, and the anthropology of the paranormal, to our understanding of the universe as a whole, when he wrote that no account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.'
The unusual phenomena investigated by parapsychologists, and the range of altered states of consciousness and supernatural beliefs encountered during ethnographic fieldwork, are aspects of the world in which we live and the cultures that have developed in it, and as such should not be ignored by the social sciences. Although we are a long way from the outright acceptance of paranormal phenomena as valid subjects for serious investigation by mainstream anthropology, it is promising to see that both contemporary anthropologists and parapsychologists are coming to realize the mutual benefits each discipline can receive from the type of interdisciplinary collaboration suggested by Andrew Lang at the end of the nineteenth century (Giesler 1984; Young & Goulet 1994; Goulet & Miller 2007; Bowie 2010; Luke 2010; Wilson 2011; Young 2011).
Over the course of the discipline's development, anthropology has shifted its focus from attempting to explain away supernatural beliefs to an approach that accepts the significance of subjective anomalous experience in the development of such beliefs without applying a reductive interpretation.
This is a positive step forward for our understanding of the ways in which consciousness and culture interact to create reality/realities, and I look forward to further research in this direction.
Notes
Sections of this article were first published in Edgescience: The Magazine for the Society for Scientific Exploration, Issue 10 (March 2012), pp. 14-18.
* It was Joseph Long's unusual experience in Jamaica that ultimately led to the publication of Extrasensory Ecology in 1977. I think of this anthology as a companion to Long's groundbreaking book on the connections between anthropology and parapsychology.
http://realitysandwich.com/162119/supernatural_natural_anthropology_paranormal/
