We specialize in achieving the near-impossible. Miracles take a little longer.

That’s the old joke, isn’t it. We smile because, by definition, miracles are simply not admissable by a rational mind, however long they take.

Except, that is, in Italy, where “miracles” happen all the time. Daniel Williams has got an interesting piece in the Washington Post about this continuing phenomenon. “Weeping Madonnas, sacred blood that goes from solid to liquid and back again, lottery numbers divined by gazing at a photo of a deceased pope, sudden cures after contact with a holy relic: Miracles are old phenomena in Italy, the land where St. Francis tamed a wolf and wild doves.”

His story, though, is about a scientist, Luigi Garlaschelli, who assiduously investigates emerging miracles from his lab at Pavia University. “He belongs to a group called the Italian Committee to Investigate Claims of the Paranormal, made up of Italian scientists who use science to try to explain the inexplicable.”

“Miracles are just paranormal events in religious clothing,” Garlaschelli says. “I’m a chemist. I look for the substance behind things. We’re just trying to study phenomena. If there’s a non-miraculous answer, we say so.”

Nowadays, he believes, it’s often about defending scientific methods against attacks from fundamentalists. He cites the growing tussle in the U.S. between the Evolutionists, who champion variations on the work of Charles Darwin, and the supporters of Intelligent Design. Add the Creationists to the mix and, “Science should not be lethargic.”

As for Rome and its attitude to strange events, the Reverend Peter Gumpel, an official at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, which investigates reports of miracles by candidates for sainthood, is suitably sceptical. “Some of these things are medieval in origin,” he says. “I stay away from them. Our belief, however, is that there is a personal God who intervenes in history.”

The Washington Post concludes:

Garlaschelli is a bearded man in a white lab coat who smokes a pipe. He studies not only religious phenomena, but also plain trickery. He has written a book about sorcerers and levitation and one about an ancient Italian sword stuck in a stone that may be the precursor of the King Arthur legend. It’s a far cry from his usual research, which produces academic papers with titles such as “Recent Progress in the Field of N-acylalanines as Systemic Fungicides.”

As for the “Italian” sword in the stone, a major pinch of salt is required. That tale is a British legend.

[Source: azCentral]

In a lecture of that name, Rudolph Steiner said this about contacting the “dead” :

We encounter the Dead at the moment of going to sleep, and again at the moment of waking …

These moments of waking and going to sleep are of the utmost significance for intercourse with the so-called Dead ~ and with other spiritual beings of the higher worlds.

The moment of going to sleep is especially favourable for us to turn to the Dead. Suppose we want to ask the Dead something. We can carry it in our soul, holding it until the moment of going to sleep, for that is the time for bringing our questions to the Dead … On the other hand, the moment of waking is the most favourable for the Dead to communicate with us.

We will be dealing a lot with what Wordsworth called, “unknown modes of being”. One observer who found this field compelling was Rudolph Steiner*, founder of Anthroposophy. From a lecture, here he tells of his awareness of such modes :

“From that time onwards a soul life began to develop in [me] which made [me] conscious of worlds from which not only external trees or external mountains speak to the human soul, but also the Beings that live behind them. From that time onward, [I] lived together with the Spirits of Nature that can be personally observed in such a region; [I] lived with the creative beings that are behind the objects …”

* Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) was born in Austria. He found his life’s work in the realms of consciousness and cognition. His techniques for the development of awareness to nature’s cycles, daily meditation and concentration practices, and clear critical thinking can lead individuals to reach spiritual levels of consciousness safely. He believed working along with the spiritual worlds enriches the life of the individual and the world.

One of the most famous, and often-told, incidents of out-of-body experience was that of Dr. A.S. Wiltse, an American doctor who was deemed to have died in Skiddy, Kansas, in 1889, but who “woke up” a few hours later.

The doctor apparently died of typhoid after saying goodbye to family and friends. He “woke up” feeling unconnected with his body, though still inside it. He was able to examine the connection between the body and his soul ~ which he now seemed to be. “I learned that the [skin] was the outside boundary of the ultimate tissues, so to speak, of the soul.”

With a kind of rocking movement, he separated from his body feeling the “innumerable snapping of small cords”.

“As I emerged from the head I floated up and down like a soap bubble until at last I broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded to the full stature of a man.” As he turned to make for the door his elbow brushed against a man in the room and passed right through him.

He walked out of the door and noticed a thin cord, “like a spider’s web”, running from his shoulders back to his body on the bed.

He then started to walk down the road and saw three rocks ahead of him. A voice that seemed to speak from within him said that if he passed the rocks he would go into the “eternal world”, but that he had the choice to return. As he looked through an archway, he saw a small black cloud and felt he would be stopped.

Suddenly, he awoke, still lying on the bed. He told everyone what had happened, but they merely urged him to rest, no doubt astonished by his recovery.

For a fuller version of this experience, see Colin Wilson’s “Afterlife”. Check here for the latest price.