Rosalind Heywood was an author and life-long member of the Society for Psychical Research in London. She was a well-known psychic who recorded many of her experiences in her autobiography, The Infinite Hive, which alas is no longer available on Amazon, but can sometimes be found in library stacks. Here is one of her experiences :

Soon after our arrival at Okehampton [in Devon, England] my husband and I went out to catch the tail-end of the sunset. It was one of those evenings when the whole world holds it breath. The moor towered in shadowed contours between us and the sinking sun, and above it the western sky was green and gold like glacier water. Suddenly, without warning, the incredible beauty swept me through a barrier. I was no longer looking at Nature. Nature was looking at me. And she did not like what she saw. It was a strange and humbling sensation, as if numberless unoffending creatures were shrinking back offended by our invasion, and it struck me like a blow that even the windswept little tree against the skyline seemed to be leaning away from us in disgust. “What shall we do?” I whispered to my husband. “They loathe us. We can’t gatecrash like this.”

He did not laugh at me. He, too, felt an intruder. So I said, should we not stand quite still and explain mentally that we came as friends, with humility, and would be grateful for permission to walk quietly on the moor? I thought, too, of the old days when simple souls linked themselves to wild nature by the ancient magic of oak, ash and thorn.

Writing as experient, not as investigator, there is, thank goodness, no need to invoke sophisticated explanation like autosuggestion for the astonishing experience that followed this gesture of apology. It was as if, like a wheeling flight of dunlin, all those visible and invisible creatures swung round as a unit to inspect us, and I seemed to feel their sigh of relief as they came to a group decision. We were not dangerous or cruel. Our apology was accepted. We might come on ~ and “in”. At the time I did not even think it odd that the little windswept tree was now leaning towards us in a friendly fashion.

An interesting point by Paul Bloom opens up a vast area of speculation … or knowledge, depending on whether your paranormaility experience is real, or just second-hand. Here’s part of his point :

Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. …

It’s only relatively recently that science has set itself up as a new religion, Scientism, and has successfully tabooed all paranormal experience. Indeed, experience of anything beyond the material world is seen as deceiving mental constructs. “It’s only psychological!” is the familiar taunt.

Those of us who believe that everything is psychological, including matter, are lumped in with the flat-earthers of the Middle Ages. The question remains, though, why would children be born with a predisposition for supernatural phenomena if these weren’t an integral part of the life experience of every individual. As evidence stacks up in favour of the supernormal, orthodox and official science goes ever more into denial.

[Paul Bloom]

Although the famous Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung, was a scientist and worked hard to retain his credentials in the scientific community, he was at heart a spiritist. Here’s an excerpt from his Collected Letters which proves the point. I’ve taken this from Colin Wilson’s admirable book, Afterlife.

“I once discussed the proof of identity for a long time with a friend of William James, Professor Hyslop, in New York. He admitted that, all things considered, all these metapsychic phenomena could be explained better by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious. And here, on the basis of my own experience, I am bound to concede he is right. In each individual case I must of necessity be sceptical, but in the long run I have to admit that the spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other.”

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