By Jaime Licauco
Inquirer
Have you wondered why some people cannot believe in the existence of a nonphysical world even though they may have encounters with nonphysical beings?
I remember a friend who saw the ghost of his father in his living room after the father?s burial. The ghost smiled then disappeared.
My friend, a highly rational and skeptical man, could not believe he saw his father?s spirit because he did not believe in ghosts. He dismissed the incident as just a product of his own imagination.
?Maybe I just missed my father, and so my mind created and projected an image of him. But he wasn?t really there,? he said.
Bias
Others dismiss ghosts and other nonphysical entities because of religious bias. The Christian religion teaches that when a person dies, his/her spirit goes to heaven, purgatory or hell and, therefore, cannot return to earth. ?Whatever is seen is the devil?s work, or a product of one?s imagination.?
The great English essayist and thinker Sir Francis Bacon pointed out that once a person adopted a point of view or opinion agreeable to him/her, he/she would do everything to preserve that belief. Even if there were better reasons to believe otherwise, he/she would make distinctions or rationalizations so that the original opinion or belief remained intact.
I see examples of this tendency of the human mind quite often.
I once accompanied an American science writer to see our faith healers (psychic surgeons) at work. He saw the healer open the body of a patient with his bare hands, take out diseased tissues or blood clots, and close the opening without any trace of the procedure.
The American watched all this at close range and took lots of pictures.
When the process was over, the writer slumped on a chair in a state of shock. I was talking to him but he did not hear anything. He just sat there staring blankly. His wife gave him water to drink. Afterwards he said to me, ?I see it, but I don?t believe it!?
When his article came out in Omni Magazine, sister publication of Penthouse, he declared that the whole process of bare-handed psychic surgery was completely fraudulent. But he could not explain how Filipino faith healers did the trickery in front of him.
?The hand is faster than the eyes.? He believed what was taken from the patient?s body, the tissues or blood clots, or whatever they were, were hidden cleverly in the hands of the healer and did not really come from the patient?s body.
This is still the opinion on psychic surgery of majority of western investigators. ?It?s simply sleight-of-hand or trickery.?
Different dimensions
But I think there is another explanation why some people cannot believe in ghosts, elementals, psychic powers and other paranormal events. It has something to do with different levels or dimensions of reality.
We have, on the one hand, our common, day-to-day type of reality, which neuro-scientist Lawrence Le Shan calls Ordinary Reality. But there is another way of perceiving the world, what Le Shan calls Clairvoyant Reality.
The problem is that people using ordinary perception do not and cannot see other levels of reality. Thus, they cannot believe it exists. To ?see? spirits and ghosts, or experience a supernatural event, one must somehow be in an altered state of consciousness.
I think the basic problem lies in the insistence of materialist science that there is only one level or dimension of reality, the physical world. All the rest are illusions or imaginary. So they label supernatural stories ?fairy tales.?
Commonly held or accepted beliefs are difficult to change. There was a time when everybody believed that the sun revolved around the earth, until Galileo proved it was the other way around.
But since that view was considered not only unscientific but, worse, heretical from an ecclesiastical standpoint, Church authorities forced him to retract his statement or be burned at the stake. He reluctantly retracted under duress but he reportedly murmured, ?But it (the earth) still moves.?
Mexican shamans, whom anthropologist Carlos Casta?eda wrote about in his fascinating books (beginning with ?The Teachings of Don Juan?), say there are two ways of looking at reality, Tonal and the Nagual.
The Tonal corresponds to Le Shan?s Ordinary Reality and the Nagual to Clairvoyant Reality. A person in the Ordinary Reality cannot see anything beyond the physical world. But, in the Nagual mode, he/she can see the unseen, or what ordinary eyes cannot see.
Psychics, mystics, and holy men and women of all countries from ancient times to the present have attested to this fact.
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