In the hustle and bustle of everyday life, it’s easy to overlook the many things in our world that just don’t fit into any conventional view of reality. Because they just don’t make any sense, logically, or in the framework of what we’ve been taught in school, they aren’t usually given a second thought. Sometimes they’re dismissed outright as fantasy, or delusion, and anyone bold enough to say something is promptly ridiculed or tossed out of “the group.”
Why would people be so quick to judge? Perhaps the exploration of the topic would be too threatening to the ego, which likes to keep everything in its world under tight and predictable control. Or perhaps a corporate interest would be threatened if the public’s consciousness were to be raised regarding a certain topic. Especially in the age of social media, when a person expresses an idea or asks a question that goes against the conventionally held beliefs of group, they’re ridiculed and threatened with exclusion. Perhaps it’s because if that radical thinker’s notion were to be proved true, it would invalidate a large portion of the work the group has identified with.
Such a closed-minded group dynamic stifles innovation, reduces the likelihood of lively and deep discussion of opposing viewpoints, and generally inhibits the evolution of our society, in my view.
Some of the things I’m thinking about that fit into this category include:
- UFOs
- Crop circles
- Channels and channeled material
- Exploration of evidence of reincarnation
- The death-defying stunts of adrenaline junkies captured on Go-Pro cameras
- Cures to incurable diseases using natural methods, or cheap repurposed drugs
- Experiences of instantaneous and miraculous physical healing
- Exploration of paranormal abilities
- The extraordinary abilities of some individuals, especially autistic ones
- Meaningful coincidence (serendipity)
We’ll explore these topics a bit here. I hope the tour might leave you with a sense of awe, and remind you of the truly miraculous and wonderfully unpredictable nature of the reality we actually experience in this lifetime.
UFOs
Recently renamed UAP (unidentified aerial [or anomalous] phenomena) by the US government, the UFO mystery has been with us for as long as I can remember. As of this writing (2023), a shift as recently taken place in which the government has, for some unknown reason, decided to admit that not only have UFO sightings been occurring for decades, but that many have been reported by military pilots (400 sightings documented so far) and recorded on the sophisticated radar and infrared cameras onboard the military aircraft.
As reported by The Hill (here):
In an intriguing (and little-known) 2021 incident, a U.S. spy satellite captured multiple images of a mysterious “Tic Tac”-shaped craft flying over water. Within hours, intelligence analysts compared the object to an extraordinary 2004 incident involving another “Tic Tac”-shaped craft.
In that encounter, four naval aviators were left stunned as a strange elongated object with no wings or engines conducted jaw-dropping maneuvers. Eyewitnesses ultimately briefed members of Congress on the incident, which included several perplexing detections by radar and infrared (heat) sensors. Meanwhile, other aircrews told Congress of their daily, years-long encounters with unknown objects exhibiting highly advanced – and distinctly un-balloon-like – flight characteristics.
There is no longer any doubt that something current technologies cannot explain has been happening. In June 2022, NASA announced they were commissioning a study team to examine UAPs from a scientific perspective.
The observations are astounding: craft that can make sharp turns without slowing down, crafts that have no visible means of propulsion or heat signature indicating any propulsion system we are familiar with, observations of crafts that traverse between the sky and the ocean water and back again.
It’s been easy in the past, and most people have taken the easy path, to discount such reports and label anyone who claims to have encountered a UFO as crazy, a “tin-hat,” or delusional. That response is really not viable any longer.
“It used to be that one person would see something and say, ‘look Martha, there’s something up there.’ Now, things have changed. Now we have multiple sightings by multiple modes. That is the gold standard–the gold standard for looking for these objects. Not just one person but several people that are reputable. Not just radar, but visual sightings, infrared sensors, telescopic evidence. Now we have multiple sightings and multiple modes. And so the burden of proof has shifted. It used to be that the burden of proof was on people who believed in UFOs. They said if you saw something, prove it. Now the burden of proof is shifted to the Pentagon, the military. Now they have to prove that these aren’t extraterrestrials.”
Dr. Michio Kaku
Ryan Graves, a former Navy fighter pilot and engineer, chairs the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics’ UAP Integration & Outreach Committee. In a fascinating article in Politico (here), Graves reports:
On a clear, sunny day in April 2014, two F/A-18s took off for an air combat training mission off the coast of Virginia. The jets, part of my Navy fighter squadron, climbed to an altitude of 12,000 and steered towards Warning Area W-72, an exclusive block of airspace ten miles east of Virginia Beach. All traffic into the training area goes through a single GPS point at a set altitude — almost like a doorway into a massive room where military jets can operate without running into other aircraft. Just at the moment the two jets crossed the threshold, one of the pilots saw a dark gray cube inside of a clear sphere — motionless against the wind, fixed directly at the entry point. The jets, only 100 feet apart, zipped past the object on either side. The pilots had come so dangerously close to something they couldn’t identify that they terminated the training mission immediately and returned to base.
“I almost hit one of those damn things!” the flight leader, still shaken by the incident, told us shortly after in the pilots’ ready room. We all knew exactly what he meant. “Those damn things” had been plaguing us for the previous eight months.
Here’s an official video declassified by the US Navy of something called the “Gimbal” encounter, which occurred in 2015. Listen to the pilots exchanging incredulous commentary: “There’s a whole fleet of them.” “They’re all going against the wind; the wind is 120 knots.” “My gosh!”.
In 2022, an excellent 60 MInutes segment was also dedicated to the UAP phenomenon.
So what does it mean?
Dr. Kaku noted that it’s clear whoever built these craft is technologically far superior to us, and therefore could exterminate the human race if they so chose. Since all they seem to be doing is, in a sense, “playing” with us, in my view, we likely don’t have anything to fear in that department.
How are these crafts propelled without any visible means of doing so? No heat signature, nothing trailing behind. How can they perform maneuvers that would destroy any conventional aircraft due to the mechanical forces involved?
Even more importantly, if they are from an alien civilization, where is their home planet? I think the exploration of our own solar system would already have revealed the presence of any nearby advanced civilization. Of course we know that the universe is unimaginably large, but we also believe that the fastest speed that can be traveled is the speed of light. And even light takes 14 years to reach the nearest planet that potentially could harbor life. That’s a long time for an extraterrestrial visitor to have to live in a spacecraft, if all they intend to do is fly around and harass some military jets. And the trip back home is 14 years as well.
Maybe the crafts are “manned” by androids; e.g. non-human (robotic) pilots. Again, what would be the point? Any communication back to the home planet would take a minimum of 14 years if the speed of light is indeed the physical limit. The observations made by the military pilots seem to suggest that there is some intent in the patterns of engagement performed by these crafts. Are they “playing” with us?
I think it’s time to revisit some of our most closely held beliefs. For one example, that the speed of light limits our reach into the cosmos and effectively isolates us from the far reaches of space. There may be a way to circumvent this apparent limitation, perhaps with wormholes or some other intentionally created rift in the fabric of space-time. Or, maybe advanced beings take advantage of some method of teleportation involving dimensions beyond the three we’re used to. Actually, instead of saying “there may be a way,” perhaps it’s time to say “there must be a way.”
Crop Circles
I think the phenomenon of crop circles is a great example of something that appears in our world without, to my mind anyway, any explanation that relies on mechanisms humans are accustomed to. As with UFOs, anyone who doubts they are man-made creations or expresses curiosity, is labeled a “fringe theorist.” Though they admit there has been scant scientific study of them, Wikipedia says:
Crop circles have been described as all falling “within the range of the sort of thing done in hoaxes” by Taner Edis, professor of physics at Truman State University.[3] Although obscure natural causes or alien origins of crop circles are suggested by fringe theorists,[4] there is no scientific evidence for such explanations, and all crop circles are consistent with human causation.
Whenever I see “there is no scientific evidence,” it’s a red flag that means to me “no grant money has been awarded to study this topic, because either 1) the pursuit of this topic would be detrimental to the career of the investigator; or 2) moneyed interests would oppose the possible findings.”
Let’s look at several examples. Ask yourself how you and your friends might go out into the fields late at night to drag around ropes and boards and form patterns like these.
Food for thought.
Channels & Channeled Material
Conventional wisdom would dictate that anyone who has produced written or spoken material by a process they call “channeling” has done so by accessing memories and knowledge present within that person’s own brain, perhaps applying a healthy dose of creativity to the mix. How could it be anything else?
My cardiologist father, to my surprise, was quite taken by Edgar Cayce, known as the “Sleeping Prophet,” and his apparent ability to perform medical diagnoses, even remotely, without the benefit of a medical education. Much has been written about Cayce. His super-normal abilities are unquestioned. I’m grateful to dad for exemplifying such open-mindedness. No one who has looked closely at Cayce has come away believing anything other than that he had a miraculous and unexplainable ability.
That same spirit of curiosity and free discussion of ideas brought the channeled work A Course in Miracles (ACIM) into the house around 1977, when mom bought a copy for dad as a birthday gift. ACIM is a beautifully designed work in three volumes which came about over a seven year period as Dr. Helen Schucman, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, received inner dictation from a voice she knew to be Jesus. Considering the impressive size, overall structure and consistent theme of ACIM, as well as the beauty of the language it uses, it seems quite clear that it is more than the product of Dr. Shucman’s imagination.
For those that accept the more heart-centered view of reality, channeling is a form of psychic ability that involves connecting with higher sources of wisdom and love, such as angels, natural spirits, or advanced teachers. Channelers receive and convey messages from these entities through their intuition, feelings, visions, or words. Channeling can help people with their spiritual growth, healing, guidance, and understanding of reality. It can also be done with spirit guides, which are friendly spirits that assist channelers on their spiritual journeys.
A channel seems to be able to tap into information, concepts, and wisdom that far exceeds the human-limited capacity of the person doing the channeling. In my world, the channeling phenomenon is another example to show us that there is more accessible to our awareness than we might think is possible.
Reincarnation
I vividly remember the moment in my 20’s when the thought came to me, maybe this life isn’t all that there is of “me.” It was one such an impactful notion that I can recall exactly where I was and what I was doing when that idea arose.
In 1966 psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson published a book called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. I attended a packed lecture hall at the University of Washington around that time in which Stevenson described his work and presented a slide show from his travels to India and Sri Lanka. Stevenson says:
The case usually starts when a small child of two to four years of age begins talking to his parents or siblings of a life he led in another time and place. The child usually feels a considerable pull back toward the events of the life and he frequently importunes his parents to let him return to the community where he claims that he formerly lived. If the child makes enough particular statements about the previous life, the parents (usually reluctantly) begin inquiries about their accuracy. Often, indeed usually, such attempts at verification do not occur until several years after the child has begun to speak of the previous life. If some verification results, members of the two families visit each other and ask the child whether he recognizes places, objects, and people of his supposed previous existence.
Reincarnation is felt by many to be the most probable hypothesis for most of these cases because:
- The large number of witnesses and the lack of apparent motivation and opportunity makes the hypothesis of fraud extremely unlikely.
- The large amount of information possessed by the child is not generally consistent with the hypothesis that the child obtained that information through contact between the families.
- When there is correlation between congenital deformities or birthmarks possessed by the child and the history of the previous individual, the hypothesis of random occurrence is improbable.
When we factor in the high likelihood that the life we’re currently experiencing and living isn’t the only life we’ve ever known, one gains a new perspective on its meaning. To my mind, questions arise too:
- If I learn the lessons I came into this life to learn, can I “graduate” to some higher existence, so I don’t have to come back here and re-experience the challenges of childhood again? I hope so.
- What kinds of lives did I live in earlier incarnations? Did I have experiences then that still affect me now, either positively or negatively? Can I heal these here in this life?
- Are people I know now (relatives, friends, co-workers) reincarnations of people I have known in other lives. My gut feeling is, yes, very much so.
Adrenaline Junkies
If you believe, as I do, that your experience of this life is whatever you create in your imagination and then project into your “reality,” then it’s no surprise that you can find examples of people inventing extreme experiences for themselves. In their view of their reality, these activities are entirely reasonable, and they wouldn’t attempt them unless they knew they’d be safe at the end of the day.
Some examples:
Fred Fugen leaps from a hot air balloon chairlift, free-falls, then pops a parasail to fly/ski down the mountain. Check it out here.
Another example of daredevil paraskiing (short clip):
And here’s a famous video showing two wingsuit flyers leaping off a mountain with the goal of catching up to an airplane and flying into the open door of that aircraft.
Here’s a BMX downhill racer with a cameraman and drone operator that is as skilled as the racer.
The only way these feats can be accomplished is effectively “mind over matter.” These people visualize the success of their endeavor, and then experience the reality of it.
Miraculous Healing
Sometimes, for reasons the rational mind cannot explain, miraculous healings occur. People given weeks to live will give up hope, do something they had always wanted to do but put off doing, and discover their potentially life-ending condition is resolved. Or, in the case of Jamie Ogg, finding his first breath of life after doctors told his mother, Kate, that unfortunately he did not survive childbirth.
First-time parents, Kate and her husband David, were welcoming twins into the world, but they were told minutes after the first was born that the second had stopped breathing and had only moments to live. Kate requested to hold the lifeless body against her chest for a final goodbye. She asked David to join her in the hospital bed with his chest bare too. With the miraculous power of this loving embrace, the baby, who they had already named Jamie, took his first breath and began moving. Together with hospital staff, Jamie was nurtured into life.
Extraordinary Feats
In the realm of mysteries of life I include examples of humans who somehow are able to perform extraordinary feats of astounding difficulty. Some of these seem to defy ordinary logic and reason, reaching into the supernatural realm of the “vast intelligence of the universe” to achieve their ends. Here are some examples.
Memorizing Digits of Pi
John Cosgrove, an 11-year-old boy, memorized 2,052 digits of pi. The world’s record (as of this writing) is an astonishing 70,030 digits, achieved in 2015 by an Indian man, Suresh Kumar Sharma. It took him over 17 hours to recite all these numbers. If you find it hard to remember a 16-digit credit card number, imagine the discipline needed to accurately a sequence of tens of thousands of numbers!
Superhuman Strength
22-year-old Lauren Kornacki was on her way out the door when she found her father, Alec, unconscious and crushed underneath his BMW 525i. “I guess the way he was moving the car with his wrench, the jack slipped and it fell on top of him,” Kornacki said. “He was unconscious and his arm was caught over his chest.”
“I just literally lifted up the car. It was like a table with a short leg. It kind of balanced it back out and shifted enough to free my dad,” Kornacki said, adding that she didn’t consider the feat to be “Hulk-like.”
Once Lauren’s father was freed from beneath the car, Lauren began CPR. “I didn’t even get through a full set before he started breathing again,” she said.
Going Without Breathing
Spaniard Aleix Segura Vendrell set the World Record for the longest time breath held underwater in 2016 with the time of 24 min 3.45 secs. How is that possible?
Climbing Skyscrapers
At age 60, to celebrate his “retirement” from climbing, Frenchman Alain Robert scaled a 48-story skyscraper in Paris.
Since beginning in 1975, Robert has climbed more than 150 towering structures around the world, including Dubai’s Burj Khalifa – the world’s tallest building – the Eiffel Tower and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Autustic Savant
Derek Paravicini is blind and severely autistic, requiring help with everyday tasks such as dressing and washing himself. He is also a phenomenal piano player with perfect pitch who can play any piece of music immediately upon hearing it.
Derek is the subject of many documentaries and programs, including a TEDx talk (here). Another is In The Key Of Genius: The Incredible Life of Derek Paravicini. He is featured in an episode of Mind Field called Divergent Minds on YouTube. His ability at the piano is extraordinary, but what is truly amazing is his ability to hear a piece of music for the first time and immediately be able to play it on the keyboard.
Artistic Savant
Steven Wiltshire has drawn entire cities from memory; his 189-foot wide drawing of 300 square miles of New York City was based on a single twenty-minute helicopter ride. Although he as been diagnosed as being on the autism scale, he is considered to have an photographic memory.
Amazing Feats of Physical/Mental Ability
There are many examples in this category.
Consider the 19-year-old Colombian man, Angel Alvarado, who holds the World’s Record for solving three Rubik’s cubes while juggling said cubes.
I personally can juggle three objects, but juggling for four minutes would be a stretch. I haven’t figured out how to solve the Rubik’s cube. So what kind of superhuman mental gymnastics are needed to solve three cubes while juggling them, in a record time of 4 minutes, 31 seconds?
John Evans, a British man weighing 343-pounds, managed to balance a 352-pound car on the top of his head. He has balanced 101 bricks weighing 416 pounds as well. He lists his world’s records on his website: http://www.headbalancer.com/world-records.htm
In 2002, Gert Mittring calculated the 23rd root of a 200 digit number in 40.83 seconds. He has held numerous world records for mental calculation, such as calculating the 89,247th root of a 1,000,000 digit number.
Can we consider that such feats might be achieved via access to “the vast intelligence of the universe,” and not by means of the clearly-limited capabilities of the human brain—even an extremely well-trained one?
Serendipity
I consider serendipity to fall into the category of “grand mysteries” because once you’ve experienced a coincidence so unexpectedly profound and meaningful, you know it can’t have occurred by random chance—and the mystery of how it could have happened is born.
Once my mind was opened to the awareness of the beautiful magic of my own existence, I began to sense that events and experiences I had were being in some sense “choreographed” by an unseen script writer—one that had a higher purpose in mind.
It’s not always clear whether the script was written long ago and is being played out now, or whether it is being written now, moment by moment while it’s being acted out. Because some of the “coincidences” must have required lots of prior planning (on the part of the creative intelligence of the universe), my impression is that my experience of my life is co-created with unseen forces in the universe that support me in manifesting thoughts and dreams I hold in my mind.
Some spiritual teachings that have come into my life offer insight into these notions. For example, A Course in Miracles says in Lesson 158:
Time is a trick, a sleight of hand, a vast illusion in which figures come and go as if by magic. Yet there is a plan behind appearances that does not change. The script is written. When experience will come to end your doubting has been set. For we but see the journey from the point at which it ended, looking back on it, imagining we make it once again; reviewing mentally what has gone by.” (W-158)
As we’ll see ACIM has a lot to say about the ego. In the context of this quote though, the phrase “The script is written” refers to the fact that the time when we each come to understand the truth of who we are is already set. It is in the script, so there is no doubt that this time will arrive eventually.
Elsewhere, I recount the story of how I came to meet my sweetheart, Madeline. It’s a beautiful combination of serendipity and manifestation. It seems to me that serendipity may be the correct interpretation of an event that has come about through a process of intentional manifestation.
Another byproduct of our understanding of the mechanisms involved in what unfolds in our lives is the fact that literally “anything can happen.” That even includes things that are so improbable that one would be tempted to say “that’ll never happen.” As I noted when the insight came to me and I tossed the three coins, if “the vast intelligence of the universe” (an infinite source of creative wisdom) is to impact my life in its ingenious and inspired ways, serendipity is one way that works quite well, while effectively defying any effort to prove its actual existence. Just magical!