One religion’s mystic truth is another religion’s silly superstition. But I would say the real question is not why so many people believe in the ‘paranormal’, but why we have defined ‘normal’ so narrowly that it eliminates whole realms of human experience and potential. What we call ‘normal’ or ‘rational’ is a very narrow band of consciousness, and it simply doesn’t encompass all of who we are. The tools of what our current science can measure only a small fragment of reality. Before the invention of the microscope, who would have believed in microbes?
What is ‘normal’ is for people to have dreams, intuitions, hunches, flashes of inspiration, incidents of serendipity, and moments of deep connection that can’t be measured or predicted. The Wiccan and Pagan traditions train people to value and use our intuition and to awaken those states of awareness that go beyond the narrow band of what our culture recognizes. We develop tools for entering—and coming back from—altered states of awareness, and for discerning whether something is a true vision or a paranoid fantasy. Our rituals and ceremonies are designed to bring us into those deep states of connection.
I’m heartened that so many people remain open to the mysteries of what science doesn’t yet know and cannot yet explain, in spite of all our culture’s efforts to convince us that such beliefs are silly at best, insane or evil at worst. The universe has a pattern that is an interwoven whole, and there are many ways of knowing, perceiving and naming it.
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