Answer to My Previous Question

My last post was a question—Guardian angel or subconscious mind?  The question is interesting. It confronts a true story that baffles the scientific imagination. Celestino saved from annihilation by a voice from nowhere.  So where did that voice come from?  My view of the phenomenon is not based on any religious assumptions.

 

I think parapsychology can open the way to an explanation. Without listing a bunch of scholarly references, we may assume that precognition is possible in nature; and in fact there’s much literature backing up the reality of this almost unnerving capacity to subvert one of our most common intuitions of reality: the before and after of time.  This happens to be something I know about from direct experience.  One day in 1981, to impress Jodie Foster, John Hinckley shot and attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan. He failed, and Reagan promptly recovered.  All this I already had learned from three dreams, written down, and shared with my students.

 

Celestino was saved by a voice whose origin might have been the worried soldier himself, perhaps more likely by his unusually prayerful mother, or maybe by some kind of group effect.  Only Celestino heard the saving voice, as one might hear a voice in a precognitive dream.  The persistence of the voice reflected the serious danger at stake.

 

The general point about human psychic powers: they add up to an awesome composite of what some might call our divine capacity.   At their root is consciousness—the irreducible mystery we’re all acquainted with.  Moreover, we know from ample research about the latent potential of consciousness to perform psychokinetic and cognitive wonders. 

 

When you scan the range of supernormal marvels that both history and modern times afford, the idea of allies and messengers that dance around time and space, and perform miracles, begins to seem plausible. But much resistance persists among those unable to wean themselves from reductive materialism.  Such seem to suffer from a kind of imaginal paralysis.

 

Call it your guardian angel or the genius of your psychokinetic imagination; God or your creative unconscious: whatever works, whatever resonates. Both reflect part of the truth. I mean the kind of truth that breaks out of a deadening shell and opens into a new way to see the world.