Teamwork is often the key to success in life: in sports, in business, in marriage, in politics-- and in war. What interests me is the concept of paranormal teamwork, group attempts to do things seemingly impossible—extraphysical, to be exact. The kind of thing that a materialist would never admit could be real. I get it. It sounds strange to say that ordinary people can be trained to perform miracles.
Nevertheless, the English psychologist, Kenneth Batcheldor, trained a group of five people, not known for any esoteric skills, to succeed in a controlled experiment. They caused a table to rise into the air, that is, to levitate—and without any physical contact! A small group of humans get together and manage to suspend the most basic physical force in nature--gravity. That seems to be saying something about a shocking piece of human potential.
Much of the research that led to these experiments involved seances where the aim was to contact deceased spirits. We seem to have stumbled on a group dynamic with a variety of potential uses, one that enables us to defy gravity but that also enables us to interact with presumably deceased persons. Moreover, the group dynamic we’re discussing can be used to explore still other forms of paranormality. For example, as aid in one’s personal evolution, in situations that call for healing, in the world of artistic challenges. And so on. Each member of the group is also learning how to sustain the rapport that is the key to the dynamic.
So, for example, under the heading, personal evolution, you might describe an issue that’s problematic, and the group does its thing, Jung would say, by using our active imagination: identifying with the problem and looking for ways out. The group-dynamic is childlike in its openness and responsiveness. The aim is to interact with the deeper layers of our mental life. The challenge is to learn how to do this. Batcheldor favored a group process where nobody is singled out as special. Individuals in the group did not want to stand out as a source of strange powers. The important thing was to explore phenomena that stimulate your imagination and see what it’s trying to tell you.
Despite the continued reluctance of scientists to accept the reality of the paranormal, interest is growing and spreading, especially when the latest neuroscientist, philosopher, clergyman, or hospice nurse has a mind-blowing near-death experience. Modern resuscitation technology, used to bring people back from death, is leading to a revolutionary model of the afterlife.
I believe that the reality of the NDE is going to lead to the discovery and development of safe procedures for inducing experimental crossovers into the afterworld. That would mark a radically new step in the evolution of the human species. For centuries there always were claims of traffic between our world and another. The connections were always hard to pin down. For the rationalist, it was easy to dismiss the idea of an invisible world. But there were gifted people that reported encounters with spiritual worlds and beings. The names of Blake and Swedenborg, Joan of Arc and Teresa of Avila, come to mind as famous examples.
The near-death experience provides a growing mass of evidence strongly suggesting the reality of postmortem survival. The ontological expansion is twofold. In addition to an extraphysical afterworld, we now know we are, and have been, visited by a host of nonhuman intelligences, UAP, UFOs, beings from other worlds and beings that also seem to operate near free from the constraints of physical reality. I wonder: are the ETs interacting with us our future selves? Are they here to coax us into a new phase of evolution? Are they here to activate the expansion of paranoia into metanoia, of murderous mendacity into more intense life and empathy?
In another post, I plan to describe an outline of how a group might proceed to get into the experiment of forming a creative group dynamic
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