I really don't know we should make of the silly paranormal events of everyday life.
I had an extreme, and extremely trivial, example a couple of days ago; one of those "lost then found" things, when an object disappears then reappears.
This time it was a pair of shoes, and my wife had helped me search for them in the place they later turned up - which was the (unmissable) middle of the carpet in a room that had been (this was the weird bit) locked overnight.
Of Course this stuff is explicable in terms of human fallibility, or somebody playing a trick - but the fact is that I would have sworn in court that the shoes were not where we found them - or, in other circumstances, that they must have been stolen from where I left them.
At bottom, all evidence is eye witness; and this has been enough to start wars and convict murderers etc; yet when something "inexplicable" happens, then we casually dismiss and forget it!
I don't have any explanation for these trivial paranormal things, I don't even know what they mean or imply.
Perhaps nothing more, or less, than a negative, mildly-disruptive, reminder of the hidden complexity and mystery of the world we inhabit...
6 comments:
lots of cultures talk about similar little creatures that mess with people, mostly by stealing or moving things around. and i have appealed to st. Anthony of Padua to help retrieve them with great success.
the world is indeed mysterious, and it takes a lot of effort for people now to deny it.
.Laeth
@Laeth - Yes, there are plenty of paranormal and supernatural theories past and present, about what kind of entity may do such things; but this stuff does all seem rather "random" (as they call it nowadays)! It is like a message without content - the message itself being The Thing.
for my mind it's as random as humans doing things that seem nonsensical or just out of spite or to annoy. happens every day, and indeed there is no great meaning in them. just part of living in a world of free beings.
David C from the Ramblers had a similar anecdote in Sitting in Medici's, about a paper vanishing from right in front of him, he also had no idea what it "meant", just took it as a sign that the huge array of non-physical forces/beings could intercede at times. I've found a similarly frustrating sense of meaninglessness in most coincidences, they are so striking that I want them to mean something profound, but all I can gather is that reality is weirder than people assume, other than that there's no meaning I can discern.
@Laeth - That sound reasonable! It also fits with the idea that the beings responsible include those who have rejected salvation (including for what we would regard as bad reasons), and preferred some kind of ghostly semi-existence.
@Walter A - I agree. This is why I don't "collect" or record such experiences. But this time it was such a gross an unambigious example (albeit very trivial!), that it really forced itself on my attention.
The "rational" explanation is, of course, that I am going nuts and therefore cannot rely upon my mind for the simplest of perceptual information* - and that would naturally be the explanation that most other people would favour!
*This implied level of self-distrust would, if accepted and acted-upon coherently, have multiple catastrophic implications for my everyday life.
Yet those many people who "explain" such events happening to themselves in aa casually dismissive way ("I Must Have not seen it, when it was really there and totally obvious..."), never actually follow-through, and go ahead to mistrust every perception of their normal lives. This shows that it is not a genuine explanation at all, but just an assertion that they intend to ignore any and all such events (on the basis of prior assumptions).
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