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...
10 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).
@Bruce, i can't bring myself to be so quick to judge it as a result of damnation. perhaps it's just nature. much like i could never be chinese, these creatures might not be able to be fully human. also i don't see such trickster folk as necessarily evil in their intentions (and in general i think no culture ever saw them that way; it's more like they have their world intersects with ours, but has different rules). i honestly think they are just playful, and though it might be annoying to us, maybe it's akin to how dogs and cats or even human children do annoying things without being aware of how annoying they are. the difference with human children of course is that they have more room to learn and grow.
@Laeth - I did not say "damnation", nor imply it - not unless you assume that damnation is the only alternative to resurrected eternal life in Heaven - something which I have for many years I have repeatedly denied.
We’ve all been there! Meanwhile I’m pondering what it means to run into a second encouragement to invoke St. Anthony in two weeks. Guess I’ll wait and see if there’s a third.
This stuff happens more with young children in the house, and while that could be explained by blaming said children, I suspect some low-level demons are tasked with undermining family cohesion using that sort of thing, including the classic “monster under the bed” stuff disrupting everyone’s sleep. Acknowledging the activity and praying while not fussing about it overly has been a pretty reliable cure in our house.
Your shoe example could be a similar act to get you and your wife annoyed at each other. Demons aren’t necessarily competent so I think this is part of why these situations fairly often fail in the sense that we just find it funny and it even brings us closer together. But then when people repeat and repeat a materialist explanation for the event it does cause spiritual harm, so maybe the demons are cleverer than I think!
I grew up in a household with a lot of this sort of thing, and with no explanation except materialist ones offered, which as you note basically amounts to calling one or more humans “crazy.” I do think it added up and caused a sort of rot over time, even though as you say no one is actually willing to accept the diagnosis fully. Instead it made the adults who lost things more prideful and defensive, and then for the children who saw things there was always some level of fear and search for a medical explanation, including expensive but relatively harmless stuff like MRIs but also experimental things that proved physically and psychologically harmful. All from very mild and normal paranormal stuff (well, that combined with pre-existing sinful tendencies in the people involved.)
Long story short I think usually it’s low-level demons and has little impact but sometimes it can really pay off for them so they keep at it.
Meant to add that I think characterizing them as pixies or whatever small, nasty, malicious, but not really dangerous or powerful creature is spiritually directionally helpful as it nails that recognition of the reality while also treating it with the contempt it deserves. The effort involved in dispelling such creatures (setting out some sort of talisman that repels them usually) is in correct proportion moreorless.
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