Deep Weird, Damned Facts

There is another factor I thought I should mention: deliberate intention. As 'Dan' went to reach for the flour, he had an absolute certainty in his mind that he was going to add the honey to the flour. Perhaps also the fact that he had just moments earlier rinsed the outside of the jar and so even though he was fetching the flour, he was still focussed on the honey jar.

This is the bit that we find hard to grasp, that in thinking of both the flour and the honey at the same time, the thoughts were not separate in his mind, he thought of both things at once and that's what he got.

The missing part is that this is not repeatable, it appears almost to depend on a casual disregard, not any self-consciousness or stress.

At least, I'm just thinking of ideas, I don't know any of this but it's how I attempt to make sense of the world.

At least, I'm just thinking of ideas, I don't know any of this but it's how I attempt to make sense of the world.

I think that's the best we all can say on these issues.  It's so difficult to know what is really going on.

The missing part is that this is not repeatable, it appears  almost to depend on a casual disregard, not any self-consciousness or stress.

Actually I'd like to clarify my ideas here. While I still agree that it is not self-conscious, in the sense of watching oneself attempting to do the 'impossible'; trying too hard to achieve something 'strange', something which breaks the rules, that may be hindered by being aware that it is impossible, it's a thought which gets in the way, that's what I meant by 'casual disregard'.

On the other hand, stress, in my own experience, sometimes strange things happen when I am very stressed, perhaps even distressed, a feeling of getting emotionally involved, that may actually help in setting the scene for something unexpected to take place.

I think that probably bears a similarity to some of what our founder @Doug described in a thread he wrote for us on his experiences.

Deep Weird Dialogues 5 - Dr. Simon Young and Contemporary Fairy Experiences

In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter has a short but sweet conversation with Dr. Simon Young about the differences between contemporary fairy experiences and traditional fairy encounter narratives.

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Deep Weird Dialogues 6 - Dr. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette and the Mystery of Coincidence

In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter talks to philosopher Dr. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette about her chapter on the mystery of synchronicity.

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Deep Weird Dialogues 7 - Barbara Fisher and Project HERA

In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter talks to Barbara Fisher of the 6 Degrees of John Keel Podcast about her chapter in Deep Weird with Dr. Christopher Diltz. The chapter gives an introduction to Project HERA, an effort to create a searchable database of entity encounters.

Deep Weird Dialogues 8 - Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes on Panpsychism and Extraordinary Experience In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter talks to philosopher Dr. Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes about panpsychism and how a panpsychist metaphysics might help us to make sense of extraordinary experiences.

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In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter talks to Dr. Gregory Shushan about his chapter in Deep Weird, which un-peels some of the many layers of Near Death Experiences in an historical and cross-cultural context.

Having read the book, I would say its level varies, but one of the highlights for me was Dr. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette's discussion regarding synchronicity. I'm not sure her video clip (above) does her justice.

The examples she gives are enormously impressive. She seems to have culled the very best synchronicities, including her own, to show just how extreme these can be.

Whatever their explanation is, it can't be mere chance.

David

In this episode of Deep Weird Dialogues Dr. Jack Hunter talks to psychical researcher Alan Murdie about the evidence for poltergeist phenomena and about his interactions with legendary poltergeist researchers Maurice Grosse and Guy Lyon Playfair.

The Anthropology of the Weird: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Anomalous Experience

Jack Hunter

...In other cultures, therefore, experiences such as telepathic communication between two individuals, predicting the futurein dreams, seeing the dead reanimate, witnessing an apparition,communicating with spirits through entranced mediums, or being afflicted by witchcraft (amongst others) may be considered entirely possible. Many highly respected anthropologists, in conducting ethnographic fieldwork amongst other cultures, have gone several steps beyond appreciating different modes of thinking about the world and have crossed the threshold into alternate ways of experiencing it. E.B. Tylor, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Bruce T. Grindaland Edith Turner all crossed this threshold during their fieldwork,and all interpreted and presented their experiences in different ways. Through examining the ways in which these ethnographers documented their experiences, and how their personal world-views accommodated such unusual phenomena, it is possible to gain an insight into both changing academic attitudes towards the anomalous and the mysterious nature of the paranormal itself.

The Anthropology of the Weird: Ethnographic Fieldwork and Anomalous Experience

Jack Hunter

There is an academic aversion to the most unusual forms of extraordinary experience, which has resulted in a gulf between the kinds of experiences discussed in the scholarly literature - with phenomena often falling into distinctive types and categories (OBE, NDE, voice hearing, encounters with light, religious experience, and so on) - and the writings of popular paranormal researchers, who have more frequently been able to discuss a broader range of experiential accounts (from UFO encounters to Bigfoot and fairy sightings, and everything in between). Notwithstanding this divide, however, there are significant themes that run through the established academic literature on religious and extraordinary experience and the canon of popular paranormal research. These phenomenological similarities suggest that even the most unusual experiences, which are often ignored by academics, contain elements that connect them to other forms of extraordinary experience (such as psychedelic, spiritual, religious, and transpersonal experiences) that are more broadly accepted. This presentation concludes by suggesting that a sense of ‘high strangeness’ might well be a core underlying feature of extraordinary experience more generally and that instead of being neglected, the ‘deep weird’ should be granted greater and renewed scholarly attention.

The Weirdness of Weirdness

John Horgan

This dispute has a parallel in the realm of spirituality. I recently posted profiles of two sages with divergent ideas about the state of insight known as enlightenment. For Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist, enlightenment consists of seeing “the sheer mystery of everything.” Far from getting answers to the mystery, you see “the massiveness of the question,” which fills you with “exhilaration and dread.”

The other sage, a philosopher and avid meditator whom I’ll call Mike, told me that he achieved the highest state of mystical enlightenment in 1995. The essential component of his worldview is a sense of oneness. 

“What you are, and what the world is, is now somehow a unit, unified,” Mike said.

Wonder wasn’t part of Mike’s outlook. If anything, he said, enlightenment made the world seem less weird. Nor did William James, in his classic work The Varieties of Religious Experience, include feelings of wonder, or weirdness, in his criteria for mystical experiences (although he did include “ineffability,” the quality of being hard to express in words).

These disagreements give me pause, because they make weirdness seem subjective. And yet I cling to my conviction that the world is weird, and that its weirdness is more fundamental than other qualities we attribute to it, such as goodness, badness or oneness.