The Spiritual Lessons of the Paranormal

Michael Tymn has just offered in his blog a synthesis of his many years of study and experience, in response to an inquiry from a friend having to deal with the dying of his wife. This I think provides the take of one very knowledgeable man of how there can be a rational basis for both a spiritual belief system and if necessary, for some sort of religious faith. It is bridging spirituality, religion and science. Tymn is especially well versed in the earlier and long history of psychic investigations before psychical research became extremely unfashionable. 

His friend (who had a conventional orthodox Christian upbringing) asked what his sources of information were. Tymn responded by explaining that "the sources included psychical research and afterlife studies in mediumship, near-death experiences, past-life recollections, instrumental transcommunication, and various other paranormal phenomena over the years." 

An overview of the 10 little "lessons" Tymn offered:

1. Faith vs. Conviction:  There is compelling evidence that consciousness survives death.
2. The God Factor: Proof of God is not necessary to accept evidence that consciousness survives death.

Everything I was taught in religion classes began with the a priori necessity to accept the existence of an anthropomorphic God, and everything I heard from the atheistic side began with debunking the existence of that same God.  The survival of consciousness, or afterlife, issue was always secondary and contingent upon proof of God. Not until I began studying psychical research did I realize that it is not necessary to have proof of God before examining and accepting the evidence for survival.  One can accept survival and infer some kind of Creator or Higher Intelligence without believing in a humanlike God or subscribing to the whole “worship” side of religions.  To put it another way, the evidence for survival leads to God, not the other way around.

3. No Humdrum Heaven:  The Afterlife is much more dynamic than that taught by religions.
4. Spirit Body:  We have a spiritual body, the outer rim of which is called the aura.
5. Hades:  There is an adjustment period immediately after death.
6. Awakening:  We awaken on the Other Side with the degree of consciousness at which we left the material world.
7. Judgment:  There is no Judgment Day, per se.  We judge ourselves.
8. Reunion: There is a reunion with departed loved ones and friends.

9.  Rebirth: After the adjustment period, we settle in and spiritually evolve from there.

Whether reincarnation involves a rebirth of the total personality over many lifetimes or something much more complex in which fragments of the soul are reborn as the “higher self” remains in the spirit world in a Group Soul is unclear and apparently beyond human comprehension, but one way or the other there is a spiritual evolution taking place in which the soul learns to deal with adversity and gradually perfects itself, moving to higher and higher realms. 

10. True Oneness:  We retain our individuality as we spiritually evolve.

The ultimate, according to some beliefs, is the attainment of Nirvana, at which all souls become One with the Creator. While this implies a loss of individuality, various advanced spirits have informed us that it is just the opposite – we become more of an individual.  We develop latent gifts, acquire greater knowledge, become stronger in character, and never lose ourselves.  Complete perfection is never attained, although there is a constant striving toward it.  At some point, we succeed in finding ourselves, and in the process we find greater unity with others. “You do not lose your individuality in a sea of greater consciousness, but that depth of the ocean becomes included in your individuality,” the group soul called Silver Birch explained.

I remember writing down a description of the reincarnation cycle that came up, sadly the attribution is lost as it was mentioned second hand ->

"This idea that we travel through our lives as a group with several people that we have this core connection to, led by perhaps one bodhisattva, working on issues within our core character through the different lifespans, returning to the bardo, and then spinning out again. Beautiful."

It struck me as one of those things that I'd like to be true, though I admittedly haven't read up enough on the evidence of this.

From transpersonal psychologist Charles Tart's archives of the self-accounts of scientists' transformative spiritual experiences, TASTE (The Archives of Scientists' Transcendent Experiences), at www.issc-taste.org/index.shtml, covered in Psiencequest at https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-t...ight=TASTE .

This seems to be an extraordinary example of the developing of a greatly expanded awareness of the true depths of the soul in spiritual evolution, "True Oneness", alluded to by Michael Tymn in lesson 10 of his summary of the 10 main spiritual lessons of the paranormal. My impression is that he didn't totally lose himself in some sort of Nirvana. His sense of himself as an individual was not totally lost, it just was hugely expanded as described in mediumistic communications of the teachings of group soul Silver Birch.

John Wren-Lewis was by profession a mathematical physicist and then transitioned to psychology. He for a long time was a quasi-materialist humanist, an agnostic and skeptic on mystical experiences being anything real. An extraordinary near-death experience due to drug overdose poisoning changed all that fundamentally. His experience was not like the typical NDE documented by many investigators in the Western world. No tunnel, life review, meeting with deceased loved ones, and other typical features.

It was more a transition fully into some sort of cosmic consciousness. It was profoundly life-changing, one feature shared by deep NDEers. A state that continued in him throughout his later life. A profound change had occurred in his inner being (or in that level of being he was aware of), so that his sense of self was nearly wiped out, or actually transformed, expanded beyond all limits that he could have formerly imagined.

It may have been a transition to at least a partial awareness (to the extent possible while in the physical body) of Soul consciousness. Perhaps engendered by a unique set of circumstances including particular required trauma occurring to his brain, combined with readiness by his personality due to study over many years, and the readiness of his soul.  

THE DARKNESS OF GOD: A Personal Report on Consciousness Transformation Through an Encounter with Death (at http://www.issc-taste.org/arc/dbo.cgi?se...00051&ss=1 ):
John Wren-Lewis

"...subjectively, my experience was not of leaving the body, or of going into an apparently heavenly realm: It was not of going anywhere, but more like everywhere having somehow become present to me, or, more precisely, of somehow becoming present to consciousness without there being any more "me" to be conscious. And that is why I can so immediately identify with young Nachekita in the Upanishad: In that nirvanic condition there was aliveness or awareness, and, therefore, in terms of human logic, I have to say that there must have been some kind of Self, but the self of John with his personal history had ceased to be, finished. And I don't mean that my former life was forgotten- rather, I had the sense that all personal histories, mine and my friends' and those of all who have ever lived or will ever live, were now recognized as mere incidents in an infinite Aliveness that is beyond all history, beyond all space-time limitation. I feel-and feeling is what this is all about-that had I chosen to do so I could have reviewed my whole life, as many people have done in near-death experiences, or conversed with my long-dead relatives, or said hello to "angels, archangels and the whole company of heaven," but in that shining dark there was no desire for such separate experiences, since All was already present.

.............................................

"...although I was not an atheist, my Christian beliefs were of a very liberal-humanist-modernist kind, and I dismissed all mysticism as neurotic escape from life (Wren-Lewis, 1966). My experience completely shattered this whole line of thought, for it was utterly unlike any fantasies I have ever had of heaven, either in childhood (when my religious ideas were of the crudest possible Jesus-in-white-robes type derived from Sunday-school pictures) or in adult life, when I was repelled by the whole idea of Nirvana as I then understood it. But more important even than that is the fact that what I experienced was, quite precisely, the extinction of individual selfhood that the mind is supposed to find too terrifying to face. I think I have been privileged to have the experience promised by the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz, 1957)-that the approach to physical death provides an opportunity for the ordinary limited self to "die," to give up grasping its little separated identity, whereupon the discovery takes place that selves are not separate, but simply manifestations of the only real Selfhood, infinite Aliveness. My guess now would be that all religious "fantasies," as the skeptics call them with some justification, and even those palpable visions of heaven that psychologists have to explain as hallucinations, are the mind's attempts to put pictures to its intuitions or occasional glimpses of this universal Aliveness underlying all individual existence, which in itself is beyond all picturing and all theological theories.

And the whole process was blissful, which is another way in which my experience differs markedly from most near-death reports, where there is almost always a terrible sense of regret at coining back from a heavenly state or "place" into the narrow world of physical existence. The physical world to which I "came back" was in no sense narrow-it was glorious beyond belief, and to be manifest seemed merely another mode, as it were, of the blissful dark. I resonate to those wonderful words attributed to God in the Book of Job: "Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth, when the morning stars sang together and all the songs of God shouted for joy?" I feel I know exactly why the Bible says that God looked upon the creation and saw that it was good. But before my experience, the idea of God creating the world always conjured up images of a superpotter or builder at work, whereas the "feel" of my experience of creation was nothing like that. It was more like Aristotle's idea of created things being drawn into existence by the sheer radiance of divine beauty; the bud that was me opened out, as it were, in response to that black sun that was also, in some utterly paradoxical way, my-Self. I was alpha and omega, the beginning and end of the creation-process."

..............................................................

I have put all this in the past tense, a description of something that happened to me in Thailand, but that leaves out the most astonishing thing about it, namely that it is all still here, both the shining dark void and the experience of myself coming into being out of, yet somehow in response to, that radiant darkness. My whole consciousness of myself and everything else has changed. I feel as if the back of my head has been sawn off so that it is no longer the 60-year-old John who looks out at the world, but the shining dark infinite void that in some extraordinary way is also "I.""

[Ninshub]

10. True Oneness:  We retain our individuality as we spiritually evolve.

The ultimate, according to some beliefs, is the attainment of Nirvana, at which all souls become One with the Creator. While this implies a loss of individuality, various advanced spirits have informed us that it is just the opposite – we become more of an individual.  We develop latent gifts, acquire greater knowledge, become stronger in character, and never lose ourselves.  Complete perfection is never attained, although there is a constant striving toward it.  At some point, we succeed in finding ourselves, and in the process we find greater unity with others. “You do not lose your individuality in a sea of greater consciousness, but that depth of the ocean becomes included in your individuality,” the group soul called Silver Birch explained.

That's lovely. I really like the way that's articulated. I hope it's so.