Why I Believe in the Supernatural

What was lightning to the ancient Greeks? It was the power of Zeus, symbolic of his rule over the Olympian gods.

Today we know lightning is not a supernatural phenomenon. It is electricity. The same force of nature we use to power practically everything within our world. Looking back, we can see how every force of nature we’ve come to understand, and harness, at one point was believed to be a supernatural phenomenon.

This is in part why, when we speak of the so-called supernatural phenomenon today, ESP, visions, etc, they should not be discounted as mental inventions or deemed ungrounded in reality. They are just not grounded yet. They are our lightning.

To think we understand the world around us is not only arrogant, but also naïve. While some phenomenon might be inventions of our own imagination, to discount any re-occurring “forces” because science has yet to understand them undermines the pursuit of science itself. 

For example, consider déjà vu. It is the feeling of familiarity with the events of a certain situation, as if you’ve seen them before. Often times people say they’ve dreamt of the events taking place, sometimes years ago, and only now while the event is occurring, are they making the connection.

The phenomenon has been discounted as a “delay” in neuronal processing. In layman’s terms, we see the event happen but our brain processes the events one millisecond too slow, making us feel as if we are reliving the event a second time. This hasn’t been proven 100%, and doesn’t explain why some individuals can make distinctions between how long ago they “dreamt” of the event. Some moments of déjà vu can feel like they occurred two weeks ago, others years.

More elusive, and more astonishing, is the idea of global consciousness. A bigger version of the “someone’s watching me” feeling. Check out this video on the The Global Consciousness Project, an initiative to test for what many Jedi have called “the force”. While what is being measured doesn’t equate to moving cars with your mind, it does provide strong statistical evidence about a weak natural force that spans across the consciousness of all humanity.

For over a decade, 35 random number generators, which pick between 0 and 1, randomly, have been running in several different locations across the globe. Statistically speaking, over a large sample size, we would expect the number of 0’s to be about 50% of all the numbers randomly chosen and vice versa. However, in events of major global effect, where millions of people are focusing on one singular occurrence – 9/11 for example – the number generators have all shown major skewness favoring one number over the other. So much skewness that the likelihood that these sudden spikes in the data are random is one in a billion.

Thus, the experiment points to an unknown human connection that spans the globe, something that is weak, but probably exists. While there are skeptics to the experiment, the fact that such changes have even been recorded cannot go unnoticed.

It is experiments like these, the kites flown in a thunderstorm, that turn the supernatural into the natural, and the natural into the harness-able. As such I refuse to call certain supposed phenomenon “supernatural,” because decades from now, there may not be anything super about it. Instead, it is the “futurenatural,” a natural force waiting to be discovered. 

To say that the supernatural does not exist, because it is impossible, is ignoring the long history of humankind, where the forces of today were the supernatural of yesterday. It is only within the context of our history as a species do we understand the future of our kind, and our current ideas as nothing more than a temporary belief-set trapped within a small time interval that is our momentary existence.