Super Natural

I’ve just read an interesting book by Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal. The title, “Super Natural”, is deliberately distinguished from the word, “supernatural”, which refers to phenomena considered beyond “nature” and thereby dismissed as not eligible for further inquiry.

Phenomena explored in this book—such as UFO sightings and abduction experiences—are here treated as fully worth further investigation; a first step towards which must be to recognize several things: we don’t know their cause; these kinds of events have been occurring for thousands of years; and there are many people alive today who have been intensely affected.

One of the authors, Whitley Strieber, has been strongly impacted by events that are usually referred to as alien abduction, but he is scrupulously avoiding saying that he was abducted by extraterrestrials. This does not mean that he doubts the reality of his experience, or that of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have experienced something similar in recent decades.

He discovered just how widespread these phenomena really are when he received hundreds of thousands of letters after he wrote honestly about his own experience in Communion. He paid a steep price for this honesty. The author of best sellers such as “The Day After”, which was made into a film with Dennis Quaid, was stunned when his readers turned against him to such an extent that he lost his home. And he was amazed to discover how many others have been traumatized and isolated–marginalized by government misinformation campaigns and by society’s fear of anything that challenges its established views of what is real.

The other author, Jeff Kripal, has researched and taught religious history for 30 years. His knowledge is crucial if these events, occurring now and for centuries, are ever to be understood.

I have not had such experiences myself, but I am struck by how deeply the authors go into features common to both modern UFO reports and the history of folklore and religion. Their analysis sheds light on the ambiguous middle ground between physical existence and distortions caused by trauma. In their closely reasoned dialogue, writing alternate chapters, they bring into the foreground an undeniable reality in our world: as long as society remains confined inside the bubble of its current world view, we will not be able to benefit from the opportunity to see our consciousness in a new light. There is no mystery about the consequences of remaining on our present course of denial: our cities will keep drowning and our forests will keep burning.

This book explores a radical possibility: that we are being offered a chance to communicate with a consciousness that has been present on our planet for thousands of years. If you’re interested, here’s a link to the book on Amazon:

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