What is paranormal?

What is paranormal?

Dictionary.com defines it as, “of or pertaining to the claimed occurrence of an event or perception without scientific explanation, as psychokinesis, extrasensory perception, or other purportedly supernatural phenomena.”

I don’t like that definition. I think it’s more enlightening to look at the origin of the word. Para comes from a Greek root meaning beyond. Normal means typical.

So, paranormal should just mean “beyond typical.” However, the word now has a connotation of falsehood. If someone says something is paranormal, it’s almost the same as saying it’s not true.

I am not saying I believe in ghosts and spirits and alien visitations. I’m not saying I believe people disappear into thin air. I’m not saying I believe in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. But I am saying that I believe in things we can’t understand. While many supposedly unexplainable events can be attributed to people’s natural tendency to misremember things, there is a lot of weird stuff that happens that is more than just human brain error.

My dad inspired this post because he started reading a lot of books on strange disappearances. He kept talking about them for so long, and it really pissed me off. He would get so intrigued in these reports of small children gone missing after leaving their caretakers’ line of sight for thirty seconds, and I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have it. I’d tell him it didn’t mean a thing.

“What does that prove? Something happened to those kids, there’s an explanation.”

I’d say that over and over again. But then I realized something. Every time he told me one of those weird stories, I would get uncomfortable. I would want him to stop. I didn’t let it change my thoughts. I didn’t accept the information. I thought I was just being rational—he was talking about bizarre stories that defied reality (my conception of it, anyway). But honestly, I was being closed-minded.

I prided myself on my objectivity. I only believed proven facts.  But when I saw how I was just shutting out everything my dad said, I realized the flaw in my thinking. It was a really Western style of looking at the world. Western thought tends to believe in consistency—there is one solid truth for everything that happens, and it will always make sense if we can just find the answer. But I’m not sure that’s not how things really are. Eastern cultures typically focus on a balance between contradictions. Rather than get rid of contradictions in search of one right answer, they accept the natural balance between contradictions.

A really easy way to see it is by examining the difference between Eastern and Western concepts of good and evil. The West is all about doing the exact right thing and ending evil. In contrast, Eastern philosophy stresses balance between the two (yin and yang, anybody?). Furthermore, any Eastern text I’ve read never focuses on living a sin-free life; rather, they stress living in peace with everything that happens. So, while the East accepts the natural “bad” in the world, the West seeks to eliminate it.

Back from that tangent, I think that Western thought has a similar flaw in its method of finding “truth.” Rather than accept all incoming information, it only allows that which makes sense. However, the world is full of things that don’t make sense. Human beings are not capable of understanding every single event and property in the universe. Weird things are going to happen. And rather than deny that they do or try to rationalize those occurrences, we should accept them for what they are. If we don’t, we cut ourselves off from an entire chunk of reality. To find truth, we have to be receptive to all kinds of incoming data—even (and I would argue, especially) to the kinds of data that go against our previous beliefs.

Believing in the paranormal doesn’t have to mean believing in demons and ghosts and spirits. It just means believing in something we can’t understand—something beyond normal, widely accepted facts.

So keep an open mind, because so many weird things happen out there, and the world is way cooler when you leave room for those weird things to be true.