Paranormal epiphany

To describe what is incomprehensible and out of order is not an easy task and no less so, when there is an urgent need for understanding. The events, we are about to explain, took place over a period of almost three months, but it lasted nearly two years before Adam had recovered and regained balance on most levels. By then he had once again changed his idea of self and the reality of things together with his conditions of living, but he had preserved his faith and integrity. At that time we had also attained some insights into the nature of Adam’s experience and what must be termed a preliminary interpretation of it. From the beginning we choose the term “paranormal epiphany” to designate what had occurred, but we must confess to our initial perplexity in spite of a considerable professional knowledge on the phenomenology of mystic experience. Anyway, it was soon apparent to us, that the phenomenon at hand was of paranormal character and dimension, since there was a total contradiction of the known laws of physics and the normal workings of inner and outer reality. Unfortunately, we did not remember much of Steiner’s analysis of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic structures, and those ideas did not offer themselves to us immediately. When we decided to determine the typology of the experience as being “paranormal” and hence “realistic, but out of order”, pertaining to “otherworldly realms” or “strange dimensions within our known world”, we simultaneously ruled out any intra-psychic explanation, either from a mental disorder or from a mere change in Adam’s level of consciousness. Surely the experience was mysterious, but it was not mystical in the general sense, it was something completely different. Also we were sure that Adam had stayed sane and in possession of all his normal faculties of sensation, perception, thinking and so forth through the whole process. Had he been in a state of psychosis or schizophrenia, he would certainly have embraced everything differently and reacted without critical distance and separation. Schizophrenics seldom question the reality of their experience and do not try to evaluate it objectively. Their separate reality always boils down to some sort of personal defence-mechanism and is very static and of some secondary benefit to them, but this was the very opposite in Adam’s case. And the powers, schizophrenics are confronted with, are mostly imaginative and fancied and rarely produce external effects. Thus we had to shut out all kinds of psychological explanation [projection, imagination, distortion of perception, delusion, and so on], and this left us with the paranormal, and respectively with the occult, or to be more precise with demonology and/or angelology, which was in principle known to us from studies of religion, but never from close exanimation and certainly not from practice. Evidently this line of understanding was more congruent with the experience, since there were clearly some external powers involved. It was absolutely not a private situation and we have to maintain, that Adam’s I, whatever I-ness means in this context, was not the actual agent of the experience, and that some practical level of otherness was involved, since Adam was not in control of it and only had very limited powers to respond to and influence the process. 

Now, when talking of external, extrasensory powers, we are close not only to the province of demonism, but also to many other realms of mysterious beings with different characters and zeal. We are human souls in the living myriads, and speaking of a rendezvous with one or several “other ones” the pressing questions is, how we are related with them, what are their nature, and are they friendly and sympathetic to us or not. In the first chapters of this book we made it clear that we have only limited knowledge and overview of the spiritual hierarchies and their hosts. The case is not different with the lower worlds and their inhabitants, and since Adam’s guest(s) never introduced themselves or gave away their identity, which for that matter probably would have made him or us no wiser, we can only infer from the evidence. Out of sheer ignorance then, we referred to the involved outer agent as the “principle”. This term leaves open the possibility that there was no organizing entity in the last resort, but only some functional laws and causes pertaining to energy and consciousness. Though it is most likely that the experience was regulated from spiritual and ethical principles and subjugated to natural laws in the widest sense, we are still inclined to believe, that there was a separate intelligence and superior power at work beneath the whole sequence and framework.