My father’s reluctance to talk about a taboo subject:
the supernatural
As the author of paranormal cozy mysteries, I have created a “Miss Marple” type fictional character named Blythe Golightly. Like Agatha Christie’s famous sleuth, my “Blythe” character is an elderly woman who lives alone in a small town and solves whodunits.
But Blythe’s real passion is researching supernatural religious phenomena. So is mine.
Scripture references angels, Watchers, Nephilim, demons—even Satan himself. In Luke 10:18, Christ declares, “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven.” The Bible and the Torah both mention witchcraft and magic.
Then you’ve got the jinn of Islam, the monsters of Buddhist mythology, the uncanny creatures of Hinduism.
The supernatural is in fact deeply ingrained in almost all major faiths.
“Beings made of light”
My father, who passed away in 2014, once encountered what he called “beings made of light.” It happened several years before he died, while he was in a medically induced comatose state lasting several weeks. He required intubation, dialysis, and a nasogastric tube for feeding.
Dad spoke with me about these beings only one time, when he had come out of the coma, and we found ourselves alone in his hospital room. I asked him if he remembered anything, and he reluctantly described a fascinating experience.
He communicated with three “beings of light” who existed in a kind of celestial realm that Dad had difficulty describing. Their purpose was to teach and guide him, he told me. Dad was unable to verbalize what he’d learned, but said it was beyond anything he’d ever imagined.
He said the beings told him (in a way not involving speech) that he must return to his body.
No teller of tall tales, my father was a man others often described as “honest as the day is long.” A blue-collar hard worker, Dad learned the plaster and stucco trade from his father and the carpentry craft from his uncle. He built many homes in Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas, and had a reputation as a fine craftsman. Dad received his private pilot’s license in 1973 and belonged to the Midland West Texas Flyers. His greatest joy was flying his Cessna 120, which he rebuilt from two salvaged airplanes.
Dad liked to read aircraft and aviation magazines, Popular Mechanics, and the occasional Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour Western novel. He didn’t like movies and rarely watched anything on television other than the news broadcast.
I asked him, “Do you think the beings of light were angels?”
He responded, “I couldn’t say.”
Dad was a Christian, but he never would have made up a story about meeting three beings of light who taught him mind-blowing truths during a brief stay in some unearthly realm. In fact, he never spoke of it again.
The “voice” that could be God, an angel, a saint, or your higher self
In his book, “The Paranormal Christian,” author Richard D. Lewis asks the question: “Why should the supernatural be a taboo subject for Christians?”
You can and should talk to God, according to Lewis. He spends some time discussing “The Voice,” which he says could be God, an angel, or your higher self. I’ve experienced “The Voice” myself. The Voice is an inner knowing. It is loving and reassuring, and it will counsel you, teach you, comfort you, and warn you.
Lewis does not discount the classic beliefs of the Catholic faith, such as praying to Mary. The spirit of Mary is here and accessible, he says.
Some people even have ET entities as guardian spirits and guides, Lewis maintains. He adopted many of these beliefs after taking Dr. Doreen Virtue’s Angel Therapy Practitioner Course in 2003.
Author Lewis is a certified spiritual counselor and an ordained minister. He discusses unholy entities, such as incubus/succubus attacks, demons, fallen angels, and the like, and how to avoid them.
Lewis admits he is speculating when he says the gods of classic Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology could be fallen angels. He is even less clear when he discusses the subcategory of spiritual beings called “elementals” (this includes fairies, gnomes, leprechauns, mermaids, and pixies). He does not attempt to document the reality of these beings.
For me, it doesn’t matter, because I think we should open our minds to the supernatural and not judge others for their paranormal experiences, which belong to the transcendent dimension of reality.
Is consciousness the basis of reality?
If one accepts that consciousness is the basic element of reality, and matter secondary—a stance taken these days by some well-known theoretical physicists—one enters the realm of the spirits.
Suddenly the existence of angels, demons, ghosts, and all sorts of supernatural religious phenomena becomes irrefutable.
My fictional character, Blythe, sees and communicates with ghosts, and even with a jinni—one of those supernatural beings of smokeless fire mentioned in the Koran. She grew up listening to her granddaddy talk of “haints,” which is a “real useful word if you’re from the Carolinas,” like Blythe.
She says, “Haints can be any kind of spirit, evil or not. Granddaddy painted his porch ceiling and his front door and window frames ‘haint blue,’ to protect his home and family. Since he grew tobacco and made moonshine out in the woods, he had to be pretty wary of spooks and outsiders alike. Now Granddaddy is a haint, himself. But he’s a good haint.”
Like author Richard D. Lewis, my fictional character trusts the Good Lord (along with her Granddaddy haint).
Christianity is a mystical religion, Lewis asserts, and theologians who consider all ghostly experiences to be demonic are oversimplifying. I think he’s right.
Lewis maintains there are spiritual entities who are holy and others who are not. He admits that witchcraft and mediumship are forbidden by the Bible, but asserts that prophesy through communication with angels and the Holy Spirit is acceptable.
Departed spirits, angels, or other entities from the unseen realm may at times interact with those of us living. This happens in the Bible—but it also happens today, Lewis says. It has happened to him, in fact, and he gives multiple examples from his life and the lives of others.
I like Lewis’ considerable endnotes; they substantiate his thesis that the paranormal is as real today as in Bible times. He quotes the Bible a lot, but he also quotes news articles and scientific studies, such as those published in Frontiers in Psychiatry.
He dismisses ESP, saying it’s “dangerous.” Why go to a Ouija board or a psychic for answers when you can go directly to God? The danger, Lewis says, is that you don’t know who you’re talking to.
As for me, I try to balance mystical experience with what science says.
What science says about the transcendent dimension
Theoretical Quantum Physicist Dr. Amit Goswami, a retired full professor from the University of Oregon’s Department of Physics, where he served from 1968 to 1997, is a pioneer of the new paradigm of science called “science within consciousness.”
Dr. Goswami says when a quantum object is observed, it can mysteriously jump from one spot in space to another, and also affect a correlated twin object, no matter how far apart they are. So where does a quantum object, such as an electron, exist when it “jumps” from one spot in space to another?
It exists in the transcendent dimension of reality, he says.
Linking physics to psychology and Carl Jung, Dr. Goswami says that the Swiss psychiatrist discovered empirically that there is a transpersonal collective aspect of our unconscious operating outside space-time (Jungian synchronicity). This collective unconscious is the same one that allows out-of-body experience to occur.
According to Dr. Goswami, our brain-minds function as part of a unitive consciousness, and that’s how we arrive at consensus reality.
Yet people do have mystical experiences that fail to correspond to consensus reality.
If you’d like to dig deeper into this fascinating topic, here’s a link to a YouTube video about how consciousness creates reality: