Karl Jung once wrote, “Religious experience is absolute. It is indisputable. You can only say that you have not had such an experience, and your opponent will say, “Sorry, I have.” And there your discussion will come to an end.”
Therein lies the problem of dealing with any personal experience. Some people claim that they have seen a genuine extra-terrestrial creature; I have not. We might assume that person was simply mistaken, fooled by some sort of optical illusion. Or we might even assume intentional dishonesty. Perhaps mental illness best explains why this person believes he or she has seen an extraterrestrial.
But what we absolutely cannot do is to claim with any conviction that this other person’s experience was imaginary or a lie, unless we can prove it.
Literally, if we weren’t there to see for ourselves, how can we possibly claim to possess this knowledge? Some people might argue that it’s logical to assume, or common sense to believe that there are no aliens in outer space because there is no evidence they exist. If behavior in the physical world was always logical and common sensical, computer programmers would never have to write code to handle exceptions.
Fortunately, I can understand this phenomena all too well, because I have publicly confessed that I believe that I have personally experienced supernatural phenomena. I specifically referred to paranormal entities that one might describe as a ghost or a demon, depending on one’s personal beliefs as to whether or not ghosts actually exist.
Whatever “it” was, this invisible entity was intelligent and had the ability to manipulate matter. I could describe these personal “ghost stories” for the reader. Critics may honestly confess that nothing remotely similar has ever happened to them, but as Jung explained, what those people cannot say (with any degree of certainty) is that my experiences were not real, simply because they have not had the same experience. That would be a most arrogant assumption expressing unwarranted confidence in the ability to exceed one’s own limits of personal knowledge, unless this person has a unique talent for telepathy, of course.
Recently, I wrote an article titled Blind from birth to share the story of Vicki Noratuk, a young blind woman who allegedly experienced the ability to see briefly during an NDE following an auto accident while she was dead – Vicki claimed to be separated from her physical body as it lay on a table in the emergency room. Someone complained that Vicki Noratuk (now Vicki Blazon) had not actually been born blind because she lost her sight as a newborn child in an incubator, not going blind until a couple of days had passed after her birth. Therefore, this particular critic hypothesized, Vicki had somehow managed to retain memories of being able to see from only a few days old, and did remember what it had been like to see.
I admit scoffing at the suggestion that someone could retain memories practically from the day they were born, especially considering the fact that I sometimes forget what I had for breakfast. Frankly, it seemed impossible that Ms. Noratuk/Blazon could accurately recall memories formed decades previously, especially given that she described things that she could not and would not have seen as a child, but my skeptical friend turned out to have a point after all.
Now I’m not so sure. I believe it might be possible for memories dating back to the moment of birth and beyond may lurk somewhere deep in our subconscious mind. Perhaps we even retain pre-birth memories. Here’s the reason I’ve changed my mind…
Philip Pauli is considered a genius by any measurement of intelligence. At the age of three, the child prodigy studied astronomy.By the time he was four, Philip understood anatomy well enough to ask the curator of the Denver museum of Natural History why the skeleton of a dinosaur was missing several vertebrae (the answer was that it wouldn’t fit in the building otherwise.) By his eleventh birthday, Philip had completed a three year internship at that museum. More recently, he studied both theology and philosophy at Oxford.
(His story can be found at approximately the 36-minute mark in the video below…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vd7SJjdFtmo&lc=z125wn3wizrldrsca22gul5weyewwl2cf
His mother and father are both quite intelligent people, but their DNA alone does not really explain why Philip was born so much smarter than the rest of us. His mother admits that she used to wonder from where her son’s intelligence had come. Philip once told her that heaven had opened before he was born, allowing him to choose her as the one to nurture him.
In other words, Philip claimed to retain memories of events that allegedly occurred even prior to his own conception.
Before anyone assumes this young man suffers from a delusion or mental defect, please remember, he’s one of the smartest human beings alive. Before we assume he was being dishonest, please remember that he would be lying to his own mother. And, whenever it is being assumed that prevarication is involved, always ask the question: cui bono?
Who benefits from this alleged lie?
As Dr. Jung pointed out, just because I have no residual memories of my time in the womb, or even before that, I cannot with any certainty claim that Philip’s claims are false. To even form an opinion about his claims, my own confirmation bias will influence what I ultimately decide. It so happens that Philip’s extraordinary claim fits in nicely with my existing beliefs about eternity. Anyone who refuses to consider their own personal confirmation bias simply isn’t being intellectually honest in his or her approach to the alleged evidence.
I’ve never had a near death experience…well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve nearly killed myself by accident at least a dozen times during the course of my life, and either by luck or the grace of God have lived to tell the tale. Technically, due to sleep apnea, I have even stopped breathing temporarily in my sleep, but there were no bright lights or tunnels, no out-of-body experiences, and yet I believe that near death experiences are probably real, because some of the most well-documented cases involve the phenomena of corroborated, veridical new memories being formed by the mind, while the physical brain has been thoroughly incapacitated.
Hallucinations produced by a dying brain would not be real. Any “information” obtained from a hallucination should neither be previously unknown or verifiable, but that is exactly the sort of information these cases have produced. Those with confirmation bias predisposed to rejecting evidence of supernatural phenomena will tend to dismiss this empirical evidence as “anecdote” or even “unscientific.” However, real-life experiences can be notoriously difficult to reproduce in a laboratory environment, the silly movie “Flatliners” notwithstanding. Expecting someone currently in the process of dying to follow the scientific method strikes this writer as perhaps just a little bit unreasonable. I would assume the person going through the process of dying has more important things to worry about.
Because of the scientific evidence produced by the experiences of people like Pam Reynolds and Michaela Roser, I believe in the possibility of life after death. Why not life before birth?
The problem with believing Philip Pauli is telling the truth is that we have no scientific evidence that might support his claim. It is neither testable nor reproducible, by my estimation. The problem with assuming that Philip is telling a lie is that it is an assumption based on total ignorance, fed by confirmation bias.
Philip Pauli
There is only one defensible philosophical position to take in regard to Philip’s claim: agnosticism. Why should we give him any benefit of our doubt? Well, for one thing, he’s one of the smartest humans on the face of the Earth. When he told his mother this story, he was still a young child, and children tend to be somewhat more innocent and honest than adults.
We simply have no reason to assume that Philip’s memories were false, unless our personal confirmation bias won’t allow hope for life after death, or life before birth.
Cui bono? Who benefits from this lie? Perhaps the better question is, who does not benefit from lying about pre-birth memories in heaven?
Answer: Philip Pauli.
Dear Mr Leonard,
I do not believe in any religion, I am agnostic, I do not believe in any supernatural phenomenon, ghosts or demons.
And yet I had an experience that I cannot explain.
While working as a security guard at a Hovis bread mill that was closing down. For some weeks I had heard a fairly quiet knocking sound on the metal filing cabinet, it always occurred at around ten past the hour of Midnight to two am, but more often at one am, it was so regular that I asked the daytime caretaker (Mike) if he had some sort of timer in the cabinet that was ‘going off’ during my shift, he opened the drawer and showed me that it wasn’t locked and that there was nothing that could have caused the noise, he asked me if I had heard anyone coming up the stairs as he said he often had only to find no one there.
One evening a week or so I was in the canteen on the phone to my daughter when I heard a loud bang from my office which sounded like someone had thrown a snowball at the window, my daughter heard it and asked me what it was, not wanting to worry her I told her someone had thrown a snowball. Later I was sat in the office when I heard noises coming from downstairs as if the furniture downstairs was being moved around so I called my control to let them know and went down to investigate but when I went down there was no one there. The noises came again from downstairs and I called control again but didn’t bother to go down as I didn’t see the point. A little while later as I walked through the door to go to the kitchen to make a cup of tea I heard what sounded like a loud explosion just outside which made the kitchen window rattle, I checked on the cctv to see if a firework/rocket had exploded outside but there was nothing to see. I made myself a cuppa and reported it to control, as I was standing next to my desk there was what sounded like an explosion inside the office and I actually felt the floor bow with the pressure. I assumed it must have been outside and checked the cctv but again there was nothing to be seen. I again reported to control and they asked if I wanted someone to come to check up with me but I told them not to bother as I didn’t see what they would hope to achieve.
As I sat at Mike’s desk watching a film (his screen was larger than my laptop) there was a loud thump on the wall behind my chair, I grabbed my large torch unlocked the door and went into the canteen but there was no sight of anyone and there was no way they could have cleared the passageway before I got out, plus the door had frosted glass and I would have seen anyone going back towards the stairs, it happened again before the film was finished and again I went out with the same result. I moved over to my own desk as I wanted to work on my laptop and the loud thump came again but this time behind the chair I was now sitting in. I had noticed that the thumps occurred at around ten past the hour and were hitting the wall level with my head, the sound of them was somewhat diffused, like a snowball hitting the wall, kind of muffled not like a solid thing. The wall in question I had seen being built to form the office in the old canteen it was just stud partition with nothing inside apart from the electricity wires.
The thuds continued until last one sounded at ten past four, I was quite shook up by this point but refused to be daunted.
The next night (or possibly the night after that) there was a loud knock inside an open wooden half closet that we had in the room I shouted out “call that a bang” then I slammed my fist on the metal desk “that’s a bang”
Although I don’t believe in ghosts I called my visiter Dusty (Flour Mill) the knocks on the side of the filing cabinet got fewer then stopped altogether.
I felt sad when they stopped as I enjoyed thinking that there could be something else apart from blackness when we die but I have not had anything like it happen since, the mill has now been demolished.
Thank you for the interesting anecdote.
I’m curious–why do you believe the strange experiences stopped? You say pi don’t believe in ghosts or supernatural phenomena, but then you offer no rational explanations for what you saw and heard.You gave this imagined entity a name, Dusty, but did you attempt to communicate with it in any way?
I’m not reticent in the least to admit that I believe in ghosts, because I’ve had a number of extraordinary experiences and investigated them personally, as well as professionals (Ed and Lorraine Warren of “The Conjuring” also investigated the house where I had the experiences) so I’m comfortable in saying that there is no rational or logical explanation for the phenomena I personally saw, heard, and felt on numerous occasions.
Agnostic simply means “I don’t know” and the truth is, nobody KNOWS. We might think we know, but we only know bits and pieces of the truth at best.
Just because the mill has been demolished doesn’t necessarily mean those entities are no longer. Sometimes a location is “haunted” and sometimes it’s people, which I personally suspect means demonic in reality.
I do empathize–I remember at first being shocked, then disbelief, suspicions of a practical joke, basically anything BUT a ghost because those can’t be real, can they?
Why yes, they can.
I always say that I am agnostic because I prefer to think along scientific lines and as you stated in your article you cannot get inside someone else’s head to know if what they are are saying is true or that they themselves believe it, it’s also not possible to ‘prove’ that God does not exist as you cannot prove a negative.
I googled the site of the mill, it’s in Rotherham South Yorkshire here is a link;
https://www.google.com/maps/@53.4236429,-1.3592175,3a,66.5y,273.4h,87.82t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1skClH0KdnL1xnxN7gVsEzQw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
looks like there is nothing built there yet. I have moved away from the area (not to get away from Dusty 🙂 to be nearer family.
A couple of things I didn’t mention I said the sound of the thumps was diffuse another way I described it was as if it was some sort of energy hitting the wall, the knocks on the filing cabinet just sounded like you would make using your knuckle. Another thing that used to happen each night was inside the mill building. I didn’t know which room it was, they all looked the same when striped out, but the pictures from CCTV in this room would change rapidly as if the camera was being spun around in an erratic manner, this happened about 3:20 am each night, the other guys had noticed it but Mike said he thought it was the camera being reset somehow, but no other camera behaved in this way. I regret not going to check it out because I don’t even know if it was a fixed or moveable camera, if it was fixed then that would have been something else.
I think it is possible that my aggressive reaction may have been why the noises stopped although I thought the knocks may have been part of an escalation of events leading up to a specific date when the louder bangs happened, if so they would then have quietened down.
When younger I was in the army and took part in two tours of Belfast 1974 and 76 and during my time in the Territorial Army I was trained as a combat engineer so I have experience of explosives and explosions and the blast that occurred inside the security office was quite something, I still tried to rationalise it by checking the CCTV but there was no flash.
I thought that whatever it was that it was’attacking’ me as the thumps were right behind my head.
I can’t explain what it was, but it was something and that there is something else gave me great comfort.
Tony M