This is becoming irritating.
How many stories do you hear like this? I was watching an episode of a UK quiz/comedy program last night. It’s called QI, which stands for “Quite Interesting”, and is hosted by a very erudite presenter, name of Sandi Toksvig. The program is about remarkable, quirky and funny facts of nature, science and history.
Last night’s program took an unusual turn. The first story Sandi told was from one of the program’s researchers (the QI “elves”) about his young child, who out of the blue talked in a matter-of-fact way about the family he was in previously and his then mother’s name. This was connected to the fact that 14% of the population believe in reincarnation.
She then told a personal story of filming at a country house location. Her son, age 7, had wandered off during filming. Asked on his return where he had been, he said that he had been playing with a girl who had broken her leg. The owner of the house went white. There were no children on the property at the time, but there was a historical ghost story about a young girl who had died after falling and breaking her led. There was no way that Sandi’s son would have known of the story.
Subsequently the program conversation was being reviewed, not from the usual (presumably digital) recording for broadcast, but from a separate analogue reel-to-reel audio recording made by someone else. That recording was broken into by the voice of a young girl, who said “I died”. This was not on the program VT, which sounded normal and as expected.
Sandi gave no indication at all that these stories were to be doubted. They were well aligned with the general tone of the program’s remarkable facts. However, they were definitely presented as weird and spooky, then passed over on the way to the next question about something “real” with an air of disbelief.
I have heard a thousand stories like those across several decades. Perhaps you have, too. Some of those stories are in books, documented, maybe consistent in character for a particular individual and often researched for backup, so not always purely anecdotal. To the researchers and writers, they are not one-offs and curiosities. Nevertheless, the treatment in the wider world is the same either way. There, they are all merely stories, curiosities to be passed over with either wonder or scepticism, but never to be looked at for anything deeper.
How many more thousands would it take for us to treat these phenomena as if they might be important? What would it take for them to be investigated, not with a preconception that they must be disproved but with a genuine scientific approach that treats them as real and intends to discover what is going on that we are not seeing? What is the nature of a world in which such events are real and normal?
The reason this program annoyed me more than usual was that the stories were told as real, but that a presenter who is by nature intensely curious did not show any curiosity at all. Something that begged for enquiry received none. “Nothing to see here, move along.” The result is that we continue to treat the conventional, limited version of reality as all that is available to us, while the expanded, enhanced reality that is potentially more interesting and more powerful stays unexplored.
Does any of this matter to you? Where are the stories that you have heard but aren’t generally told? I would love to see them in the comments. Are they real to you or are you totally sceptical, regarding them as of no significance? Perhaps you take it for granted that there is a conventional explanation but it’s not worth any time and effort to find out? I see that as foolish. What might we be missing that could be of value to the world?
I assume that it is obvious from the way I have written, if not from many others of my posts, let alone my book, that this deeper, nonordinary context is real to me – more real than the conventional one that sits on the surface. I have no doubt that we are missing out on a lot of value, and I suspect that it might be urgent. The world has problems that we can’t solve with our current tools and paradigms. If you think it might be your reality too, do you think anything should be done about it? If so, what, and how might we make that happen?
Do let me know.
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Find my books at:
The Science of Possibility: Patterns of Connected Consciousness
Your Access to Possibility: 7 Amazingly Simple Success Keys to Creating Your Life Consciously
7-Stage Parenting: How to Meet your Child's Changing Needs
Reinventing Capitalism: How We Broke Money and How We Fix it, From Inside and Out