Seasoned students of the highly weird are subject to all manner of ideas and theories regarding what might loosely be called the paranormal. In presenting this rather convoluted solution here in this writing, language and definitions of the words used becomes a stumbling block almost immediately. Depending on your point of view, the label “paranormal” might specifically refer to ghostly activity– and even within that realm, there are various types of ghosts, and a multitude of viewpoints about what each type is and what they represent. As subjects such as ghosts, UFOs, cryptozoology, and various occult traditions become more mainstream the curious seeker is beset with all manner of opinions, many of them claiming expert knowledge. With all of the forms of media available to us now, from books and blogs to reality TV and online influencers, it can be difficult to know where to look for good information regarding the anomalous.
It’s only natural to develop systems for understanding our world, and conjecture regarding these things that don’t neatly fit into our consensus model of reality is no different. To stick with ghosts as an example, one wishes to find some authority figure who knows what they are- or, short of that, some framework for understanding the phenomena around them. In so doing, the curious seeker will find over a century’s worth of studies in parapsychology; they will find ghost hunters with their own methods and ideas, ranging from the mystical to the pseudoscientific. They are likely to find mediums and demonologists, and in each and every case they will have been presented with answers to something that by definition is unanswerable. It ultimately boils down to the big questions, such as what happens when we die. The only people who know are the ones who have, and perhaps they tell us and perhaps they don’t. There are perhaps questions even bigger than life after death, for which language becomes even more impenetrable. The effort becomes one of making the ineffable effable, and eff it- it’s worth a try!
The multitude of viewpoints each have their own merits as well as their dubious qualities, and where they overlap our popular conception of things such as ghosts coalesces around certain forms, definitions, and inborn assumptions. It is our nature to find patterns, and one could spend a lifetime refining subcategories and deviations with an ever-magnified specificity and still not adequately explain each spook, specter, and apparition. We may get bogged down in minutiae, and though we’ve used ghosts as an example here this same framework applies to UFOs as well, or cryptids, or even specific types of UFO or cryptid encounters to the exclusion of all others. Every viewpoint has its place, from that of the scoffing skeptic to the kookiest of cranks, culminating in flawed popular models for the honest investigator to begin puzzling over. The homogeneity that results in these models allows for virtually anyone to play the game, to pick up puzzle pieces and build off of them. There is a low bar for entry in the world of paranormal speculation, and our technology allows now for anyone with the right device to be part of the conversation. This is equal parts wonderful and problematic, and one wonders whether any progress can be made retreading the same ground. Our bird’s-eye view of looking at how folks look at the phenomena no-one can explain may not help in our attempt to eff the ineffable, but it just might help us come up with bigger and better questions.
There are other ideas which have become more popular over the years which eschew the strict categories and divisions outlined above. The idea of co-creation, for instance- that anomalous phenomena is a collaborative psychic process which can produce any number of otherwise unexplainable effects. There is little doubt that the observer plays a large role in how various anomalies are perceived and reported, and the more one looks at accounts and cases the more one realizes how deeply personal many of these effects are. The lines between the ufological and the ghostly, for instance, fade and break down; we may start to develop a paranormal Theory of Everything. This, however, can also be problematic as it provides an easy answer for every particular story. Ideas that are similar to co-creation, borrowed from occult and spiritual systems and divorced from their original context, become deployed as solutions for virtually every highly weird entity. When terms like “tulpa” and “egregore” are thrown around with reckless abandon, our puzzle comes no closer to showing us a picture of the blinding reality beyond our limited perception. Instead of effing the ineffable, it merely effs it up and confuses matters further. It simply adds to the columns of categories and rigidly excludes other ideas, in a continuation of the very systems it seeks to escape.
Even worse is the idea that nothing is real. As models like the Simulation Hypothesis have become more popular in recent years, anomalies are increasingly referred to as “glitches in the matrix”. The technological frameworks of these ideas carry with them the implication that they are new models of reality, when in fact they are ancient. The idea that we all live inside of a computer simulation is really just a cyberpunk reframing of concepts that trace their roots to spiritual models such as Gnosticism and even further back in time to Buddhists constructs of reality. While these are big picture ideas, they are also non-starters for our purposes in investigating odd phenomena. We may very well be living inside a digital code or an archonic construction of false materiality, but the danger inherent with such beliefs is that one might come to conclude that nothing here on earth matters. The technological spin on these old ideas is particularly dangerous, as it divorces the model from any spiritual and moral framework. For our purposes in exploring the highly weird, we are explicitly interested in phenomena as we perceive it here in the material realm; what we see and hear here, and what stories we tell and systems we conjure to explain them are for all intents and purposes our reality. Even if all of it is some form of invention, it is worth looking at the constituent parts to learn more about how it all works.
Reality is so big and weird that we can’t even conceive of the vantage point from which we could appreciate how big and weird it all is. Perhaps there are intelligences and entities for whom this vantage point is the norm, and there have certainly been those who have presented theories along these lines. Such an entity would be beyond our dimension of space and time, existing alongside us in mind-bending ways that can only be occasionally perceived if at all. These types are variously called inter-dimensional beings, or ultraterrestrials, existing on a superspectrum mostly outside the bounds of our material realm. Of course, some might say the same of demons, while others might have other religiously oriented or folkloric concepts to rely on. There really is no end to the possibilities, and we could conjecture about any or all of them until the end of time. In trying to illustrate the problems of creating a system of myriad concepts and categories, we have done just that– and perhaps it's a fool’s errand to take such a lofty view of it all in the first place. Foolishness has never stopped this writer before, though, so as we fly closer to the Sun upon waxen wings we might ask ourselves this question: What if everybody is at least a little bit right?
That is to say, with any particular paranormal event there may be several, or many, factors at play. One explanation need not exclude others. Is a Bigfoot sighting just simply a sighting of an unknown animal? Or is it a timeslip to another era? Perhaps the hairy beast shuffled in from another plane of reality and ambled right off into yet another- but some combination of these things could simultaneously be true. It might be productive to inquire why these encounters happen, more than how- if for instance our hypothetical Bigfoot encounter is followed by poltergeist activity or premonitory dreams, or happens at the same time as UFO sightings in the area, perhaps there’s a reason for it all beyond our ability to see. There might be machinery behind the veil, and causation need not follow linear time or reality as we know it. Perhaps we can look to the work of Prof. Lucifer G. Butts for a little insight into how this might work:
The fictional professor is the creation of cartoonist Rube Goldberg, and the inventor of the marvelous machines that have become synonymous with Goldberg’s name. The satire of the cartoons involved engineering absurd and complicated devices, often using live animals, to accomplish some miniscule action. If we employ the cartoon logic inherent in these machines to a multidimensional structure of reality, we may gain some insights into the how’s and why’s of highly strange events. First and foremost, the design is comically absurd from where we sit in material, non-cartoon reality. Of course, this is what old Rube intended. From a 4th or 5th dimensional standpoint, however, our comings and goings and our machinations may appear just as crazy to an outside intelligence; perhaps something like the Butts patented egg opener makes more sense there.
These machines rely on living things to remain static in time and space, and then behave in a predictable way once stimulated in order to complete the chain reaction of events. Imagine our metaphorical bird’s eye view once again, and the allusion to waxen wings and the Sun- this would be similar to the viewpoint of our extra dimensional intelligence, only we’ll add that the wax is not melting and the Sun has not begun to set. That is to say, our hypothetical observer from 5-d reality is outside of our concepts of linear time. Such an entity would be able to act upon static living things, including you or I or any experiencer of high strangeness. From where they sit (if indeed they have butts on which to sit) they could view any and all moments of our lives as frozen, static realities- and move backward and forward as they wish. One wonders if some cosmic cartoonist engineers events with us as playthings, pieces of a weird machine which we have no ability to conceive of (if indeed they have a Prof. Butts for whom this would be a habit.) We would be blissfully unaware, like the little monkey in the cartoon– that is until the pistol fires, and we perform the prescribed duty of jumping in alarm to continue the chain reaction.
Causality becomes a mind-bending proposition when one removes Time from the equation. In this cartoon and others, the Goldberg design relies on a flower to grow after being splashed with water, in order that it might push upon a stopper above. In cartoons, there is no problem with such rapid growth from a plant, but as we reconcile cause and effect with the realm of timelessness this becomes a fantastic thought experiment. What would it mean if both the parrot and the monkey had perspectives to match that of a small potted plant? What if the firing of a pistol took the same amount of time? Suppose plants are sentient and their perspective is better equipped to deal with the brain-breaking model of non-linear (or even non-existent) Time! Maybe the trees know more than we do.
No event, whether paranormal or mundane, happens in a vacuum. Any event that we can conceive of is contingent upon other events, environments, and material items. We exist in a complex universe wherein every action has an attendant reaction, on and on through the Goldberg machines of our lives. Like dominos falling in every direction with every move or decision, our actions have spiderwebbing effects connecting otherwise disparate seeming events and phenomena. Sometimes something gets stuck on a strand of said web, alerting our spider sense and becoming apparent as a synchronicity or apport. But perhaps our foolhardy flight has gotten us tangled up in this web, as we might begin to wonder what Rube Goldberg really has to do with paranormal events.
You’ll be relieved to know, dear reader, that there is some support for some of these wackier ideas; artist, writer, and paranormal researcher Eugenia Macer-Story explored a great deal of multidimensional concepts in her papers written for The U. S. Psychotronics Association. In exhaustive detail and complicated, technical terminology Macer-Story presents her ideas about the “Fluidice Matrix”- a system through which living information can be transduced from one dimension to another. The manifestations of this as we perceive it can appear to us in any number of ways, and she doesn’t shy away from referencing everything from psi effects to astrology to UFO sightings in her work. In her paper Reflexive Time: The Magic Non-local Touch, she describes the conditions through which 5-d actions might be triggered and perceived as objects of wonder from a 4-d perspective. In essence, these would be anomalous events with no apparent cause.
In the paper, she utilizes Einstein’s analogy of a stationary person and a moving train to illustrate these anomalous transductions from another realm by adding a 5-d helicopter above. The train represents linear time as we perceive it, where the helicopter exists outside of time, and the paper outlines the various ways 4-d “anchor points” allow for non-local intelligences to interact with our world. She posits that certain times and places are more likely for such an intelligence to “plug-in”, and the paper concerns itself with how one might predict such things. For our purposes in our own peculiar flight of fancy, the mathematical and physics based approach of Macer-Story in her papers may be a bit too obtuse and heady to discuss adequately; this humble writer is not entirely sure he understands her theories overall. It’s enough, then, to say that someone much smarter than I has probably come to similar insights within these streams of weirdness, and it’s perhaps little wonder that Macer-Story found various outlets for expressing her world view in her other writings, her songs, and her artwork. While people now glibly mention “glitches in the matrix” when referring to odd occurrences, Macer-Story conceived of a fluidice matrix using advanced physics terminology to support it.
If living informational energy can exist non-locally to our material, mundane reality and occasionally touch down like the tip of a cartoonist’s pen to paper, any and all miracles, wonders, and paranormal happenings could be possible. While Rube Goldberg may never have intended his wacky machines to provide a springboard to understanding a greater reality beyond what we see and hear, untethered to the passage of Time and free floating in another dimension, the absurdity of his cartoons may just be an approximation of Truth in comical garb. Perhaps Prof. Butts deserves a prize for excellence in paranormal research, while we’re at it. One suspects that the old debates will continue, favoring one theory or another about every minute aspect of the paranormal- with skeptics decrying the woo all the way, and grifters looking to cash in, and honest but naive seekers caught up in the mix. It’s all as it should be, as they are all playing their parts in a machine. So are we, if we’re being truly honest- but it’s nice every once in a while to zoom out and take it in from a bird’s-eye view aboard a 5-d helicopter… pondering the ineffable.
