Maybe we are not so important to be even contacted in the first place and our paranormal experiences are just internal, subjective events?
This is the question I find myself asking lately.
Technically, we could say all human experiences are internal, subjective events. Our brains are locked in our skulls, and all info about the external world comes through our senses and is woven together/interpreted, at the conscious level at least, by the mind.
In that sense, all conscious human experience
has to be psychological. And while most humans agree on a whole host of object facts (common sense) about the nature of reality, one need only have a brief conservation with someone to realize that bubbling under the surface of all of us is our own private logical about the nature of reality.
I'll be the first to say that I think many people who have "experienced" Mothman have really experienced an owl flying by overhead. While I don't think the materialistic, scientific worldview is necessarily the defining worldview, I do think many people fail to understand the subjective, psychological nature of their experiences. For instance, the human mind literally fills in the blanks when sensory data is missing: Thus, when you see a moving shadow take the shape of a creature, what one may be experiencing is
pareidolia, an incredibly intense psychological phenomena. But what I think many people fail to realize is that this experience of pareidolia can
still trigger an emotional response; in fact, I would say especially if one doesn't realize or at least question whether they are experiencing pareidolia, they
will have a powerful emotional response.
I think the emotional response is even more powerful than the pareidolia! The emotional response - fear, panic, confusion, excitement, joy, etc. - is what causes the experience to seem real. Moreover, the experience is real! But it's the understanding of the experience which may be wrong.
What I would really like to see is a series of experiments in which a large sample of individuals allow themselves to be randomly exposed to various stimuli and are then asked to share their perceived experience.
For example, over the course of 2-3 months, have people randomly exposed to a cloth sheet fluttering high up in a tree, late on a windy night, under low light conditions. The following day, ask each person to report what they experienced. I'd be curious to see what details, if any, people would add to the experience. (That was a lame example, I'm sure others could think of better experiments.)
However, having said all that: I personally don't think pareidolia can account for all the paranatural experiences that people have reported down through the centuries. There are many people, I'm sure, who are very, very aware of pareidolia who have experienced the paranatural. Moreover, the are some very clear patterns that have emerged over the years which speak to this phenomenon as being more than individual, subjective events. (Although, the patterns could arguably be chalked up to pattern in the human psyche/collective unconscious.)
My big question now is whether the "force" identified in this episode interfaces with us directly via the mind, or whether it does actually take on a physical manifestation.
