Eileen J. Garrett - Adventures in the Supernormal

Adventures
in the
Supernormal

by
Eileen J. Garrett

HELIX PRESS
NEW YORK

Copyright 2002 by Eileen Coly.

All rights reserved. This book, or any part thereof, must not be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 1-931747-01-6

Published by Helix Press
an imprint of the
Parapsychology Foundation, Inc.

228 East 71st Street

New York, New York, 10021, USA

TEL: 212-628-1550/FAX: 212-628-1559

www.parapsychology.org

Printed by

Thomson-Shore, Inc.

Dexter, Michigan, USA

Cover art designed by

Illuminations, Inc.

Greenport, New York, USA

Adventures

PROLOGUE

Just who was Eileen J. Garrett? No simple answer emerges. Her personal memoir, reprinted here after many years, allows the lady herself to consider and contemplate her own experiences in her own words in her own Adventures in the Supernormal.

For those who experienced the force of her personality firsthand, Garrett was an essay in contradictions. Many know of her through her writings and good works within the fields of publishing and parapsychology. To us, her daughter and granddaughter, she was a beloved ever-present whirlwind of activity with a deeply centered core, almost the eye within the storm of a complex personality.

Author, publisher, entrepreneur, and foundation executive, Garrett never failed to elicit a response more to the point, a strong reaction from those she touched. In attempting to define more completely the essence of Eileen J. Garrett, in addition to reprinting her unique personal chronicle in which she dealt with the psychic elements in her life, we have collected a selection of remembrances from those who actually knew her. These vignettes appear at the end of the book. We have also reprinted a selected bibliography of works by and about her.

This new edition of her book is being published as part of the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Parapsychology Foundation, the non-profit organization Garrett founded in 1951 to act as a worldwide forum supporting scientific exploration of psychic phenomena, an organization which we are proud to currently administer.

It is our fond hope that new readers and old friends will enjoy the insights and commentary of this unique individual, as we welcome you to join us in continued Adventures in the Supernormal.

Eileen Coly

President

Lisette Coly

Executive Director

Parapsychology Foundation, Inc.

TO MY NEW READERS

Some time has elapsed since the first edition of this book was published. The story it tells, however, will always be new to those, like myself, who have to travel in uncharted regions, defying the usual established conceptions of time and space.

Paranormal phenomena are alleged to belong to the world of dreams and fantasy, fading strangely away when exposed to the cold light of fact. In telling my own life story, I have sought to interpret paranormal aspects of personality, not in allegories or symbols, but in impersonal terms of thought and action. The process for such activity must become almost a dedicated one. For me, these chapters of my life are linked to the love of God and man.

The gift of vision belongs to all. It links man to the world he lives in, and by virtue of its magic not only permits him to uncover the secrets of nature herself, but may someday enable him to wrest the deep meaning of creation from the Universe. This can be an alarming thought. It might cause one to hope that the justice of the Universe will not reveal all, for the history of mans discoveries of nature discloses that he has turned his knowledge against all living things, and eventually against his own kind. This has been the willful and destructive choice that man has made for himself in order to possess without love and understanding. He has made captive the elements, only to change them and dissipate them to his own undoing, bringing forth more and more destruction. He cannot plead ignorance of the laws of life, for every great human upheaval has brought with it teachers who have tried in vain to save him.

The story of my life shows the ways by which I have endeavored to adapt it to a world of tradition, like the surroundings of my early years, and carry it through within a system of fixed laws. It shows how, as a child, I grasped the exciting interpretations that remained my own all through maturity. It tells how I have lived within a world of the immediate, and yet have been aware of the demands of time and action. It tells how it happened that I came to know the end before the beginning, and how the actions of others have often been a part of my own dream. Mine has been a life of adventures in the inner and outer world.

I am often asked what this vision does for me how does it affect me? One feels that one is so busy sensing the pulse of life that one cannot write too clearly about it. Returning to the worldly and the usual from adventures in the paranormal, one does not bring back new language to clothe the shimmering thought. When one seems to be touching the stars, the cosmic dust which one desires to bring back as evidence of the adventure vanishes before mans sober gaze. The impact of ones vision may be lost when the experience has to be related in reasonable and cautious terms. I truly hope, however, that this new printing of my book will be read and understood as an invitation to a richer and more meaningful life.

Eileen J. Garrett

1969

PREFACE

The writing of an autobiography is a perfectly defensible activity, but it is also an exercise in egotism of a kind in which I have no desire to indulge. To write of ones life may be excused either by reason of public eminence or of true greatness, and neither of these conditions fits me very neatly. I have, nevertheless, spoken of my own life in the pages of this book because, to achieve my special purpose, I could not avoid doing so. A word now about that purpose and the measure of personal revelation these pages contain.

I have a gift, a capacity a delusion, if you will which is called psychic. I do not care what it may be called, for living with and utilizing this psychic capacity long ago inured me to a variety of epithets ranging from expressions of almost reverence, through doubt and pity, to open vituperation. In short, I have been called many things: from a charlatan to a miracle woman. I am, at least, neither of these.

In this book I hope to tell the reader what I am. It is an answer to literally hundreds of requests for information concerning supernormal perception and how it functions. Because I am the agent of this perception, it has been necessary to search for the moment of its first incidence. This came in childhood, and thus it is that my book begins with childhood.

Here, then, is so much of my life as I believe necessary to an understanding of the origin and functioning of supernormal perception. Nothing that I felt to be pertinent to that understanding has been withheld; nothing not to the point willfully revealed. I have presented the truth as I have seen it.