Watson - Beyond supernature: a new natural history of the supernatural

BEYOND SUPERNATURE .
A Bantam Book

New Age and the accompanying figure design as well as the statement the search for meaning, growth, and change are trademarks of Bantam Books, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Copyright 1987 by Lyall Watson.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Watson, Lyall.
Beyond supernature.
Bibliography:
1. Occult sciences. 2. Physical research.
I. Title.
BF1411.W33 1987 133 87-1348
eISBN: 978-0-307-81652-8

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v3.1

Those who refuse to go beyond fact,
rarely go as far

THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY in Collected Essays, 1881

As a biologist, I am fascinated by the soft edges of science, by the fleeting glimpses we get of strange shadows just beneath the surface of current understanding.

I tried in Supernature to redefine this fringe, to reconcile nature with what seems to be supernatural. And helped, up to a point, to create a sort of demilitarised zone into which both scientists and enthusiasts could go without abandoning either their sense of proportion or their sense of wonder.

But that was fifteen years ago and much has happened since. The publication of Supernature made me a focus for anomalous experience and gave me the freedom to explore it at will. I have tried, along the way, to keep contact with those who share my excitement by putting out position papers in the form of six further books each looking at the loose ends of the world in a slightly different way.

The time has come now, however, to go back to the beginning once again and see where we stand, almost a generation on.

During the last few years there has been a strong reaction against research into the unusual. Critics of anything paranormal have established influential committees with the express purpose of stopping such research altogether. They have succeeded, in at least one case, in destroying reputations by sending magicians, posing as psychics, to ingratiate themselves with a group of researchers, with the express intent of deceiving them at every opportunity. These tactics prove nothing, except perhaps a degree of intolerance which is blatantly unscientific. There are few fields which would be proof against such invasions.

Given wide public interest in the supernatural, it was probably inevitable that it should become a big business and suffer from all the distortions of the marketplace. I am ruefully aware of having helped to create this situation and accept my share of responsibility for fuelling enthusiasms which have, in some cases, got out of hand. Our culture, however, is prone to such excesses.

There is, when you look at it closely, no such thing as the supernatural. All we have are reports of experiences which seem to be beyond natural explanation but we do have these in astonishing abundance. And the reports have become so frequent and so widespread that they are very difficult for anyone with real scientific curiosity to ignore.

I am fascinated by the fact that people all over the world have, and not just in our cultish time, come to accept the existence of some sort of paranormal reality. They hold beliefs in the existence of things such as spirits, of miraculous happenings, reincarnation, communication with the dead and telepathy amongst the living and these beliefs are so persistent and so much alike that it is tempting to look for common cause.

Where do such ideas come from and what is it that sustains them, even in the face of official incredulity and scorn? Is it possible, even if the supernatural does not exist, that we need somehow to invent it?

I am not wedded to the proposition that the supernatural must exist. If one defines supernatural experience simply as the experience of something unusual, something which exceeds the limits of what is deemed possible then there is clearly a vast field of experience, of repeated experience, from all over the world, just waiting to be explored. The fact that such reports are, by their very nature, largely anecdotal, has led to their being discarded as unacceptable to science. Which is a pity and a waste, because I suspect that answers to some of the riddles of the paranormal might well lie in the pattern and content of such reports.

The greatest barrier to scientific acceptance of anything unusual remains its elusiveness. Which is a problem that leaves parapsychology for the moment the most formal and least disreputable approach an immature science without basic principles or consistent findings, hoping still to produce the elusive repeatable experiment. Failure so far to do so in the laboratory makes it easy for some orthodox scientists to dismiss the supernatural as meaningless; but it is difficult for anyone like myself, who has been involved in the field, that is outside the confines of the lab, to deny the common and powerful reality of experience that breaks the rules.

My own experience of the unusual in action in a wide variety of cultures, suggests very strongly that there is something well worth pursuing. I have watched the rise of interest in the occult and the inevitable backlash with fascination. I have shared the high expectations of those trying to get to scientific grips with telepaths and metal-benders; and suffered with them the disappointment of discovery that the phenomena are strangely, almost wilfully, elusive. I understand the disillusion which has resulted, but must say that nothing has happened in the last fifteen years to alter my certainty that we stand to learn important things about ourselves from scrutiny of those areas in our lives that can be almost commonplace, but nevertheless defy easy description.

I believe that what the supernatural very badly needs is a new and fresh and thorough overview. A cross-cultural survey of the paranormal. An ethnography of the unusual. A broadly based and well-funded professional operation designed to retrieve and catalogue and classify all unusual events everywhere.

This is unfortunately not it. This is nothing more than my own personal attempt to make sense of what I have seen and heard in recent years. It is an attempt to define and describe the range of unusual experience a little more precisely. An attempt which I sincerely believe to be necessary, because I remain convinced that there are things going on around us which cannot easily be squeezed into forms that fit the accepted mould.

So, despite the cavils of self-appointed committees for the suppression of curiosity, I continue to pursue ghosts on the edges of perception. I persist in pointing out inconsistencies in natural history not because these necessarily mean anything in themselves, but because they could lead to better understanding of what is usual through a new and more open-minded analysis of the pieces that dont quite fit.

And as with Supernature, I offer this new survey to all those who can still look at the world with wide eyes and wonder.