Published records on and my personal experiences with Paranormal Phenomena

S. N. Arseculeratne

(Emeritus Professor of Microbiology, University of Peradeniya.)

This is an abbreviated version of a lecture given to the Peradeniya University’s Alumni Association. I will describe evidence for the reality of Paranormal phenomena in accordance with what John Ziman (Fellow of London’s The Royal Society), wrote “Come with reliable, consensible evidence, and we will be ready to be convinced” and that is what I did in my lecture.

Aristotle commented ” It is of man’s nature that he wants to know“. In that quest for knowledge, scientists have unearthed much about Nature in many categories of knowledge, in the physical and biological sciences; these are considered branches of Normal Science, which are amenable to direct exploration. There are phenomena that are well known for centuries, but have defied exploration thought they have been written about by many prestigious authors; these fall into the category of the Paranormal.

Many persons are skeptical of the reality of Paranormal phenomena and consider them as mumbo-jumbo as did Richard Dawkins; I wrote to him challenging his skepticism. Skeptics should remember that Shakespeare’s Horatio said “There are more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. A former physicist Peter Betts, now Ajahn Brahmavamso, a Buddhist monk in Australia wrote “Scientists, for the most part, are brainwashed by their education and their in-group conferences to see the world in a very narrow, microscopic way“. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world”. In 300 BC, the Lu Shih Chhun Chhiu commented ” If a man climbs a a mountain, the oxen below look like sheep and the sheep like hedgehogs. Yet their real shape is very different. It is a question of the observer’s viewpoint”.

Britain’s Society for Psychical Research had 12 Nobel Prize laureates and many fellows of the most prestigious scientific society in the world, The Royal Society of London; members included Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

I gave a lecture to the Peradeniya Univesity’s Alumni Association in January 2019 titled. Published records on and my personal experiences of Paranormal events. There are nine categories of phenomena of which I had personal experience or reported evidence. These nine categories comprised:

1. Re-incarnation, Also termed Re-birth and palingenesis. This referes to the successive births of a personality after the death of each one. Ian P. Stevenson of Virginia University (USA) is the world’s foremost authority published a book, “Twenty cases suggestive of Reincarnation” to which I contributed a case.

2. Discarnate Entities, are personalities after their death on earth, existing in some unidentified celestial abode. These can be accessed parapsychologically.

3. Astrology, I have numerous experiences with the mundane type as well as with the 1,400 year old Indian Palm leaf horoscopes studied by the German Thomas Ritter.

4. Palmistry, Refers to the analysis and prediction of life’s events through the lines on a palm.

5. Clairvoyance, is the ability of a psychic to read concealed writings mentally without direct vision. I had an Indian who visited my home in Malaysia, who was able to read and copy concealed and documented items through the mind alone.

6. Precognition, The most remarkable example was the publication of a novel 12 years before the predicted Titanic’s sinking event really happened; the congruence between the fictional events and the real event was total. Morgan Robertson described fictionally the sinking of the British ship Titan after a collision with an ice-berg in the North Atlantic. The real ship the Titanic suffered the same fate in 1912 with the loss of 1400 passengers.

7. Psychokinesis, The ability to perform physical acts through the mind alone and not through physical means.

8. Telepathy, Purely mental communication of information between persons.

9. Prophetic dreams. These are dreams experienced by people related to the event which they dreamt of. The most remarkable was Auguste Kekule’s dream of a snake biting its own tail as a parallel of the ring structure of the circular benzene molecule. The Sri Lankan parallel was of a domestic worker’s dream of her employer’s wife who was admitted to hospital with a head injury; the worker had left her service eight years previously.