Paranormality in Memoir

I promise, I am not going all woo woo on you, but some of the best family stories that you may want to mention or elaborate on, put in context, or frame with other family beliefs may well have some elements that involve things that are beyond explanation.

The linguistic differentiation between superatual and preternatural makes sense to me as an anthropologist, but it can be difficult to understand outside of that framework.

Natural Versus Normal

Comparing what is natural to what is normal is comparing apples and oranges. Things can be natural. Behavior can be normal. These are differences of type or class. We should not compare the natural, what is a part of nature, with normal, which is a type of behavior.

Natural

• SUPER. The term super in supernatural is from the Latin super– which means above, beyond, or outside, and essentially means that anything called supernatural is not subject to the laws of nature, and is outside of the laws of nature.
  • Gods, angels, and demons are supernatural or beyond natural.
  • Standard tenets of religions are of a supernatural nature.
  • Religion cannot be explained through equations.
• PRETER. And then there is preternatural from the Latin pre- which means “before.” It is of the natural world and presumably subject to the laws of nature, but is not yet explained. Something that is preternatural exists in a state before an explanation.
  • A sound, a movement, and light phenomena are things that may not yet have been explained, but we expect an explanation, eventually, and one that it will conform to the laws of physics.
  • People in herding cultures may think that a supernatural spirit poisoned the well, or put a curse on a family that drinks from that well, but people in industrial cultures will know that an organism is probably found in the well and making people ill until a pathogen is identified,

Normal

• PARA. The prefix para- is from the Greek and means: or, beside, forward, off or away. What is paranormal runs along side normality and Cannot be explained in relationship to anything found in nature and is not simply misunderstood or unexplained. . It has no explanation.

Examples of these Types of Explication

Preternatural Example: UFOs or UAPs might be explained away in another 70 years as robotic vessels that are opening Einstein Rosen Bridges to travel within or between planetary or galactic systems collecting data and dispersing knowledge and life generating molecules. That would be preternatural to humans as we do not understand the physics that would make such technology available, but we can be relatively certain there is a physics of the future that that would follow the laws of nature, but it just isn’t known here as yet.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. –Arthur C. Clark

In 1962, in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible”, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke

Supernatural Example: God, miracles, demons, shamanism, Wicca, and animism all exist in the supernatural realms of believers . Faith cannot be seen, nor can it be disproven via use of the scientific method. Some people simply do not believe in anything that has the aspect of religious belief in nonphysical realities.

Paranormal Example: Ghosts, precognition, visions, and werewolves have no relationship with religion and do not relate to aspects of what might be an as yet unexplained physical property.

In telling stories of our strange experiences and the stories of what we have been told by others, it helps readers to understand how you classify the experiences you relate in your memoir. It may help convey similar experiences to group what you view as religious or supernatural encounters together. Compiling UFOs with NDEs (near death experiences) will not lend credence to the stories you tell.

Stories that have elements of theoretical physics might hang together better with each other if you label them as such. Mixing religious experiences with spooky stories will probably gain you very little. Let the expectations of your readers guide your grouping. It will help you organize and minimize offensive juxtaposition. By using the best fitting terms you will also be helping people understand differences between a little bit off and and unexplainable experiences. It might be helpful in distinguishing between dimensions and distance and deities.