“The Biggest Taboo” (2011) - Prose Three

While slightly different, this example nonetheless connects with the previous case in that a person you know/love/trust is informing you of what (s)he believes was an authentic experience. In one case, the experience was remembering a past life; in the other case it was seeing rain outside. The gray area of this binary of human experience ranges from concrete physical perception to what so-called mystics call the “depths of consciousness”—the “transpersonal” experiences constituted by perceptions of more than just (ordinary and physical) sensation, emotion, and thought. How do we interpret or make sense of a seemingly intelligent, sensible, honest human being who claims ability to have an out-of-body experience at will, for instance? The experience and general claim that this individual communicates definitely falls significantly outside any sort of societal norm. Yet, what does such abnormality mean?