The Sense of Being Stared At

 

Regular visitors to this blog will have already noted my attraction to the woo-woo side of life: ghosts and dreams and astrology and tarot cards and that kind of thing. Rupert Sheldrake (father of mycologist Merlin Sheldrake) is similarly inclined and has spent his life earnestly investigating what other people call paranormal phenomena, but which he is convinced are actually a natural part of life on earth.

I've previously read Sheldrake's Dogs Who Know Their Owners Are Coming Home (alas, our puppy never showed any sign of unusual awareness of our approach, only jumping up when she actually heard us arrive), and The Sense of Being Stared At examines such phenomena as precognition, telepathy, and of course the power of attention. I'm sure most of us have experienced weird coincidences like thinking of people just before they telephoned us, making people turn around by staring at the back of their heads, or waking up just before our alarm was set to go off. Apparently there are several accounts of people who felt an intuition of danger before the events of 9/11, and it seems such premonitions are not uncommon -- numbers of passengers on trains involved in crashes are lower than on ordinary days, suggesting that some people felt moved to avoid travel on that day.

I'm not sure whether Sheldrake's theory that our minds extend beyond our bodies in what he's dubbed 'morphic fields' is the actual explanation for such phenomena, but it's a fascinating discussion, and in a world of quantum physics where particles are spookily connected across universes and observers influence outcomes just by watching, maybe we shouldn't write off paranormal phenomena just yet.