7 W W W.PA R A P SYCH . OR G Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 Mindfield Va r i et i es of E x t ra o rd i n a r y E x p e r i e n ce I n 1902 William James’s hugely influential work The Varieties of Religious Experience was first published. It collected together his series of Gifford Lec - tures on “natural theology” given at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902. Over the course of the lecture series James ana- lyzed religious experiences that he had gathered from literary sources, often using examples from famous or influential figures. This was likely part of an effort to bring such extraordinary experi- ences into the respectable world of the elite of the day and to sug- gest their worthiness for study, though in effect it narrowed his sample size considerably. Never- theless, the emphasis on variet- ies of experience — as opposed to “religious experience” as a single discrete category — is the crucial point for the purposes of this short article. James gives a summary of the varieties of what he calls the “religious sentiment” — which may include “religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth” (James, 2004, p. 36) — that is, the different forms that religious feelings can take. He explains: One man allies it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious ob- jects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psycho- logically specific nature. (James, 2004, p. 36) For James, then, there was not a single “religious experience” but many different religious expe- Pa ra ps yc h olo gy a n d t h e Va r i et i es of H i g h St ran g en es s E x perience | by JACK HUNTER Downloaded by JackHunter on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at www.parapsych.org. Not intended for redistribution. 8 W W W.PA R A P SYCH . OR G Mindfield Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 riences . Despite this diversity, however, James does recognize some important themes that seem to run centrally through the many varieties of religious experiences that he analyzed. These are quali- ties that he referred to as: • Ineffable — they cannot ade- quately be put into words • Noetic — they impart knowl- edge, often of God or the ulti - mate reality • Transient — they are short- lived and temporary • Passive — they feel like they are coming from outside of the experiencer There is, therefore, both a mind-boggling array of variet- ies of religious experience and a sense of their interconnectedness. James’s recognition of the many forms that religious experience can take would go on to influence later approaches in the study of other types of extraordinary expe- rience. Robert Masters and Jean Houston, for example, continued this theme in the 1960s with their Varieties of Psychedelic Experi - ence (1966), which — although dealing only with LSD (itself just one among many other varieties of psychedelic substances) — em- phasized the diversity of experi- ences occasioned by the consump- tion the drug. There is no single “monolithic” LSD experience, just as there is no single monolithic religious experience. Masters and Houston explain, in relation to the experiential reports documented in their book, that: It is not possible to say that they are “typical.” Every such experi- ence is in many significant ways very individual and depends for its structure and content upon what the subject brings to the session in the way of personal history and frame of reference. (Masters & Houston, 1966, p. 6) This is what Timothy Leary and colleagues referred to as “set and setting” — individual mindset and environmental setting — in the context of their early research on the perceptual effects of psilo - cybin (Leary, Litwin, & Metzner, 1963). Extraordinary experienc- es, including those that are not induced by psychedelic substance, are modulated by these factors — they are shaped by our cultures, beliefs and expectations (though they can undoubtedly still sur- prise us). Individual differences also, then, play an important role in contributing to the variety of extraordinary experience. Though again, as with James, Masters, and Houston do emphasize some key threads running through that variety. The book is structured according to the following criteria: • Experiencing the body and body image • Experiencing other persons • The world of the non-human • The voyage inward • Psyche and symbol • Religious and mystical experience Psychedelic experiences may take on a rich variety of forms, but there are also common themes — transformations of body image, altered perceptions of human and nonhuman persons, mystical and religious symbolism, and so on. In 2000, Etzel Cardeña, Ste- ven Lynn, and Stanley Krippner ensured the continuation of the “varieties” tradition with the publication of their edited volume Varieties of Anomalous Experi - ence . Here, the varieties of anom- alous experience are expanded from the religious and psychedelic to include everything from, commonly documented sensa- tions and perceptions like syn- esthesia, lucid dreaming, out-of- body experiences, and auditory and visual hallucinations, to rarer and more seemingly inexplicable experiences such as anomalous healing, past-lives, near-death, mystical experiences, and even T h e B u l l e t i n o f t h e P a ra p s y c h o l o g i ca l A s s o c i a t i o n Psychedelic experiences may take on a rich variety of forms, but there are also common themes [...] P a ra p s y c h ol o g y a n d t h e Va r i et i es of H i g h St ra n g e n es s E x p e r i e n ce Downloaded by JackHunter on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at www.parapsych.org. Not intended for redistribution. 9 W W W.PA R A P SYCH . OR G Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 Mindfield [...] the strangeness rating is a measure of “the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common sense terms” P a ra p s y c h ol o g y a n d t h e Va r i et i es of H i g h St ra n g e n es s E x p e r i e n ce alien abductions. (Cardeña, Lynn, & Krippner, 2000) These are amongst the most common categories and varieties of extraordinary experience used (and experienced) today, each of which has its own associat- ed subfield of research. But this segregation of research agendas frequently leads to the “damning”, to use Charles Fort’s terminology, of certain experiences that blur these neat categories. They are excluded (Hunter, 2021a). E x t ra o rd i n a r y E x p e r i e n ces i n t h e F l u x of L i f e : H i g h S t ra n g e n es s I have argued elsewhere that the historical shift from field-based psychical research to laborato- ry-based parapsychology result- ed in a disconnect between psi research and the actual lived ex- perience of the paranormal, which is often much more chaotic and complex (for example, Caswell, Hunter, & Tessaro, 2014, p. 470). In a similar fashion, the neat cat- egories of experiences that have been compiled by researchers from James onwards often merge and overlap with one another in the flux of real-life experiences. Author and UFO experiencer Mike Clelland, for example, describes how his own real-life paranormal experiences are often enmeshed in a “tangled knot of implausibil- ity” in which “synchronicity spills over the edges like an unattend- ed sink” (Clelland, 2020, p. 44). In Clelland’s case, his own UFO experiences were synchronistically intertwined with numerous uncan- ny encounters with owls. Seem- ingly distinct paranormal events and experiences often merge and overlap in the real world. Indeed, so common is this kind of para- normal cross-pollination in the life-worlds of many experiencers that Clelland considers it “a sign to trust the event as legitimate. The more complicated the inter- woven details, the more valid it seems” (Clelland, 2020, p. 44). In the popular UFO and paranormal literature this element of para- normal experience is referred to as the “High Strangeness” factor. The term “high strangeness” was coined by the pioneering UFO researcher and astronomer J. Allen Hynek in the context of his “Strangeness Rating” for UFO encounters. He explains: A light seen in the night sky the trajectory of which cannot be as- cribed to a balloon, aircraft, etc., would ... have a low Strangeness Rating because there is only one strange thing about the report to explain: its motion. A report of a weird craft that descended within 100 feet of a car on a lonely road, caused the car’s engine to die, its radio to stop, and its lights to go out, left marks on the nearby ground, and appeared to be un- der intelligent control receives a high Strangeness Rating because it contains a number of separate very strange items, each of which outrages common sense. (Hynek, 1979, p. 42) In other words, the strangeness rating is a measure of “the num- ber of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common sense terms” (ibid.). Computer scientist and UFOlogist Jacques Vallee later ex- panded Hynek’s rating, elaborating seven distinct levels of strange- ness — ranging from the lowest level of a simple sighting of a light in the night sky all the way up to abduction experiences and the psychic side of the UFO phenom- enon, accounts of which contain the highest number of anomalous information bits (Vallee, 1977, pp. 114–119). It is precisely these high- ly strange cases that collapse the Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 Downloaded by JackHunter on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at www.parapsych.org. Not intended for redistribution. 10 W W W.PA R A P SYCH . OR G Mindfield Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 neat categorizations of experiences discussed above. P a ra p s y c h o l o g y a n d H i g h S t ra n g e n es s Psi phenomena seem to run through the apparent diversity of highly strange experiences. Mind-to-mind communication (telepathy), for example, is a common thread that runs through many varieties of extraordinary experience — from mystical communications with God (Luhrmann, 2012) to interactions with Bigfoot (Cutchin & Renner, 2020, p. 71) and telepathic commu- nications from alien entities (Mack, 1994, pp. 38–39). What contribution does parapsychology make to un- derstanding high strangeness? One point of contact with the themes discussed above are the well- known varieties of psi phenomena revealed in parapsychological experiments over the years: • Extrasensory perception (te- lepathy, clairvoyance, remote viewing, etc.) • Psychokinesis • Precognition • Retrocognition Psi, like exceptional experiences more generally, is multiple, varied and diverse, and frequently over- laps in lived experience, rendering these neat categories of phenom- ena difficult to disentangle in the real-world. Parapsychologists Michael Thalbourne and Lance Storm addressed the entangle- ment of psi phenomena with their concept of “psychopraxia”, which effectively suggests that both ESP and PK are inseparable from one another, as well as from other “normal” processes of information gathering or action in the world. They explain that: The reason for the ambiguity comes from the fact that ESP and PK are discourse-dependent concepts that have emerged out of a fundamentally dual- istic framework — any kind of paranormal cognition is auto- matically labelled ESP because it largely manifests mentally, and any kind of paranormal action is automatically labelled PK because it largely manifests physically. Researchers tend to avoid any attempt at disambig- uation or clarification. (Storm & Thalbourne, 2019, p. 9) It is clear that parapsychology alone does not provide an expla- nation for high strangeness experi- ences, though the subtle processes that parapsychologists investigate do seem to play an important role in the enormous diversity of highly strange experiences. C on c l us i on s : Fu n da m e nta l D i ve rs i t y William James highlighted the “varieties of religious experience,” psychedelic researchers empha- sized the role of individual differ - ences in modulating extraordinary experience, and more recent ef- forts have brought a broader array of extraordinary experiences into respectable scholarly discourse. High strangeness experiences, however, frequently collapse neat scholarly categories, sug- gest deeper interconnectedness of extraordinary experiences and phenomena, and are damned in the academy. Psi phenomena are often important features of high strangeness experiences — fa- cilitating communication with ex- traordinary entities, for example. But like high strangeness experi- ences, psi also refuses to be put into neat categories. There might T h e B u l l e t i n o f t h e P a ra p s y c h o l o g i ca l A s s o c i a t i o n High strangeness experiences, however, frequently collapse neat scholarly categories, suggest deeper interconnectedness of extraordinary experiences and phenomena, and are damned in the academy. P a ra p s y c h ol o g y a n d t h e Va r i et i es of H i g h St ra n g e n es s E x p e r i e n ce Downloaded by JackHunter on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at www.parapsych.org. Not intended for redistribution. 11 W W W.PA R A P SYCH . OR G Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 Mindfield P a ra p s y c h ol o g y a n d t h e Va r i et i es of H i g h St ra n g e n es s E x p e r i e n ce also, therefore, be deeper threads underlying both psi and high strangeness. George Hansen’s trickster theory, for example, sug- gests that the boundary-dissolv- ing characteristics of paranormal experiences and phenomena belie a deeper, weirder interconnected- ness (Hansen, 2001). This trick- ster-like quality is also inherent in other natural systems, and so may be an even deeper character- istic of the natural world (Hunter, 2020). Diversity might also be a deep feature of consciousness — just as biological systems tend towards increased biodiversity, so does consciousness tend towards psychodiversity — and this might have important implications for our understanding of the varieties of high strangeness experiences, amongst other things (cf. Hunter, 2021b). Finally, D. Scott Rogo argued that the range of high strangeness experiences recorded throughout history points in the direction of multiple co-existent realities. In his book Beyond Reali - ty (1990), which surveys a range of paranormal and spiritual experi- ences, he explains his intention, to show that the existence of psychic, spiritual, and so-called “extraterrestrial” forces points to the possibility of multiple realities... Such phenomena as ghosts, UFOs, and religious miracles reflect the existence of parallel realities probably co- existing in time/space with our everyday reality. (Rogo, 1990, p. 11) Diversity and a capricious resis- tance to neat classification seem to be core features of exceptional experience more generally. S y m p os i u m On May 21, 2022, I will be chairing an online symposium on “Parapsy- chology and High Strangeness” to begin to unravel some of these threads. More news will be an- nounced in due time, and I hope that I might see some of you there. R e f e re n ces Cardeña, E., Krippner, S., & Lynn, S. (2000). Varieties of anomalous experi - ence: Examining the scientific evidence. Washington: American Psychological Association. Caswell, J. M., Hunter, J., & Tessaro, L. W. E. (2014). Phenomenological con- vergence between major paradigms of classic parapsychology and cross- cultural practices: An exploration of paranthropology. Journal of Conscious- ness Exploration and Research, (5) 5, 467–482. Clelland, M. (2020). The messengers: Owls, synchronicity and the UFO ab - ductee . Beneath the Stars Press. Cutchin, J., & Renner, T. (2020). Where the footprints end: High strangeness and the bigfoot phenomenon: Vol. 1: Folklore. Dark Holler Arts. Hansen, G. P. (2001). The trickster and the paranormal . Bloomington: Xlibris. Hunter, J. (2020). Harmony and ecology. In N. Campion (Ed.), The harmony de - bates: Exploring a practical philosophy for a sustainable future (pp. 209-220) Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press. Hunter, J. (2021a). Deep weird: High strangeness, boggle thresholds and damned data in academic research on extraordinary experience. Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, 7 (1), 5–18. Hunter, J. (2021b). “...not the action of mind upon matter, but the action of mind-matter upon matter-mind...”: A world of many minds in archaeology and ethnography. Time and Mind: Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Cul- ture, 14 (4), 481-485. Hynek, J. A. (1979). The UFO experi - ence: A scientific inquiry. London: Corgi Books. James, W. (2004). The varieties of reli - gious experience . New York: Barnes & Noble. Leary, T., Litwin, G. H., & Metzner, R. (1963). Reactions to psilocybin admin- istered in a supportive environment. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 137 (6), 561–573. Luhrmann, T. (2012). When God talks back: Understanding the American evangelical relationship with God . New York: Knopf. Mack, J. E. (1994). Abduction: Human encounters with aliens . London: Simon & Schuster. Masters, R. & Houston, J. (1966). The varieties of psychedelic experience: The first comprehensive guide to the effects of LSD on human personality . New York: Dell Publishing. Rogo, D. S. (1990). Beyond reality: The role unseen dimensions play in our lives Wellingborough: The Aquarian Press. Storm, L., & Thalbourne, M. (2019). Thalbourne’s theory of psychopraxia. Mindfield: Bulletin of the Parapsycho - logical Association, 11 (1), 8–12. Vallee, J. (1977). UFOs: The psychic solution: UFO influences on the human race. St Albans: Panther Books. Volume 13 Issue 3 2021 Downloaded by JackHunter on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at www.parapsych.org. Not intended for redistribution.