My Encounter with God: Part IV

Telepathy, mind-reading, psycho kinesis, metal bending, faith healing, out-of-the-body experience, poltergeist, and the likes of them-all these are paranormal phenomena. They were treated with scorn and disdain by the main-stream scientists. They were even believed to not occurring at all; rather it was believed that they were mostly falsely reported as occurring by some ignorant and superstitious people. Did I hope then that these paranormal phenomena would help me prove the existence of God? Yes, I did. This is because I myself possessed, and still posses, one paranormal ability. If “somewhere in this world somebody is going to die”, then I will have a premonition of his/her death days before, and sometimes in one or two rare occasions, even months before, the occurrence of such death. I cannot exactly say who is going to die, but I can with absolute certainty say that very soon I am going to receive the death-news of someone with whom I even may not have any blood-relation at all. Here there are three circles within which such deaths can occur: 1) Family circle, 2) friends circle and 3) last but not the least, the celebrity circle. These celebrities may be local, regional, national, or even international. The only criterion that is applicable in each case here is that the death-news of the person must have to reach me somehow. Now I must explain how I come to know beforehand that “somewhere in this world somebody is going to die”. There are some common symptoms. One such symptom is that suddenly my mood will become off. I will lose all the positive meanings of life. I will lose interest in everything. Everything of this life will seem to me an illusion, a Maya. Whatever I do at present, whatever I propose to do in future, appear to me as nothing but vanity. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity”. When this mood comes heavily on me, I become dead sure that somewhere on earth somebody is going to draw his/her last breath very soon. Then one day again everything will become normal, and I will again find that life is worth living. And I will then get the news of someone’s death either through the newspaper, or maybe over phone, or by some other means, depending on within which circle such death has actually occurred. Another common symptom is that during those days my throat will be choked. It will become extremely difficult for me to utter even a single word. I will feel in those days that if I try to talk to someone, then I will definitely begin to cry. So when it becomes urgently necessary to talk to others, I have to suppress this propensity to cry with some tremendous effort, and then only I can speak out. And this constant urge to weep will always be there. I will not understand why I am so prone to weeping. But when I will get the death-news of someone, everything will be clear to me. Then there is another symptom, the most mysterious of the three. I will feel as if I have been transported somehow in another time, in another century that has long been lost. This time is not the present time, but another time of some bygone century, long, long ago lost from the surface of the earth. The people that I am seeing around me are also not of this present world, but they are all from that lost world. The road I am trotting is also of that lost world. I will feel as if I am in a world that was here on earth many, many centuries ago, but that has gone forever. Thus there will be a veil of unreality over everything surrounding me. When I will have this feeling, I will again know with certainty that “somewhere in this world somebody is going to die”. Although in the first two cases the suffering I have to go through is simply unbearable, still I must have to confess here that when I do have this particular type of experience, I relish it very much. This is because if one can see this present world as an already lost world of some bygone century, then nothing can be more mysterious than that. Physicists may not agree here, but I think this experience is equivalent to some sort of time-travel, because I am seeing this present century as a bygone century. As if my consciousness has somehow gone many centuries ahead of time, and from there it is seeing this present century retrospectively as a long-lost century. If this is not time-travel, then what is time-travel? During such an experience my wife appeared to me so distant in time that it seemed as if she was from some pre-historic period. So I was seeing a woman of some pre-historic age just in front of me! Although it was only an appearance, because it could not be real in any way, still her whole bodily appearance as a woman of some pre-historic century seemed very much real to me.

I have written that “I cannot exactly say who is going to die, although I can with absolute certainty say that very soon I am going to receive the death-news of someone”. But this is not the whole of truth, because in one or two rare occasions I have been able to exactly guess the name of the person whose death is imminent. I will give just one example here. A few weeks back a famous Bengali poet, novelist and litterateur has died. Months before his death I knew that this time it would be him. Once when I saw him appearing on the TV screen, I thought: How come he was still alive when he was supposed to die? A few weeks later he died.

So, when I have a genuine paranormal ability myself, why should I disbelieve others who might also have one or two genuine paranormal abilities themselves?