Tweet Last time we spoke with Dr. Jack Hunter, it was upon release of his book Engaging The Anomalous : Collected Essays on Anthropology, The Paranormal, Mediumship and Extraordinary Experience. He’s an anthropologist who has devoted much of his research to exploring paranormal experiences from a more holistic perspective. Instead of just searching for physical evidence in paranormal experiences, he factors everything in from the culture of the experiencer to the history of the surroundings to try and get a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Dr. Hunter giving a presentation Humans seem hardwired for extraordinary experiences, so why can’t we prove it? Everyone knows someone that they trust that has had some kind of strange psychic experience or seen something that they absolutely can’t explain. So why is it so hard to prove it? One theory lies in the idea that the very words “paranormal” or “supernatural” are part of the problem. Those words say that metaphysical phenomena is something outside of normal experience. In our interview with J. Van Ysslestyne, the author of Spirits From The Edge of the World, which is a study of one of the oldest continuous cultures on the planet as well as the one that gave us the very word “Shaman”, she says that to that tribe, the very idea that we’re separate from our surroundings, our land, our ecological system, is an alien thought. We are part of the land as much as a tree and as much as a bird and they have a spirit or an energy that we can connect with. Paranormal experiences reflect that energy and when we isolate ourselves from it, or try to study the physiology of the experience instead of what happened as a whole, we’re not getting the entire picture. When we do that, we become observers instead of participants. And being a participant seems to be essential in having a paranormal experience. That form of belief, animism, is one of the oldest kinds of religions, and it’s less of a religion with “rules” and more of a system of belief and conduct. The idea that we’re all connected to the world around us and that spirits are in everything whether it’s an inanimate object or not is how our ancestors viewed their surroundings for much longer than we’ve had modern religion. Okay, so in this belief system does that mean that rocks have souls? Well, maybe not like humans, but sure, they have their own type of souls. Their own type of energy and it interacts with all the other energies around it and the system itself becomes its own entity. From Bigfoot to faerie sightings to UFO encounters to ghosts, people have often experienced the extraordinary outside in nature. What does that mean? The new book, feeling at one with his feline friend.