![]() "Izaac, this is tea, not whisky." My father's mouth dropped. After taking a sip, the minister gave my father a perplexed look. One day, he invited the former Minister of Justice (a sort of attorney general) and other friends to dinner. My father, a dentist, had welcomed to his practice many of the Portuguese immigrants that flooded Brazil after the Carnation Revolution of 1974. When I was growing up in Rio, my parents loved hosting dinner parties. I also have had one such experience (actually more than one), that I relate in detail in my recent book The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected, under the chapter heading "The Witch of Copacabana." Here is a brief summary: "I'm not alone." The radio stopped playing the next day, as mysteriously as it had started. "My grandfather is here with us," Shermer's wife Jennifer said, tearfully. After searching for possible sources, they were amazed to see that it was the transistor radio, as if it had come back to life on its own. On their wedding day, they were surprised to hear music coming from upstairs. They tucked it into a drawer in their bedroom and forgot about it. The transistor radio had been broken for years and Shermer's attempts to fix it failed. Among them was an old radio that belonged to her dear grandfather, the closest father figure she had growing up. A few weeks before his wedding, his German bride-to-be shipped many of her belongings to their home in California. I know Michael and can attest to his rock-solid convictions. Luhrmann mentions how Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a notable rationalist, had one such experience that defied any sense of logic and left him stunned. Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can't explain." "I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality. She was on a train, going to interview with a group of people that practiced a form of powerful magic, when she felt strange: When she was a graduate student in England, she had one such experience that left her wondering. Tanya Luhrmann, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and an expert on what could be called the experience of the sacred, has written extensively on the subject in The New York Times as an op-ed contributor, in books for the general public, and in more academic settings. What are these events - and what are they trying to tell us, if anything?įor a rationalist, the usual response is one of dismissal, based on the law of large numbers: When there are billions of people experiencing billions of different events every day, chances are that some will encounter events that are so rare that they are deemed, on the surface, as unexplainable. It could be strange sightings, events that apparently challenge the laws of nature, that evoke the supernatural, or feelings of being possessed by some kind of universal awe, that elicit a connectedness with something grander, timeless. Nearly everyone has had weird experiences, things that happen in life that seem to defy any sort of rational explanation. ![]()
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