by Mattie Mutare

Created on: December 27, 2008

Experiences with the paranormal.

I certainly believe that there are whole dimensions of human spirituality that remain unexplained. Perhaps the bad reputation of all things paranormal are fuelled by those who ascribe to spirituality more than they can exhibit, those who charge for spiritual services and those who wish to derive some personal importance (and power) from their practice or knowledge (this includes most hierarchies of all religious, spiritual groupings and followers of witchcraft type practices).

As a result of this, the academic and intellectual world has possibly lost an interesting topic for investigation, not from a religious or spiritual viewpoint but from a genuine knowledge-seeking perspective. We study dreams while knowing that they are unreal in some ways but real in others don't we?

I relate below my experience with fortune telling.

Having been born and living in Africa I was fortunate to gain access to many books from a private library, from the age of thirteen. I became an avid reader. In my reading I developed an urge to study other spiritual beliefs; Christianity, Islam, Budhism, Zen mysticism, African traditional beliefs, the Umbanda/Candomble beliefs of South America and even witchcraft. This extensive reading allowed me to explore my own psychic abilities and by the age of fifteen I was fairly well known as the fortune-telling teenager in the second-largest city of a certain country in Southern Africa, but I never charged for it.

Without any formal training I began telling fortunes and reading the future for a wide variety of children and adults. My favourite technique was palmistry. One day I read the palm of a teenage girl who I had long fancied for a girlfriend but found to my horror had only about another ten years to live before a tragic death. I did not tell her this (because I personally had no implicit belief in fortune-telling and still don't). I quietly observed her over the years. As it turned out just about ten years later she lost her mind and disappeared eventually being declared a missing person. I can only surmise that she died.

At school, my physics teacher (a British ex-University physics lecturer) was curious about my psychic ability and we would sit and debate the workings of fortune telling. I told him that I had no inherent belief in it but certainly knew that it appeared to tell significantly more truth than chance would yield. In one of our discussions he requested me to read the past of a visiting student who

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