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Sometimes metaphysics is described as “physics of tomorrow”. Many of the phenomena studied by metaphysics resemble a fantasy movie script, but maybe in the future they will become everyday and ordinary.
In an interview published on the otherside.gr, Nicholas Koumartzis, member of the Greek Community of Metaphysical Journalism and PhD candidate at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, speaks of the most well-known and mysterious metaphysical phenomena:
1. Telepathy, sixth sense and extrasensory phenomena
All the three terms refer to the ability to collect information from a remote environment, without using the five known senses. For some people, it means that there are additional senses that are in use but are not yet recognized: there might be the sixth, seventh, eighth and so on senses.
To study these phenomena, numerous experiments were conducted: from Zener cards and Ganzfeld experiments, to more modern ones that use electroencephalography (EEG). Most of them show that there is indeed something that can not be explained by the known laws of conventional science.
2. Poltergeist
The word poltergeist comes from the German words poltern, which means “to rumble” and geist, which means “spirit”, and is commonly used in many languages to describe a “noisy spirit”, i.e. a spirit or action that causes a number of unexplained events, such as loud and repetitive noises, moving objects, unbearable odors, flickering lights, opening/ closing doors and windows, etc.
Usually this phenomenon occurs suddenly and lasts for a few days to several years and then disappears as suddenly as it appeared.
3. Deja Vu
The phrase is French and roughly means “I have already seen this”. It is a strong sense of a person, experiencing an event or situation, that he has seen or experienced it before. It is often accompanied by a strong sense of deep understanding and even stronger feeling of paradox saying that “something is wrong”.
That is, there must be a strong factor of “impossibility”, i.e. deja vu is associated with an event/situation that is practically impossible to have been experienced before, like the feeling of having been before to a place you are visiting for the first time.
4. Near-death experiences
The term “near-death experience” (NDE) is used to describe an experience of people who are close to death and has much in common with out-of-body experiences, since both involve separation of the consciousness from the body, floating in space and collecting information from the environment while a person is in a coma or unconscious.
There are many documented testimonies of doctors and nurses reporting that when some comatose patients returned to life, they knew situations and circumstances that had taken place near them when they were in coma.
PS. Relation between the paranormal, supernatural and metaphysical
Finally, as to the differences between the terms metaphysical, paranormal and supernatural, things are a little fluid. Most people interested in such kind of phenomena use all the three terms in the same way.
However, the metaphysical is a shortcut of the term metaphysical philosophy, which is one of the main branches of philosophy that deals with the first principle, cause, destination and the end of the world.
While natural sciences deal with the reality based on the experience, metaphysical philosophy deals with a transcendental world which can not be investigated through experience, observation and experiment.
On the other hand, the term metaphysics is mistakenly associated with mysticism and religion. While mysticism is based on experiences of a particular nature and religion – on faith, metaphysics is based on logic.