• Q and A

    Questions and Answers from the Risale-i Nur Collection
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Do Such Supernormal Phenomena as Telepathy, Spiritualism, and Necromancy Have a Reality?

 

Such supernormal phenomena as telepathy and spiritualism are widespread. Millions of people who seek peace and happiness to counteract the domination of their worldview, and spirit by technology and materialism, attend séances for so-called transcendental experiences. Some people are more inclined to and can perform supernormal phenomena. For example, a female medium by the name of Madame Gibson predicted the partition of India in 1947 and the murder of John Kennedy. Likewise, Fenni Bey from Ordu, Turkey, who fought at the front of Madina during the First World War, relates:

We were under siege in Madina. I was unable to communicate with my family in Istanbul. One night in a dream I saw fire and smoke in my house. In the morning I sent for a private of mine, who was a medium. I told him to go into a trance and, traveling to my house—I told him where it was situated—describe to me what he saw. He did what I told him and began to describe: “I have reached the house, I have knocked on the door and an old woman in a head-scarf has come out with a child in her arms.” I told the private to ask the woman if there was anything wrong in the house? He related to me: “She says your wife died yesterday.”

Spiritualism is very widespread nowadays. Before further explanation, I should point out that I discuss such things only to emphasize that existence is not restricted to matter. Rather, as in the case with a book or a piece of writing whose main existence lies in its meaning, that which is metaphysical, spiritual, or immaterial is the essential part of existence. Matter, on the other hand, is accidental and a changing means for the manifestation of the immaterial. Great saints like Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi communicated with the spirits of the dead and even of those who had not yet been born; modern spiritualists and mediums communicate with unbelieving jinn or devils who appear as the dead person with whose soul they wish to communicate. Also, mediums who predict future events usually make contact with jinn and then report what they are told.

Jinn live longer than us, are active in broader dimensions (realms) of time and space, are much quicker than us, and can see things that we cannot. However, they cannot see the future and we should not believe their predictions, even though a very few of them do come true. It is a known fact that the American and Soviet intelligence services competed with each other in using supernormal ways of communication like telepathy. In a not too distant future, world powers will be using jinn to communicate with each other, especially in secret intelligence activities. However, it is dangerous to seek to contact and communicate with jinn or devils, because it is easy for such beings to bring these seekers under their influence and control them.

A psychiatrist friend of mine relates the following account:

I was invited to a necromantic event in a house in Samsun (a province in northern Turkey). The youngest daughter arranged cups and letters on a table. One of the friends present invited the soul of his late grandfather. After several calls, a man appeared. When we asked him insistently who he was, he answered: “Satan.” We were greatly astonished. A while later, I asked him why he had come although we had not called him. He wrote on the table with the cups: “So I come!” I asked him whether he believed in God. He wrote “No!” When I asked whether he believed in the Prophet, again he wrote, “No!” I began reading to him some passages from a book concerning the existence of God. When I read: “A factory with such and such features points to the engineer who planned and built it,” he wrote: “True”; but when I read: “So too the universe with all the planets and particularly the world with all plants and animals in it indicate God,” he wrote, “No!” This continued for some time, and I began reciting to him from Jawshan al-Kabir (The Great Armour), a collection of supplications to God. While I was reciting, the cups were moving on the table. Meantime he wrote: “Give up that nonsense!” When I continued to recite, he could not endure listening and disappeared.

Like such supernormal experiences, observations of some doctors at the time of death also prove the existence of the spirit and spirit beings. What Bedri Ruhselman reports in Ruh ve Kainat (The Spirit and the Universe) from a doctor is in complete agreement with the observations of a group of doctors from Holland, which were published in the newspapers. A doctor narrates:

My wife was ill. When she went into the pangs of death, two things resembling two clouds descended into the room and hovered above her head. Meanwhile a form appeared, which was connected to my wife on the nape of the neck with a cord and was fluttering. This continued for five hours. In the end, the cord broke off and the form, the spirit, rose away. This was the end of my wife’s life.

 

This article has been adapted from Risale- i Nur Collection.