Who may be "Edgelings"*?
(Edgelings: those who might give us hints as to how to amplify or modify the direction an evolutionary leap can take.)
Here's a list of possibles:
- Adepts of various contemplative traditions who access exotic powers such as the Tibetan tumo (the ability to generate heat from within the body, enough to dry out a soaking wet sheet worn in a very cold room in an hour or so). These are also the Siddhis of the Yogic tradition, the "little miracles" like levitation or spontaneous healing ability that often occur on the way to enlightenment.
- People in deep existential or psychological crisis, some of whom may be going through so-called "acute psychosis" or "spiritual emergency". The credibility of the imagery and story-lines of these peoples' experiences is usually strongly discounted by mainstream medicine. But if one really listens, there are frequent hints of possible highly unusual (evolutionary?) motion.
- People with various illnesses that can cause radical consciousness modifications: e.g., certain epileptic styles, severe hypoglycemia, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc.
- Adults and children with psychogenic wounds or physical anomalies (stigmata, missing pregnancy).
- Athletes who get in "The Zone" and exceed their previous performance dramatically; or masters of martial arts like Aikido, who've been filmed making "impossible" moves. (In one frame of the film, the Master is surrounded by attackers. In the next frame, 1/24 second later, he's two feet away. No leap, no blur of movement in either frame.)
- People with various (practiced or spontaneous) non-athletic exceptional abilities -- extended perceptual range (e.g., hyper-sensitive hearing [above 30khz]); extraordinary control of bodily processes (e.g., the documented ability of some Yogis to stop their heart beat for many minutes at a time); outrageously consistent telepathic skill; powerful, and often fully documented, paranormal healing ability (and some healers' ability to generate spikes of up to 60vt [!] on an object in a Faraday cage [see "The Copper Wall Experiment": Tiller & Greene]); etc.
- Psychedelic adepts. Whatever one may think of psychoactive compounds, they have given some "travelers" powerful life-changing insight into their own and humankind's potential -- and turned the travelers' lives in novel, important directions to boot!
- Contactees and/or abductees by "extra-" or "ultra-terrestrials" or other kinds of "visitors" who now and then appear in quite concrete or mythic or archetypal guise. (These intelligences may sometimes bounce in and out of several kinds of "terrestriality", or be in more than one at the same time. We're not True Believers in any single explanation for this diverse phenomenon.)
- Near-death experiencers, some of whom feel like very new beings indeed after their arresting and illuminating encounters on "the other side". (It's interesting to note here that both near-death experiencers and UFO contactees and abductees often report after their episodes the sudden onset of sensitivity to many kinds of common electricity and electromagnetism in the environment. Are those events "designed" in some way to jolt some new [or old, even ancient] "circuit" loose or into action?)
- Savant syndrome people. (E.g., a man, blind since birth and dysfunctional in most areas of life, who's never had a single piano lesson, hears a recording of a Tchaikovsky piano piece only once and can sit down and play it flawlessly? What does this imply about that elusive construct we call "human potential"?
- Some creative geniuses.
- Some twins with exceptional capacities and apparent paranormal mental connection with each other.
- Water-birth children, some of whom are reported to have striking, spontaneous paranormal capacities.
Go to "twilight zones" in right sidebar for more on other blurred-boundary, evolutionary eye-openers.
_______________________*Profound thanks to Saundra Kiehn for this coinage!
