J'ai récemment exploré certains liens entre parapsychologie et écologie dans mes travaux. Même si les connexions entre les deux domaines semblent inattendues, elles sont nombreuses et profondes.
Je me suis beaucoup appuyé sur les travaux de Bertrand Méheust qui montrent des points de convergence. Une publication en anglais se trouve dans un numéro spécial du Journal for the study of religious experiences publié par le centre mis en place à Oxford par Sir Alister Hardy. Elle est accessible gratuitement en ligne.
Evrard, R. (2021). From the ecology of anomalous experiences to political ecology: Bertrand Méheust’s work in progress. Journal for the study of religious experiences, 7(2), 17-38.
Abstract:
The retired professor of philosophy Bertrand Méheust (1947-) is a major French author in the areas of both ufology and parapsychology, but since 2009 he has also published essays on political ecology. While some of his readers know him only for one of his specialties, Méheust overtly establishes complex links between ecology, politics and anomalistics. All his work over the past decade describes the common properties of social groups integrating charisms (including Jesus’ so-called miracles), especially their orientation toward a natural and cosmic solidarity. These groups are usually confronted with an ecocidal and organized denial which successfully manages to avoid any overheating which would take the system to tipping point. Méheust relies on his expert knowledge on institutional rejection of psychical research seen in past centuries, especially French metapsychics and its qualitative and “ecological” approach to psi experiences. But he has also applied political ecology to anomalistic theories like those on elusiveness and on the Trickster archetype. This article is an attempt to summarize his gateway concepts which were based on the functions of anomalous experiences, in particular their ability to “generate religions” that reorganize the links between man and his environment.
J'ai également organisé le 21 novembre 2020 une journée d'étude en ligne au sein de la Parapsychological Association sur le thème “Ecology, Nature and Parapsychology”. Les abstracts se retrouvent ici.
Mon intervention se présente ainsi :
A recent collective book edited by anthropologist Jack Hunter, Greening the Paranormal (2019), developed some links between ecology and parapsychology. The most obvious intersection between both is a commonly-reported aftereffect of several different types of exceptional experiences (psychedelics, near-death or abduction experiences, etc.), in which the experiencer comes away from their encounter with an enhanced sense of connection to the environment and the world around them. The study of this rising “ecological consciousness” shows another promising aspect of these experiences. Links between ecology and parapsychology were already made by several authors, with approaches like Méheust’s “ecology of the psi subject”, Long’s “extrasensory ecology”, Warwick’s “transpersonal ecology”, Devereux’s “re-visioning” of the Earth, and Schroll’s “transpersonal ecosophy”. More recently, the Global Consciousness Project was developed as a holistic experimental approach to psi, a unique 20-year scientific collaboration of researchers recording the effects of mass consciousness in response to major global events. But, as suggested by Hunter (2019, p. 3), we should not examine parallels between ecology and parapsychology just for the sake of exploring interesting intersections, “but for the essential task of contributing towards a much broader – necessary – change of perspective concerning our relationship to the living planet.” While humanity’s greatest challenge is the current ecological crisis, parapsychology may contribute to the expected changes of behavior by changing the way we think about our place in the cosmos.
