However, there is a profile of this notable personality that is very little known. We refer to your interest in spirituality and the topics which today we know with the name of “paranormal.” Therefore it seemed convenient to us – given that this Monday January 27 marks 46 years since his death– inquire about it. The results have been – at the same time – surprising and very interesting.
Let’s see.
Let us begin by pointing out that the November 30, 1961 appears, for South publishing housethe first edition in Spanish of “About things seen in the sky”, the last book written by Carl Gustav Jung. The flap text, approved by Victoria Ocampo, reads: “Jung analyzes with scientific rigor the various stories regarding ‘unidentified flying objects´, then goes on to consider dreams in which images are manifested that evidently correspond to the ´flying saucers´ whose presence has been reported during waking life and then examines pictorial compositions linked to the issue.” Yeah. This book by Jung is about UFOs.
On the question of extraterrestrial life we find in “Testimonies VIII” (1969) this suggestive phrase: “We will become a place of tourism for other stars (more worthy of survival), whose unpredictable inhabitants will come to contemplate our ruins.”
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In the same book we find – regarding his correspondence with Aldous Huxley–references to parapsychological experiential experiences (especially extrasensory phenomena) and spiritual themes.
Our author also had her knowledge in Astrology as emerges from these words of his referring to Sur magazine: “… a common work where my role has been to contribute something coming from chance, that tenacity that I owe to the signs of Aries and Capricorn.”
Victoria Ocampo with Rabindranath Tagore
The questions of what popular wisdom calls “sixth sense” It was not alien to him either. In his essay “Tagore in the San Isidro ravines” He explains that he has “an awakened intuition that I receive as an antenna…”
In that same work, we find this other thought that reveals his spiritual convictions: “The moment we perceive that the apparent triviality of the finite is as false as the apparent emptiness of the infinite, we are close to assuming that everything on earth is true.” It is the word of God.” And on another occasion he writes: “… God, you don’t want to protect me from anything and you don’t fear or reproach me for the oblivion in which I leave you! God, to know that we only go towards you along the paths of freedom! “God who understands me and who I do not understand!”
Victoria Ocampo and Tagore.png
She was so informed about paranormal matters that, in a letter to the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1940)where he tells her about the beauties and conveniences of visiting the southern lakes, he adds: “I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find a pleciosaur there…” Victoria knew this between history/myth/legend of the existence of a family of antediluvian creatures, inhabitants in those water mirrors.
Ocampo had read and studied the book with relish.“An experiment with time” (An experiment with time), published in 1927 by John William Dunne. This is a text dedicated to the parapsychological phenomenon of precognition (certain knowledge of a future fact that cannot be known by reasoning, deduction, or logical inference) and the difficulties it addresses in the way in which humans perceive time.
He also learned about the ideas about karmaclarifying that there were three forms: hereditary, karmic and conscious.
He learned about the first institution dedicated to the research of what, at that time, was known as “occult phenomena.” We refer to The Society for Psychological Researchcreated in London at the end of the 19th century. He mentions her in his book “Sundays in Hyde Park” (1936) where he also mentions the Theosophy, Anthroposophy and the occult. The names of Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner and Annie Besant they appear cited there.
One of his biographers, Adolfo de Obietaexpresses: “This whole theme of the mind, well, was not foreign to him, it was his own. She was not only informed about areas of dark knowledge or not knowing. He knew, and perhaps had experienced, that there are many worlds within this one and outside this one. There is even some reference to spiritualist episodes or parapsychological enigmas, and to some ‘communication’, although without talking about spiritualism or further specification.”
We can agree that spirituality and the paranormal were also part of the interests that motivated Victoria Ocampo.
Antonio Las Heras is a doctor in Social Psychology, parapsychologist, philosopher and writer. “Dare to live fully” is his most recent book. www.antoniolasheras.com
