Steven LaChance Blog

I have been sitting with a question for a while now, and the longer I sit with it, the less interested I am in answering it and the more interested I become in why it keeps showing up, again and again, in such recognizable ways.

Across history and across cultures, people have talked about moments that interrupt ordinary life in ways they struggle to explain. Sometimes those moments arrive quietly. Sometimes they arrive with force. Sometimes they alter a single life. Sometimes they ripple outward and reshape communities, belief systems, even entire civilizations. What they share is not their scale, but their effect. Something enters experience that does not fit cleanly into what came before, and what follows is never quite the same.

There is often a sense of structure, a sense of order, and a strange feeling of familiarity, even when the experience itself feels disorienting. Time may feel altered. Fear may appear. So may awe. And when the moment passes, whether quickly or over years, it leaves behind consequences that cannot be undone.

Later, when people try to talk about what happened, they give it a name. Haunted. Abduction. Religious experience. Something to hold it in place long enough to explain it to themselves and to others. The name helps, at least at first. It gives the moment edges. It tells them where to set it down. But the experience itself never quite fits inside the word they choose.

Before these moments are named, before they are sorted into belief systems or categories, they already have a recognizable shape. They unfold in familiar ways. They affect people in familiar ways. But we rarely linger there. We reach quickly for explanation, almost instinctively, as if naming the experience will steady it. We have been conditioned to explain first and understand later, to place the experience somewhere familiar before we have really spent time with it.

So we label it based on what we believe, what we have been taught, and what we think we already understand, rarely stopping to ask why we are doing that in the first place.

The explanations themselves change because our frameworks change. A religious culture reaches for angels and God. A moral world talks about demons. A technological age looks outward and calls it extraterrestrial. Now we are turning inward, using the language of consciousness and artificial intelligence, because the mind has become where mystery feels easiest to manage. Different words. The same habit.

This is where the cost shows up.

When we name too quickly, we do not just close the conversation. We flatten the experience. We turn something complex and disruptive into something tidy and familiar. We stop observing how it behaves and start defending what we believe it is. Over time, this fragments what may be a single recurring phenomenon into competing explanations that no longer speak to one another. What could have been compared, studied, or understood becomes siloed, protected, and argued over instead.

What gets lost is not belief.
What gets lost is understanding.

If we slow down instead of rushing to explain, different questions come into focus. How did this appear. How did it behave. What did it change. What stayed. Those questions do not belong to belief systems. They belong to observation. And they remain useful no matter what conclusions someone eventually reaches.

There is another layer worth noticing. Once labels harden, power follows. Naming brings authority. Authority brings control. What is named can be managed, sanctified, dismissed, or feared in ways that serve existing structures. That does not require coordination or conspiracy. It is simply how human systems respond when uncertainty is left unattended.

The unsettling possibility is this. The unexplained may not be a collection of unrelated mysteries at all. It may be a recurring architecture that keeps intersecting human consciousness, filtered through belief, culture, and language each time it appears. The truth may be out there, not as a single answer waiting to be found, but as a pattern we keep encountering and renaming.

So instead of saying it was an angel, a ghost, an alien, or any number of familiar explanations, we describe what happened. How it appeared. How it behaved. What it changed. We resist the urge to name it at all. And if you can stay there, even briefly, something important happens. The edges widen. The experience stops collapsing into a category. Connections begin to appear that are easy to miss once a label is applied.

This way of approaching paranormality does not give you answers you can cling to.

But it does give you something better.

It gives you a way of seeing that stays open.

And once you notice that naming is not the end of the conversation, but the moment it usually stops, you begin to see just how much has been happening in front of us the entire time.