Post by swampiewolfess on Feb 3, 2008 12:18:11 GMT -5
Supernatural Studies in the Material World
One doesn't typically get the chills during a PowerPoint presentation in a well-heated conference room. But ghost stories were the hot topic at a two-day event in San Francisco's Cowell Theater billed as the first scientific conference on the afterlife for a general audience.
Take, for example, a tale spun by "Professor Paranormal" Loyd Auerbach, a former teacher in the now-closed parapsychology department of Pleasant Hill's John F. Kennedy University, about a ghost named Lois.
The story is set in the mid-'80s, when a family moved to an old Victorian house in Livermore. Soon after settling in, they became aware of a ghost named Lois, the former owner of the house, who was developing a relationship with the 12-year-old son. The boy told his family that he spoke to Lois daily. "Apparently," Auerbach said, "Lois even helped him with his homework."
Auerbach was intrigued. He and two students piled into a car with some rudimentary recording equipment and headed to Livermore, casually discussing stuff like one student's former dance career and Auerbach's thoughts on purchasing a new car. When they got to the house, they met the boy. He said Lois was distressed. They had just watched "Ghostbusters" on television together, and she was worried they'd bring equipment to vaporize her. Auerbach assured him this wasn't the case. Well, the boy said, then Lois wants to know whether the student would continue dancing and what color car Auerbach wanted. They were floored.
Auerbach said he checked the tape - the three didn't mention anything they had discussed in the car with the boy. He also checked the car for bugs. Nothing. The story, from Lois, was that she had been nervous about their visit and didn't believe they wouldn't try to hurt her, so she rode with them in the car. Auerbach and his team also investigated details of Lois' life relayed by the preteen. It all checked out.
Auerbach holds a master's degree in parapsychology, has written seven books on the subject and has been a fixture on the paranormal lecture and television circuits for more than a decade. He - and several other speakers at the conference, titled Investigations of Consciousness and the Unseen World: Proof of an Afterlife - exist in a strange professional realm that encompasses rigorous academic training, spiritualism and sometimes fraud.
But the other academics at the conference didn't lack for degrees. There was Dean Radin, who began his career in electrical engineering and cybernetics at the University of Illinois before moving on to psychic phenomena at the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University and the University of Nevada. Also represented were Gary E. Schwartz, a Harvard-educated, former Yale professor who now teaches psychiatry, psychology, medicine, neurology and surgery at the University of Arizona, and University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies researchers Dr. Jim Tucker and Dr. Bruce Greyson.
These academics take their paranormal work seriously; they also risk ridicule on campus and struggle to find sources of funding to investigate what happens after we die. One of the issues they face is whether an afterlife is provable by scientific method. Some, like Julie Beischel, who co-founded Arizona's Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, think it is.
"This is how science works," Beischel said. "There's a question and science investigates it. You can't draw a line and say, no, that's outside of science. Science doesn't have any boundaries in what it can investigate."
The mood at the death-centered event was anything but grim. Between presentations the 170 or so attendees chatted in the small foyer of Fort Mason's Cowell Theater. The crowd displayed certain Northern Californian traits - purple was a favorite color, scarves and cloaks abounded, and at least one person addressed the conference topic sartorially, with a sweatshirt that proclaimed, "I've Had A Difficult Few Past Lives."
For all the hugs and smiles and the scientifically coded words and acronyms - "NDE" means "near death experience" and "OOB" stands for "out-of-body experience" - many people had a simple reason for attending: grief.
The Forever Family Foundation, the New York nonprofit that sponsored the conference and that promotes scientific inquiry into the afterlife, was started by grief-stricken parents, Bob and Phran Ginsberg, whose 15-year-old daughter, Bailey, died in 2002. Bob Ginsberg, who works in the insurance business, said that until his daughter's death he never contemplated the paranormal or the possibility of an afterlife.
"The morning of Sept. 2, 2002, Phran woke me up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. She was white as a ghost, and said, 'Something horrible is going to happen today,' " Ginsberg said in a phone conversation from his home in Oceanside, N.Y. "Long story short, my son and daughter were in a car accident that night, and my daughter passed away.
"Months later, when the shock wears off, I wondered, 'What happened? Was that precognition? Someone sending a message?' At the time I wasn't open to such talk, but logically how do you explain it?
"I needed evidence. I needed to hear from scientists and researchers." His foundation now has 3,000 members.
Forever Family Foundation member Diane Kaspari of Portola Valley attended the conference with her husband, Bill. They lost their son in a car crash when he was in college. After that happened, she said she started researching, reading and paying attention to "lots of things that weren't pure coincidence."
"The night he died, I was crying terribly. I lay down and thought, 'Where are you?' " she remembered, "and then I felt this incredible warmth, and I heard him - it wasn't an actual voice, but a telepathic one - say, 'It's OK, Mom, it's no big deal. I'm still here.' It was so perfect. That's exactly how he talked."
Scientists being scientists, no one stated outright at the conference that an afterlife had been proved, and no one seemed interested in espousing any particular vision of it. Religious views were never mentioned.
The conference topics - from ghosts, to near-death experiences, to an especially interesting presentation on reincarnation reports from children - were designed to explore the disconnect between the "mind" and the "brain." If one could be shown to operate without the other, such as a brain-dead person who was resuscitated and then offered details of a hospital scene or a particularly well-documented reincarnation - then a case could be made for consciousness existing outside of the physical body.
Greyson, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia's department of psychiatric medicine, related a case where a patient was put under anesthesia for brain surgery and the brain drained of blood to the point where no brain waves were detectable. After the operation, the patient reported on aspects of the surgery in impossible detail.
In another case, Greyson said a patient whose heart stopped beating claimed to have an out-of-body experience while technically dead. The patient said while floating above the hospital, she saw a red shoe on a ledge of the hospital building, far from the room. Sure enough, a nurse recovered a red shoe from the unlikely spot.
But for as much anecdotal evidence and data as the presenters gave, there was recognition that believing in the paranormal is difficult without a direct experience.
"I feel sorry for the skeptics," said Kaspari. "They're the ones who've already made up their mind."
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/29/DDNEUL5LD.DTL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- IS IT COLD IN HERE DEPARTMENT -
Russian Scientist Says Earth Could Soon Face New Ice Age
Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in a recent interview.
"Russian and foreign research data confirm that global temperatures in 2007 were practically similar to those in 2006, and, in general, identical to 1998-2006 temperatures, which, basically, means that the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005," said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of a space research lab at the Pulkovo observatory in St. Petersburg.
According to the scientist, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has risen more than 4% in the past decade, but global warming has practically stopped. It confirms the theory of "solar" impact on changes in the Earth's climate, because the amount of solar energy reaching the planet has drastically decreased during the same period, the scientist said.
Had global temperatures directly responded to concentrations of "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, they would have risen by at least 0.1 Celsius in the past ten years, however, it never happened, he said.
"A year ago, many meteorologists predicted that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the year 2007 the hottest in the last decade, but, fortunately, these predictions did not become reality," Abdusamatov said.
He also said that in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.
By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added.
"By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said.
The Maunder Minimum occurred between 1645 and 1715, when only about 50 spots appeared on the Sun, as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000 spots.
It coincided with the middle and coldest part of the so called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.
"However, the thermal inertia of the world's oceans and seas will delay a 'deep cooling' of the planet, and the new Ice Age will begin sometime during 2055-2060, probably lasting for several decades," Abdusamatov said.
Therefore, the Earth must brace itself for a growing ice cap, rather than rising waters in global oceans caused by ice melting.
Mankind will face serious economic, social, and demographic consequences of the coming Ice Age because it will directly affect more than 80% of the earth's population, the scientist concluded.
Source: RIA Novosti-Russian News and Information Agency
en.rian.ru/science/20080122/97519953.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- HAUNTED MINDS DEPARTMENT -
The Consciousness of the Haunted House
The relationship that exists between a haunted house and its occupants is like two circles colliding. Each circle is a myriad of conscious interaction that constitutes its own form of a created reality. Haunted landscapes and UFO 'hot-spots' may be where these highways of consciousness intercept and perhaps for a period of time interlock. Experiencing paranormal phenomena may be a meeting of minds where each interacts with the other, and so may be recognised or interpreted by the other.
Both the haunted terrain and the walker in the terrain bring each other into being by mutual recognition and interaction. Therefore the walker becomes the haunted terrain as the haunted terrain begins to walk. Each reality validates the other and each may interpret, absorb and possess the other for the duration of the haunting.
A haunting experience is essentially about exploration of consciousness and this is achieved through the interaction of the observer with the environment that may observe us in return. These are consciousness enriched landscapes where we become both the observer and the observed. With doorways unlocked and gates flung open we merge, into what could be the beginnings of an ongoing boundaryless interaction.
The nature of physical reality often becomes questionable as time shifts occur and we experience things such as apports, teleports, the multiplication of food or the passing of objects through metal and wood. What we assumed to be steadfast physical reality becomes an intangible process of dreaming. Rather than ending a story with, "I woke up only to find that it had all been a really bad dream.", we might say, "I began to dream only to find that it had all been a really limited reality."
It is natural for consciousness to cling to the physical world but materialism is meant to express our growth not limit it, since the physical world is also limitless. Only by our desire to possess and control it, do we place ourselves in these binary orbits of limitation. The paranormal is normal. It is only relegated to fringe subject matter because our idea of reality collapses under such situations and so the haunted landscapes are treated to a dose of human fear followed by an attempt to control.
So what are these landscapes we enter when we collide with the ghostly beings? Bruce Duensing writes of his experience with a ghost while on a highway, where an interaction between the two takes place as though ghost were physically manifest. There follows a brief conversation where the ghost gives advice on hitchhiking.
"I spun around to take another look to determine if I had walked far enough. He had vanished. There was nowhere he could have hid even if he was odd enough to have done so for no reason. I stood alongside the interstate for quite a while and attempted to process what had occurred. [From: INTANGIBLE MATERIALITY A PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY TOWARD INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION]
Interestingly, Duensing is focused on the relationship that occurs between the ghostly being and himself, rather than the thrill of 'seeing a ghost', this bringing to mind that relationship involves empathetic interaction and not cheap entertainment. The processing that takes place after such encounters is common as our interpreting minds attempt to catalogue an experience into a filing cabinet that contains no files. When one interacts with a ghost they collide with the reality of another being.
This interaction is clearly evident in movies such as The Shining and Poltergiest where the families are being slowly influenced by and absorbed into another reality, that exists separate to but simultaneously alongside their own. It perhaps takes a strong mind to avoid possession or even psychosis and to remain both selfless and aware under those circumstances and to witness without ego fear or judgement.
In order to experience the haunted landscape you must become it and unbecome it simultaneously, so that a flow of conscious energy is continually evolving. All worlds are haunted. All consciousness is ghostly. The worlds are made up of consciousness.
Hauntings involve a collapsing of boundaries and limitations. Only the skeptical mind rebuilds the structures and then forgets what lies beyond them, or even that they have built them, then denies all possibilities beyond what they have built. But these are fragile sand castles erected on the sea's great edge and the ocean is coming.
Who's reality do we exist in when come across a ghostly being? As they are the ghosts of our worlds, perhaps we are the ghosts the theirs, something intangible yet vaguely recognised that they too reach out to, only to find that their hands and their thoughts pass through us unrecognised and unacknowledged. Do we walk through the walls of their worlds on occasion? Are the physical environments we occupy simply 'haunted' landscapes for them? The living consciousnesses of the disembodied may strive to find the mind who can perceive them and translate them into our world through a physical medium. But are the embodied the disempowered elsewhere?
If we are to understand and develop relationships with ghostly beings, it will be within our own thought processes and not in the light of a ghost hunter's torch. We are our thoughts and when we connect and become entangled is not where our bodies end, but where our minds begin to meet and journey together. If the physical world is thought into existence, then it is very likely as limitless as the mind that imagines it. What we choose to label as realities are merely stones in a stream, a series of reference points in universes of conscious development and interaction.
The way to investigate a poltergeist is to understand the consciousnesses involved in the collision of worlds and the collapse of boundaries. What were they thinking? What state of mind are they in? How do they contribute or connect to the phenomenon? I believe that there are a multitude of consciousnesses involved in poltergeist or haunting or UFO experiences, which in their own way are simply another kind of haunting. Phenomenon is catalogued by human organisations but in the intangible realm it remains interconnected. The only given is interaction.
Therefore a haunting is merely another reality that we experience, while the circumstances are favourable to such interactions. This is likely to involve the meeting of minds rather than the need to capture, record or prove. The ghostly consciousness may be tuned into our environment as in the movie The Others.
These so-called 'others' may very well experience us as ghostly. Rather than two passing ships in the night, we become two colliding circles of reality imbued with multitude of consciousness. We are overlapping points collision in a mind created world, that feels as if it exists all around us but is only just out of our awareness.
When one enters the environment of a haunted house or landscape, one enters the consciousness of it as it enters us. Haunted people and haunted landscapes are the one being. Your mind is a landscape just as the landscape is your mind. It is all consciousness colliding and interacting, and in the case of many of us, an attempt to physically manifest or unmanifest. In the same way that the many selves of a multiple personality strive for co-conscious existences, so may we need to become co-conscious in order interact with and understand the worlds of ghostly beings.
While each reality may involve its own rules and have its own ways of becoming and being, this video film clip (Take Me On by Aha) relies on frames and the interaction between a comic book character and a young woman in a diner to show that LOVE allows us to traverse the boundaries of the worlds that exist parallel to our own.
One doesn't typically get the chills during a PowerPoint presentation in a well-heated conference room. But ghost stories were the hot topic at a two-day event in San Francisco's Cowell Theater billed as the first scientific conference on the afterlife for a general audience.
Take, for example, a tale spun by "Professor Paranormal" Loyd Auerbach, a former teacher in the now-closed parapsychology department of Pleasant Hill's John F. Kennedy University, about a ghost named Lois.
The story is set in the mid-'80s, when a family moved to an old Victorian house in Livermore. Soon after settling in, they became aware of a ghost named Lois, the former owner of the house, who was developing a relationship with the 12-year-old son. The boy told his family that he spoke to Lois daily. "Apparently," Auerbach said, "Lois even helped him with his homework."
Auerbach was intrigued. He and two students piled into a car with some rudimentary recording equipment and headed to Livermore, casually discussing stuff like one student's former dance career and Auerbach's thoughts on purchasing a new car. When they got to the house, they met the boy. He said Lois was distressed. They had just watched "Ghostbusters" on television together, and she was worried they'd bring equipment to vaporize her. Auerbach assured him this wasn't the case. Well, the boy said, then Lois wants to know whether the student would continue dancing and what color car Auerbach wanted. They were floored.
Auerbach said he checked the tape - the three didn't mention anything they had discussed in the car with the boy. He also checked the car for bugs. Nothing. The story, from Lois, was that she had been nervous about their visit and didn't believe they wouldn't try to hurt her, so she rode with them in the car. Auerbach and his team also investigated details of Lois' life relayed by the preteen. It all checked out.
Auerbach holds a master's degree in parapsychology, has written seven books on the subject and has been a fixture on the paranormal lecture and television circuits for more than a decade. He - and several other speakers at the conference, titled Investigations of Consciousness and the Unseen World: Proof of an Afterlife - exist in a strange professional realm that encompasses rigorous academic training, spiritualism and sometimes fraud.
But the other academics at the conference didn't lack for degrees. There was Dean Radin, who began his career in electrical engineering and cybernetics at the University of Illinois before moving on to psychic phenomena at the University of Edinburgh, Princeton University and the University of Nevada. Also represented were Gary E. Schwartz, a Harvard-educated, former Yale professor who now teaches psychiatry, psychology, medicine, neurology and surgery at the University of Arizona, and University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies researchers Dr. Jim Tucker and Dr. Bruce Greyson.
These academics take their paranormal work seriously; they also risk ridicule on campus and struggle to find sources of funding to investigate what happens after we die. One of the issues they face is whether an afterlife is provable by scientific method. Some, like Julie Beischel, who co-founded Arizona's Windbridge Institute for Applied Research in Human Potential, think it is.
"This is how science works," Beischel said. "There's a question and science investigates it. You can't draw a line and say, no, that's outside of science. Science doesn't have any boundaries in what it can investigate."
The mood at the death-centered event was anything but grim. Between presentations the 170 or so attendees chatted in the small foyer of Fort Mason's Cowell Theater. The crowd displayed certain Northern Californian traits - purple was a favorite color, scarves and cloaks abounded, and at least one person addressed the conference topic sartorially, with a sweatshirt that proclaimed, "I've Had A Difficult Few Past Lives."
For all the hugs and smiles and the scientifically coded words and acronyms - "NDE" means "near death experience" and "OOB" stands for "out-of-body experience" - many people had a simple reason for attending: grief.
The Forever Family Foundation, the New York nonprofit that sponsored the conference and that promotes scientific inquiry into the afterlife, was started by grief-stricken parents, Bob and Phran Ginsberg, whose 15-year-old daughter, Bailey, died in 2002. Bob Ginsberg, who works in the insurance business, said that until his daughter's death he never contemplated the paranormal or the possibility of an afterlife.
"The morning of Sept. 2, 2002, Phran woke me up at 3 or 4 o'clock in the morning. She was white as a ghost, and said, 'Something horrible is going to happen today,' " Ginsberg said in a phone conversation from his home in Oceanside, N.Y. "Long story short, my son and daughter were in a car accident that night, and my daughter passed away.
"Months later, when the shock wears off, I wondered, 'What happened? Was that precognition? Someone sending a message?' At the time I wasn't open to such talk, but logically how do you explain it?
"I needed evidence. I needed to hear from scientists and researchers." His foundation now has 3,000 members.
Forever Family Foundation member Diane Kaspari of Portola Valley attended the conference with her husband, Bill. They lost their son in a car crash when he was in college. After that happened, she said she started researching, reading and paying attention to "lots of things that weren't pure coincidence."
"The night he died, I was crying terribly. I lay down and thought, 'Where are you?' " she remembered, "and then I felt this incredible warmth, and I heard him - it wasn't an actual voice, but a telepathic one - say, 'It's OK, Mom, it's no big deal. I'm still here.' It was so perfect. That's exactly how he talked."
Scientists being scientists, no one stated outright at the conference that an afterlife had been proved, and no one seemed interested in espousing any particular vision of it. Religious views were never mentioned.
The conference topics - from ghosts, to near-death experiences, to an especially interesting presentation on reincarnation reports from children - were designed to explore the disconnect between the "mind" and the "brain." If one could be shown to operate without the other, such as a brain-dead person who was resuscitated and then offered details of a hospital scene or a particularly well-documented reincarnation - then a case could be made for consciousness existing outside of the physical body.
Greyson, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia's department of psychiatric medicine, related a case where a patient was put under anesthesia for brain surgery and the brain drained of blood to the point where no brain waves were detectable. After the operation, the patient reported on aspects of the surgery in impossible detail.
In another case, Greyson said a patient whose heart stopped beating claimed to have an out-of-body experience while technically dead. The patient said while floating above the hospital, she saw a red shoe on a ledge of the hospital building, far from the room. Sure enough, a nurse recovered a red shoe from the unlikely spot.
But for as much anecdotal evidence and data as the presenters gave, there was recognition that believing in the paranormal is difficult without a direct experience.
"I feel sorry for the skeptics," said Kaspari. "They're the ones who've already made up their mind."
Source: The San Francisco Chronicle
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/29/DDNEUL5LD.DTL
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- IS IT COLD IN HERE DEPARTMENT -
Russian Scientist Says Earth Could Soon Face New Ice Age
Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in a recent interview.
"Russian and foreign research data confirm that global temperatures in 2007 were practically similar to those in 2006, and, in general, identical to 1998-2006 temperatures, which, basically, means that the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005," said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head of a space research lab at the Pulkovo observatory in St. Petersburg.
According to the scientist, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has risen more than 4% in the past decade, but global warming has practically stopped. It confirms the theory of "solar" impact on changes in the Earth's climate, because the amount of solar energy reaching the planet has drastically decreased during the same period, the scientist said.
Had global temperatures directly responded to concentrations of "greenhouse" gases in the atmosphere, they would have risen by at least 0.1 Celsius in the past ten years, however, it never happened, he said.
"A year ago, many meteorologists predicted that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the year 2007 the hottest in the last decade, but, fortunately, these predictions did not become reality," Abdusamatov said.
He also said that in 2008, global temperatures would drop slightly, rather than rise, due to unprecedentedly low solar radiation in the past 30 years, and would continue decreasing even if industrial emissions of carbon dioxide reach record levels.
By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years, the scientist added.
"By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041," he said.
The Maunder Minimum occurred between 1645 and 1715, when only about 50 spots appeared on the Sun, as opposed to the typical 40,000-50,000 spots.
It coincided with the middle and coldest part of the so called Little Ice Age, during which Europe and North America were subjected to bitterly cold winters.
"However, the thermal inertia of the world's oceans and seas will delay a 'deep cooling' of the planet, and the new Ice Age will begin sometime during 2055-2060, probably lasting for several decades," Abdusamatov said.
Therefore, the Earth must brace itself for a growing ice cap, rather than rising waters in global oceans caused by ice melting.
Mankind will face serious economic, social, and demographic consequences of the coming Ice Age because it will directly affect more than 80% of the earth's population, the scientist concluded.
Source: RIA Novosti-Russian News and Information Agency
en.rian.ru/science/20080122/97519953.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- HAUNTED MINDS DEPARTMENT -
The Consciousness of the Haunted House
The relationship that exists between a haunted house and its occupants is like two circles colliding. Each circle is a myriad of conscious interaction that constitutes its own form of a created reality. Haunted landscapes and UFO 'hot-spots' may be where these highways of consciousness intercept and perhaps for a period of time interlock. Experiencing paranormal phenomena may be a meeting of minds where each interacts with the other, and so may be recognised or interpreted by the other.
Both the haunted terrain and the walker in the terrain bring each other into being by mutual recognition and interaction. Therefore the walker becomes the haunted terrain as the haunted terrain begins to walk. Each reality validates the other and each may interpret, absorb and possess the other for the duration of the haunting.
A haunting experience is essentially about exploration of consciousness and this is achieved through the interaction of the observer with the environment that may observe us in return. These are consciousness enriched landscapes where we become both the observer and the observed. With doorways unlocked and gates flung open we merge, into what could be the beginnings of an ongoing boundaryless interaction.
The nature of physical reality often becomes questionable as time shifts occur and we experience things such as apports, teleports, the multiplication of food or the passing of objects through metal and wood. What we assumed to be steadfast physical reality becomes an intangible process of dreaming. Rather than ending a story with, "I woke up only to find that it had all been a really bad dream.", we might say, "I began to dream only to find that it had all been a really limited reality."
It is natural for consciousness to cling to the physical world but materialism is meant to express our growth not limit it, since the physical world is also limitless. Only by our desire to possess and control it, do we place ourselves in these binary orbits of limitation. The paranormal is normal. It is only relegated to fringe subject matter because our idea of reality collapses under such situations and so the haunted landscapes are treated to a dose of human fear followed by an attempt to control.
So what are these landscapes we enter when we collide with the ghostly beings? Bruce Duensing writes of his experience with a ghost while on a highway, where an interaction between the two takes place as though ghost were physically manifest. There follows a brief conversation where the ghost gives advice on hitchhiking.
"I spun around to take another look to determine if I had walked far enough. He had vanished. There was nowhere he could have hid even if he was odd enough to have done so for no reason. I stood alongside the interstate for quite a while and attempted to process what had occurred. [From: INTANGIBLE MATERIALITY A PARAPSYCHOLOGICAL JOURNEY TOWARD INTERSPECIES COMMUNICATION]
Interestingly, Duensing is focused on the relationship that occurs between the ghostly being and himself, rather than the thrill of 'seeing a ghost', this bringing to mind that relationship involves empathetic interaction and not cheap entertainment. The processing that takes place after such encounters is common as our interpreting minds attempt to catalogue an experience into a filing cabinet that contains no files. When one interacts with a ghost they collide with the reality of another being.
This interaction is clearly evident in movies such as The Shining and Poltergiest where the families are being slowly influenced by and absorbed into another reality, that exists separate to but simultaneously alongside their own. It perhaps takes a strong mind to avoid possession or even psychosis and to remain both selfless and aware under those circumstances and to witness without ego fear or judgement.
In order to experience the haunted landscape you must become it and unbecome it simultaneously, so that a flow of conscious energy is continually evolving. All worlds are haunted. All consciousness is ghostly. The worlds are made up of consciousness.
Hauntings involve a collapsing of boundaries and limitations. Only the skeptical mind rebuilds the structures and then forgets what lies beyond them, or even that they have built them, then denies all possibilities beyond what they have built. But these are fragile sand castles erected on the sea's great edge and the ocean is coming.
Who's reality do we exist in when come across a ghostly being? As they are the ghosts of our worlds, perhaps we are the ghosts the theirs, something intangible yet vaguely recognised that they too reach out to, only to find that their hands and their thoughts pass through us unrecognised and unacknowledged. Do we walk through the walls of their worlds on occasion? Are the physical environments we occupy simply 'haunted' landscapes for them? The living consciousnesses of the disembodied may strive to find the mind who can perceive them and translate them into our world through a physical medium. But are the embodied the disempowered elsewhere?
If we are to understand and develop relationships with ghostly beings, it will be within our own thought processes and not in the light of a ghost hunter's torch. We are our thoughts and when we connect and become entangled is not where our bodies end, but where our minds begin to meet and journey together. If the physical world is thought into existence, then it is very likely as limitless as the mind that imagines it. What we choose to label as realities are merely stones in a stream, a series of reference points in universes of conscious development and interaction.
The way to investigate a poltergeist is to understand the consciousnesses involved in the collision of worlds and the collapse of boundaries. What were they thinking? What state of mind are they in? How do they contribute or connect to the phenomenon? I believe that there are a multitude of consciousnesses involved in poltergeist or haunting or UFO experiences, which in their own way are simply another kind of haunting. Phenomenon is catalogued by human organisations but in the intangible realm it remains interconnected. The only given is interaction.
Therefore a haunting is merely another reality that we experience, while the circumstances are favourable to such interactions. This is likely to involve the meeting of minds rather than the need to capture, record or prove. The ghostly consciousness may be tuned into our environment as in the movie The Others.
These so-called 'others' may very well experience us as ghostly. Rather than two passing ships in the night, we become two colliding circles of reality imbued with multitude of consciousness. We are overlapping points collision in a mind created world, that feels as if it exists all around us but is only just out of our awareness.
When one enters the environment of a haunted house or landscape, one enters the consciousness of it as it enters us. Haunted people and haunted landscapes are the one being. Your mind is a landscape just as the landscape is your mind. It is all consciousness colliding and interacting, and in the case of many of us, an attempt to physically manifest or unmanifest. In the same way that the many selves of a multiple personality strive for co-conscious existences, so may we need to become co-conscious in order interact with and understand the worlds of ghostly beings.
While each reality may involve its own rules and have its own ways of becoming and being, this video film clip (Take Me On by Aha) relies on frames and the interaction between a comic book character and a young woman in a diner to show that LOVE allows us to traverse the boundaries of the worlds that exist parallel to our own.
