Common Knowlege Aint So Common?

A person contacted me recently, saying that they were pretty sure that was more to reality than we'd been taught. He went on a bit, but the upshot was that wanted to buy a K2 meter and go to a graveyard on afternoon and answer the question once and for all. These sort of things come up a lot in my conversations, and I'd thought I'd publish my response as a point of general information. I tend to forget that I have been involved in this for a long time, and what I take for common knowledge really isn't that common at all. If you are going to get into the paranormal and do psychic research, you have to understand that psychic abilities don't follow the rules that we take for granted. That doesn't mean it doesn't follow rules, we just don't fully understand them yet. Just like in the early days of electricity, nobody knows what it is or how it works, so there's plenty left to be discovered, for those who have a mind to do so! Here is the letter in full, I hope you find it informative.

Hello,

Well, I have some good news and some bad news. But first, a little story.

My daughter called my this past weekend. She lives in another state. She wanted my help with something that had happened: A couple of days before, she was lying in bed at around 8 in the mornings, and she heard some noise outside her door. When she looked, she thought she saw the door begin to open a crack, then she blinked and it was closed again, without a sound. Then she had a feeling that there was something in the room with her. This feeling was so strong that she was afraid to move or open her eyes. She stayed like the for about a hour, then got up and left the room. She didn't know what to make of it, and she hadn't slept in that room since because she was afraid of it coming back. The irony of this is that she has complained to me, several times, that she was mad that she had never seen a ghost or had any kind of related experience! The thing is, she has been exposed to quite a bit of paranormal stuff, even had a spirit attach to her at one point, but, as far as she was concerned, it wasn't "real," so it didn't count. I have to say that I went on a similar journey, and it's taken me over a decade to get that the "unexplained" is all around us, all the time. The catch 22 is, if you can't believe it, you can't see it.

Ask any die-hard skeptic and you'll see that, not matter how much evidence you present, no matter how good the quality, they know that "it's fake or there's a reasonable explanation." In my daughter's case, she probably would have dismissed it as a bad dream, not too long ago. When you accept that reality is bigger than the material world, you will start to realize that it permeates our lives in ways small and large. The biggest problem turns out to be sorting the wheat from the chaff: There is so much bunk out there from people that literally seem to believe everything they read, and people that appear to deliberately spread false and misleading information for profit, that you have to develop your own inner sense of what is true for you. The good news is that you will find what you are looking for, if you can believe what you find. The bad news is that no amount of proof will be good enough, if you don't.

I, personally, don't watch "ghost" shows, though I have been on a number of investigations. I have seen some interesting stuff, nothing dramatic, and nothing that would have convinced myself a few decades back, but a lot of it raises intriguing questions in my mind. I also find it interesting to watch how the other people on the investigations, feel, think, and react.

If you do some more research, you will find that instruments appear to react to the person holding them. In the same situation, it will be dead as a door-nail in one person's hands, and light up like a Christmas tree in another's. In a way, this makes sense, because our instruments are designed to be as insensitive to paranormal influences as possible, otherwise they would appear to be unreliable for the purpose for which they are designed. They are not completely immune, as some people can significantly affect electronic and physical devices: You know, the people who can't wear a watch, for they simply won't work around them, or they crash computers, if they get too close. As a computer scientist, I had the opposite effect, people give me stuff that's flaky or doesn't work, then I fiddle with it for a while and it then works just fine. I've gotten a lot of free appliances and electronics that way.

Here's the really bad news: I you want to prove it to yourself, you are going to have to put in a lot of time, one afternoon won't do it, no matter how spectacular the results. They could have been just a fluke. Any serious investigator will tell you that the "good stuff" is rare and you have to put in a lot of hours to get it. The only exception to this are the "gifted" psychics. I put gifted in quotes because it rarely seems a gift to those people. Believe me, having spirits bug you 24/7 is more of a pain-in-the-ass than anything else.

All that said, if you want to hang out for an afternoon, I could do that. We can swap stories and try a few things to open you up, if you're interested. Do you have a place in mind? Let me know.

Rodney Whitehouse