Science vs. Faith & Psi

McMenamins Hotel Oregon

I just returned from this year’s UFO Fest in McMinnville OR. I went with my daughter, who flew in for the Fest. I don’t get to see her much these days, so it was good to have several days together, to talk and work to connect more as equals and adults. She left this morning, and now it’s time to confront some truths. I’ve been happy to sit on the fence and not take a stand on whether or not the events I hear described did, in fact, happen. Perhaps it’s time to take a hard look at myself and get off the fence.

This year, the main topics were the Ariel school incident, and Skinwalker Ranch. Both are pretty well documented with many witness, and physical evidence in the case of Skinwalker. My current thoughts are summed up by this quote from Dr John Mack, Harvard psychiatrist, “If this is real, what does it mean?”

At the heart of this question is always the tension between faith and science. I don’t think there really is any conflict between the two, and, as far as I can tell, the majority of scientists and theologians throughout history seem to agree with me. The only problem seems to be a relatively small number of extremely vocal extremists on both sides, who believe that their views are the only correct ones, and that any deviance from their worldview will result in the downfall of civilization or the slippery slope to eternal damnation, depending you which side they happen to be on. Extremists are, at best, misguided, and in this case especially so, because in their vigorous defense of their respective positions, they great violence to the very ideas they claim to be protecting.

This is nothing new on the religious side of the debate. Fringe beliefs have been around for ever, and even mainstream religions have been used to justify everything from slavery to genocide. Christianity has splintered into a bewildering veriaty of sects with more philosophical, and nocturnal differences than you can shake a stick at. Some even within the same physical church! But, the one thing they all are supposed to agree on, that faith is “firm belief in something for which there is no proof,” is trashed by those that insist that they must have physical proof to believe. These are the bible literalists that say the the Bible is 100% literally true, and if you see anything that contradicts their interpretation of The Word, you are wrong. They behave like Groucho Marx when he said, “Who you gonna believe, me, or your own eyes?”

The “scientific” extremist are no better. If there is one thing that is absolutely critical to the success of science, it’s the principle that everything in science is provisional, that evidence trumps belief, every time. But, once you start saying that some ideas cannot be questioned and certain evidence must be ignored, science becomes dogma based on faith, and contrary ideas, taboo. (Banned TED Talk: The Science Delusion - Rupert Sheldrake at TEDx), where the free exchange of ideas and data is slaughtered by explicit threats to a persons' reputation and livelihood.

You know that something’s up when you hear the phrase “Extraordinary claim require extraordinary evidence,” widely attributed to Carl Sagan. Science extremists love to trot this one out whenever they are faced with evidence they can’t refute or deny. It’s simply an authoritative way of saying: No matter how good your evidence, it’s just not good enough. The problem here is that there is no objective measure for “extraordinary,” any claim the skeptic doesn’t like is “extraordinary,” and no evidence is “extraordinary” enough to support it. Wonderful “Get Out of Jail Free” card, isn’t it? Science extremists have a whole bevy of tricks they use to protect their positions, and every last one of them would be loudly called out and denounced, if used by the other side. It’s a sad state of affairs when the very tools of science are twisted and used to undermine the very foundations of science and the objective inquiry it depends on.

Extremists on both sides suffer from the same assumption, unquestioned by pretty much everyone. The assumption that This Is It. That We Are It. They we humans are the pinnacle of development, of evolution, of science, that there are no new fundamental discoveries to be made, no new theological insights to be gained. The our knowledge, philosophy, and worldview is the best there ever was, or will be. Because, if they are not, then we can expect that every argument put forward by either side would likely be rendered moot by new discoveries in science, philosophy or theology, as has happened many times in the past. The problem with extremism is that it paints you into a corner, and you have no way out when the world changes and your “firm foundation” turns to dust.

I seem to have wandered off-topic here, but maybe not. Where do I sit? I’m never going accept any of the mainstream religious views, because none of them are compatible with reality, as I know it. I know, I tried. Neither do I align with the foolishness of the Richard Dawkins of the world and their strict materialist thinking. There is clearly more going on here than can be accounted for by science as we know it. The evidence for Psi and consciousness out side of the brain is steadily piling up, despite vigorous opposition by powerful parties. But the, frankly crazy, stuff at the Skinwalker ranch, do I buy that?

What I an struggling with, is that I don’t yet have a worldview that all these things fit into. That isn’t a reason to reject it all, but it doesn’t make acceptance any easier. In that sense, I suppose it’s lucky that I haven’t had any dramatic experiences that would either require me to believe or question my own sanity, I have the luxury of taking my time. However, circumstances are pushing me to take a stance. I know where I’d like to stand, but I’m not really comfortable with standing there “on faith” until I figure something out. So, I’ll just have to get over it.

As always, I welcome your questions and comments.
Take care.

I'm back: Belief Space!

Hello again! I haven’t posted in a long time because I have been getting my life in order. Before you ask, no, I’m not done. But I have moved into a new phase, and I’m now moved to start getting back into the world!

I’ve set up a new web site!  It definitely was time: The site was getting pretty long in the tooth, and was just a stopgap, anyway. Another reason is that I’ve significantly changed my outlook, understanding and methods, so that the old site no longer resonated with me. My views and techniques have really evolved over the past couple of years, so a new look and message was definitely in order. Have a look!

There is so much to cover! I don’t have room for it all here, but I will probably touch on aspects of what I’ve learned over the next several months. Today, I’m looking at something that happened recently, seemingly because of a presentation I’m writing for the local MUFON chapter, but I suspect the shift has been going for a while and this is just part of the process!

Anyway, the trouble started when I actually sat down and started writing the presentation. I realized, after babbling on for a couple of pages, that I didn’t really know what it was I wanted to say, because I was too afraid to take a stand on anything controversial.

I had started out with the idea of exploring the how past life regressions can be used for healing. But that quickly moved to UFOs and abductions, as they occur in regressions, which still didn’t feel right. Long story short, I’m now zeroing in on UFOs and what they tell us about the nature of reality. I’ll have to keep you in suspense because it’s not finished yet, though I’m getting there!

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about here. Over the past couple of months have experienced an increasing amount of pain in my back, upper and lower jaws, ankles, legs, kinda all over. It’s not chronic, persistent pain, as a rule, but it feels like stiffness from overuse. I have taken on some new activities, but nothing that would explain what’s going on. I constantly have the feeling, especially in my upper back and shoulders, of being compressed or confined, and I’m constantly stretching and twisting, trying to loosen it up, but nothing works.

I went to a Reiki circle recently, and the leader started the evening with a guided meditation. I’m now going to make a scandalous confession: In the 11 years that I have been involved in Reiki, I have never felt anything. I constantly hear about wonderful the energy feels, and how useful the energy is for everyone else, but I have never felt anything of any kind. I’ve never been 100% sure if that’s a failing on my part, or everyone else is fooling themselves.

Well, during the meditation, I confronted this conundrum and noticed that I didn’t want to believe that any kind of spiritual healing works. I had a vision that, inside myself, there is this…I don’t know, call it a “container.” I remember struggling to come up with a word to describe it, but I failed. (“Container” isn’t right, but it’s all that I got, so I’m going with it.) The “container” appeared dirty white, and it represented the boundaries and limitations I have put around my spiritual, intuitive and paranormal abilities. “Thus far and not further,” I had decided what was possible for myself, and what was not and I kept those boundaries firmly in place. But the container is struggling and straining, the abilities want out! I then realized that my physical discomfort really felt like I was a lobster who had outgrown its shell. The shell was starting to come apart, but it hurt! Physically and emotionally.

I would like to say that I have burst the container and my abilities are now in full flower, but, not so much. The container is one of belief and fear, designed to keep me safe, and it won’t be easy to let go of that. However, now I know, so I can work on it.

In the study, METAPHYSICS OF THE TEA CEREMONY: A RANDOMIZED TRIAL INVESTIGATING THE ROLES OF INTENTION AND BELIEF ON MOOD WHILE DRINKING TEA, Dean Radin and Yung-Jong Shiah demonstrate that belief is a very important component in achieving any spiritual, parapsychologal, effect.

I learned, early on in my life, to not trust anything or anyone. I have survived by accepting everything and everyone only provisionally, and then testing for myself whether the thing or person is solid and trustworthy. This has served me well in computer science, giving me a good understanding of how things work, which is invaluable when it comes time to extrapolate what might be possible in designing new systems. Unfortunately, I am beginning to understand that it falls apart completely when it comes to the paranormal. There, belief is a necessary precondition. You must believe a spell, for example, can work before it will work. Totally opposite of the normal, scientific, approach of being skeptical until there’s enough evidence. This implies a whole new paradigm for scientific discovery and validation.

I clearly have very specific beliefs about what is true and possible for me, around the paranormal. Despite everything I have seen around me, and have experienced personally, I still have it all in the “provisional” box. I’m just too afraid to believe everything I hear. I want some way to distinguish the “real” from the truly delusional, for I believe that distinction still exists. I don’t know how to do that yet, but I’ll keep working on it. In the meantime, I’ll be using meditation and other techniques to deconstruct my beliefs around magic and the paranormal and see where that leads me.

As always, feel free to comment and question. I am absolutely a work in progress.

Take care,

Rodney Whitehouse

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

What Do I Believe?

The following is a excerpt from “Into the Light” by John Lerma MD (http://www.amazon.com/Into-Light-Afterlife-Pre-Death-Experiences/dp/1564149722). This is from a chapter titled “Father Mike,” who was a 78-year-old, retired, Catholic priest who was well respected and had been president of a Catholic university. He was in the hospice unit to live his last days, diagnosed with terminal cancer. At this time, Dr Lerma was working at that hospice unit, caring for the terminally ill and making their last days as comfortable as possible. This section deals with the final minutes of Father Mike’s life:

“As I arrived at the hospice unit, the lights on the hospice floor were flickering on and off. There was an incredible sense of peace in the midst of the chaos that was occurring. Several nurses and my secretary were present. They had rushed me there to experience an inconceivable event. Every time the lights turned on and off, little feathers fell from the ceiling, drifting down as if they were snowflakes. One fell in the hand of a nurse and disappeared. As soon as they fell, they disappeared. Father Mike’s call light was going off and on. His door, which had been closed when he died, was now open. The secretary and one nurse saw a bright light shining from his room. They thought the lights were coming back on, but the bright light was radiating from his body or bed., Out of that light came this bright sphere that floated out of his body and circled the bed about three times before it soared out of the closed window. Less than a minute later, the lights came back on, it stopped raining and all the feathers disappeared. We all had goose bumps.”

I’ve tried to write this piece several times now. Each time I ended up ranting about the people who refuse to accept the evidence of the paranormal, in all it’s different forms, and I didn’t like that. I kept rewriting it, but it still didn’t feel right. Then I finally got it: The real question is, do I believe it? And the answer is, <ding> I’m not 100% sure that I do. Sure I have my intensions, but can I really accept that feathers can just appear out of nowhere and then vanish?

This now brings something into focus. There is an idea in the psychological world that everyone and every thing you dislike or hate, is part of yourself that you can’t accept. You then project it out onto people or things in the world, both separating yourself from it and unconsciously hoping that destroying it will purge it from your psyche. If that is true, then my issues with hypocrisy and abuse of power stem from my own fears and tendencies in those areas. Guess what? It turns out that I don’t have to look too long to see the truth of that, which some recent incidents have made all too clear. This leads me to the next question: What do I do about it?

I’ve been watching some Abraham-Hicks videos on YouTube. These are about a woman named Esther Hicks channels an energy that calls itself Abraham. (It took me a while before I figured that out.) Usually I don’t watch, I just listen. He/She can be very entertaining, though, at points, I sometimes I wonder why everyone is laughing so hard. (Maybe being in a seminar for 8 hours makes you a little punch-drunk?) Anyway, most of her talks center about manifesting, abundance, getting what you want, the life you want, you get the idea. I listen because these talks resonate on a very different level than someone like Tony Robbins, and give me the idea that there’s something there, if I can just wrap my head around it. In pondering/meditating while listening, the question came up about knowing who you are and what you want. At that point, I realized that I don’t know who I am.

Isn’t that a strange thought? How can you not know who you are? When I looked, I mean really looked, I could see that there is a significant part of me that I don’t have access to. It’s just an indescribable something, that is just there, and it’s completely impervious to my usual techniques to getting a handle on it. I am getting that I need to meditate in a new way to deal with it and move to the next level. I need to get out of my head, with it’s logic, language and symbols, and into something more abstract. Forget what I have been taught and practice just be with certain “concepts.”

I have spent a good portion of my life stripping away layers of conditioning and expectation, a process that has steadily accelerating over the years. At first, it was no big deal. It just made me feel better about stuff and my life better as a whole. But, as I continued, my personality and outlook began to shift. The changes were subtle at first, but over time my tastes began to change, and, eventually, I became profoundly dissatisfied and my choices led to a wholesale life restructuring. That’s a fancy way of saying that I left my career and my marriage, got a new place to live, new job and new friends. Not really on purpose, but things just happened when I realized that I could do that any more.

At this point, it seems like the process has removed most of my cultural conditioning and expectations, those “shoulds” and “should nots,” along with the fears of what will happen if deviate from the norm. I have lost a lot of comforting beliefs and rituals about the world and my place in it. But, at the same time, I have become a lot more open to new ideas. Most people cloak their skepticism in science or faith, but we all know that the simple truth is that they’re mostly worried about “what will people think?” While I wish I was completely free of that, I’m not, but I am about 90% less worried about it than I used to be. I get now that I can never be who a really am, until I can stop pretending to live up to someone else expectations. Make no mistake, we are all pretending, one way or another.

Do I believe that those paranormal things actually happened, really? Yes I am, and I’m willing to take all the flack that that engenders. What about everything else in “Into the Light?” (It has a very Christian focus) I still have very negative feelings around terms like “God,” “Jesus” and “faith.” Probably because I constantly hear those words used to justify the most hateful, hurtful and destructive actions and I can’t understand how anyone would want to be associated with the awful things that are said an done in the name of “God’s Love.” That aside, I can deal with the idea that these concepts have just as much claim to legitimacy as ghosts and guides, so I shouldn’t toss them out due to personal prejudice.

In reality, (funny to say that in connection with the paranormal, but, oh well) all “supernatural” forces are conceptually the same, whether you’re talking about God on high or the things that go bump in the night, and all evidence needs to be evaluated and considered. The waters around these phenomena are muddy enough already, there’s no point in making it worse by buying into artificial distinctions. It’s a good idea to keep my mind open all aspects of the paranormal, for that is the only way to ever begin to draw any kind of comprehensive understand of what’s going on, and what are the implications for everyday life. Then, perhaps, I can stop being upset by the compulsive skeptics.

“Who are you going to believe? Me, or your own eyes?” —Groucho Marx

What's the "Truth" about Ghosts?

Someone posted a question on a web site asking about the "Truth about Ghosts." I wrote this reply.

Ah, what is "truth?" First of all, "spirits" of all kinds seem to exist in the stories of every culture, as far back as we can tell. And in every culture they take on their own, unique, characteristics, which generally reflect those of their culture. People have been having Spiritual experiences, well, forever, as far as anyone can tell.

Today, in the U.S. alone, surveys show that millions of people admit to having spiritual, paranormal or unexplained experiences, many of them on a daily basis. Yet the culture as a whole insists that these are all just stories, that there is no evidence that any of these phenomena exist. Well, that is true, if you ignore the testimonies of millions of people, and all the research over the past 100 years.

Consider this: Scientists have been looking for Dark Matter for about 100 years. They say that it makes up 96% of the universe. That includes you and me. So far, they've found exactly nothing. Zero, nada, zippity-do-da, nothing. Yet it's perfectly acceptable in scientific circles to talk as though it exists and spend millions to dollars looking for it. Yet those same people will go out of their way to ignore and discredit anything that might show evidence of something psychic, on the basis that there is no evidence.

It's understandable, I suppose. On one side, you have the materialists who blindly insist "there aint no such thing," and on the other, you have a gazillion religious and spiritual groups who all put their own particular spin on spirituality and the paranormal. Often these groups are at odds with each other, each insisting that their interpretation is the only correct one. So, even though most of the people in the world pretty much agree that there is Something Going On Here, in regard to spirits and the paranormal, the is no concusses on even the basic characteristics of what that Something might be. The poor researchers in this field have to take fire from every quarter: Not only from the materialists, but also from the religious/spiritual types who are afraid that the researchers will find something that contradicts their beliefs or might take some of the "mystery" out of their faith.

To be purely objective, there is plenty of empirical evidence that "ghosts" (or paranormal phenomena) exist, but we all know that almost nobody is completely objective around this subject. Do your own research: There is plenty to read about Near Death Experiences and all the phenomena around them, which, together with the reincarnation research of Ian Stevenson, strongly suggest that there is more the afterlife than "Science" currently wants to admit. Remember, science, by it's own admission, can only explain 4% of the universe, what's going on in the other 96% is completely unknown.

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And now for something completely different: I am going through some extremely difficult times right now, emotionally and financially. I don't know where I will be six months from now, in a lot of different ways. If anyone would like to meet, talk, visit, share a cup of coffee, that would be really nice as I really need to get out of my head. Thanks.

Paracon 2015, Part 2 - Impressions

Some more thoughts on the Grey Ghost Paracon aboard the USS Hornet. This is the just the second time I’ve been to a “haunted” place since I’ve come out of the closet about the paranormal, both to myself and to world at large, and allowed myself to notice and feel whatever there was without discounting it. The evening “investigation” tours took all the attendees, in small groups, to many of the shipboard hot spots. My group was led by a woman who was an intuitive, and was a member of an investigation team that is based on on the Hornet. She had many personal stories to tell, which I find more interesting than the second hand ones.

The first stop was CIC. Though somewhat technically interesting, it was also hot and stuffy. I felt there was zippo activity there and the tech people got nothing as well. I the next stop was a Ready room, I think. This was the most interesting for me. There I had impressions of two people, one in the hall, outside the room, and one inside the room. It also seemed to me that these entities were less than full-fledged personalities, they just seemed two-dimensional, somehow. Perhaps these were what are called “residuals,” more like recordings than spirits.

The one in the all seemed to me to be a cook. He was sweaty and dirty and a little angry about something. He was stuck in the hall because he wasn’t allowed in the room, officer country, maybe? The other person was at the other end of the room from me. He was wearing a flight jacket, but he wasn’t a pilot. It took a while to sort out the impressions, but finally I realized that he was dressed more like a WWII Army pilot, not navy. He was extremely angry about something “she” had done.

The tech seemed to react more here than anywhere else. Near the end of our allotted time, I felt both impressions leave. A little while later the guide suggested that we move on, and I spoke up, for the only time on this tour, to vote yay because the entries had all left.

The next notable spot was one of the emergency generator rooms. The guide had a great story about what she, and others, had seen and felt in this room. All the interesting stuff happened on one place, but I couldn’t see where that was, because of the dark and all the people and equipment blocking my view. After she finished her talk and had answered questions. I wondered about the general area and got strong chills in one, particular, spot. I don’t know if that was “the” spot or not. (I’m not too worried about being “right” these days, I just want to experience what I can.)

Sick bay was the last interesting spot. This consists of a suit of rooms including offices, and a variety of examining, operating, testing and treatment rooms. It was interesting because of all the equipment and other details of the era, and because of a general feeling of the place. I had strong chills when I first looked into the entrance, and occasional “bumps” in various places.

I have now accumulated several first-hand accounts of ghost encounters aboard this ship. Most of them seemed perfectly ordinary, except that the “person” vanished, inexplicably. They happen to people alone in the dark, and on the hanger deck, in broad daylight, with hundreds of people present. Most often the ghost was seen by only one person, but sometimes more than one. I can’t help but wonder if many more people see these things, but just never realize it. I mean, how would they? If you saw a “sailor” on a ship with lots of veterans and others wearing various kinds of uniforms, would you notice?

This is an idea that has been forming in my head for a while. If the paranormal exists, then it’s part of nature and it’s happening all the time, all around us, the effects are just too subtle to notice, as a rule. On the other hand, we don’t want to notice this stuff, so it’s easy to edit it out of our experience. We chalk it up to inattention, confusion, wishful thinking or coincidence. Many great scientific discoveries have been the result of someone noticing a series of anomalous events, errors, odd things that were considered not worth explaining, and “connected the dots” to realize that there was a pattern here that said something new about the world.

Right now, the whole paranormal/psychic phenomena area is a mishmash of weird stories and scientific data points. All very confusing and mostly anecdotal, with no clear rules to sort the wheat from the chaff. By far, most investigators and ghost hunters are out to find cool stuff, so that have a good story to tell. It’s not really about advancing understanding, which really isn’t too surprising. I guess we are still waiting for a Newton or Einstein who makes the one, critical, observation that begins to make sense of it all.

My visit to Grey Ghost Paracon 2015, Part I.

A Paranormal convention. This was something that wasn’t even on my radar six months ago, and here I was a vender at one. I honestly don’t know what to expect, so I guess then it’s hard to be disappointed. This convention took place on the aircraft carrier Hornet, in Alameda, California. Originally commissioned in 1943, the Hornet served from WWII through the Apollo program, and was decommissioned in 1970. This ship saw a lot of action and is famous for being haunted.

I had never been there before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in the ship itself, so I’m going to have to go back there sometime when I have the time to look everything over and go on the tours. I had first heard about the convention through a couple I had met through my MeetUp group on reincarnation. They had worked on the ship, and so I was able to hang with them and other docents at meal times, got a little peak behind-the-scenes and some of the inside dope on some of what goes on there.

The convention started with the usual stuff, vender tables and presenters giving talks for about two hours, then dinner, and then we were all divided up into “investigation” teams, each with a couple of guides, that toured the ship’s hot spots. After these tours were finished, about 1:30 am, people were free to wander the open areas until 3. I quit at the end of the tour. I was really tired and had seen enough.

During vender time, I set up a table for my services and immediately started learning. The first thing I noticed, is that everybody else had a banner that they hung from the front of there table. I didn’t. Next time I’m going to have to look into that. The other thing I got, was that almost nobody seemed to understand what I was all about. I suppose that I assumed that people really into ghost hunting and the paranormal would, at least, know about releasing spirits and de-possession, but apparently not. Or they only were acquainted with it in a peripheral sort of way, it really didn’t have anything to do with what they were interested in. In fact, the whole concept of de-haunting might actually piss them off a bit, I mean, they’re into investigation, if we clean out the haunted places they’ll have nothing to do.

It seemed like a lot of the conventioneers were from various investigation groups. Now that I think of it, I should have spent more time talking to the different groups and finding out what they did. What little it did pick up showed me that there are many different approaches and goals for these groups. Who knew that there were so many? There was also a group with t-shirt messages I won’t repeat here; Any convention attracts all kinds, I suppose.

I haven’t watched too many ghost shows. I have seen some, but they didn’t prepare me for what I ran into at this con. I really hadn’t realized how much the paranormal world was divided into Sensitives and Techs. (I made up these names, but the division is quite real.) The TV shows I’ve seen give short-shift to the sensitives. (Probably because there’s not much to see there.) There is also a third category, the pure scientist, who is less interested in ghost hunting, per se, and is focused on parapsychology and the science behind the whole phenomenon. I only saw one person in this last group, who I’d already seen at HCH Institute, where he teaches classes. The Sensitives tend to focus on developing their intuition, and so don’t pay much attention to the tech, and the Techs seem to pay little attention to their senses, so the groups seem to have an uneasy partnership, each not really sure what to make of the other.

It seems logical that there should be crossovers, intuitives that also know their tech, but I didn’t meet any. One of the presenters was a fellow that apparently has created and built most of the devices that are out there now. He makes his living selling these devices and doesn’t really have anything to say about whether ghosts exist or not. He just builds stuff that people like and looks good on TV shows. At least, that’s what he says.

For me, this raises a question. I’m capable of building whatever hardware might interest me, but I’m also an intuitive. I find it easier and more interesting to depend on my senses than to depend on a bunch of cranky and clumsy devices to detect and communicate. On the other hand, tech is completely objective and creates a record, so there is that to consider. But, what would happen if the engineers and intuitives got together and built devices that detected what the intuitives felt? I have read up on the tech, to some extent, and it seems that most of it is based on the idea of looking at random signals or input and looking for non-randomness, that is then translated into output. Presumably, the spirits are able to influence the random signals in order to communicate. What if you, instead, searched for things that are sensitive to psychic energy in the same way that other instruments are sensitive to light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet light and other forms of radiation?

One of these days I’m going to have to seriously sit down and consider this whole idea. It seems to me that all the people building tech are not sensitive, so they have no way to reality-check their ideas. It’s like blind people trying to design and build a camera. How do you develop the science and technology of optics for lenses, for example, if you can’t see? My theory is, that any device or detector that you can buy, has already been de-sensitized to the paranormal as much as possible. Because these influences are pretty much everywhere, all the time, it’s just that most people don’t notice them, except when they’re unusually strong, or they’re unusually open to it.

My idea, if anyone wants to fund it, is to investigate sensors and circuits and devices of all kinds that are generally avoided because they “don’t work right,” or exhibit, seemingly, random behavior at times, to see if any of them react to the paranormal things that I can sense. It’s like when scientists that stumbled across x-rays, and had to figure out how to image and control this new form of energy that nobody had ever seen before. I’m sure that there are methods of objectively detecting paranormal “energies,” for lack of a better tern, but these methods have all been discarded by technologists because they appear to be unstable and unreliable by people who didn’t recognize what they are actually responding to. If anyone wants to fund this, let me know. ;)

Paracon: To be continued. There’s lots more to talk about.

Thoughts on The Seth Material

More thinking about the The Seth Material. I am dwelling on what he said about reality. I have problems with thing like The Secret on philosophical grounds, because I just can’t see how it could work in any reasonable way. I mean, just think of what would happen if everybody could, and did, manipulate reality for their own personal benefit? Wouldn’t the world be a total chaos of competing interests? What would happen when the interests of different people clash, like both wanting the same thing? You can see the problem here.

One possible out here, is to say that you need to be enlightened, to a certain point, before you can make any meaningful impacts on outer reality. That way, you will not be totally greedy and will work with the flow, so to speak, aiming for general benefits. Well, Seth says that’s not so: We all constantly construct our own realities, apparently using some template, but filled in using our conscious and subconscious beliefs as the guide. The trick is that each one of us has our own, personal, reality, which implies that how we experience the world doesn’t necessarily correspond to what others see, and that there is no objective reality out there. He uses the example of three people in a room with a book. In this example, there are three copies of the book, one constructed by each person, none more “real” than any of the others. The books are similar, but never identical. He also says that our personal realities only connect at a few points. I am truly not clear about what that means.

Notice that he said that we construct our personal realities. That everything we see and hear and touch and experience is constructed by us, for us, and no one else can see or perceive any of it. This raises a several questions for me.

My first thought has to do with the psychic and paranormal: Are these perceptions part of our constructed reality, or are they “leaks,” as it were, around the edges of our constructed realities, allowing us glimpses of what is behind the curtain? This is certainly logical and makes a lot of sense, given the context, that, no matter how well we construct our worlds, they will still require a certain about of “buy in” from us in order to be accepted fully. Just like in movies and games, where it requires a willing suspension of disbelief in order to become fully immersed, we have to play along with the rules and not notice the flaws and inconsistencies that might ruin the effect. Paranormal perceptions could be one of those flaws, which might explain some of the enormous interest in, and the incredible resistance to, the subject.

If we all construct our on versions of reality, how do they correspond so closely to each other, especially considering that Seth says they barely connect at all? (Maybe they don’t correspond as closely as we think, how would we tell, after all?) Is there some kind of underlying reality or….something…that connects us all and keeps us in sync with one another? It’s said that we’re all connected through our higher selves. That would provide a mechanism for connection, and the fact that we are generally not aware of this connection allows for information to be exchanged between individuals to co-ordinate their realities on a subconscious level. There is still a lot of speculation here, and I plan to keep reading. I’m most interested in information on just how we manipulate this reality that we’ve created. (Isn’t everyone?) Subject of another post.