Unexpected Benefits

This Sunday I attended the monthly Paranormal Pub, put on by MUFON and McMenamins. Admission is free and I find it’s a great way to spend a Sunday evening. And it’s only a short walk to several great pubs, if you don’t want to go home afterwards. The speaker this month was Susan Pease Banitt clinical social worker and author, talking about past life regression and it’s role in healing trauma. McMenamins serves a variety of adult beverages and I suspect that my partaking may have had a role to play in later events.

I like to show up early, so I can get my drink and get settled into my favorite spot before the crowd shows up. I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me, and then, as luck would have it, some people I’d met a few times before, at other events, showed up and joined us. The person who sat next to me was someone I thought was pretty cool, but that may be because I’m pretty sure this aint our first BBQ. I generally don’t say anything in these cases, it seems best to let sleeping dogs lie unless it comes up for some other reason.

At the end of her talk, Susan offered a group past life regression for anyone who wanted to stay. Of course, we all stayed.

My regression didn’t seem all the remarkable. I saw three scenes, all three were dominated by the big round eyes of a young girl, about six or so. I couldn’t see much else about her except a dress that tagged her as native american. For myself, I saw dirty, knobby, bare feet and extremely ragged pants. I got the impression that I was European, maybe mid thirties, and very dirty, ragged and in really bad shape. My impression is that I was the girl’s father, but I never knew about her, or I abandoned her mother before she was born. I saw nothing about the mother, so perhaps she was dead. It seems that, somehow, I’d found my way back to the tribe in this terrible state. The first scene seemed to take place in the late afternoon on a rainy, overcast day. The light had that particular flavor to it. The girl and I were standing outside. I think there might have been other people around. Nothing else happened.

In the second scene, it was night, and I was sitting with the girl, in front of a big fire, outside, with many other people. In this scene I had the impression of teepees in the background. Again, it was just a snapshot with no action.

In the last scene, I was lying on the ground, in the dirt, it was day again, morning perhaps, and the girl was standing next to me. I was dying. I was inside the camp, for there were a few people and teepees around, but no one was paying any attention to us. I soon raised up floated away, watching the scene grow smaller and smaller below me. The girl was watching me the whole time. The little girl was the person sitting next to me.

Afterwards, I felt...off. And the feeling got worse and worse as time went on. It only took a few minutes before I was fighting to hold it together against fear, shame and indecision. I just wanted to get out of there. Part of me was yelling at me to talk to someone and get some sort of help, but fear of “being a bother” took control and I fled without saying anything to anyone. I drove home, doing all I could to hold it together under an onslaught of fear, guilt and shame. I apologize to everyone there for being so rude as vanish without a word.

After a miserable night, I dragged myself up to see that nasty shadow was still there. I know I had to do something about it, I had an unusually busy day with clients and other appointments, and the last thing I needed was to have this cloud hanging over me, interfering.

Finally, my rational mind kicked in and the obvious dawned on me: I’d picked up a hitchhiker during the regression. That’s a new one on me, I’ve never even heard of even the possibility of that before! Fortunately I had time before my first appointment, so I had a conversation with my new tenant. I can’t remember his name now, but he actually was from that time. He and a girl had tried to run off together, but the men of the tribe had caught them and killed him. Somehow he managed to latch onto me and I pulled him into the present. It only took a few minutes to send him on. It felt do good, after all that turmoil, to be so relaxed and peaceful again. I couldn’t enjoy it long, though, places to go, people to see, and all that.

I can’t be sure of this, but I suspect that having some alcohol in my system made it easier for him to latch on to me. Maybe this was all meant to be, so it would have made no difference but, who knows? Another insight I’ve had about this is that I think that my reaction was so strong because his feelings hooked into and amplified latent feelings of my own. That could be another reason why and how he was able to effect me so strongly, his deep resonance with my emotions, on a subconscious level, that allowed him to slip past my normal defenses.

I’m sure he is gone, but an echo of his feelings still remain. So here’s another aspect of this whole incident: Perhaps his purpose was to help me to bring up and deal with emotions that I’d allowed to slide out of sight, where I could ignore them. This, and other events, are making it pretty clear that I’ll be confronting some uncomfortable issues pretty soon.

Between Life and Death

“Is there a state between life and death where spirits hang out?”

I was asked this question recently. My first reaction was that it almost seems a bit silly, then I realized that it’s a reasonable question, given that our culture doesn’t officially recognize any sort of life after death, outside of religion. I suppose there’s a whole book to be written about the way people invoke God, Jesus and a Higher Power in one breath and distain for the supernatural in the next, but that’s not for today. I should just accept that most people are either completely ignorant when it comes to spiritual matter, or have aa very simplistic, childlike conception that hasn’t been thought about since they were six.

Short answer about life after death: There appears to be another place where souls go after death. Some call it heaven, others like to objectify it as another “plane of existence” or “energy level.” Whatever it is, the transition is often described as a journey through a tunnel to a white light. However, not all spirits make that transition, and they end up hanging around with us, unseen and unheard, for the most part.

Souls can stay for many reasons. Common ones are, fear of punishment/judgment from a religious upbringing, addiction or drugs, power or sex, unfinished business, and, perhaps the saddest cases, souls simply don’t know they’re dead. This can be because they died suddenly, or while unconscious, and, because they believed that death was nothingness, conclude that they must be still alive.

I know that seems odd, I mean, how could you not know you’re dead? Aren’t there lots of clues that *something* is different? The problem is that souls need a physical body to function properly in this reality. Without it, the tend to lose track of time and space, and even memory gets tricky. Without a body that keeps track of time through its needs and process, awareness tends to live in a perpetual “Now.” With, perhaps, only a dim awareness that they’ve repeated the same actions and asked the same questions, over and over again. Physical bodies seem to also play a role in forming the new memories that allow a conscious to draw conclusions, make deductions and “move on.” Souls appear to be more or less stuck in the attitudes and state of mind they had when they died. Souls usually can only be reasoned with on a basic, emotional, immediate fashion. Childlike, in a way, you can reason with what’s right in front of them, part of their current reality, but if you try and get too complicated or abstract and you will lose them.

I’m sure that, right now, people with extensive experience with the “other side” are probably giving me a hard time right about now. They have had contacts with spirits that were highly intelligent and helpful, or otherwise don’t fit the description I just gave, and I agree. The reason is, there’s a distinction between “souls” and “spirits.” Souls are the departed that have not yet returned to the light, and Spirits are entities that either have gone to the light and returned or have never incarnated in the first place. There is a process of reintegration that all souls must go through to be able to function effectively in a discarnate form. You can look to Sylvia Brown’s books, Answers About the Afterlife or many other places for descriptions about what that’s like. The point here is that I’m talking about Souls that have not yet gone back to the light, not Spirits, that have returned.

Could you say that souls, stuck in transition, so to speak, are between life and death? In a way, I suppose, but I wouldn’t say that. Their bodies are most definitely dead, no question there, but their souls have not completed the incarnation cycle, so perhaps. It occurs to me while writing this that immortals would also be “stuck” and unable to complete the cycle. I have no personal interest in living forever. I think eternal life is overrated. Without the periodic refreshing of viewpoint, knowledge and enthusiasm that comes from each incarnation, existence would devolve into a increasingly meaningless succession of days and events that would blur together into utter blandness.

As a final note, I want to add that I feel that the “supernatural” is much more complicated than anyone seems to think. It’s as rich in variety and life and experience as our “natural” world, perhaps even more so. We only see a small portion though our very limited lens, and one of the reasons it seems so confusing is we only see disconnected parts of it. Like the Blind Men and the Elephant story, where each man touches a small portion of the animal and concludes that the whole animal is like the tail, the foot, the trunk or the ear, we each get our own piece of the “other side” and we draw our own conclusions, which are distorted further by our own limitations and beliefs. All in all, it’s not surprising that people from different cultures and different backgrounds paint very different pictures about what they perceive.

Do Ghosts Exist?

Do ghosts/spirits exist?

What's really interesting about this question is that you don't need postulate any new physics, or anything else, for that matter, for ghosts to exist, you just have to recognize and accept that fact that the body of science isn't complete. Or, to put it another way, "science doesn't know everything." Just have a look at what we have already: There is "dark matter," something nobody's ever seen or detected, despite over 100 years of looking, yet scientists say makes up over 90% of the universe. You and me included. Also, thanks to quantum mechanics, we have particles that behave like naughty children, doing one thing when you're "watching" and something quite different when you're not. (Double Slit Experiment)

The debate is still raging about what it means that you can change the outcome of a physics experiment simply by observing it. I mean, how do the particles "know" that you are looking at them anyway? Isn't that a case of human minds directly influencing matter, i.e. a "psychic power?" If not, why not?

Getting back to ghosts. What are ghosts? A common definition is that they are some form of consciousness, disconnected from a material body. Millions of people around the world claim to seeing or interacting with spirits every day, so there plenty of empirical evidence that they exist. However, it is all subjective, and there is no, really good, object evidence, so far. (Before you say "Ah ha! If it was there they would have found it by now!" Remember, they have been looking for Dark Matter for 100 years, have not found anything, yet it's still respectable to spend millions of dollars on experiments looking for it.)

Now, before you declare victory for the materialists, consider this: There is no hard, objective, evidence that consciousness exists. Yup, there is a group of respected scientists that believe the consciousness does not exist, and the thing that you call "consciousness" is merely an illusion. (The hard problem of consciousness) Even among those who agree that consciousness exists, nobody knows what it is. Since we can't detect it or measure it in any way, we have no way of knowing if consciousness is dependent on the brain or not. Thus we have the two main models: Brain as Generator and brain as Phone.

Brain as Generator says that the physical brain generates consciousness. Brain as phone says that the physical brain acts like a cell phone, a conduit through which the "spirit" interacts with the physical world. These two models are debated, but the phone model not given much credence. All the evidence that I can find for the Generator point of view, consists of noticing that damaging or stimulating various parts of the brain effect perception and consciousness, and saying that demonstrates that consciousness is created within the brain. On the other hand, is someone out there willing to argue that messing with the inside of your cell phone, so that it doesn't work so well, or not at all, proves that the voices, texts and internet content it displays are generated within the phone? If not, then the Generator model has no evidence at all.

The empirical evidence implies that consciousness survives death and does not need a physical brain to exist. (i.e. "ghosts") But we're not likely to find out more than that anytime soon, because the real question is, why is it considered rational and scientific, to ignore the vast body of empirical evidence, and ridicule anyone who attempts to do serious research in that area, in favor of a position that, admittedly, has no evidence, even anecdotal, to support it's position?

Ghost Tours in the UK

On our recent trip, my daughter wanted to go on all of the ghost tours, they seem very popular now. The tours mostly just covered local folklore, but each one had spot and story that was worth the effort.

The first one was a walking tour, in York, where the last stop was the most interesting. This was at a main church, but not the main church. I can’t remember what it was called, but there is a statue of Constantine as a young man, outside. The church is currently undergoing a restoration. (Which seem pretty typical for the UK right now. They seem to be in the midst of a lot of preservation and restoration of their historic sites.)

The interesting story for this place starts with a friend of the tour guide. This friend was apparently doing some work in the church before they started the restoration, and he says he clearly saw a group of Roman solders walking through the church. They were only visible from the knee up, the rest being below the floor, and they seemed to ignore the building, walking through objects and walls, and then disappeared after leaving the building. He saw them clearly enough to be able describe their clothing, weapons and armor accurately. Nobody believed him, of course. But later, during the restoration, they discovered a Roman road beneath the church, in the right location and depth to account for the path the solders took and how far their feet were below the current floor level. The guide had more to say, but that was all that I really cared about.

The next ghost tour was on a bus in Dublin. Again, mostly history and folklore on a blacked-out bus. I supposed they wanted it dark and spooky while he was telling his stories. (The summer sun goes down pretty late at those latitudes, so you have to make your own dark.) There were only two stops where we got off the bus, one in the catacombs of Christ Church and the other at a park.

The park was the last stop, and it contained a ruined church. The park is what used to be the church grave yard. The bodies were still there, but the headstones had mostly be moved to the sides and lined up along the walls of the park and the church, roughly corresponding to the places where they had been removed. I saw this more than once on this tour. In Chester, they reused the headstones as paving stones, shades of Poltergeist!

Nothing but the stone walls remain of the church. Apparently it has be burned three times, each time killing people. The first time was after the reformation. Someone got word that a secret Catholic Mass was being conducted there and burned the church with the people inside, killing everyone except a few of the leaders that were then tortured and executed. The second time was a hundred or so years later, when it caught fire during a service and killing everyone inside. The third time took place in the mid 60’s. The church was a ruin at that time, but i guess there was still stuff in it to burn.

The guide told a story that happened about ten years ago, during one of these tours. A Mexican woman was on the tour, and she was a medium. When they got to this point in the tour, she remained outside and refused to enter the church. When asked why, she said that she was not welcome there.

After some time, she did enter the church walls, then gravitated to one corner where she proceeded to have a conversation with a “boy” no one else could see. She described the boy, and his description matched that of a local boy that had died in the fire in the 60’s. At that time, kids of the neighborhood played in the church. Now there is a gate at the one door and it’s locked.

Interestingly, the fire seems to have been set, but it’s still an open case as to who set it and why. Sure, she might have heard about the case somewhere, but the guide insisted that is was a small bit of local news that never made the national or international news.

For myself, I definitely sensed something in that area, inside the church, and especially near that corner. I didn’t want to get to close to it. Later that night, after we returned to the hotel room, I did some remote releasements on entities trapped in and around that church. Sure, maybe I’m undermining a tourist attraction, but I’m sure that the tour will function just fine even if there aren’t any ghosts still trapped in the church. And besides, how can you possibly justify keeping a sentient being trapped in limbo for entertainment? So you can make money? The guides will never know the difference, since they don’t seem to sensitive to this stuff at all, and I really could not, in all good conscience, leave them there.

Perhaps that’s why I was supposed to go on this tour, to free those spirits. I don’t know, but, when it comes to explanations, you pays your money and you makes your choice.