Mumbling Down The Forest Path: Of Ghosts, and PSI, and ETI.

[ Hello again, folks. This post is just a signal that I'm still on this side of the Light Tunnel, and thinking of the world of anomalies occasionally. Life in Wheeling caring for Mom has ended; I have extricated myself from that apartment of three years; and I'm trying to re-settle here in my Kalamazoo home. But it's still a bit chaotic --- I haven't even gotten the laundry done yet, so I'm as far from the world of anomalies as you can get. But still.... here is a posting admittedly different from most. Usually I try to stick closely to a presentation of the factual or at least witness-testified basis for the topic of the moment, and then {maybe} make some hypothetical stretches --- hopefully well labelled as such. This post? I'm going to Blow Into The Wind a bit. The reasons for what will be said here are scattered throughout the 300-odd posts that preceded it. So ... for better or worse, here we go..............]

I find the intellectual world of the 21st century a strange place, even bizarre. We, as a globally-developing culture, seem Hell-bent upon trying to convince ourselves that we have, roughly, figured everything out. In the end, we say "authoritatively", it's all in the textbooks. We have only working out of the details to do. Some really Big {Bang} Thing happened at about X-years ago, spewing out energy and then matter according to textbook laws, and everything else will be explained from there.

BUT IT OBVIOUSLY IS NOT TRUE.

There are whole areas of experience which are not incorporated into this [what is really at this level of talking about it no more than] jumped-up opinion. The cardinal sins of these areas are just that "science" can't reduce them to easy materialism nor get them to "hop" on the lab bench when we say "jump".

There is a LOT of tragedy in this. Even from the point of view of the scientist openly seeking truth, that person WILL NEVER FIND "IT" until these other aspects of reality are incorporated into the actual Big Picture.

The title of this post gives some of these realities away. "Ghosts", and "PSI", and, much less profoundly, "ETI."

PSI, at least some forms of it, simply flat exists.

If I was to describe something as a precise awareness of some fact or event which was neither present to the observer's ordinary sense perceptors [as described in the biology textbooks], nor accessible through memory, then such phenomena simply happen. Such moments of "clairvoyance" are actually common. They may not be lengthy nor spectacular, but they are common. Almost all of us are aware of having somethings like this. It is our "culture" that hammers away at us to intimidate us into not believing it.

One of my brothers has these perceptions somewhat regularly and quite a bit more spectacularly than the rest of us. One common theme for him is the perception of auto accidents [with a great deal of specific detail as to ambulances or not, number of police cars, positioning and type of wrecked vehicle]. He "sees" these when he is several miles away yet driving to and from work. They are not the only clairvoyances he has, but are the greatness number as to type.

I'm not so lucky as he as to the quality of my momentary sensing of the Hidden, but such things happen now and then as they do to most of us. These small knowings are not much in themselves. It is the fact that they exist at all which is the big deal.

These moments are telling us that there is more to Reality than the universal stage that we wake up to in the morning and spend our time absorbing and coping with. They are telling us that there is more to Reality than our simplistic models of Space and Dimension. There is something "bigger" about Reality than the physics and astronomy texts are willing to say. And, if we read the better ones carefully, even they are admitting that there is more. NONE of the forces REALLY operates "in" Space. All of them are "projected into spatial locations" from other aspects or dimensions. No actual "matter" exists sitting around and bumping into things like miniature pool balls. All "locations" that we call a "particle" are projections of forces from those same "elsewheres".

But physics wants to make its stand right there. Yes, there are these other dimensions, and yes, the "things" of the material universe that we perceive with our biological senses are projections from these dimensions, but it is all there is. It's still just physics and Law. There is no "special" aspect called "consciousness", and whatever THAT will ultimately be found to be, it will be "physically lawful". Nothing can exist beyond the Laws of Physics, and that will all be seen as "normal". By fiat, the "paranormal" does not exist.

Well, as the Old Hippie on the Reality Street would say: "Ummm.... That's your..... ummmm. opinion.... man". And in fact, the huge preponderance of our own experiences say that it is a hung-up opinion which is flatly wrong. "Somewhere" there is something associated with our consciousnesses which can "touch" many more aspects of this universe than just the blunt stuff directly in front of us. Just as the physical forces "touch/interact" with one another "down there" in those other dimensions, so too is the realm of consciousness capable of such "touch". There is some fundamental intertwining. From that, albeit imperfectly, come clairvoyant and telepathic moments.

But who cares? The reductionists obviously do. The materialists obviously do. They are deathly afraid that this will open up the spiritual, and then all [Heaven and] Hell will break loose and ruin their cozy little Universe and their "I'm all there is" philosophy. But for us here at the blog, it doesn't have to be phrased in science vs spirituality terms. For us it's just our search for a better model of reality; one which can actually cope with the phenomena we see. We simply want to "see" better.

So.... here is another "one": "Hauntings" whatever they are, are real. We have a constant battle in the community of scholars who try to research "odd things" when it comes to the Haunted Houses. There are places wherein there seem to be "only" physical force effects [and we call them poltergeists], there are places where there seem to be only visual appearances, usually of people [and we call them apparitions], and there are places where both of these things manifest [ and we call them the products of "ghosts"]. Whatever these things are, they're all real, and it seems more and more to me that they're closely related. AND, they're a real pain-in-the-butt for the reductionist establishment to contemplate [so the most ridiculous "explanations" are thrown out there for the claims].

The "haunted house" in my family manifests both poltergeist and apparitional phenomena, though, I believe, never at the same time. The physical effects in these locations are as real as the kitchen whisk which flew over the stovetop spiraling nearly six feet onto the floor while my Mother and my Sister-in-law watched. They are as real as the group of nutcrackers which "exploded" like they'd been hit by a bocchi ball, flying all over Mom's apartment to the startled shock of my Sister-in-law. And apparitions appear in that house too. Doctor Ackermann, the original builder/owner, has been seen by several people, usually motionlessly standing or sitting, looking at his pocketwatch. The small child, Kenny, has been seen innumerable times by a particularly sensitive young girl. In Kenny's case, he interacts with her, and told her his name. This was a nickname and not at the time known by anyone in the house. Once, during a "bed-jumping poltergeist effect" heard through the ceiling by four people, the young girl yelled "Kenny, stop jumping on the bed!!", and the effect stopped. It is VERY difficult for me to believe that such things are 1). unreal, 2). mundane, and 3). unrelated. What produces them?

My favorite 19th century girlfriend, Catherine Crowe, collected a small mountain of such events for her Nightside of Nature. So have MANY other open-minded scholars. This stuff is true and it doesn't fit well with the model of the reductionist universe.

The term "Apparitions" itself gives us some trouble. It is applied to what are apparently two entirely different but both anomalistic things. There are the haunted house-type apparitions, which though extremely realistic and seemingly "solid", are in fact not so, and pass right through other solidity as if they were only holographic in nature. The Apparition at Knock was a spectacular example of a holographic apparition which hung about so long that it was seen by dozens, approached, and reached right through by a couple of the witnesses.

The other sort of "thing" which gets the name "apparition/ ghost/ phantom" is very different. This is the thing often known as the Phantom Hitchhiker. These whatever-they-ares are tangible, touchable, "solid". The case in my family, posted on this blog as The Helen Lane case, was lengthy, multiwitnessed, touched by at least three of the four relatives in the automobile, and due to great luck of another relative running the local police station, it was determinable that the entire ensemble of Helen Lane and a non-police officer at the desk, did not exist. In fact the whole affair seemed in retrospect to have taken place in some OZ-effect Twilight Zone. Reductionist theories do not handle this.

The Trickster phenomenon. Well, I'm really puzzled about this one, but I have at least three members of my own family and two very close friends [all excessively sane, by the way; some even obsessive about their household organization, which is why they noticed these things] that have told me of their experiences. Things go missing. Things reappear. Some of these things go missing from locations where it is nearly impossible to see how that could happen. Upon tearing that area apart, and searching all other imaginable places, the thing "comes back", NOT JUST ANYWHERE, but in the exact spot ravaged several times before looking for it --- BECAUSE THAT IS WHERE IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALL ALONG.

So.... WAS it there all along? Did it "slip out of phase" with our reality for a while? Or did something "take" it? The Old People have always called this The Trickster or some equivalent name. For them it is a paranormal entity [Or entities], neither good nor bad but enjoying messing with humans. Is that what's going on? Can't say, of course, but SOMETHING very unusual and very outside the Reductionist box is.

I'm going to leave Faerie alone for now. You know from past entries that I have plenty of evidence to at least make a responsible defense of the hypothesis that such paranormal entities exist and occasionally manifest in our seeing. I'm going to leave water kelpies like at Loch Morar et al alone to. Many of the cryptozoological entities seem very like denizens of that same reality whatever it is. I'm going to leave Ouija alone, even though the amount of witness testimony for related "poltergeist" effects is enormous. I'm going to leave the Catholic Church's exorcism effects alone, even though they are suspiciously precisely like the paranormal effects seen in some poltergeist manifestations or more often projected illusions bombarding [literally] the priests involved. And what of Balls-of-Light which seem to move intelligently, nevermind that they shouldn't even exist in the first place? And what of dowsing? My best academic friend --- a physicist!! --- does it frequently. And strange Falls-from-the-Sky? And as you know, we could go on.

This is what all of us want to know. What's really going on? It seems that we have a nice relatively well-behaved universe, and then we have this "other stuff". Of all our current "other stuff", the best behaved [in the sense of fitting comfortably with the unimaginative status quo] are the existences of many forms of extraterrestrial intelligences and the likelihood that they are around covertly watching our weird behaviors and trying to understand our weird ideas. UFOs are simple. They comprise no deep understanding problem at all. It's these other things. The ETI/ETH hypothesis will smoothly solve itself in time, whenever those guys-upstairs want it to. When that happens, we might learn a lot of standard science and advanced technology, but it will all neatly fit. We will probably learn nothing, or almost nothing, more about these other mysteries. In fact, this could be a reason why ETI is here studying us, hoping to get a clue. They could have easily technologically sterilized their lifestyles so badly that creative thought and experience about the Old Mysteries is absent.

I don't think that we explorers of this bigger picture are asking much. We'd like some help from the empowered establishment but we know we aren't going to get it. They are going to sit in their comfortable walled-off boxes and miss the real meaning of the Universe, happily turning into concrete as they do. I'd just like nothing at all out of them. No disapproval, no mockery, just get out of my Cosmos and let our exploration go as it can. I'd like to see an intellectual atmosphere unhindered enough to allow some people to honestly give the physics world and the world of states-of-consciousness an honest try at melding together.

The physical Universe is sure a big place. The Whole Universe is much bigger. The physical universe is a mighty big box. But it is still a box. I don't like boxes, and I don't think that we're going to understand the most important things about Reality working inside boxes. Give me at least a big window or a door.

And that's what I think that the "visions", the haunts, the tricksters, and the Helen Lanes are doing. They are the Windows to this bigger reality. We have to shrug off the constrictions of our modernism and open our eyes.

It's pretty wonderful.

Till next time, friends. Peace and good Communion.