Dear Soul Arcanum:
I love the show Ghost Hunters, (on the Sci-Fi channel), but it has me puzzled. Though these guys believe in ghosts, they rarely get the evidence they’re looking for. (In case you’re not familiar, they investigate possible hauntings by taking all sorts of high-tech equipment to those locations. They then only deem a place to be haunted if they are able to capture indisputable evidence on tape.) The longer I watch this show, the more skeptical I become. It seems when studied scientifically, most paranormal phenomena falls apart. Your thoughts?
– Joe
Dear Joe:
I often watch this show, as it’s one of my kids’ favorites. Those who aren’t familiar can check out the website of The Atlantic Paranormal Society – a.k.a. TAPS – for more information.
Every time I watch it, I feel bad for these guys. They are trying to measure something metaphysical with physical equipment, so it’s like watching someone who is blind trying to prove the existence of colors by setting up a tape recorder. They need someone who can actually perceive what they’re looking for to guide them.
Also, with their blundering approach, they’re more like ghost busters than ghost hunters. Think about all the things that deer hunters do to avoid chasing away their prey; when TAPS shows up and starts moving stuff, making noise and joking around, they literally scare off the very entities they’re “hunting.”
It’s also important to consider that when a homeowner reports hearing sounds, seeing things, or even being touched, they may NOT be perceiving these experiences with their five physical senses. It’s more likely they are perceiving them via ESP – EXTRA-sensory perception, or via a mixture of physical and extra-physical senses.
We traditionally view ghosts as ethereal, misty beings. The term ether refers to energy in the process of manifesting. Ether is neither physical nor non-physical, but something in between. It only makes sense that since ghosts are not actually physical, it takes more than physical senses to perceive them.
The astral plane where earthbound spirits reside is close to our own realm of emotion, so it is just about as hard to capture ghosts on tape as it is to capture the essence of emotions such as love, longing, fear or anger on tape. This also explains why the best instruments we have for perceiving ghosts are our own feelings.
We first become aware of the presence of metaphysical entities with our “sixth” sense. We feel something, and that makes us pay attention. When our feeling alerts us, we may then “look” for what is causing this feeling and perceive something vague, or more commonly, something in our peripheral vision that “disappears” when we look at it directly. It is not our physical eyes doing this seeing – it is an extra-sensory experience that we perceive to be physical. Obviously, there is no video camera or recording device on the planet that has ESP.
The same is true of noises and touches. When spirits “touch” us, it is usually our auras that register the touch – not our physical skin – though we may not consciously know the difference. (When you feel “shivers” up your spine, for example, that is happening in your aura – not your physical body.)
There are various degrees of manifestation in the physical, however, which is why researchers do sometimes get physical evidence. For example, you may recall a recent episode of Ghost Hunters in which one of the investigators felt he had been slapped, and manifested scratches on that area of his back. (This sort of evidence is rare because it takes tremendous energy for metaphysical entities to affect the physical world.)
Another thing that always strikes me when I watch this show is how “unspiritual” these researchers seem to be in general. While they have a sincere interest in the subject, they have a pretty irreverent attitude, and seem to think that they can study ghosts the same way a biologist studies frogs or butterflies.
Pondering the sorts of places we typically associate with ghosts and spirits can teach us a lot about their nature and the best ways to study them. Cemeteries are a great example, for they are havens for earthbound spirits for a number of reasons.
First, spirits tend to move on from places where there is constant change and commotion, and settle in quiet places where energy can stagnate, and cemeteries are rarely disturbed. Also, everyone who enters a cemetery thinks about death and spirits, which sends the spirits there a lot of energy. If I were a spirit in need of a place to hang out where no one would try to get rid of me, and where I’d get fed a lot of energy in the form of mental and emotional attention, I’d linger in a cemetery myself!
In light of all of this, we might deduce that to get spirits to show up in supposedly haunted houses, we should treat those places as we would a cemetery. This means lowering our voices and moving carefully. Instead of bustling through with extension chords, laughing and joking, we should maintain a respectful, quiet, sacred approach.
Further, it takes a shift in consciousness – a meditative state of mind – to create a bridge to spirit, and most of the time, these guys are either goofing around or psychically shut down by their obsession with “scientific” evidence. Their minds are in full waking beta instead of the alpha state essential to perceiving subtle energies and initiating inter-dimensional communication.
They’re also fooling themselves with their “scientific” methods. Quantum physical experiments demonstrate that the beliefs and expectations of the observers will affect what is observed, so a skeptic who undertakes an experiment may get negative results, while a “believer” who undertakes the same experiment may get mind-blowing positive results. As no one can be 100% objective, researchers tend to convince themselves that they’re unbiased, yet all the while their conscious and subconscious desires and expectations are affecting their experiences. This tends to yield variable results, which is pretty much what happens on this show.
Though I’ve never seen them do it, TAPS does have an article at their site about using psychics in tandem with all the technology. This sounds like a great idea to me, because I believe if they had a “spiritual leader” aligning the energy of the group, they would have far more interesting experiences and be able to help the earthbound spirits they encounter. Such a person could also close portals and clear the energy of the buildings they investigate.
If you read the articles at the TAPS website, you’ll see that the investigators do believe in the existence of ghosts, demons, etc., and they often remark on the feelings they have during investigations and their frustration with not being able to capture much with their technical instruments. Despite this, they don’t seem to be changing their approach, and as a result, it seems to me that what they are really proving is that physical devices are not the ideal tools for studying metaphysical phenomena.
I’ll leave you with one more thing to counter to your doubts: Many experiences with spirits are personal in nature. They only happen for the people spirits are reaching out to, whether those are people the spirit loved during life, or people the earthbound entity has grown attached to for some reason. Just because others can’t perceive what the “haunted” can, that doesn’t mean those spiritual encounters aren’t “real.”
– Soul Arcanum
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