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We all tend to by fascinated by questions about the afterlife – what happens to people after they die, for example, or what we will experience after we transition. Connected to these questions is the issue of ghosts and apparitions. What do these phenomena say about the afterlife and our universe?
I have pondered these questions myself over the years, in addition to having some direct experiences that have given me information, and would like to offer some insight that may shed more light on these topics and give more than the usual explanations.
The Afterlife
I’ve been privileged to tap into the Other Side over and over again in my intuitive work with clients over the years and have somewhat of an outsider’s glimpse into it as a result. (As I write “outsider,” I have one of those “not quite true” gut feelings that denies what one has stated – probably because since birth I’ve felt more comfortable There than here on Earth.) At any rate, I’ve been able to get a glimmer of the Other Side over and over again.
Most of us have witnessed mediums communicating with departed loved ones, one of the ways that many people have gotten a sense of the afterlife. What has struck me about mediumship is that every medium I have thus far seen appears to be communicating with the personality of the person who died. But that’s not what I get when I tap into the transitioned loved ones of my clients – and frankly this has puzzled me.
When I tune into someone who has died, I often have to do two things: first, tune into the person in life (when he/she was still alive) to verify that I’ve got the right person, and, secondly, to then tune into the person at the present time. However, when I tune into the present, I don’t usually get the personality of that last lifetime. Instead, I get the higher soul awareness, rather than the Sue or Tom that my client would recognize or know.
What I’ve come to learn is that we have a different persona (or personality) from one lifetime to another. Just as we will change gender, race, nationality (planet), etc. in different lifetimes, so too will we have different personalities.
At some point after we transition, we drop the persona of that lifetime and get into our higher soul awareness, the awareness that transcends and incorporates all the personas we’ve adopted from lifetime to lifetime. Whereas in life we may have been American, for example, our higher soul awareness is that of a child of the universe, not identified with any one country or culture. (Yet we can always remember who we were in any lifetime.) I’ve seen some people who were able to get into their higher soul awareness almost immediately upon transitioning (perhaps because they had a deeper or more conscious spirituality during their previous life), and I’ve seen others who took much longer to do so (and were actually struggling to acclimate to where they were for any of a variety of reasons). The length of time it takes to acclimate will vary from person to person (bearing in mind, of course, that time as it may exist on the Other Side, has no direct correlation to our experience of time here). Yes, it does get complicated!
Insofar as what people are doing on the Other Side is concerned, I’ve gotten quite diverse things – things that have given me an even better sense of the afterlife. (Because I’ve covered that in my book Invisible Blueprints, I won’t detail it here.) What I would like to say here, though, is that our loved ones don’t forget those they left behind on Earth. Even though they get into their higher soul awareness at some point and have dropped the personality of their last lifetime, they remember their loved ones, are aware of what they are experiencing, and are fully able to project their personality to their loved ones whenever they choose to. This may be what mediums are communicating with: the projection of the personality. And the reason for this may be that loved ones left behind would not take as much comfort from a communication from the higher soul awareness, devoid of the personality they knew in life. Passed-on loved ones are aware of this fact, choosing to project what would be both recognizable and comforting to those on Earth.
Ghosts and Apparitions
No discussion of departed souls would be complete without a discussion of ghosts and apparitions. I recently attended the Mensa Annual Gathering at which there were two presentations on ghosts, in addition to mine on intuition. (And, yes, Mensans were genuinely interested in these topics.) Neither presenter on ghosts covered the source of the “hauntings” in much depth – i.e., what caused them. Yet the question fascinates me.
I have read a great deal about the subject of ghosts in the last forty years, and I even lived in a house that was haunted back in the mid-70s outside of Chapel Hill. From what I’ve read and experienced, I feel that different hauntings can come from a range of causes.
Let’s take that haunted house I lived in. The house had been built in the early 20th Century and lived in by the same family for about fifty years, but had been vacant for almost twenty years when I moved in. The first night I spent there, I saw a ball of light go through the room after the light had been turned off. This was my first such experience – and it really jolted me. (It’s one thing to read about such things and quite another to experience it for the first time.) I also heard noises, like a party going on, from a room across the hall, a room that was physically empty at the time. Over the next couple of years, there were noises upstairs that sounded like children running through the room (even though the room was full of boxes and furniture and had no clear path for anyone to run through) and drawers being opened and closed. Footsteps were heard coming down the stairs a few nights, articles were moved on occasion, and the dogs would sometimes yelp and jump off the front porch. A figure fitting the description of the father of the family would sometimes be seen outside at dusk.
The noises were quite real. If I had had a tape recorder, I’m sure they could have been recorded. However, those noises felt to me that they were simply an accumulation of daily noises from the past – a residue still in the house — auditory manifestations devoid of any volition or intent. In other words, the children weren’t trying to haunt and I didn’t feel that a presence was trying to create them. The daily activities and noises of the family from over the decades were simply imprinted in some way on the house and its atmosphere.
The articles being moved, on the other hand, did seem to have volition behind them, as if someone had willfully and deliberately – if not mischievously – moved them.
What this means is that not all apparitions or manifestations are caused intentionally or that there is an intentional haunting.
There are often hauntings and apparitions in locations where there was tragedy, massive death, or great pain and suffering or stress. Take the battlefield at Gettysburg, for example, which has been reported to be haunted, or a house where there’s been a sudden, violent, or tragic death. I feel that a place that has seen intense or consistent suffering is imprinted with the emotional intensity – the emotional residue – of those involved, without any volition or intent to haunt. After all, emotions are energy, and intense emotions are intensified energy which can imprint on a physical location.
A friend recently visited an old battleship and felt the presence of the spirits of the men who had served on the ship still there. She questioned the haunting nature of this experience. Yet it may not be a true haunting in the sense of someone departed trying to haunt a place. The ship certainly saw a lot of emotional intensity during its service – fear, intense focus during battles, painful death – and that emotionality very well may have been imprinted on the ship. And, additionally, some spirits may still be there, haunting it.
A few years ago, I visited a courthouse in a small town in Arkansas widely reputed to be haunted. I was told by the guide that people who attempted to spend the night in the courtroom were usually spooked (pun intended) by what they saw, sensed, and heard – and often flee from the building. In the courtroom myself, I could feel a sense of all the people who had been in there over the years and I could sense their anxiety as they waited for their cases to be heard. Whether that was a residue or there were presences still there, I failed to try to determine. In one of the stairwells, the guide asked if I could feel anything and I replied that I had the sense of someone’s death, perhaps a rope. It turned out that someone had been lynched and hung there. The intensity of that fear and pain, I feel, was imprinted on the place, even though it didn’t feel that the victim was truly haunting the spot intentionally.
That said, there can also be intentional haunting, by those who have died and haven’t acclimated to where they are and haven’t moved on. In this case, I would say that they haven’t dropped their personalities from the lifetime and are clinging to aspects of that life and unresolved issues. It is this type of case in which people – ghost whisperers, if you will – will attempt to assist them by getting them to “go to the light” or helping them to resolve their unresolved issues. For all I know, in situations like these it’s also possible that the person did indeed get into his/her higher soul awareness after transitioning and the haunting may be an imprinted residue due to the intensity of the situation or a projection from the higher soul awareness, due to something being unresolved. (It gets even more complicated!)
Here’s yet another cause of an apparition: one presenter at the Mensa Gathering mentioned a Tibetan priest who had intentionally physically “resurrected” someone who had passed on – conjured him/her up physically. We could call this type of instance a ghost, but one has to wonder where its consciousness is – and this situation would be devoid of volition on the part of the ghost.
And now consider this instance: there was a fascinating and widely related account of two English women, Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, both academics from Oxford, who went to Paris on holiday in 1901 and toured Versailles while there. Finding their surroundings strange and encountering oddly-dressed people (in old-fashioned clothes), the two women felt that things were not quite “right” and subsequently did some research after their return to England. They discovered that the Versailles they had visited was the Versailles of the 18th Century without the architectural details and changes that had been made since that time. One woman they had seen in Versailles they later realized was Marie Antoinette. They subsequently wrote an account of their experience in An Adventure. (A good account may be found at http://members.aol.com/timeslip8888/versailles.html.) Basically these two women upon arriving in Paris had suddenly stepped into a former century.
How do we explain this type of apparition – more of a time warp than a haunting? It would appear to be the intersection of two time periods – two dimensions that inexplicably intersected, with one supplanting the other. In instances such as these, we have to wonder if the people populating these other time periods can see us and our present time period.
And now, consider this case: a friend of mine related to me an out-of-body experience he had in the sleep state. In this out-of-the-body experience, he traveled to the place where his grandfather had lived – as well as to the time period that his grandfather was alive there. During this experience, he met, talked with, and interacted with someone there. He told me that he knew during the experience that he had gone to this previous time period and even told the person he was speaking with that he didn’t live there. He related to me the person’s total shock as my friend dematerialized before his eyes as he was preparing to return to his body. So this represents yet another potential cause of apparitions: someone time-traveling during an out-of-body experience.
As you can see, there are neither consistent nor simplistic explanations for these phenomena. We may want simple explanations and we may want to understand the afterlife in our normal or our customary cultural terms, but this is not the case. My sense is that the afterlife has many surprises for us. Passed-on loved ones are not restricted to their former personalities. And hauntings, ghost, and apparitions are not necessarily caused by the same factor – or by people always trying to haunt. What this speaks to, I feel, is that our world truly reveals a greater deal of complexity than we may either realize or give it credit for. Wonderfully intricate world fully deserving of our respect and awe, isn’t it?
This article was first published in the October/November 2007 issue of “Innerchange Magazine.”
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This article is an open query to all ghost hunters, paranormal investigators, psychics, mediums, parapsychologists, and theologians regarding the possible moral obligations concerning assisting certain types of ghosts–as defined as the consciousness of deceased persons possibly trapped in the material realm–to move on to ‘the other side.’I am an amateur paranormal investigator with limited experience and many questions cross my mind, not only about the research and gathering ‘evidence’ of the paranormal, but also questions related to the moral, ethical, and spiritual aspects of this endeavor.My question is this:Do we have an obligation to assist ghosts in their transition to ‘the other side’?The question is based on a series of assumptions as follows.1. Ghosts are the consciousness of deceased humans and certain ghosts are ‘stuck’ in the material realm.2. Some ghosts may be unaware that they are ghosts and/or they are unable to muster the actions/steps necessary to ‘move on.’3. There is something beyond the material realm. A place or state exists that is a natural and probably desirable next step, and getting there is necessary to complete the spiritual evolution of these free-floating ‘minds’ called ghosts. 4. Thus we, as the living, being knowledgeable of the condition of their existence–and theoretically having the tools to assist them in their spiritual evolution–should render this assistance.The above assumptions possibly place us–as paranormal investigators and others concerned with the spiritual evolution of our species–in a unique position to be able to provide this assistance. If the assumptions above are true and/or you believe in ghosts, to not act based on these assumptions be could something akin to leaving Kitty Genovese bleeding on the street.If you believe that people should be altruistic–that is being obligated and willing to help our fellow humans (and ghosts)–we should seriously consider this issue.There is research that shows that humans can be altruistic. They certainly may demonstrate this trait. We operate in groups for the greater good and are social creatures. However, there is also social psychological research that demonstrates that we are very selfish, e.g. we may only clearly operate altruistically when it serves our own needs/ideals or that of our family. We may be unique in the animal kingdom considering our combination of altruistic and selfish traits. The discussion of these psychological and sociological ideas certainly goes beyond the constrains of this article, but they do bear mentioning.So, when considering this question, one has to look deep into oneself and society and consider whether your answer to the question is self-serving or genuinely altruistic.Considering the popular television show Ghost Hunters, rarely do they televise cleansing efforts, involve religious authorities or psychics specific to this issue, and it appears that their activities in regards to their clients mostly involve educating their clients to paranormal phenomena with the tenet that knowledge reduces fear–and that there is really nothing to fear. At least for the humans involved.This is just on the surface, and TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) certainly provides more services than is discernable from their television show and has demonstrated the capability to provide referrals to professionals and experts capable of operating under the assumptions I mentioned earlier.Anyone that has done any background research on Grant, Jason, and Steve–the force behind TAPS– realizes that their paranormal experiences far exceeds what is able to be shown in an hour television show. For all the commercialization and debates to as to whether the ‘evidence’ they present is valid, they do deserve immense credit to bringing the realm of the paranormal–and implications on the spiritual evolution of the human race–to light and educating the general public in regards to these type of phenomena as genuine and legitimate human experiences. Other television shows have a bent that lends themselves more toward addressing the possible moral and ethical responsibilities that this article is questioning. Paranormal State, the team of young investigators and paranormal entrepreneurs from Penn State, definitely deserves credit for bringing this issue more to light and embracing a wider spirituality that underlies the entire endeavor. Both groups, Ghost Hunters and Paranormal State, are clearly human-centric. The living are more important then the dead. Their needs take precedent, being the primary needs in any case. This is a premise I have to believe, as my belief in ghosts and the afterlife are unresolved at best. If a child is scared, or an adult is being tormented by paranormal experiences, the impact on their quality of life is obvious. Why the supposed ‘ghosts’ are exhibiting this ‘behavior’ is always secondary to the needs of the living..Are we racist against ghosts? Do we neglect their needs in support of the living? Absolutely, but this is the way it is. There is a conscious and unconscious assigning of priorities in any paranormal investigation, and whether we are ‘racists’ considering ghosts is fodder for another article, the implications of which are not discussed here. I take this type of bias as possible indication of genuine altruism exhibited by the human race. It is one of the ways that demonstrates that we, as living humans, are part of the same family. Ghosts, by definition, are not, though perhaps they once were. Thus ghosts become the second-class citizens of any paranormal investigation. Though ghosts are the reason we’re investigating in the first place, in reality they are not. We are investigating for us, and sometimes ghosts are treated like nothing more then strange animals in a zoo where we go to gawk. Again, these issues are very interesting, but beyond the bounds of this article.So, we come back to the original question:Do we have an obligation to help ghosts move to the other side?Consider the following series of questions which represent a potential can of worms related to the question above. 1. What if some ghosts choose to stay?There are documented cases of people who are alive, astrally traveling or presumably engaging in ESP and appearing as apparitions to people, family members, or even complete strangers. How do you determine the difference between this phenomena and that of a haunting? Then we would need to determine the difference between a residual haunting and an intelligent haunting, assuming that residual haunting is not caused by a conscious spirit.What’s left may be an intelligent haunting. If so, how would we decide if the ghost wants to be here, or that it doesn’t know it is trapped? What if the ghost knows it’s trapped, and believes that the other side is hell? Again, we have a can of worms here which may place us–as paranormal investigators–casting judgements that have already been decided by the concepts of God across a variety of religions.2. How do we determine the reasons why an intelligent ghost is staying? How do we decide those reasons presumably using the tools we have now?3. Once we’ve determined the answers to #1 and #2, what do we do next? How do we decide which ghosts to help, and those that don’t need or want our help? What tactics do we employ to accomplish this?So, we are left with a series of questions that are very important, addressing the basic premise of what it is to be human–and to be a ghost–and our obligations and responsibilities as to what that means. Ranging from theology, spirituality, psychology, to the tactics of ghost hunting, this “hobby” certainly generates questions–and possibly answers–that may affect all of the human race.I have no answers, only questions. However, in my quest to become a more competent paranormal investigator, I believe the techniques and technology are the relatively easy questions to address. The questions behind why we are employing such tactics–the difficult part in my opinion–and our eventual goals become very important for all ghost hunters to consider.I firmly believe that we cannot flail blindly in the dark when dealing with such questions. I think, whether we believe in ghosts or not, we do have an obligation to help them if they need it. Not to do so makes you less human in my opinion. And, I feel that many groups neglect these questions or when they are addressed, it is done so in an cursory and self-serving way. I certainly do not exempt myself from this, and perhaps writing this makes me a hypocrite. In my opinion, there are many obstacles in the way of developing any type of consensus in these matters. One of the main obstacles is inconsistent use of language and even a basic ignorance, and perhaps disagreement, in regards to various terminology.For example, many groups state that their goal is to find proof of the paranormal. This is a misnomer. The fact is that paranormal phenomena does exist. I define paranormal as something that is currently unexplainable by science. There is plenty of phenomena that is unexplainable by science, as every scientist will tell you.One needs to clearly define the words they are using if they pretend they are doing something remotely resembling scientific research. If everyone uses the same word in a different way, no one has any idea what anyone is talking about. In scientific research, one doesn’t generally have to worry about this. In the field of paranormal investigation, I feel this problem is pervasive.Some groups clearly state that their goal is to prove the existence of the afterlife or life after death. These groups come more closely to presenting themselves in a way that elucidates their goals. But what exactly are their goals? Lets be frank, no one is probably ever going to prove the existence of the afterlife in the foreseeable future. A lofty goal, sure, but one in all likelihood is probably unobtainable. Setting realistic goals is important in any endeavor, and ghost hunting is no different. Perhaps setting such an all encompassing goal undermines the method, and the ability to work toward obtaining this goal. Running around, taking strange photographs, capturing audio of unexplained voices, and documenting cold spots and spikes in EMF activity may not be advancing the body of knowledge toward proving the afterlife in any meaningful way. However, at this point, these are some the most popular tools we have.If you do want to prove the existence of the afterlife, and you capture some evidence of what you feel is a ghost, how come most people just walk away from it? They put the picture on their Web site and show it off, with little regard to the ghost itself. Even worse then that, they may return to the location–even bringing in more investigators–in an attempt to capture further ‘evidence.’ And yet, what is done as far as attempts to determine why the ‘ghost’ is there and what can be done to help it’s spiritual evolution? Again, this unfortunate spirit is reduced to an exhibit, a zoo animal, and something to be harassed. There has to be more then that, and as a ghost hunter or paranormal investigator, especially if you believe in ghosts, you should do something about it, and hopefully something that will help on a spiritual level. Otherwise, in my opinion, you are nothing better then a tourist and an amateur, and are solely thinking of your own needs and desires. In other words, you are being self-serving.Many groups are very committed to debunking. In my mind, these groups have less of an obligation to assist these disembodied spirits. For myself, I am not convinced of the existence of ghosts. The paranormal phenomena I have captured evidence of is simply that in my mind. It’s paranormal–unexplained by science. Subsequently calling such phenomena a ghost is a leap of faith I can’t make with any degree of certainty at this time. Thus, I’m fairly comfortable not attaching any spiritual implications or obligations to any such phenomena.Until I am actually convinced that there are such things as ghosts, I don’t necessarily feel any obligation to take further steps beyond just trying to figure out what “it” is. However, I do articulate this, and don’t run around identifying such phenomena as ghosts, then do nothing about it. Also, I do work with people who study these aspects of paranormal investigations, and feel that they have the skills to address these aspects if necessary.Of course, I may be wrong and self-serving and–in an effort to justify my actions and reconcile them with my thoughts and opinions on the subject–may be neglecting a very important piece of the puzzle. In fact, I have a nagging feeling in the back of my head this may be the very case.Given the original premise of this article, ghost hunters become elevated to a unique group– a group who has to have an understanding of human psychology, culture, and spirituality, and be able to offer advice and take action concerning a spirits spiritual well-being.The field of paranormal investigation will evolved only if people consider the basic questions, motivations, and drives beyond just capturing evidence. Look at the original question underneath it all…why do we do this?To take a basic tenet of ethics, one must first do no harm. Regardless of whether ghosts exist–and by default this implies the existence of an afterlife–I sincerely don’t believe that most paranormal investigators are causing any harm. But if one does consider the spiritual implications regarding helping a trapped spirit, we are acting on a body of imperfect knowledge, and thus by doing so, perhaps could cause harm if we aren’t very careful and thoughtful in our methods.So, are there any answers in this article? Probably not, but there are many questions and the half-baked musings of an amateur ghost hunter who may just be in over his head.
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