The methodology of science stands fast and firm on its pedestal of 'Objectivity'. The idea – hypothesis – must be proven to be possible using quantifiable, standardizable, measurable, repeatable experiments. The expected outcome must be the same at every test; plug in the right stimulus, physical environment and energy, and you will always get the same result.
So they say who follow the Scientific Method but, the rule of Objectivity has yet to make a perfect human voice. Using observation via endoscope and x-ray, we know exactly what the vocal mechanism looks like at rest, when breathing, talking, eating, and singing. We can observe the changes in the shape of the mechanism when the singer hits that magnificent high note or the booming, chesty low note, and we can attempt to recreate the best sounds of the voice with mechanical interference to retrain minds, muscles, and nerves to move in a manner that will produce the best sound.
I was a classically trained singer; I had this system of objective training used on me – it didn't work. My mind could not tell my pharynx to open the larynx 2.5 millimeters and tilt forward 3 degrees in order to transition from a high note to a low note. Half of the muscles involved are involuntary and they don't listen to this techno-babble! They don't do measurements.
What did work for me was subjective; my teachers said think about being an organ pipe growing larger to accommodate that deeper sound; relax and feel the resonance spread from behind your eyes to the back of your jaw. You can't measure this. It is a different thing for every student. But it works. If you 'make it so', see and feel it in your mind, your body just figures it out. It's not scientific by today's definition, but it once was all the rage of the enlightened world of music in the 18th century. We call it the lost art of Bel Canto singing.
So what does this have to do with the paranormal, ghosts, parapsychology and science? It's my way of using an illustration to explain a dilemma. You see, there is more than one type of science. You may have already begun to suspect I was headed here when I followed up the objective quest for categorization and classification of things using scientific methodology with the mind experiment and the multiplicity of quantum physics.
Humans seem to have a natural urge to put things in some kind of order or perspective in relationship to their position in the universe. We have a need to know that the set of all elephants is not the set of all pianos. We appear to be born with a need (probably a very healthy one) to learn the difference between apples and oranges, tigers and cows, candy and poison. But we also have a very great proclivity for seeing only this either/or, on/off, black/white, good/evil, binary universe. In our early history it was most likely a very healthy survival mechanism – us against them – kind of thing. Unfortunately, the universe is not black and white; that would be far too simple.
Now we are back to the Paranormal and the Metaphysical; the pseudo-science, things not always quantifiable with the knowledge we have today. (Stop me anytime and get your voice into this! I really would like some feedback, just to make sure I haven't gone insane or something thinking about this stuff too much!) Are there such things as ghosts? Do your ancestors watch over and protect you from somewhere beyond physical death? Are there such things as deities and where do they reside in the universe? Is there a spiritual plane of existence beyond the physical universes and, if so, what is it? Can one transmute lead to gold with the right formula, ritual and incantation? How? Why?
When our ancestors were living in caves and hunting mammoth they asked things like this. And they probably looked around and tried to find an answer. That answer developed into myth and religion. Belief.
Belief is subjective, you can't measure it except by means that are so extreme they are life-ending. Belief in its most subjective form becomes religious dogma; it is never questioned, just believed to be so. But Belief can also be based on objectivity; the probability that something must be so because the observations and tests and anecdotal evidence are consistent and recurring over time, space, and generations.
What are ghosts?
Can one be psychic?
Is time real?
Can one reincarnate?
Is there other life in the universe?
We don't know yet. These could all be a thousand different things depending on what evidence, both subjective and objective, you choose to believe. And now we are where we were last time: can belief make it so?
Do you ever remember being scared of something unknown, such as the dark? Your parents gave you a night light and told you it was just your imagination, right? Mine did. I was probably three going on four at the time and I know I was that age because we moved into the house I grew up in just after my third birthday, and my brother and I shared a room for half a year. He got his own room when I started letting him out of his crib so he would shut up at any hour of the night he woke me up. My parents didn't appreciate a toddler wandering the house at 2:00 AM therefore the pantry/laundry room was moved to the basement and the room redone for my brother.
Shortly after that I became afraid of the dark and was given a sweet little lamp, (Mary and her little lamb) with a nightlight bulb in it. That was fine in the bedroom, but my parents would leave the bedroom door open at night so they could hear me from their bedroom, and I could see the antique piano in the dining room from my bed. Sometimes I could see things – shadows – moving around between my doorway and the piano. It would freak me out. I really did believe in ghosts when I was four! It certainly kept me in bed when I was awake, although I was a formidable and fearless sleepwalker. Until I was 10 or 11, my parents' friends would use this fear of the dark and ghosts to keep me out of trouble when we visited. One of their friends brewed his own wine and beer in his basement, so they told me the Boogie Man would get me to keep me out of the back stairs and away from the brewery. Another refilled his own bullets in his basement. He told us kids that a big black demon lived down there and if we were noisy or went down and bothered it, it would demand he feed one of us to it and, since it was a demon, we would go straight to Hell!
Now I know that the shadows were caused by the wind shifting the tree branches outside the living room window. We had a big streetlight on the corner and it could light up the whole living room at night if the curtains weren't pulled all the way shut. It is always windy where I grew up, so the wind was always tossing the tree branches around and making moving, menacing shadows in the living room and the dining room.
Now I know that my parents' friends were just trying to keep us kids out of trouble and safe with these terrorizing stories about monsters, but it did mess me up mentally. I thoroughly believed in ghosts and monsters and demons. I don't think it is a particularly nice thing to do to a child, telling them such things and then telling them there are no such things as ghosts and that it's only their imaginations simultaneously. Children's brains aren't quite ready to try and reason through that set of contradictions.
By the time I hit 12 years of age I had become an obsessive bookworm. I had also become a "Show me! Prove it!" person. I had moved away from animal stories and adventure stories, and I had begun to read Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, the early Isaac Asimov (Lucky Star), and a juvenile science fiction writer with the nom de plume of Andre Norton. It was 1966 and we were going to send men to the moon! My parents had already let me stay up all night the year before to watch the Ranger unmanned lunar landing pictures come back and be broadcast. I had begun to get into science, astronomy, biology and the like. I believed in the possibility of UFOs because I was hooked on the Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone. But I was also learning to question. I was learning the difference between reality and fantasy and trying to quantify all of my experiences in a practical and logical way. I had realized that the shadows in the dining room came from the trees outside. The nightlight was by now a reading lamp on my dresser. I told myself I no longer believed in ghosts or the supernatural. I had better things to believe in. It was the year Star Trek began on TV.
It was also the year I met Michelle. She was my brother's age, a magnificent horsewoman, and, I thought, a bit crazy. Her family was a bit dysfunctional so maybe that was the reason (I thought), but friends accept each other for what they are and go from there the way I was raised so, I just have a friend who is a bit crazy. I can put up with her "seeing things" in cemeteries and on the streets, and telling me that people we saw walking by were happy or sad, or sick, or dying. Within a couple years we were more like sisters than just best friends.
And just when I had gotten myself comfortable with her being just a bit crazy like some of my great uncles, who drank too much and lived like hermits on their ranches and farms, it happened. You know that quantifiable truth that turns your opinion to something being more probable because of the evidence?
We rode past the cemetery a lot, and she would sometimes stop and talk to nothing on the other side of the fence. I would just sit, let the dog pant and rest under the horse and let the horse graze – mentally sing "la-la-la, I'm ignoring what's happening. La-la-la…"
Then one day, she got in a bit of an argument with nothing, and nothing apparently started to leave. She told it to come back and listen to her. Then, at the same time, both horses brought their heads up and alerted to... NOTHING! The dogs got up too and all four animals tracked NOTHING! from right to left across an open area of gravestones and into the trees while Michelle talked to it. Then everyone relaxed. I was apparently the only one not aware. It freaked me out!
Michelle used to tell me I could do this thing too if I would just quit being afraid of it. But she is still really gifted.
So, by 14, I had picked up an additional hobby… parapsychology… the research into why and how some people can see things that aren't there, communicate, understand, see the future and the past, and know when someone is hurt miles away before it happens. My friend could do some of this and I needed to know how and why and if I really could do it also.
That was forty plus years ago. Because of my life experiences as a small child I feel I am a "Believing Skeptic". I want to believe there is more in the universe than what we see. I have to believe that there is more based on what I've learned from science in the last half century, but I want some objective proof.
Show me a man levitating and I, like the infamous Randy will also try to look for the trick to disprove the feat. If that man can come to my house at a time set by me and levitate on command from a surface I provide, then I may believe. But if he cannot do it except under his own conditions then I must doubt his authenticity unless there is enough investigation and control to provide that he is not a very good magician but a real PK expert.
Having been a musician and an educator I can tell you that illusion and magic are real. Composers are magnificent illusionists; they can make you cry or laugh with a few bars of well written music. They can make your heart race, your adrenalin run. They can turn the world's worst film into something passable and they can turn a reasonably good film into something extraordinary using only sound. That is magic. It is also an art and a science.
Our life experiences predicate our beliefs and our beliefs help create our life experiences. It is a strange circle, but it is who we are as individuals and groups of the greater societies of the human race.
So, now I've talked all the way around this circle of thoughts on the paranormal, parapsychology, science, and ghosts. I really would like to know what the rest of the world thinks and why, from everyone - skeptics, believers, and the undecided. Do ghosts exist and what are they?
We have a century of serious research in the field of parapsychology in the USA. Unfortunately, most of our researchers are now dead, retired, struggling as non-profit organizations, or doing their work in other countries where their research is taken more seriously by the governments and educational institutions. To get a degree in Parapsycology now, you really must study abroad, although there are certificates available here from some institutions, not all of them legitimate. Lloyd Aurbach teaches a certificate class in paranormal/ghost hunting in California. Many spiritualist groups have classes, some of which offer certifications.
We also have some of the most severe skeptics of the paranormal, parapsychic, and metaphysical in the USA. The overall attitude is that you have to be crazy to believe this stuff! There seems to be no middle road any longer.
So, we listen to radio programs late at night, like Coast to Coast, which host these "crazy" people, some of them truly "crackers", some of them with impressive credentials and evidence, and some of them just searching for the truth and presenting evidence as and where they find it with no real final explanation - only questions and their beliefs, (kind of like me!).
Do you believe in ghosts?
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