20 Reader Responses

1. alistair Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 5:39 am

   i have no empirical evidence for seperate spirit entities. i believe we all have access to information from what jung called the collective unconcious. this information comes through effort in meditation or prayer, or it comes by accident after periods of duress or a brief traumatic shock.
   if one is prone to denial of the self by nature or through indoctrination and has experiences of enlightenment then the rational mind finds comfort in non-rational explanation.
   listening to terence mckenna and others speak of plant ethogens i get a sense of intellegence there,but maybe the sudden nature of the experience is too much for the ego to accept and creates a mediator to buffer the shock. never tried it though.
   when it comes to penn and teller, i don`t get the feeling there is a spiritual basis to thier show. it`s pure hollywood. an act hammered out in hotel rooms around the nation, fed by fast food and faster women and presented to a jaundiced audience of tourists on the las vegas strip. and this is at the hieght of thier success.
   james randi? chronic denier of his own consciousness. traditional cynic. knows the cost of everything to the penny but has no appreciation for value. allows science to do his dirty work for him. horrible little man.

2. James Russell Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 10:43 am

   I can’t speak for Penn and Teller, but Randi has always struck me as a mean-spirited little troll. Maybe that’s the deal with Penn & Teller too, just a basic smallness of spirit.

   I think it’s undeniable that there is a degree of charlatanry involved in “real magic”, and that this is worth exposing to prevent people being hurt by it. The problem is, the frauds can be properly demonstrated fairly easily. Doing it the other way round is almost impossible; you could empirically verify, for example, that J.Z. Knight is not channelling a 35,000 year old Lemurian called Ramtha, but I don’t know how you could prove it if she actually was doing that. I suspect people just find it easier to assume it’s all a sack of crap as a result.

3. Tim Boucher Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 4:58 pm

   I think it’s undeniable that there is a degree of charlatanry involved in “real magic”, and that this is worth exposing to prevent people being hurt by it.

   I used to think that, but now I’m not so sure. Why is it undeniable that there’s charlatanry going on? If there is or isn’t, why is it worth exposing? Shouldn’t people be allowed to believe, if that’s their prerogative? Why do we need to show them it’s not true? Maybe the kind of “truth” they have is better? There’s a certain element to this whole equation of: I know better than you what’s good for you. And if we put that on other people in what seems like an insignificant way, why shouldn’t other people put that on us?

   Anyway, as to the main question, I’ve seen two spirits while awake and fully sober, along with various other things in other states of mind. So I’m not going to try and argue any points, since I have direct experience here.

4. alistair Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 5:08 pm

   direct experience is critical to truth. i think it`s different for everyone actually. i just finished watching 12 monkeys a few minutes ago and i would say that movie goes into some of this stuff quite nicely.
   some delusions do hold up better than others.
   i like the one where my children`s smiles warm my heart.

5. Brenden Simpson Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 5:12 pm

   Houdini and his like used to do the same thing, albeit perhaps with a slightly more receptive mind to it than some of their modern counterparts.

   It’s because they deal in illusion that they know how easy it is to convince people that the fairly mundane is supernatural. If they are ham-handed in their exposure of those they view as charlatans, it’s because they’re more concerned with keeping people from being conned than anything else. If you’ve seen a Penn and Teller show, you’ll note that the majority of the acts involve showing people how the trick works. A mildly telling point.

   Are there spirits out there? Well, sticking to the stage magician thread, Houdini claimed that if there was a way to contact the living from beyond the grave that he would do it. So far I haven’t heard any reports of his success.

   Why yes, that was a skillful deflection of the question…

6. Fell Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 6:04 pm

   I’ve had a major shift in my thoughts regarding “spiritual” entities just recently. Before, I built up an understanding to help myself in which I figured demons and spirits, et al., were aspects of the human group consciousness, out of Jung’s myth of an subconscious mind.

   Now I am leaning towards a more alien topology of how we’re interconnected. I’ve been trying to make a mental relationship between details of what I know of demonic evocation and the whole concept of an intersubjective world/matrix in which we exist, as according to many. I am sure there’s some multi-syllabled scholastic name for the study of such, I just refer to it as “we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.”

   If that’s the case, then beings spoken of in the occult would be beyond normal sensate convention. To be able to interact with them, a sense of the subtle and a wisdom of perception and symbolism would make sense in order to try to comprehend any sort of entity that would be alien to our manifest environenment. And for those who could, in fact, “see” or sense these entities in any way, I would imagine they’d be often interpreted as monsters or fearsom as the mind would not be able to interpret them as such as, consequently, would wrap a mental façade around them to aid in comprehension. Something not making sense would most likely be interpreted as dangerous or alien. Comforts are things we are familiar and have a commonality with.

   I tried to explore these ideas in regards to teleology (link) this week, and then a touch further with the experiment in artifical life architecture known as “Here Be Dragons” (link). It hurts my brain to much to try to simplify it at this point; I’ll be need to ponder a bit longer yet.

7. Fell Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 6:10 pm

   Also, on this note, there is a very decent book (a little heavy reading) called The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram:

   In writing The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram consulted an engaging collection of peoples and works. He uses aboriginal song lines, stories from the Koyukon people of northwestern Alaska, the philosophy of phenomenology, and the speeches of Socrates to paint a poetic landscape that explains how we became separated from the earth in the first place. With minimal environmental doomsaying, Abram discusses how we can begin to recover a sustainable relationship with the earth and the nonhuman beings who live among us–in the more-than-human world. –Kathryn True

   He used to actually work as an illusionist, and then he went off to study “real magic” and was astonished with his discoveries with the world. This is an interested book for anyone interested in the seperation of human perception from the queit, occult worlds from which our societies have displaced us.

8. Tim Boucher Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 6:39 pm

   Yeah, thats a fantastic book, actually. I was lucky enough to see Abrams do a really amazing lecture at my college in around 1998 or so. Seems like a great guy, tons of awesome things to say.

9. alistair Says:
   August 28th, 2005 at 7:05 pm

   so we have somehow lost the relationship with spirits. not surprising given the depth of distraction that culture provides. i have no doubt that humans have had discourse with spirits historically, and that the conversation continues with some of us today. jaqcues vallee feels confident that aliens as we know it exist and are trying to communicate but they are so far advanced and are so alien that we come away traumatised from the experience. or maybe the archetecture and chemistry of our brains is playing hide-and-seek with it`s self in some perverse delusional bunny-hop across our consciousness.

10. Fell Says:
    August 28th, 2005 at 10:46 pm

    Tim, you’d be the first person I know who’s even heard of it, let alone read it!

    alistair, I just recently picked up Confrontations, by Vallée, but have not yet had a chance to start it. I look forward to doing so, though. I’ve heard nothing but good things.

11. alistair Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 9:28 am

    fell, here is a link to an interview with jacques vallee that talks about his views regarding u.f.o.s
    www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc839.htm

12. hebrides Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 10:09 am

    mostly m’eye ghostly experiences have occured when in the limnal state in between wakefulness and sleep and the most recent occurred after a ritual, so it’s hard to say. but I would ask, is it that certain experiences are “hallucinations” or misperceptions due to a certain state of consciousness or is it that these are real things that we’re less likely to perceive unless we’re in a different state of consciousness. Both are valid interpretations of the data, though I don’t know if you could argue for both on an equal footing using Occam’s Razor.

    Another thing to ask though is, just b/c someone “fakes” something once, does that mean they’re faking it ALL the time? Blavatsky was supposedly caught red-handed faking some mediumistic-type stuff on an occasion, but the question is why was she faking? Is it that she could never do the real thing? In a book I read on the whole CIA Remote Viewing programs, there was a section dealing with traditional shamanism and its relation to some crazy phenomena surrounding Uri Geller (the spoonbender). It stated that sometimes shamans would purposely do sleight-of-hand tricks in order to build up a certain type of energy or skill that aided in doing the real thing. I don’t remember exactly, but that’s pretty suggestive stuff to me. And Gurdjeiff at one point had his students put on a demonstration of “fake” occult phenomena, always making a distinction between that and the “real” thing. Why’d he teach them how to do the fake stuff at all? Just so they could tell it apart from the real thing? Or is it a step along the way?

    Ooh! I just found this essay that sort of treats the same stuff: http://the-philosophers-stone.com/articles/charlatn/magus.htm

    Food for thought.

13. alistair Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 11:33 am

    there is a suggestion in what you are saying hebrides, that we need to create some sense of expectation about what it is we percieve, in ourselves and in others. a perceptual charging of the atmoshpere. i tend to agree that a warm-up is necessary in most things that humans do, so why would matters of the spirit be any different.

14. Fell Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 12:05 pm

    alistair, thanks. I’ll have to read that this evening.

15. J. Puma Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 12:16 pm

    hm, well, i tend to think that ’spirits’ etc. are different manifestations of the same stuff that happens during ufo encounters. they’re not ‘real’ or ‘unreal,’ they exist in a space between the two. at the same time, there’s definitely ‘charlatanry’ going on sometimes, and sometimes there’s not, but it’s often not as cut-and-dry as all that. for instance, iirc, in traditional shamanic cultures where the shaman is a healer, he’ll often “palm” a little ball of hair and bones and act as though he’s expelling it from the body of the sick individual as part of the ritual process. but, it serves the purpose of giving a physical manifestation to the person’s ills, and giving a psychological jolt to the patient. it *looks* like charlatanry to western eyes, but it’s part of the process. it’s like, we pretty much all know that castaneda’s ‘don juan’ character *may not actually exist*, but does that make any difference in the long run? i don’t think it does. does that make castaneda a charlatan, or someone who’s exercising ‘controlled folly.’

    i actually love penn & teller, though– i dunno, they crack me up.

16. rev max Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 2:07 pm

    iirc, in traditional shamanic cultures where the shaman is a healer, he’ll often “palm” a little ball of hair and bones and act as though he’s expelling it from the body of the sick individual as part of the ritual process. but, it serves the purpose of giving a physical manifestation to the person’s ills, and giving a psychological jolt to the patient. it *looks* like charlatanry to western eyes, but it’s part of the process.

    Another explanation I have heard is that this is also intended to trick the spirits!

    One of the weird things about certian types of ritual magic is that you would imagine that disincarnate entities wouldn’t be so easily fooled by some things

    For example there is a type of curse that some people do where they approach a spirit with a substance that the spirit is reputed to be disgusted by and offer it to them

    ANd say something like “Oh I’m sorry Mr. SPirit, I would never offer you liver & onion ice cream (or whatever) but so-and-so told me to do it, blah blah blah”

    So then Mr. SPirit gets pissed and goes after so-and-so instead of the person who really offered it

    Like i said, it works but its weird - its difficult to understand why it would work

    It is difficult for people to see and sense psirits, sometimes I wonder if it might not also be difficult for spirits to see and sense people

    Perhaps human efforts to contact them seem like paranormal intrusions from their POV as well

17. Conclave » There’s No Such Thing as Humans! Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 2:37 pm

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18. Tim Boucher Says:
    August 29th, 2005 at 2:40 pm

    That’s totally hilarious that people try to trick them. Really though, just because they are spirits, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’d be super intelligent, does it? There might be a range like with humans from the very dull to the very bright. It makes perfect sense in a way, really.

19. James Russell Says:
    August 30th, 2005 at 1:16 am

    Why is it undeniable that there’s charlatanry going on?

    One word: Necronomicon.

20. Pop Occulture » The Wave-Particle Duality of Spirits Says:
    October 4th, 2005 at 12:38 pm

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