¿Qué es un fantasma?
- Un evento terrible condenado a repetirse una y otra vez, un instante de dolor, quizá; algo muerto que parece por momentos vivo aún, un sentimiento, suspendido en el tiempo, como una fotografía borrosa, como un insecto atrapado en ámbar.
Un fantasma, eso soy yo. (“El espinazo del diablo”, 2001)

What is a ghost?

–A terrible event, condemned to repeat itself again and again; an instant of pain, perhaps; something dead that seems at times alive again, a feeling, suspended in time, like a blurry photograph, like an insect trapped in amber. A ghost–that is what I am. (“The Devil’s Backbone”, 2001)

A ghost: a hologram extending outward in time and space from the Implicate Order; a consciousness emerging from the Spiritual into the material. There is much more to say, so please be patient; I will continue to define the ghost, but there is some background information you will need to understand what a discarnate entity truly is. For the moment, allow me to introduce Michael Talbot (unless you read the previous post, in which case you already know who he is):

Michael Talbot’s The Holographic Universe (1992) has become a classic in popular science. Although Talbot was a “science writer” and not an actual, practicing scientist, he understands his subject on a deep level. He bases his theories on the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, who both—independently of each other, in different fields—came to espouse holographic models of the universe and our perception of reality. As Talbot states, “. . . there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it. . . are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time.”

Of course, I jump on the “level of reality beyond our own” and want to know, exactly, what that is; and, because of the way I think, I have to ask that question first. Talbot doesn’t really venture an answer to that question until the end of the book. Clearly, however, we have seen this line of thought before: Plato’s cave, dualism in philosophy, structuralism in language and almost every religion on the planet. The idea that the reality that we perceive is either a copy, an imitation, or a hologram of a deeper, “authentic” reality is an ancient idea receiving new attention from writers on science (mostly quantum physics), medicine, psychology and a smattering of other social sciences. I admire the cross-disciplinary approach to something as fundamental as the nature of reality; however, I remain unsure about the conclusions.

What I don’t think that I understand very well is how the latest revelations into consciousness affecting the material world translate into a “deeper order” of reality. The placebo effect, the psi effect, mind-body healing, evidence for reincarnation, the relationship between the observer and the observed that skews the results of experiments in quantum physics: all of these documented and well-studied realities of human consciousness lead one to believe that we are creating—or at least, participating actively—in the creation of the “real”, of ourselves, our identities, our futures and the fate of everything around us. The fact that consciousness itself seems to be everywhere and does not appear to vanish upon the death of the material body leads me to unsettling conclusions: if my body is simply an expression of my consciousness, how will I—or anyone—be able to understand myself after death as a separate, yet intimately connected, spirit in/of the universe? It all seems so vague, so transcendental, so . . . religious.  Am I a living hologram embedded in a deeper reality? Am I a spirit in a body? Am I pure consciousness expressing itself in one particular incarnation, preparing itself for the next? Am I a soul? Is my body simply a receiver of the frequencies that express it? Is material reality an illusion? Is form so mutable and transient that there is no point identifying with it at all? To all the above, apparently, the answer is “yes”.

Now, of course, the left brain sneers and spits on the ground at this point (if half a brain could spit), exclaiming that all of the above is the wishful thinking or the cultural repression of the spiritual elite, seeking to distract us from a miserable material reality whose pre-eminence can be defined and explained by a word like “cancer” (and here, I am thinking of Talbot himself) or “heart failure.” Try explaining all of this to someone who is dying, and see what happens. The material is everything to someone who has lost control of the disease process; it’s nice that some people can heal themselves through guided imagery, but what about all of those in the world that fail in that effort and die anyway? Are those people spiritual failures? How did Talbot come to understand his disease? Was he at peace with the fate of his material body? Could his own imminent demise have inspired, in part, this last book that he wrote?

Michael Talbot died in 1992 at the age of 38 from leukemia, in the midst of the AIDS epidemic which took away many of his friends; he therefore was well acquainted with death and the reality of loss. Talbot’s book—and others I have read in a similar vein—does not deny death or the fact of dissolution of the material body and all forms of matter surrounding us, far from it; cancer, AIDS, Parkinson’s, accidents, etc. may have death as the outcome. In any case, none of us materially survive this physical existence. For Talbot and others, it’s not about when or how you shed your material shell, it’s about the nature of consciousness itself and how it not only survives your body, it is not a function of that body. It does not originate in the “material” at all, but is only expressed by it. We have presented (on prior soulbank posts) the evidence for such an assertion, (near-death experiences, children’s past lives, past-life regression, mediumship, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, shamanism, and more) but what IS new here is the idea that EVERYTHING is a holographic projection: your body, your cancer, your cat, your right hand, your rose bush, your brain, the pile of leaves in your yard, your yard, the dirt, the worms; all material reality.

This goes back to particles traveling beyond the speed of light, to the reality that on the most fundamental level of creation particles are interconnected so that what happens to one immediately affects the other. If we had no evidence that this process happens on a larger scale, perhaps we would have to scale down our expectations; however, we have an abundance of data indicating that this actually does occur. Here is Talbot summarizing one of Karl Pribram’s main findings regarding the holographic nature of the brain:

“The question that began to bother him was, If the picture of reality in our brains is not a picture at all but a hologram, what is it a hologram of? The dilemma posed by this question is analogous to taking a Polaroid picture of a group of people sitting around a table and, after the picture develops, finding that, instead of people, there are only blurry clouds of interference patterns positioned around the table. In both cases one could rightfully ask, Which is the true reality, the seemingly objective world experienced by the observer/photographer or the blur of interference patterns recorded by the camera/brain?” (31)

This issue led Pribram to David Bohm, who posited that the entire universe was holographic in nature. There is an “implicate” order of things, a kind of matrix where everything is “enfolded,” and an “explicate” order of reality where material forms emerge (“unfold”) into the world as we perceive it. An electron, for example, is not a separate, discreet “thing” that we are observing, but part of the implicate order that emerges when we call it into being and submerges again into the implicate when we cease to create it through observation. Thus, “when an instrument detects the presence of a single electron it is simply because one aspect of the electron’s ensemble has unfolded, similar to the way an ink drop unfolds out of the glycerin, at that particular location. When an electron appears to be moving it is due to a continuous series of such unfoldments and enfoldments.” (47) So: how we interact with the electron determines where, when and how it “unfolds” from the implicate order. If the universe is ordered holographically (all parts contain the whole), concepts such as ‘location’ and ‘time’ are useless. Talbot employs the metaphor of a fountain’s geysers as not separate from the water out of which they flow. He also states that electrons—all sub-atomic particles—are not “particles” at all, but “just a name given to a certain aspect of the holomovement”. (48)

If you’re head isn’t swimming by now, then you don’t grasp the bizarre reality flip that has occurred here. There are no “parts”, no fragments, no separate individuals, no discreet material objects; therefore, whenever we categorize, make distinctions, engage in binary thinking (‘sick’, ‘well’, ‘alive’, ‘dead’, ‘good’, ‘bad’, etc.) we are lost in the false images that the material world makes us believe through the trickery of our perceptions. Cancer, then, is an unfolding of a process that is not differentiated from ‘non’ cancer, or more accurately, ‘cancer’ does not exist as a category in the implicate order. The material world is constantly in flux and not based in any kind of ‘ultimate’ reality.Can we control the material, physical world?  It may be a “holographic” reality, but for most of us, it’s the only reality we know. What I can’t fathom is how we might move past the material world to Ultimate Reality. Is it a matter of belief? Of faith? Can we change the hologram? Can we shift our consciousness to a parallel universe, occupy an alternate space? The suggestion offered is that through prayer, mediation, and the practice of separating the consciousness from the body, we can indeed alter the material reality which we only appear to occupy. Again, we are back to the spiritual tenents of many religions, most of which advocate the above practices as a way to understand and contemplate the Divine.

Now, finally, we have the explanation for what a “ghost” is. Like the sub-atomic particles that manifest when observed, a ghost appears when our consciousness interacts with it. A ghost is an intact consciousness that “unfolds” from the implicate order, when we call upon it to do so, whether consciously or unconsciously. Something “binds” a ghost to the material world, and that is will: either the will of the immaterial spirit or our will to see it or experience it, but more probably a combination of both. A ‘ghost’ might wish to manifest in the material world because it has yet to see his connection with the implicate order, and is therefore willing and able to separate from it. Once a ghost ‘unfolds’ in our world, it has become separate, disconnected from its source. That may explain the sadness and confusion of the ghost: it has irrevocably ‘forgotten’ the Spritual Order from whence all matter derives. Talbot refers to ‘habits’ that create rules and laws, even the laws of physics, and the following could certainly be applied to ‘ghosts’:

“. . . the ability of consciousness to shift from one entire reality to another suggests that the usually inviolate rule that fire burns human flesh may only be one program in the cosmic computer, but a program that has been repeated so often it has become one of nature’s habits. As has been mentioned, according to the holographic idea, matter is also a kind of habit and is constantly born anew out of the implicate, just as the shape of a fountain is created anew out of the constant flow of water that gives it form. Peat humorously refers to the repetitious nature of this process as one of the universe’s neurosis. ‘When you have a neurosis you tend to repeat the same pattern in your life, or do the same action, as if there’s a memory build up and the thing is stuck with that,’ he says. ‘I tend to think things like chairs and tables are like that also. They’re a sort of material neurosis, a repetition. But there is something subtler going on, a constant enfolding and unfolding. In this sense chairs and tables are just habits in this flux, but the flux is the reality, even if we tend only to see the habit.’ ” (137)

A consciousness stuck in repeat is indeed victim of a habit; the habit of occupying material space. We are used to the idea of a spirit repeating itself in the material world as defining the problem of the ghost (at least, paranormal researchers are), but the idea that all material reality is stuck in a repetition is a bit harder to grasp or accept. If the reality we perceive is stuck in the same ‘habit’ of appearing as solid when it is truly part of the larger ‘flux’, then we are no different from the ghost: living humans and spirit humans are simply variations in the frequency patterns that constitute perception. The distinction “living” and “not living” doesn’t apply here, either. The only difference between ghosts and “us” is simply this: we have different frequency patterns. We are just variations in an energy theme. The material and spiritual all come from the same implicate order, and ultimately there is no difference between us. Once a ghost takes material form, he is no longer any different from us; our desire and will to interact with him or her creates the communication and defines the experience.

Time, chronology, is a complete illusion in the holographic universe. There exist several holograms in the implicate order (or, if you prefer, “spiritual” order, for I do not see the difference) that contain various outcomes for one’s destiny in the material. This can also be understood as parallel universes or other dimensions. The past, present and future are all contained in and expressed by the spiritual, or implicate, order. Or, if you prefer, there are infinite worlds with infinite outcomes for all of us. Some come into being, others do not, some morph into each other, some create a rift where we can see the future or experience the past as present; a great deal of what we call “psychic phenomena” can be understood this way. Clairvoyance may simply be the ability to see into another hologram, where everything that is going to happen has already happened. The ghost, of course, is out of time; it could well be that what we consider the ghost is really the living consciousness of a material human from a side dimension to ours, or an inhabitant of a different hologram who escaped it through a rift or shift in the fabric of time/space, or a spiritual being from a higher order that we only see in the brief moments when we are confronted by the Uncanny. Words, indeed, fail me. Words, of course, fragment reality into artificial and unreal representations of lived reality. Writing cannot convey the spiritual order in any meaningful way, but perhaps can—at the very least—give one the conceptual framework from which to formulate one’s own theories, or arrive at one’s own epiphany.

But you don’t need to rely on epiphanies. Read the book. Then read more books. You will see that in all the ways we study reality, there is one common theme: reality, as you understand it, is infinitely bigger, more complex and contains more possibilities for consciousness than you can imagine; but try, try anyway. The next time you see a ghost, you can say, with all certainty:

A ghost. That is what I am.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect’s name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect’s findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect’s findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect’s discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium’s front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect’s experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate “parts”, but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these “eidolons”, the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be — every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of “All That Is.”

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a “mere stage” beyond which lies “an infinity of further development”.

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat’s brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious “whole in every part” nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram’s theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage–simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word “zebra”, you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like “striped”, “horselike”, and “animal native to Africa” all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information–another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with evey other portion, it is perhaps nature’s supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through the senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram’s theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram’s belief that our brains mathematically construct “hard” reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called “osmic frequencies”, and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram’s holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm’s theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is “there” is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really “receivers” floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram’s views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual ‘A’ to that of individual ‘B’ at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

Creation – Holographic Universe
In the 1950s, while conducting research into the beliefs of LSD as a psychotherapeutic tool, Grof had one female patient who suddenly became convinced she had assumed the identity of a female of a species of prehistoric reptile. During the course of her hallucination, she not only gave a richly detailed description of what it felt like to be encapsuled in such a form, but noted that the portion of the male of the species’s anatomy was a patch of colored scales on the side of its head.

What was startling to Grof was that although the woman had no prior knowledge about such things, a conversation with a zoologist later confirmed that in certain species of reptiles colored areas on the head do indeed play an important role as triggers of sexual arousal.

The woman’s experience was not unique. During the course of his research, Grof encountered examples of patients regressing and identifying with virtually every species on the evolutionary tree (research findings which helped influence the man-into-ape scene in the movie Altered States). Moreover, he found that such experiences frequently contained obscure zoological details which turned out to be accurate.

Regressions into the animal kingdom were not the only puzzling psychological phenomena Grof encountered. He also had patients who appeared to tap into some sort of collective or racial unconscious. Individuals with little or no education suddenly gave detailed descriptions of Zoroastrian funerary practices and scenes from Hindu mythology. In other categories of experience, individuals gave persuasive accounts of out-of-body journeys, of precognitive glimpses of the future, of regressions into apparent past-life incarnations.

In later research, Grof found the same range of phenomena manifested in therapy sessions which did not involve the use of drugs. Because the common element in such experiences appeared to be the transcending of an individual’s consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of ego and/or limitations of space and time, Grof called such manifestations “transpersonal experiences”, and in the late ’60s he helped found a branch of psychology called “transpersonal psychology” devoted entirely to their study.

Although Grof’s newly founded Association of Transpersonal Psychology garnered a rapidly growing group of like-minded professionals and has become a respected branch of psychology, for years neither Grof or any of his colleagues were able to offer a mechanism for explaining the bizarre psychological phenomena they were witnessing. But that has changed with the advent of the holographic paradigm.

As Grof recently noted, if the mind is actually part of a continuum, a labyrinth that is connected not only to every other mind that exists or has existed, but to every atom, organism, and region in the vastness of space and time itself, the fact that it is able to occasionally make forays into the labyrinth and have transpersonal experiences no longer seems so strange.

The holographic prardigm also has implications for so-called hard sciences like biology. Keith Floyd, a psychologist at Virginia Intermont College, has pointed out that if the concreteness of reality is but a holographic illusion, it would no longer be true to say the brain produces consciousness. Rather, it is consciousness that creates the appearance of the brain — as well as the body and everything else around us we interpret as physical.

Such a turnabout in the way we view biological structures has caused researchers to point out that medicine and our understanding of the healing process could also be transformed by the holographic paradigm. If the apparent physical structure of the body is but a holographic projection of consciousness, it becomes clear that each of us is much more responsible for our health than current medical wisdom allows. What we now view as miraculous remissions of disease may actually be due to changes in consciousness which in turn effect changes in the hologram of the body.

Similarly, controversial new healing techniques such as visualization may work so well because in the holographic domain of thought images are ultimately as real as “reality”.

Even visions and experiences involving “non-ordinary” reality become explainable under the holographic paradigm. In his book “Gifts of Unknown Things,” biologist Lyall Watson discribes his encounter with an Indonesian shaman woman who, by performing a ritual dance, was able to make an entire grove of trees instantly vanish into thin air. Watson relates that as he and another astonished onlooker continued to watch the woman, she caused the trees to reappear, then “click” off again and on again several times in succession.

Although current scientific understanding is incapable of explaining such events, experiences like this become more tenable if “hard” reality is only a holographic projection.

Perhaps we agree on what is “there” or “not there” because what we call consensus reality is formulated and ratified at the level of the human unconscious at which all minds are infinitely interconnected.

If this is true, it is the most profound implication of the holographic paradigm of all, for it means that experiences such as Watson’s are not commonplace only because we have not programmed our minds with the beliefs that would make them so. In a holographic universe there are no limits to the extent to which we can alter the fabric of reality.

What we perceive as reality is only a canvas waiting for us to draw upon it any picture we want. Anything is possible, from bending spoons with the power of the mind to the phantasmagoric events experienced by Castaneda during his encounters with the Yaqui brujo don Juan, for magic is our birthright, no more or less miraculous than our ability to compute the reality we want when we are in our dreams.

Indeed, even our most fundamental notions about reality become suspect, for in a holographic universe, as Pribram has pointed out, even random events would have to be seen as based on holographic principles and therefore determined. Synchronicities or meaningful coincidences suddenly makes sense, and everything in reality would have to be seen as a metaphor, for even the most haphazard events would express some underlying symmetry.

Whether Bohm and Pribram’s holographic paradigm becomes accepted in science or dies an ignoble death remains to be seen, but it is safe to say that it has already had an influence on the thinking of many scientists. And even if it is found that the holographic model does not provide the best explanation for the instantaneous communications that seem to be passing back and forth between subatomic particles, at the very least, as noted by Basil Hiley, a physicist at Birbeck College in London, Aspect’s findings “indicate that we must be prepared to consider radically new views of reality”.

http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html

Article from: http://www.rense.com/general69/holo.htm

 doug-johnson.squarespace.com/blue-skunk-blog/…

Well, it finally happened. The Paranormal Housewives attracted some attention: the LA Times ran two stories; CBS2 decided to follow us Halloween night on an investigation; local papers jumped in the mix; and we are now “out” as GMT Films’ next project for a television show. The result? Support from the people who matter, and some vicious hate mail that brought me down hard this morning.

I know. This is what happens when you expose yourself to the public. I used to say that people who put themselves in the limelight deserved what they got; I just didn’t understand how much darkness and hatred is out there, and how much it hurts when you are the target of it. Of course, “you” is a relative word; the people who write such nastiness and spew so much venom don’t know anything about me or any of the ladies. They don’t care to actually learn the truth about who we are and what we do–their purpose is to inflame, hurt, accuse, wound and defame. This is what I am attempting to understand: how could people who purport to support research and investigation into the “paranormal” lash out so violently against a group of people who are involved in the same quest?

The answer is simple: their main interest is NOT research or investigation, it’s tearing down the competition or improving their self-image through insults and accusations. Not a single negative comment comes with an identifying signature or contact information. None of these critics have the courage of their convictions, or they would initiate a discussion and ask some questions instead of hiding behind the anonymous attack. It’s the very anonymity of these diatribes and their clear intent to wound that reminds me of those ‘negative entities’ that we occasionally run into in an investigation. If there are destructive energies in the afterlife, why should I be surprised that such ill-intended people exist on this side of the veil?

I suppose I have a long history of naiveté regarding human beings in general. I always believed that everyone was basically good, with more or less pure intentions; evil, as I used to understand it, was a misinterpretation or a frustration of the good. If someone was vicious, it had to be that I had not fully understood what they meant, or that somehow that individual was communicating poorly. Now, I see how innocent I truly was. There exists a sizable minority of genuinely angry, spiteful and destructive people who take pleasure in inflicting pain. What a terrible realization that has been for me and for my paranormal sisters who have to endure such vitriol, coupled with a bitter dose of sexism and envy.

For some, other people’s joy and happiness (especially when made public) inspires them to tear it down. Others rejoice in their skepticism, using it as a weapon to dismantle anyone else’s differing world view. For them, any excuse is valid to assail one’s education, preparation, intent and competence. For the committed, professional skeptic, no amount of evidence is sufficient and no real dialogue is possible. The hardened cynic is the least scientific of thinkers, since open and honest inquiry is not only discouraged, it is impossible.

Most disturbing are those who use gender as a weapon. I realize that six women investigating the paranormal in a responsible and professional way might be a threat to anyone who sees the world and its workings from an androcentric position. I thought–stupid me–that we had something approaching gender equality in this country, in 2011, but my experience with a few minor players in the ghost hunting circles has shown me that women are still considered side shows in the power plays of the paranormal. Granted, I am talking here about a relatively small minority, but these invisible, angry, divisive characters are very vocal (if not visible: they like to hide in dark corners).

I have kept my peace and not discussed this issue anywhere, thinking that perhaps the naysayers and the living devils poking their pitchforks at the PHW would simply explode in a puff of sulfurous smoke, but they are about to come out of the shadows in force as interest in our group grows. The reason that people write to us, want to hear about us, interview us and ask us questions is because we all share questions and concerns regarding our fate after death, and the destiny of souls. It is a sacred undertaking not for the faint of heart. No one, not a single living human, has the answers to these questions. No one can say what happens to human consciousness after death, not science, not psychology, not literature, not anthropology, not ANYONE. Therefore, those who casually condemn those who have undertaken the search for answers have no moral authority for their attacks.

Ultimately, I must learn to rebuff the remarks that someone tosses off with wounding intent. We must protect ourselves from negative and angry living entities the same way we must ward off  evil spirits. The living in the flesh is so much more dangerous than those alive in spirit; I hope and pray that I can take care of myself and the members of my team as we navigate this thing called publicity. You don’t have to agree with us, you don’t have to “like” us, you don’t have to watch us or read about us; however, you DO have to think about your intentions and how those define you as an individual and as an ethical human being. If one turns to the darkest of human emotions, one will find oneself swimming in ignorance and ending up haunting the corner of some unlucky homeowner’s house, who will then contact us, and we’ll have to shoo you out the window.

Let’s all go to the light. We don’t have to wait until we’re dead.

It appears I might have erred in my interpretation of “discernment of spirits”. Below is a summary of some of what St. Ignatius of Loyola had to say about the issue:

“Good and Evil Spirits

Ignatius believed that these interior movements were caused by “good spirits” and “evil spirits.” We want to follow the action of a good spirit and reject the action of an evil spirit. Discernment of spirits is a way to understand God’s will or desire for us in our life.

Talk of good and evil spirits may seem foreign to us. Psychology gives us other names for what Ignatius called good and evil spirits. Yet Ignatius’s language is useful because it recognizes the reality of evil. Evil is both greater than we are and part of who we are. Our hearts are divided between good and evil impulses. To call these “spirits” simply recognizes the spiritual dimension of this inner struggle.”

‘Discernment of spirits’, then, is not about spirits of the dead withwhom we place ourselves into contact. However, since contacting spirits requires an absolute and precise understanding of one’s impulses, motivations and ‘inner spirit,’ it is legitimate to affirm that you can’t contact spirits if you aren’t able to discern your own tendencies towards Loyola’s rather black and white understanding of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

If you don’t see, feel or comprehend your own ‘demons’, then you certainly will attract spirits of the  lower order. Like attracts like; what drags you down in to depression, anger, loss of hope or cynicism will return to you in full during an investigation into the survival of the soul. One could see it as a ‘vibrational’ frequency of despair serving as a beacon to all those–in death–who are of like mind and heart. Since so much of what we do in an investigation involves the ‘mirroring’ of ourselves in the spirit world (there are even theories that we are contacting versions of ourselves in parallel dimensions, backwards or forwards in time), we return again and again to the theme of “knowing oneself,” and taking precautions when you are not in the state of mind or spirit to attempt contact with another world.

This is why I caution those who are in the throws of depression, despair, general unhappiness or any chaotic emotional state to stay away from ‘haunted’ sites. Your emotional state serves as a magnet, destroying your chances of any objectivity in the search if you display a lack of control or awareness of your inner spirits. Discernment of spirits, then, is an interior exercise that requires a thorough self-examination before you can attempt any potentially dangerous communication with those that are now on the “other side” of you.

I haven’t answered my original question. So, I ask my readers to please help me out here, and tell me if you think there is any spiritual or religious justification for the ghost hunt. There may be spiritual justification, but my research so far is indicating that no religious sanctions can be found in the Christian Bible.

Thank you for reading,

–Kirsten A. Thorne

That, I think, is the point: we are engaged in a search for the truth, which involves an uncomfortable relationship between religion and ‘soft’ science. Religion, at least Christian/Catholic in focus, will not accept “ghost hunting” as a legitimate pursuit; however, even that assertion is debatable. There are “Christian ghost hunters” who can, quite well I believe, defend the existence of the spiritual realm here on earth. If you are a literalist and read the Bible as the exact Word of God, you truly cannot defend paranormal investigations. If Hell is a reality for you and not a spiritual state of disconnection from God, then you can’t hunt ghosts. So much depends upon how one interprets the Bible; if all of the Bible’s rules apply to you, you had better not eat shellfish or lie with a menstruating woman.

For me, investigations into the spiritual realm have refined and transformed my relationships and friendships. I feel more connected to life in all of its manifestations, more open to the possibilities of spirit, more aware of my surroundings, and closer to God. There is more peace in my heart than ever before. The results of sitting in the dark for hours on end and honing in on subtle energies have been positive and life-affirming, revealing truths that have only benefitted my relationships. I asked God awhile back if He was OK with my pursuit of spiritual truths in this particular fashion; although I certainly can’t prove that I received an answer, I believe that I did—“permission granted, but be very careful and always understand your motivations”.

Taking care means not investigating buildings where someone was worshipping or conjuring negative and destructive forces, or where there is any hint of demonic activity. Yes, I do believe in the existence of evil, however one wishes to name it. Evil can be severe mistreatment of patients in a mental hospital, or the residue of domestic violence and abuse, or the rampant desire for personal power. Evil may or may not take on a recognizable form; in that sense, we might occasionally contact an “unclean spirit,” and what is required in that case is DISCERNMENT. This is what I found in the Catholic Encyclopedia:

“Discernment of spirits” is the term given to the judgment whereby to determine from what spirit the impulses of the soul emanate, and it is easy to understand the importance of this judgment both for self-direction and the direction of others. Now this judgment may be formed in two ways. In the first case the discernment is made by means of an intuitive light which infallibly discovers the quality of the movement; it is then a gift of God, a grace gratis data, vouchsafed mainly for the benefit of our neighbor (1 Corinthians 12:10). This charisma or gift was granted in the early Church and in the course of the lives of the saints as, for example, St. Philip Neri. Second, discernment of spirits may be obtained through study and reflection. It is then an acquired human knowledge, more or less perfect, but very useful in the direction of souls. It is procured, always, of course, with the assistance of grace, by the reading of the Holy Bible, of works on theology and asceticism, of autobiographies, and the correspondence of the most distinguished ascetics. The necessity of self-direction and of directing others, when one had charge of souls, produced documents, preserved in spiritual libraries, from the perusal of which one may see that the discernment of spirits is a science that has always flourished in the Church.

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05028b.htm

The Bible could not predict that ghost hunters would become involved in tracking souls; and, of course, the Bible cannot specifically comment on ITC and EVP sessions; I take the above quote to mean that there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking to understand the realm of spirits as long as true discernment is involved. If you conduct paranormal investigations with the intent to “self-direct or direct others” towards moral ends, then you are protected from the creatures of the night that seek to hurt or destroy the sacredness of life. Again, it involves your intentions. Such investigations into spirit should never be conducted as pure entertainment for you, since surely something will come along to fulfill that desire, and that ‘something’ is not to be trusted. If you join an investigation as part of your evolution towards God, then I can find no evidence that you will be punished for such an undertaking.

I don’t know if the specific methods of ‘ghost hunting’ are sanctioned or not; I do not participate in séances or consult mediums, not because there is something inherently wrong with such activities, but because I am not sure of other’s intentions. I can only know my own; if others are involving me in a quest to speak to those who have passed into spirit, how can I be sure of their motivational purity? If I can’t know the content of someone’s heart and soul, I cannot allow them to serve as my guide to the spirit realm.

As an individual quest, paranormal investigations can either take you to the Light or drag you into the shadows. I have watched both extremes play out in the lives of investigators. The vigilance must be constant and always based on your faith and sincere desire for knowledge. If you are looking for profit, for self aggrandizement, or to gain control over others, you don’t need to go looking for the dark side—it has already found you.

—Kirsten A. Thorne

Dear Soulbank readers: I hope you will take the time to read the article below and my comments afterwards. If you are interested in survival of consciousness issues, you MUST know about Sam Parnia’s work.    —Kirsten A. Thorne

Near-death experiences are real and we have the proof, say scientists

Written by Danny Penman
Jeanette Atkinson is surprisingly relaxed about the time she died and went to the edge of heaven.“I do not want to die again in the near future because I still have too much to do,” she says. “But I have no fear of death.“People see the pain and suffering of dying and equate that with death – but they’re not the same. Death is the progression of life.” Jeanette, a 43-year-old student nurse from Eastbourne, had a near-death experience in 1979 when she was just 18-years-old. It was triggered when a blood clot in her leg broke up into seven pieces and clogged the main vessels in her lungs, starving her body of oxygen. The doctors were certain that she would die. She did – but then returned to tell the tale. “The first thing I noticed was that the world changed,” says Jeanette. “The light became softer but clearer. Suddenly there was no pain. All I could see was my body from the chest downwards and I noticed that the time was 9:00pm. “In an instant I found myself looking at the ceiling. It was only a few inches away. I remember thinking it was about time they cleaned the dust from the striplights! “I then went on a little journey around the ward and along the corridor to see what the nurses were up to. One was writing on a notepad. It never occurred to me that I was dying. It was a lovely experience and very, very serene.” Jeanette then began the journey that many others before her have reported – being drawn into a long dark tunnel suffused with light.  “Everything went fuzzy,” she says. “I found myself being drawn into a tunnel shaped like a corkscrew. “All I wanted to do was reach the beautiful lights at the bottom. The longing was so powerful but so gentle. I knew I desperately wanted to be there. But then a voice bellowed at me: ‘Come on you silly old cow it’s not your time yet!’ “I then shot back into my body – it’s all a little unclear – all I can say is that I remember seeing the clock again and it was 9:20pm. The next thing I was aware of was waking up a few days later, surrounded by equipment and feeling terrible. Later on I realised that the voice I’d heard was my grandmother’s. She’d died when I was three years old.” For decades near-death experiences like Jeanette’s have been written off as delusions by scientists. They are dismissed as no more than the last twitches of a dying brain. Modern science has no place for mysticism and the paranormal. But now a group of British researchers are challenging the scientific establishment by launching a major study into near-death experiences. They hope to settle once and for all the question of whether there truly is life after death. “We now have the technology and scientific knowledge to begin exploring the ultimate question,” says Dr Sam Parnia, leader of the research team at London’s Hammersmith Hospital. “To be honest, I started off as a sceptic but having weighed up all the evidence I now think that there is something going on. “It’s not possible to talk in terms of ‘life after death’. In scientific terms we can only say that there is now evidence that consciousness may carry on after clinical death. Our work will prove one way or the other whether a form of consciousness carries on after the body and brain has died.” Several scientific studies have suggested that the mind – or ‘soul’ – lives on after the body has died and the brain ceased to function. One study published in the prestigious Lancet medical journal found that one in ten cardiac arrest survivors experienced emotions, visions or lucid thoughts while they were clinically dead. In medical terms they were “flatliners” or unconscious with no signs of brain activity, pulse or breathing. About one in four people who have a near-death experience also have a much more profound – and sometimes disturbing – experience such as watching doctors try and resuscitate their bodies. These ‘out-of-body experiences’ often include seeing a bright light, traveling down a tunnel, seeing their dead body from above, and meeting deceased relatives. Research in America has uncovered even more bizarre results. Blind people who underwent near-death experiences were able to see whilst they were ‘dead’ – even those who had been blind from birth. They did not experience perfect vision, often it was out of focus or hazy, as if they were seeing the world for the first time through a thin mist. But the vision was sufficiently clear for them to watch doctors trying to resuscitate their clinically dead bodies. Dr Parnia has previously studied near-death experiences. Two years ago his work was published in the prestigious medical journal Resuscitation. Dr Parnia’s team rigorously interviewed 63 cardiac arrest patients and discovered that seven had memories of their brief period of ‘death’, although only four passed the Grayson scale, the strict medical criteria for assessing near-death experiences. These four recounted feelings of peace and joy, they lost awareness of their own bodies, time speeded up, they saw a bright light and entered another world, encountered a mystical being and faced a “point of no return”. According to modern medicine all of these patients were effectively dead. Their brains had shut down and no thoughts or feelings were possible. There was certainly no possibility of the complex brain activity required for dreaming or hallucinating. Dr Parnia’s initial trial was especially rigorous – he wanted to confound his critics before they could muster their arguments. To rule out the possibility  that near-death experiences resulted from hallucinations after the brain had collapsed through lack of oxygen, he rigorously monitored the concentrations of the vital gas in the patients’ blood. Crucially, none of those who underwent the experiences had low levels of oxygen. He was also able to rule out claims that unusual combinations of drugs were to blame because the resuscitation procedure was the same in every case, regardless of whether they had a near-death experience or not. “Arch sceptics will always attack our work,” says Dr Parnia. “I’m content with that. That’s how science progresses. What is clear is that something profound is happening. The mind – the thing that is ‘you’ – your ‘soul’ if you will – carries on after conventional science says it should have drifted into nothingness.” Dr Parnia says that every near-death experience is subtly different but that they all share eight or nine key features, whatever the nationality, culture or religion of the patient. These include intense feelings of calmness, traveling down a long dark tunnel, being drawn into an intense loving light, seeing your dead body from above, and meeting long-deceased relatives or friends. A few experience a brief form of ‘hell’ where they are drawn, petrified, into a dark swirling well of bitterness, hatred and fear. There are cultural differences in these experiences. Tribal people may report paddling in a canoe down a long dark river for three days towards the sun, for example, rather than floating down a tunnel towards the light. The experience, whatever the cultural differences, usually has a deep and long lasting effect. It often leaves behind a legacy of profound spirituality and removes the fear of death. “The worst thing is coming back from the dead,” says Patrick Tierney, who had a near-death experience following a cardiac arrest in 1991. “If dying is anything like the experience I had then it’s not a problem. Patrick was rushed to hospital in July 1991 following a heart attack. He survived the initial attack and within hours was chatting with his family at the bedside. “I was talking to my wife and eldest boy when I felt a little pinch in my chest,” says Patrick. “The next thing I knew I was travelling down a corridor in a medieval looking house. I was astounded. It was very real and lucid. I thought to myself ‘what the hell’s going on?’. “I came to a fork in the corridor and I knew that I had to make a decision. One branch was a dark and sinister looking hole. The other was brightly lit and appeared friendly in some way, so I floated down that one.” Patrick then found himself in a form of ‘heaven’. He was in front of a beautifully lit landscape bordered with a waist-high white picket fence. He was instantly calmed and soothed by a beautiful translucent light. He then became aware of his parents, who were behind the white fence, smiling broadly at him. Strangely, they were in their thirties despite the fact that they had both died in their seventies. “I moved towards a gate in the fence but my father gave me a look that I knew meant ‘don’t come through the gate’, so I didn’t. No words passed between us. I then found myself moving backwards through the corridor but this time it was very disturbing. “Greeny-grey gargoyle-like figures were staring at me from the roof,” says Patrick. “One, with a face like an evil goat, began to move towards me. All of the warmth and cosiness left and I was terrified. A moment later I saw the face of an angel – it was a nurse from the hospital. It turned out I’d had a cardiac arrest.” Cardiac arrest survivors like Patrick are tailor-made for Dr Parnia’s study. Scientists know that within seconds of the heart stopping the brain has shut down completely. The patient is effectively dead and there is no chance of dreams or hallucinations mimicking a near-death experience. As soon as a patient slips into a cardiac arrest, Dr Parnia’s team will swing into action. The first priority will be to get the patient’s heart beating again. Equipment used during the resuscitation will have symbols placed on top of it in such a way that they can only be seen from above. Other symbols will be placed around the patient’s body. Surviving patients will then be gently quizzed about their experiences when they regain consciousness. Those that claim to have left their bodies will be questioned in more detail to see if they can identify the symbols. Dr Parnia has designed the experiments to be bullet-proof. He is only too keenly aware that critics will tear his work apart if he leaves even the slightest doubt about the rigour of his team’s efforts. It will also destroy his career as a scientist. Even the exact experimental details are shrouded in secrecy. “We can’t run the risk of prejudicing the experiment,” says Dr Parnia. “I won’t even know some of the details. We have a researcher who will be hiding the symbols on the equipment. Somebody else will be doing the interviews with the patients. It’s what’s known as a double-blind trial. It prevents scientists from unconsciously altering the results of their experiments.” Other scientists acknowledge Dr Parnia’s formidable reputation and the care he takes over his experiments but are still sceptical about his aims. Dr Susan Blackmore, who has herself had a near-death experience but since written it off as a delusion, says such experiences “probably result from random firings in the brain.” “I think that people have near-death experiences not when they are flatlining but when they are drifting into or out of consciousness,” she says. “Having said that, I’m curious to know the results. If they are positive then they could change the world.” Because of the implications of his work – and the potential for ridicule from his fellow scientists – Dr Parnia is being very cautious in the claims he is making for the study. He is not trying to prove that we all die and go to heaven. He is instead trying to find out whether the mind continues to function after the brain has effectively died, or at least ceased to function. If the mind does continue after the brain has died then this will prove, by default, that the ‘soul’ is independent of the body. Dr Parnia will have proved that the mind – in essence, the soul – continues to live after the body has died. “It comes back to the question of whether the mind or consciousness is produced by the brain,” says Dr Parnia. “If we can prove that the mind is produced by the brain then I don’t think that there is anything after we die. If the brain dies then we die. It’s final and irreversible.” “If, on the contrary, the brain is like an intermediary which manifests the mind, like a television will act as an intermediary to manifest radio waves into a picture or a sound, then we should be able to show that the mind is still there after the brain is clinically dead. That will be a significant discovery.” But all of the theories and questions posed by scientists are academic to those who have had a near-death experience. They know the answers. “There is no doubt in my mind that there’s life after death because I’ve seen the other side,” says Jeanette. “I don’t believe in a benevolent God. I’ve seen too much suffering for that but I’m very spiritual. “I saw my daughter suffer for four years with cancer. She died when she was only 17. I know she has gone to a better place.” http://www.newsmonster.co.uk/paranormal-unexplained/near-death-experiences-are-real-and-we-have-the-proof-say-scientists.html

Although there is nothing new about near-death experiences, there is something new regarding the weight of the evidence: it has increased over the years. This conscious experience during a shutdown of all conscious awareness has not only NOT been debunked since it was first introduced to the public in the 1970s by Raymond Moody, M.D., it has actually been strengthened by new experiments and better technology. Although I am not a scientist and cannot explain the neuro-physiological details of consciousness (and I don’t believe any scientist can!), I can affirm that the preponderance of the evidence is pointing towards the existence of a personal identity after clinical death.

That’s an amazing statement. Of course, it leaves some big questions unanswered: is there an afterlife? How long might that afterlife last? What about God? Angels? Demons? Hell? Heaven? Do we “move on”? If so, where do we go? Is there such a thing as reincarnation? If you care about these issues, you have to learn to live with a certain level of discomfort. Your current understanding of what is real and possible is probably insufficient. What you understand about time is probably quite limited. Even what we understand about reality and the “world” is probably wrong on many levels. Every now and then, there is a piece of information that further rips apart my understanding of pretty much everything.

An example: a friend of mine, the dearest friend of mine, has a child with unique abilities. The other day, while at school, he saw a little girl reading in a chair. Problem? The little girl wasn’t there until ten minutes later. He had “previewed” an event that had not yet occurred.

Time flows strangely; it is non-chronological. Reality shifts, repeats and multiplies. Life moves in a cycle. Death, it appears, is a seamless transition from one state to the next. We must, therefore, revise what we assume to be true. Our world is stranger, more fantastic, than we are capable of imagining.

I go through periods of time where I am truly frustrated and upset with the whole notion that we can, or are, contacting the spirits of dead people. First of all, there is no way on Earth to prove that assertion. We assume it, but that requires a huge leap of faith that I am not always comfortable with. For one thing, the voices we hear on audio don’t seem terribly intelligent, well spoken or even nice. They repeat something that we said, they simply limit themselves to “no” (this seems to be their favorite word), or they will knock and tap about the room. On several occasions, I have heard them say “do it,” in response to a query or some other, short and direct response. The “little girl” that followed around Camarillo just loved to sing and rarely answered any questions. She even, I dare say, followed another investigator and me to Linda Vista, humming loudly enough to earn us a spot on two television shows once her voice got around on the Internet. I say “she,” ‘he,” or “they” without having the foggiest notion who “they” are. Rarely, if ever, do these ‘spirits’ identify themselves, and so more often than not, we end up playing parlor games. “Make a noise. Tap a wall. Make the lights flash”.

I quickly run out of things to say to the spirits, since they are not forthcoming. We assume, maybe correctly, maybe not, that these spirits are making a huge effort to communicate with us, and therefore they can’t do much beyond one-syllable words and a few random noises. I listen to hours of audio. Most of what I think is paranormal turns out not to be. Maybe it was me, sighing too loudly, or someone else who forgot to tag a shift or a bodily noise. Sometimes I’m utterly amazed at the “proof” I collected, such as the infamous photograph of an evil entity that turned out to be a reflection of my own hand in a window. I try to bounce back from such episodes, but sometimes the lingering and persistent notion that I am deluding myself makes further investigations seem pointless, beyond the social interaction that I enjoy and need.

Then, of course, my instinct kicks in. Taken as a whole, my experiences and those of my team are NOT easily explained in terms of mass delusion or wishful thinking. As a whole, there is something very real happening that I do not understand. Even though I am really frustrated with the voices on audio for saying completely uninteresting things, at least I am hearing something that is utterly mysterious. That’s worth something, right? Allow me an example: in one of our audio clips, one of our team members asks if I want to turn the lights on, and before I respond, there’s a fast, whispery voice that says, “Turn it on”.

WHY? Who the hell is hanging around that cottage making mundane comments about the lights? In another clip, I ask if anyone minds if I take a flash photograph. A male voice (whispered) responds: “Do it.” OK, thank you for encouraging me to take a flash photo—that’s nice and all, but why aren’t you saying something about life after death, what it’s like to meet your Maker, or if the colors are different in Summerland? What is the deal with the commentary? In most of my audio from that night (I will not reveal dates, locations or names). I hear an ongoing, whispered conversation that runs through most of the evening. Of course, I can’t make out what is said; it’s like listening to a conversation that takes place on the other side of a wall in the middle of the night, when you can’t sleep.

I suppose the “Other Side of the Wall” is a fortuitous way to phrase the issue. They are, literally, on the “Other Side” of a wall (which is Death). So. Something is interacting with me. I don’t know what, or who, it is. This makes me nervous. I don’t really like the fact that someone I cannot see or even hear at the time, is commenting on my and other’s actions in the room. In fact, the more that I think about it, I’m not so sure that we are dealing with ‘passed over’ humans here. It seems to me that what we are hearing are fragments of consciousness, not whole identities. The whole identity of a once-living person is NOT in the room with us. It’s something left behind, a kind of intelligence that has split from the original human being. What would one call that?

I don’t know how to wrap my head around this. There are many who would, at this point in my analysis, jump straight to the Demon hypothesis. Even though there is nothing in the Bible that states ghosts or spirits cannot be contacted, many Christians and Catholics believe that anything responding to one’s inquiries is demonic in nature. There is no evidence to back that up. However, I will say that after listening to perhaps hundreds of EVPs now, there is a certain pattern that I find disquieting. To better organize my thoughts, I will list the Seven Characteristics of Electronic Voice Phenomena. Why only EVPs? My rationale is that the vast majority of our data comes from audio. It is VERY rare to catch a true anomaly on film or video, and I would venture to say that in the 4 years that I’ve been investigating, we have maybe 2 strange video clips and three odd photos. We have plenty of meaningful and amazing personal experiences, but we can’t offer those to the public as proof of anything. Other electronic devices such as the iOvilus or EMF readers are useful, but only in conjunction with other, corroborative data. So, we have our sound bites.

1.    Audio captures similar sounding voices. There is not a tremendous variety of nuanced voices out there in the ether. We tend to get similar sounding male, female and child voices. The lack of individual variation may have something to do with the media in which sound travels. This may explain the distortion in our audio; we don’t know how “spirit voices” are imprinted on digital recorders. Do they utilize familiar sound waves? Is there some undiscovered mechanism that carries these voices? Can we call them “sounds” at all, from the standpoint of classical physics?

2.    ‘Spirit’ voices can sound inhuman or robotic. A substantial minority of EVPs have a metallic or robotic undertone. Some of them sound machine produced, even in the absence of machines that might be confused for intelligent voices. I am at a loss to understand or explain that phenomenon.

3.    Voices captured on audio tend to be repetitious. As I’ve noted above, it’s rare for a truly original EVP to come through. Most of them are repeating short phrases or single words. It’s as if there were a very limited vocabulary with which they are working, or it’s just too complicated to form longer or more original sentences. One could argue that if you only have the energy to say one or two words, you’ll choose the words that seem most relevant to the question or the situation. However, that does not explain the almost aggressive “do it” EVPs or those that seem to be almost confrontational. An example of a confrontation EVP comes from an investigation where someone asks, “Do you know my name?” and the clear response is, “Is that all you want?” This was an exception to the one or two word rule, and we were thrilled; this happens so rarely. Most of the time, I am amazed at how homogenous the responses are, how predictable; what kind of person is this?

4.    These voices are the most active and interested near the beginning of EVP sessions and tend to taper off over time.

It usually happens like this: we walk into a room, a building, wherever we are investigating, and the feelings are the strongest right at the start of our sessions. It’s when we are still setting up, chatting, not doing anything in particular to attract spirits or souls when we get our most shocking and interesting communications. It’s this casual lack of awareness that seems to attract activity. Just when we are concentrating the least on contact, someone out there makes the strongest bid for our attention.

5. Individual identity is almost impossible to establish.

The more we NEED to prove who someone is, the less likely we are to figure it out. When we are tracking a theory, most of the time we are led in an entirely new and unexpected direction. The “spirits” seem to delight in taking us down the wrong path, or playing with our expectations. Just when we think someone’s friendly old grandfather is returning to leave a message of love, we hear on playback a woman speaking backwards.

6. Voices captured on audio can mutate over time.

I’ve gone back to listen to an EVP and discovered that I no longer understand what it says, or it appears to say something different that what I originally thought. How this might happen is beyond me; perhaps every time I listen to my audio, I do so with different ears and expectations. Some of my best EVPs are consistent, but others have become something else. This is very disconcerting, since I suspect that someone is messing with me through my computer. If that sounds paranoid, well, that’s what happens after enough years of paranormal investigations.

7. Paranormal voices are layered and complex; there is always more being said than you think at first.

If I go back and listen carefully to old EVPs, I usually find that I missed something. There are more voices than I originally hear; of course, I can’t make out what they are saying, and it tends to be that strange, whispered conversation that I can’t decipher or comprehend. These voices are layered over one another, as if they were coming through in various frequencies, much like a radio picking up several, random stations. That is, I suppose, the most apt metaphor . . . we are attempting to “tune in” to realities that exist in frequencies that we cannot perceive by normal means. God knows what the message may be. There may be no message; perhaps what we are hearing are just stray thoughts from millions of minds crisscrossing eleven dimensions. If that is the case, then we are simply driving ourselves crazy listening to the static of the universe.

This beautiful photograph is from soniathorpephotography.com/blog.

The longer I consider the question of the survival of human consciousness after physical death, the more I notice that my perspective on age has changed. I won’t pretend that aging is no big deal for me, because I still contemplate cosmetic procedures on a daily basis; however, the preconceptions I had regarding the meaning of age have completely changed.

My best friend is twelve years younger than I am; the people I spend the most time with are typically far younger, or far older. Whereas I used to define others by how many years they had spent on the planet—dividing them into stages, groups or generations—now I see how irrelevant one’s age often is. There is a tendency in our culture to separate us into age groups by one’s decade of life. Women’s magazines are the worst culprits here, but all media tends to separate us by age, making huge assumptions about our identities based on where we are in life’s spectrum.

Only the medical profession should have any interest in our age. If we can prevent or minimize age-related disease, then we should dedicate ourselves to that endeavor. However, most psychological issues that we attribute to age are, in reality, due to the constant, negative messages of our culture that reinforce the idea that we have to maintain the illusion of youth for as long as possible.

What I see now is a continuation of the human spirit throughout the life span. My niece and nephew both came into the world with a curious, ancient wisdom that I could witness in their eyes (more so my niece than nephew; she’s “older” than her older brother). Many mothers will tell you that their children came into the world with a fully formed identity that simply unfurled over time. What I saw in my niece, especially, was a soul that had experienced several lifetimes. Although some will say that I am only basing these observations on the appearance of newborns, I know that it goes far beyond that. What I see in certain newborns is a deep understanding and awareness of their situation; they are back for another round at life, for better or worse.

This explains to me the total individuality of children, teenagers and young adults far beyond what genes might determine or environment. Whatever your belief system, it’s hard to deny that there are elements to a child’s personality that seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with their parents; there is also a kind of knowledge or common sense that seems to come from nowhere at times, manifesting itself long before anything is formally taught.

Elsewhere on soulbank, (“Who Was I Before?”), I have discussed my own childhood as defined by memories and experiences that occurred before I was born. In many ways, my adult life has been marked by this sense of “oddness” and experiences out of time that confuse and confound me.  It’s still quite clear to me that much of what I reacted to as a kid was conditioning I could not have experienced with my current parents. I can’t describe the strangeness of remembering places, people and incidents that were not originating in my present life.

That confusion, that sense of responding and reacting to a life that I wasn’t in the process of living, makes me feel rather disconnected as an adult. I suppose that sense of strangeness affects me because I am not supposed to believe in such things as reincarnation as an academic. My parents certainly never encouraged such a belief, and I was usually made to feel credulous, flaky or fantasy-prone whenever I mentioned such concepts as multiple existences. My training has taught me that such things as multiple lives are a delusion of the superstitious and uneducated masses. Although I know better after studying the impeccable research of Ian Stevenson on the subject, the inner critic is fierce and unrelenting.

The problem is, reincarnation is what best fits my experience of life and my understanding of what happens to human consciousness. My instinct tells me that consciousness recycles. Now, when I have allowed such ideas to exist and percolate into my understanding of existence, I have noticed that people look different to me. It’s more and more difficult to generalize by age, since one’s “age” might well be determined by how many times a person has passed through a lifetime. A 16 year old might in fact be far older and wiser than a 72 year old, if that teenager has internalized lessons and intuition from previous incarnations and the 72 year old is “here” for the first time.

For me, this is what accounts for the huge variation in wisdom and understanding among the people I know. We all know that you can take two individuals from the same parents, provide them with similar education and experiences, and yet they will end up as two entirely different adults. There is the argument to the contrary regarding identical twins; they lead shockingly similar lives even when separated at birth. However, identical twins could share the same ‘soul’, or spirit; is it not possible that a ‘soul mate’ is simply someone we knew intimately long before birth? Could twins be reliving an intense bond that they shared centuries ago? Is it not possible for two people to share a soul?

Of course, I do not have answers for that. But perhaps a world-renowned scientist does:

“I had become dissatisfied, you see, with the methods that had been developed in psychiatry for helping people. Orthodox theory conceives human personality as the product of a person’s genetic material inherited from his ancestors through his parents, and the modifying influences of his prenatal and postnatal environment. But I found that some cases cannot be satisfactorily explained by genetics, environmental influences, or a combination of these. I am speaking of such things as early childhood phobias, about uncanny abilities that seem to develop spontaneously, of children convinced that they are the wrong sex, congenital deformities, differences between one-egg twins, and even such matters as irrational food preferences.” (Interview with Ian Stevenson, http://reluctant-messenger.com/reincarnation-proof.htm)

For me, Stevenson’s comments regarding “early childhood phobias” certainly have special meaning. I drove my parents crazy with my inexplicable fears. Those ranged from bees to strangulation to a pathological terror of loud noises. I remember how angry and upset my father used to be when I startled so easily; my sister suffered no such fears. It appears that I was born with what we now call post traumatic stress disorder. In more ways than I can explain here, I was deeply terrified of dying. This started at a very, very young age. I remember screaming in pain about my leg hurting when there was nothing wrong with my leg; I was only four at the time. Even then, it seemed more like a memory of pain than actual pain. My parents were so frustrated and confused by my strange behavior that they simply decided that I was a weird kid, and left it at that.

But “weird kids” might be dealing with much more psychological baggage than most parents are willing to consider. Stevenson’s view on this is that children who remember a past life are more cursed than blessed, since to live with memories no one else validates is a kind of hell. In my own case, my memories are fuzzy and ill-defined, certainly nothing Stevenson would find convincing or worthy of study; but that doesn’t negate the truth of what I still feel about my childhood. The fact that so much of my behavior was “inexplicable” created a sense of marginality in me that persists to this day. All of my attempts to understand, for example, my persistent and irrational anxieties have more or less led to a dead end. Therapy has largely failed in my case, because no one has ever been willing to explore the possibility that I am STILL responding to the way in which my last life ended.

I doubt that I will explore my past life issue in any systematic way, since as an adult there is too much “corruption” of my memories. It would be impossible to know whether or not what I recall happened sometime over the last 46 years, or happened before that. In any case, my goal now is to forge new paths without looking over my shoulder constantly at who I was. Who I was is inextricably bound up with who I am now. What concerns me now is the meaning of this existence; what is God doing with us humans? Why does He recycle our souls? Is it for continual improvement, or is this a random process? Stevenson says the following regarding God and reincarnation in the same interview I quoted earlier:

“Omni: Do you see in reincarnation a glimpse of a larger purpose?

Stevenson: Well, yes, I do. My idea of God is that He is evolving. I don’t believe in the watchmaker God, the original creator who built the watch and then lets it tick. I believe in a “Self-maker God” who is evolving and experimenting; so are we as parts of Him. Bodies wear out; souls may need periods for rest and reflection. Afterward one may start again with a new body.

Omni: Do you disagree with most bioscientists, who hold that what we call mind or soul is actually a part of brain activity?

Stevenson: The assumption that our minds are nothing but our brains appears to receive support when you consider the effect of injury, surgery, a high fever, or one or two drinks of whiskey on our mental processes. Some neuroscientists ac knowledge that they have only just begun to show how brain processes account for mental ones. But they claim to know that they or their successors will work it all out. They are sure there can be no other explanation, therefore they consider no other. We are not pledged to follow all the received opinions of neuroscientists, however. Recently, a small number of psychologists and philosophers have begun to ask whether mind can ever be fully explained in terms of brain functioning.”

This questioning of the relationship between mind and brain is leading more and more to the hypothesis that “mind” is not necessarily brain function. I have addressed that issue elsewhere in this blog. What I admire most about Stevenson’s words is his willingness, as a scientist, to embrace the idea of God. I am intrigued by his contention that God is “evolving”; it seems so contrary to our assumptions regarding the nature of the divine, yet there is something to this notion that appeals to common sense: everything grows, changes, adapts and transforms. Why not God? Certainly, the God of the Old Testament is not the same God we see in the New Testament. If there can be evolution of the Divine in the Bible, then perhaps that is the most reasonable understanding of God we can hope for.

Stevenson ends the interview with the words of a child:

“Omni: Has your work influenced your own attitudes toward life and death?

Stevenson: I think so. I wouldn’t claim to be free of the fear of death, but it is probably less in me than other people. These children sometimes provide reassurances to adults. We’ve had two or three incidents of children going to, let’s say, a woman who has lost her husband and is inconsolable and saying, ‘You shouldn’t be crying. Death isn’t the end. Look at me. I died and I’m here again.’ “

That is the attitude I hope to attain in my life now, without fear of criticism or reprisals.  Perhaps that is unrealistic; certain attitudes will not change, and I cannot force academia or my own parents, for that matter, to accept that consciousness continues or reappears after death. Some battles are simply not worth fighting; sooner or later, those who find these notions hogwash will see for themselves . . . if they remember what they used to think.

For now, it’s enough for me to see people as versions of souls in development. It’s fascinating, actually, to find an explanation for who people are. Identity has taken on a whole new meaning for me, as something that is far more complicated than we ever understood. The mystery that parents feel when they stare at a child and wonder “WHO ARE YOU” makes sense in the context of “who WERE you”. We may never know for sure who they were, who I was, who you were, but the more complicated and inexplicable aspects of your existence, of your identity, might be perfectly understandable if we could only remember.

For better or for worse, most of us do not remember and cannot remember; I believe that the information is stored somewhere, but it is inaccessible for most of us. I suppose Stevenson is right about not knowing as a blessing; the ability to fully access all those memories might drive us insane in this life, or prevent us from moving into the future. For someone like me, who lives to dig up mysteries and examine them, this ‘forgetting’ feels more like a curse.

–Kirsten A. Thorne

For a long, long, time I have believed that demons are metaphors. They represent all that is ugly within us; our capacity for evil, our addictions, our inhumanity towards each other. I never felt the need to find an outside explanation for people’s repressed emotions, those that burst forth in terribly inappropriate ways due to sanctions against certain kinds of behavior. Demons have such a long, robust literary and philosophical life, that much of our collective Western history wouldn’t exist as it does without the concept of pure evil functioning in an ongoing battle with the forces of Good.

Metaphor. Psychology. Culture. Primitive belief. Repressed sexuality or anger. All of this can explain demons to my satisfaction. For many people, however, demons are literal and dangerous. I can’t read books about exorcism without paralyzing fear; I can’t continue an investigation if someone insists that a demon is hanging out there. I’ve read many, many accounts of negative entities inflicting harm on homeowners and hapless adolescents. I know that the study of demons is a hallowed and respected field of its own, with hierarchies, classifications and rank, as one can also do with angels. Of course, if you believe in the literal existence of demons, you must also believe in the actual, concrete existence of angels; and many, many people do.

My question to my readers: if you believe in the existence of demons and angels, what evidence do you have? Why don’t you chalk it up to something more human and mundane? Why demons? Is this a purely religious belief you hold based on faith, or do you have solid, concrete evidence for what you believe to be true? I do not judge your answers, nor do pretend to have an answer. I am looking to learn from you, and I hope you will respond.

Thank you.

–Kirsten A. Thorne

Volk tackles several areas of paranormal activity and/or research, such as aliens and U.F.O.s, lucid dreaming, consciousness outside of brain activity, Near Death Experiences, and—of course—ghosts. In every chapter, he makes the case that most people will ardently defend paranormal phenomena without applying sufficient critical thinking skills, or rabidly debunk it without considering the evidence. He argues for a middle ground where one is not forced into either position, but allows the paranormal to remain a mystery. On the surface, I find that argument compelling. Of course, the two camps will always war over the reality of survival of death or the existence of alien civilizations; that does not further discourse or advance our search for the truth. However, maintaining the fence-sitting position does nothing to move us forward in our quest for knowledge. Volk’s contention that much of the paranormal is “unprovable” by the scientific method doesn’t take into account the vast amount of research that has been conducted in this area over the last 150 years (at least). Yes, attempting to recreate paranormal phenomena in a laboratory setting is nearly impossible—or at the very least, very difficult. The psi results obtained so far, for example, are fairly unimpressive but statistically significant.

Clearly, much of the frustration of anomalous phenomena consists of its amorphous, changeable nature. Volk doesn’t appear to place much trust in the truth of people’s experiences and stories, which is how most of what we know about the paranormal is examined. Volk comes across as afraid to take the stories too seriously, because so much of our current knowledge is anecdotal. “Proving” the existence of another reality is more like making a court case and presenting the evidence. In the legal profession, we rely on eyewitness accounts and a preponderance of evidence indicating that something is more than likely true than not when deciding someone’s fate. That is precisely what we need to do with the paranormal—treat it at as a court case, subject it to academic and legal standards for evaluation and interpretation instead of our odd insistence that only hard science can validate what most of us already know is real.

The average citizen appears to believe that only a laboratory can yield the hardest of truths, but I am at a loss as to why we treat the paranormal that way. After all, so much of what we accept as truth comes from sociological, psychological, legal and historical epistemology (ways of knowing) and our own hard-won wisdom gleaned from experience. Volk still has traces of that annoying “you can’t trust yourself” philosophy that bases everything we perceive as potentially explicable by chemical reactions and primitive responses. Yes, it’s true that we are often governed by chemical and endocrine processes, but that does not mean we can’t separate reality from fantasy or understand on a profound level the meaning and validity of our experiences. Fringeology is a text afraid to move too far from science when it comes to documenting and understanding anomalous experiences.

What really bothers me about this book, however, is the way Volk refuses to explicitly state what he believes about the Family Ghost. The phenomena he describes during his years in the family home are so intense and compelling that it boggles the mind to think there is any explanation other than the paranormal (assuming we believe that our author is telling the truth, and I have no reason to disbelieve him). When he discovers the answer to what he thinks caused the disturbance (which, apparently, continues to this day) through lucid dreaming, he REFUSES TO ACTUALLY DISCUSS IT or openly state his hypothesis. He has boxed himself into a corner with his own philosophy, which is to leave the strange stuff to mystery and wonder. We can feel and appreciate the mystery and wonder without refusing to come up with a theory or advance a belief. Volk forces the reader to figure it out on her own, through suggestion and hinting, a literary practice that does not work for me here.

What we are supposed to divine from the last chapter or so is that his grandfather’s alcoholism created the disturbances, or perhaps the ghost of the grandfather himself, unable to be at peace with his soul due to his substance abuse issues. Volk doesn’t want to SAY that, yet I don’t see what other conclusion can be drawn based on his presentation of events and the content of his lucid dream, which he either takes seriously but is embarrassed to admit it, or he doesn’t take seriously, in which case there is no point in wrapping up his entire text with that revelatory vision. You either take your dreams/visions/lucid hallucinations as meaningful, or you don’t—but it’s a coward’s way out to refuse to delve deeply into the implications of what you have discovered.

Judging by the reviews the book has received, I am fairly alone in my assessment here. Perhaps most readers will find the mysterious ending to be consistent with the book’s message and perfectly appropriate. My issue is that the ending is NOT mysterious, simply vague. Yes, I get what the author is attempting to convey here—but sometimes, you need to take a stand and tell the world what you suspect is or has been happening in your haunted home. Volk seems to KNOW, to have a theory, but I get the sense he is far too embarrassed to lose his street cred as a hard-nosed, objective journalist and acquire the dreaded Paranormal Taint from which he sees the worst of the skeptics flee.

I love mystery and a good ghost story. More than that, however, I am passionate about the pursuit of truth. That requires taking a stand with the evidence that you have at your disposal. It also requires that you risk making a mistake or having to revise your beliefs. That is the dialectical method, and it moves forward your thinking and that of others who engage with you in debate and discussion. If your grandfather haunts your house in a violent and negative fashion, it’s time to dig in and go deeper. Yes, you could leave it as a “mystery”, or you could dare to confront the questions of a family tragedy that will haunt you forever if you don’t.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, Ph.D.