Honoring the Role of Instinct in Paranormal Research

Take a moment to watch this short video featuring Dr. Gabor Mate

The night that I walked into a house claiming demonic activity, I knew that I should not have. The result of ignoring a ‘gut feeling’ was over a week of spiritual, emotional, and physical illness. I remember sitting on the floor of the bedroom in that house, my teammates arrayed on the bed; I knew that the darkness that surrounded us was ripping holes in my heart and mind and was influencing my friends to behave oddly and out of character. I saw that my camera was malfunctioning in ways that it never had before; I could not take photographs. My recorder spit back loud interference and static; I could not record the activity in the room. I knew that this energy was what we call ‘evil’, in the sense that it sought to confuse, disconnect, distract, divide, and create despair. So why did I stay, when the second I stepped into the foyer my entire psychic alarm system warned me to turn back?

We become disconnected from ourselves in the way Dr. Maté describes when we decide that what we think the world wants or expects from us is more important than our internal alarm systems or our gut feelings or instincts. In my case, my kryptonite is a desire to please. I did not want to let down my team by backing out of a dangerous situation. Of course, they would have understood completely; but I did not give them the chance. I had decided that my own emotional, spiritual, and psychological well being was less important than possibly disappointing my team and the client. I am socially conditioned to seek out others’ approval; I have developed a skill for divining what somebody wants or needs and attempting to supply it for them. This poses a problem in research of any kind: if you seek to please those with whom you are collaborating to the detriment of your own inner compass, you may miss the truth about the case you are investigating and the motivations of those involved.

There are other ways that this disconnection from your core instincts can sink you in your pursuit of the truth. Excessive curiosity can lead one to a sort of arrogance, where you believe that you can figure out a great mystery if you read more, collect more data, conduct more investigations, or write about it from multiple angles. If you keep attacking a problem, it will eventually yield up all the answers. This is my greatest sin, but also my greatest passion; sometimes, it is difficult to disentangle dedication and devotion from arrogant assumptions about one’s ability to ‘solve’ the most intransigent conundrums of the universe. The evil in the house I ‘investigated’ (more like ‘succumbed to’) was not something that had an answer, because I was incapable of posing the right questions. Whatever was there would have laughed at my questions, anyway; one of the characteristics of demonic phenomena is its resistance to logic and reason. When one brings a desire to understand that which resists understanding, the result can be a frustration that leads to despair.

Other forms of disconnection look like a desire for fame, for attention, for money, or for status. The line between true investigation and research into the paranormal is so often blurred by the entertainment industry that I wonder if anyone can trust the ‘evidence’ that emerges from programs designed to sell themselves. I remember the moment I realized that looking cute for the cameras while ‘chasing ghosts’ had replaced any serious attempts at reaching honest answers. It was the beginning of my spiritual crisis.

What do I ask of paranormal investigators? Of parapsychologists? Of anyone studying the nonphysical phenomena that hovers between dimensions? I ask that, in addition to collecting data, to analysis, to publication of findings and reports, that you pay attention to your instincts. Allow your ‘gut feelings’ to guide your way through a difficult case, even if that seems unscientific. Following your deepest compass, your inner voice, will lead you to the truth eventually; and sometimes, it will lead you away from a situation that poses a spiritual danger to your soul.

—Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD; founder, International Society for Paranormal Research

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The Meaning of a Spiritual Crisis, and Why it Should Not be Overcome

It’s gonna hurt

It’s November 7th, 2020. For many of us, it’s a new day; a new President promises a return to sanity and allows us the audacity of hope. For many, many others, the loss of Trump (and no, this is not a ‘political’ post, so please don’t leave) is a devastating portent of chaos and uncertainty, a signal that the old world of white privilege, law and order, and traditional values is waning. For both world views, there is a spiritual crisis either to recover from or to enter into.

What, exactly, is a spiritual crisis or emergency? For me, it went like this: I lost faith first in institutions during the Great Recession. We lost our house to a bank that no longer exists, with a loan that is now illegal. We trusted banks and representatives of financial institutions to make sure we would be OK. In fact, those institutions were literally banking on our failure. After that, I lost faith in our country and in the concept that we all, fundamentally, wanted the same thing and shared the same, basic values. I learned that we did not; my progressive, academic background was alien to almost half of the country. My first inkling of what was coming happened in August, 2016. We were friends with our real estate agent, and I assumed that we occupied the same territory on human rights issues–I didn’t imagine for a second that our agent would wish to discuss his beliefs with us, and that it would leave me reeling, sick.

“If a gay person came into my cake shop and wanted two brides or grooms on the top, I would refuse to sell that cake to them. It’s my right. Those are not my values, and I have to right to refuse them service”. It felt like I had been hit in the stomach. When I recovered, I informed him that I have dear family members who are gay, and that I can’t imagine why he would tell me something so awful, so inhumane, so . . . regressive. But he was not finished. Knowing that I was a Spanish teacher, he wanted me to hear his views on immigration. “Illegals need to be sent home. Mexicans need to stay in Mexico”. At a certain point, I felt stunned into inaction and passivity. I should have terminated him as our agent, but the deal was done. We had signed the papers. He knew that we couldn’t fire him now.

Slowly but surely, family members and old friends started to parrot the same lines, or versions thereof. Every time, I would tremble in shock and outrage, refusing to believe what I was hearing. A student at my college–an older man, who had serious issues with my authority in the classroom–told me that I was hysterical over the election, and that I needed to seek professional help to “get over it”. People popped up in my life with hostile views; it was all fear-based, anger-fueled resentment or outright hatred they expressed, and I figured out that the world was either off its axis, or I had simply misunderstood and misread a vast number of people around me. The latter was, of course, the truth. I did not understand how deeply these views were hidden and unexpressed until someone came along to legitimize them.

I retreated. I did not fight. I became sick and afraid. Panic, anxiety and depression weighed me down. In 2017, God stepped in, or the Universe, or Cosmic Consciousness, or whatever name you wish to give to the force that drives existence, to the Mystery. After a series of traumas at work, a death in the family, and increasing tension everywhere around me, I came home one day and felt very strange. I tried to go to church, I tried to follow my routine, but something was happening to me that I could not understand. I had to pull over to the side of the road because memories were flooding my mind and pushing at my psyche. These memories, however, were not from this lifetime. I relived my death, my final moments, as someone else. I looked in the mirror and saw someone else’s face. I remembered my life as a teenager in San Francisco who died after her pimp filled her veins with too much heroin. I felt that death; I experienced my death in real time on the side of the road. And yet, I was still here.

What followed was a year and a half of spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical implosion. All my beliefs were tested; my pain, my traumas, my worst fears, were all exposed and revealed to all. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. My brain melted and reformed again and again. I was destroyed and rebuilt more times than I could count. I was brought so low that I considered driving off a cliff or stabbing myself with a kitchen knife. I felt ecstasy at times so overwhelming that I thought I might dissolve into the Light. It was so intense that I feared for my sanity, my very existence.

I survived, clearly. I learned that the world is going to hurt you, beyond what you can imagine, but that this world is only one of an infinite number; that this life is but one in an infinite series. You will always come back to a new challenge; always. We must keep in perspective the outrages and horrors of experience, because we have to learn to endure. We have to learn to help others endure, as well. Even if the person you reach out to believes that immigrants are dangerous or that our cities will implode because “they” (people of color, almost always) are violent and terrifying, we still have to try to bridge the enormous gaps that keep us tied up in our small worlds of fear. In the end, so much of what has driven us is simply fear. We believe that we will be destroyed by forces beyond our control. Historically marginalized people–including women–have excellent reasons for believing that a fearful, White, traditionalist society will seek their repression, at best, and their annihilation, at worst.

And perhaps it’s OK to be really, really, angry about that and decide that reconciliation is not possible nor desirable. I understand the calls to revolution; I do. However, I also understand that we have to learn how to manage the reality of human emotion and how it drives us to irrational acts and violent displays of anger and fear. I would not tell anyone what to do now, nor how to react, nor especially how to feel.

All I can tell you is this: You will be back again and again to confront these forces that drive human behavior. Whatever world you come back into, there is suffering, outrage, horror, and fear. But, there is also love, hope, redemption and grace. Far be it from me to tell you why we are here, or why we will be here again. As I see it, it’s to continually engage with the human condition, to wage battle for good, even if what that looks like is not the same for everyone. What is truly good, what is honestly a move towards what you understand as God or a move away from that, will become clear by the results of your actions. Fear will trap you, keep you distant from the ones you love, sicken you, and hurt the world, no matter how right you know you are.

I am guilty of living my life in fear and desperation. It has tied my stomach in knots, hurt every muscle in my body, robbed me of sleep, sunk me into depression, and hurt those I loved and those who might have benefited from my presence in their lives.

This year, and next year, and all the years after that–until Kirsten is replaced with another version of herself–I vow to fight the fear and take action, even if people don’t understand it, don’t like it, or resist it. I have to live an authentic life, one that God has called me to live again and again by showing me that I cannot be destroyed. Since I cannot be destroyed, there is no reason for hiding, for cowering, for raging alone in my house at thousands of injustices. I will not apologize for who I am, what I believe, and what form my actions must take. The only promise I can make is to do no harm to others; as much as that is possible. I have to do something.

A word of advice: don’t try to stop the pain of a spiritual crisis. Let it burn, let it overwhelm, allow it to push you to the breaking point. Allow yourself to fall apart, to break, and to question everything you held dear. You will recover yourself–remember that your transformation is a function of your willingness to walk a dark path. For awhile. The Light is always there, even if you can’t see it sometimes.

I have to do something for the world beyond my own deconstruction. Maybe writing this is a beginning.

–Kirsten A. Thorne, PhD

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