Revenent. Spectre. Vision. Wraith. Giest.

All of these things mean the same, and every culture has a word for this one particular thing.

Ghosts.

They have been with us from the dawn of time, from one country to the next, in various forms and manners, and they will not simply "go away".

We all commonly believe that a ghost is the spirit of a dead person that, for reasons unknown to us, lingers behind on Earth to haunt favored locations, or even the living. The question here that is being addressed by this paper is not the existence of a ghost, but the very driving forces behind the concept of a "ghost", by asking the hard to ask questions that no one seems to want to ask, let alone have the answers to.

To be able to fully comprehend what a ghost is, a person must come to terms with the nature of life--and yes--death. Ghosts, apparitions, hauntings, telepathic messages from beyond the grave and unbelieveable psychic experiences presuppose that the reciever, or at times, the observer, to accept the reality of another dimension or aspect to human consciousness into which we will all pass into eventually. Either that, or they simply refuse to acknowledge the experience or rationalize down to terms in which they are comfortable with.

We must also consider the three most important unanswered querries to date: What is man? Why is man? How is man?

For all of our technology, advances and hard core science, we cannot begin to answer any one of those questions with any degree of true certainty. And we must examine each question in depth if we are to understand what a ghost is.

Let us tackle the first question. Why is Man?

Some people toss the problem of man's origins to religion to handle, assuming us to be the works of an all powerful supreme being, a creator. But this poses problems, problems that fall far short of any answer or insight. Even if we are to accept the notion that a supreme creator made us, it leaves the next question unanswered: Who Created the Creator?

Does somethng arise from nothing?

Now, from the scientific perspective. To chalk up our existence to the slowly turning wheels of time and evolution from a simple electro-chemical compound, into the shapers of the planet, while more sensible, is to raise but more questions. Assuming this idealology is right--there seems to be overwhelming evidence that it is--what exactly was the force behind the ordering and shaping of these chemicals and bonds? The complexity of life begs to shake the very idea that all of this evolution and perfection of multi-cellular intelligent organisms from its foundations, because if this is true, who guided the process from start to where it is now? Who laid down the pathwork to what is obviously a very ordered pattern of development? Or was it purely random chance, which to me, seems very unlikely.

So we are back to square one. Why is Man?

Whether we are theistic or atheistic, materialistic or idealistic, the end result seems to lead to the same door, a door that is and remains to us, closed, locked from our science and religion both.

The next questions, What is Man? How Is Man?

Are humans, are we, merely an animal, descended from primates as Dr. Desmond Morris states in The Naked Ape? Is man a mere accidental development, having spawned by random chance from an ape over time becoming primitive man? To this day this particular hypothesis has been shunned and rejected by large segments of the population. The stigma against such an idea comes mainly from religious ingraination and strongly entrenched fundamentalism. After all, when religion goes against science it always looses.

Or does it?

On the other hand, as we must always look, is the hypothesis that we are unique creatures of the creation of supreme God, a belief that is so widespread in this country that it has made heavy of the attendence to churches and synagouges with church leaders and the various demoninations thinking of rather inventive new ways to get followers to their flocks daily.

Regardless of what you "believe" and yes, it is a belief either way whether we wish to admit it or not, it still does not answer entirely what we are and how we came to be thus highly lessens our ability to comprehend or understand what we will become in the next phase of life, if there is indeed one. The reason I state this is because a growing number of people have began to report encounters with the state of human existence that we never thought possible in scientific terms and yet it violates most religious beliefs, at least in Western society.

The majority of these people take their experiences and accept them and hold them blindly, never questioning them, seeing them as messages from beyond or guideposts that they interpret to fit their faith and sometimes, even fail in this.

They do not stop to question the how and the whys of such an experience.

It seems to me, that in the end, to answer these questions, we must look at the dark place between religion and science and explore the forbidding areas where these two dogmas meet, in order to understand the nature of humanity and intelligent existence, for if we are to ever understand man in all his forms we must take into account all the elements, strip them of their fallacies and retain the hard truth, no matter what it may be.

With that being said we must now move on to consider, What is life? How do we as humans define it. From a religious stand point? From a scientific stand point? Let's ignore the two for a moment as seperate entities and look at what life is as a fact based exploration of the definition of the term.

From birth, life is an evolution, through gradual, successive stages of development, that differ in detail from each human being to the next. Materialists and realists, yes skeptics included, like to attribute all of these changes and their effects to environmental factors, such as parental heritage, enconomical status and the like, alone. However, this does not explain all aspects of our selves, such as our personalities. For example it has been said that a child raised in a violent home will in turn be violently oriented as an adult. Yet we have seen many cases where this is not true at all, and the child grows up as a wonderful understanding kind human being.

Sadly, we have also seen the opposite.

Your likes and dislikes, your loves and fears, temperment and thought patterns are unique to you. No one else has them nor will they ever come close to possessing them. The are in simple terms your essence, your being. But they are not physical in nature, nor can they be located, disected or probed. If the pure-Materialistic view is correct, these things should not be there. They should be mere by products of raising and environmental aspects and that would bring you as a person down to nothing more than a walking sack of meat and blood.

Which is another point of contention. If life is so materialistic, if it means truely nothing, and we are just pieces of walking meat with no sense of self or essence, why do we put such value on life's experiences? Marriage? Children? If these things mean nothing, why do we engage in them? Why do we punish murderers so heavily if life means nothing to us as meat bags to put it in the vernacular.

The answer is simple.

Man is essentially a dual creature, both of body and mind, or as some would say, spirit, soul or essence. Many scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of a non-physical mind because they refuse to see a distinction between mind and brain, which are very seperate. Your brain is an organ of flesh and blood, whilst your mind is something else entirely. Some believe its a magickal energy, while others hold that it is a self sustaining electro-magnetic field.

Others say the mind is merely an odd aspect of the flesh and that we should pay it no mind, pardon the pun.

The mind is an example of the non-physical, invisble, controlling the purely physical and visible. The fields of psychology and psychiatry would not exist if they did not acknowledge the existence of a seperate mind. Now, whether this mind is the same as the concept of a soul is difficult to prove. Some maintain that from the instant of conception we are full people with a soul. Others do not, hence why abortion is such a debated topic amoungust philanthropic circles. Others maintain that when we reach a certain stage in the fetal development, we get a "soul" that combines with the body. Others maintain we dont have either.It is fairly difficult to prove either way which is truth but it is clear to me that as adults, we each have a non-physical component, variously called the soul, spirit, psi, or personality.

So what is death then? We now have some better understanding of life. What of its counter part, death?

Death is the ceasing of bodily functions due to illness or malfunction of a vital organ that simply reverses what happened at birth. Now since the mind is not biological in nature, it cannot die, nor can it be born but must always exist. This raises a whole new set of questions. Why does the mind exist? Is it part of a larger energy? Is it part of another dimension or plan of existence? Is it simple an electro-chemical manifestation of the brain? We will never know the answer to that conclusively but what seems to happen at death is this.

The non physical part of man, the mind/personality/etc seems to seperate from the body at death and go in different directions. The body, deprived of its operating force, becomes nothing more than a shell, and will rapidly submit to the laws of nature, decomposing and returning to the soil and water. The mind however, goes somewheres else entirely yet sometimes does not seem to leave this realm of existence. Accordign to Dr. Joeseph Rhine of Duke University, it enters what he called " the world of the mind" and continued its existence there.

To those that flat out reject the notion of a soul, the decomposing body is all that remains of a person after death, and hence springs forth the fear of death, its finality, and breeds nihilistic attitudes towards life whilst one lives it, a system in which the cemetery is feared and death is the end.

Death takes on many forms in various cultures, from a vengeful god like power who takes away loved ones when they are still needed here on earth, to functioning as a punishment for the sinful and the wicked, after which is the reckoning, or in rare cases, a benign begining to the next chapter in life.

While most orthodox scientific views poo poo the idea of survivial after death, there is hardly a religion on earth that does not have some conception of survival in one form or another.

Most Christian interpretations of Biblical passage seem to forbid "trafficking" in the world of the paranromal, the search for answers and such persuits. However the vast majority of world religions discourage no such thing and if we take the route to assume that a unique spirit exists within each human being, then it is clear that one step begets another, for we must ask ourselves where does this soul go upon death?

Religion is the only place to turn to get the answer to that, however, I do have problems with that as an alternative. Religion is embroidered with human fashioned elements of man kinds "justice" and to me possessed very little factuality.

Now that we have examined life and death and the basic nature of humanity's attitudes towards the survivial of the soul or mind, I think we should examine the reports of ghosts themselves to determine their basic nature.

On the surface, a ghost appears to be the surviving emotional memory or at times, even the consciousness of a once living human being who has passed on, usually tragically but not always, and may or may not be aware of his or her condition or situation. There appear to be two differnt kinds of human ghost. The ghost, which is unware of its situation and in reality appears to simply be a recording of the past recurring over and over, or, a free spirit, which is the actual consciousness of a once living human. Based on these two seperate types being reported, it is safe to assume we may be dealing with two different categories of hauntings that stem from human causes: the residual haunting and the intelligent haunting.

The residual haunting type appears to be a recording of events and routines that a person expended time and emotion on in the past, engaging in the same action repeatedly or it may also record a single event, usually a tragedy that left a deep scar on the psychic fields of the environment. It is hypothesized that this type of event leaves an imprint in the atomic structure of the surrounding environs which will play over and over until its energy is expended. Usually this type of haunting is more percievable to people who appear to exhibit psychic tendencies, which is unusual but not totally so.

The second type appears to be the intelligent haunting, or rather, the actual consciousness of a human being who was once alive. In short, these are the things that most people think about when they hear the term "ghost". This seems to be a person without a body, simply put who, for various reasons, is sticking around a place or people most familiar to them in life rather than going to whatever destination lies beyond for reasons that are known only to them.

Which actually defies Western religious beliefs that when we die we are automatically judged. If we stick around a free spirit, how does that fit in with established belief?

And if one were to counter that by saying " all ghosts are demons in disguise" then you open up a whole new can of worms, which I will go into in another article in the future.

So if we follow this train of thought, that humans have a unique aspect to theirselves, called a soul, a mind, a spirit....the uniqueness that is you, if it does not die and survives death in the form of coherent energy that is self sustaining, drawing on heat and electrical manifestations from the environment, that leads us to the next question. What are ghosts made of?

Again, harkening back to the Cemi Field Theory of Electro-Magnetic Consciousness put forth by Professor John McFadded of the School for Biomedical and Life Sciences in Surrey, there is strong evidence that the human consciousness is an electro-magnetic field.

If that is the case why arent there ghosts all around us?

Who said there wasn't?

There are an abnormally large number of reports of hauntings and ghosts. And these are only the ones that get reported. How many more go unreported for fear of redicule? Research into various belief systems and reports of objective analsysis of these hauntings seem to suggest that the world of the spirit and mind is not a seperate world but rather superimposed upon the world of the living, existing side by side with us every day.

So why would these spirits linger on the earth plane? Perhaps to stay with their families, or to be where they are most comfortable...or perhaps they fear retribution and rejection from an angry God that they believe will burn them in a Hell of fire for eternity. Or it could be a simple physical process that someone went wrong. In truth, we do not know but if we never delve into the mysteries of how this "world of the mind" may work, we will never know. As we are all destined to make that final journey from this world into the next someday, whether we like it or not, it may be in our best interests to find out.

What do you think?

----Anthony M., SSPRS Founder.

TAPS Family Member.