HOW REAL ARE GHOSTS, ARE THEY REALLY EXIST???

HOW REAL ARE GHOSTS, ARE THEY REALLY EXIST???

Throughout history, ghosts were accepted as real. Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists featured them liberally. Macbeth reacts to Banquo’s ghost, and the ghost of Hamlet’s father sets in motion the action of that play. I believe in the concept of “When there is light, there exist shadow too”. I mean if we believe in god, we must believe in evils too.

I never had any story whenever people used to talk about ghosts and spirits. I was always in the category of listeners and the one who used to get scared by such stories (Especially at night). As culture became more scientifically minded, seeing ghosts came to be considered more of a psychological phenomenon. Readers took the three ghosts in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, for instance, as figments of Scrooge’s imagination rather than disembodied physical spirits.

That said, ghosts, or rather empirical proof of ghosts, have eluded the living for centuries. Many cultures throughout time have reported on the deceased visiting the living. However, modern science will tell you a different version - there is no proof of a spiritual existence. I think this is something that is a more personal question and it begs people to question their beliefs on the supernatural. How do we prove such an existence?

For centuries hallucinations such as seeing ghosts were used as proof of madness, an objective marker of mental abnormality. But what people typically think of as objective reality is really a compromise. A one-to-one correspondence between outer reality and inner brain events does not exist. Outside stimuli impinge on sense receptors, and the brain then interprets the results. This makes reality subjective through and through. Each eye has a blind spot located about 18 degrees off to either side if one is staring straight ahead. Normally the eyes are also in continuous but imperceptible motion (ocular jitter) so that the light receptors in the retina experience continual boundary changes between light and dark. The retina’s detection of light boundaries and changes in contrast are among the earliest elements in a series of events that build in complexity to create the sensation we call seeing.

Unlike a camera that records indiscriminately everything in its field of view, the retina is highly selective in what it passes on to the brain downstream. Compared to the sharp acuity of central vision provided by the fovea (20/20), peripheral vision is quite poor (20/400). We should see a shaky, blurry world of dissolving edges and missing parts. Instead, we see a panoramic scene that seems stable and in focus wherever we look. This is the picture we see because an enormous deal of unconscious editing has taken place before visual information even enters our awareness. The brain fills in gaps. It compensates for head and body movement. It makes educated guesses about what we’re looking at, and its editing is highly biased by expectations, history, context, and desires.

People in the field of parapsychology, or the study of the paranormal, have been working for years to investigate claims of hauntings with emerging technology and have come up with some pretty astounding evidence, which I think substantiates my assertion. I have worked with paranormal investigations before and I will tell you that I’m convinced due to my own personal experiences living in my home over the past decade.

Guests have reported being touched, seeing apparitions, seeing things move on their own, and hearing voices. Some guests knew our house was haunted but weren’t spiritual in any sense. They identified as atheist or agnostic. They initially felt like our claims of our house being haunted was, at the very least, exaggerated or that we were misinterpreting random events that could be explained by natural causes. They, too, have left as believers in the paranormal based on their own experiences here.

Prior to living here, I could not have told you with such strong conviction that ghosts exist. I just didn’t have that answer because it takes the experience to know and have that conviction of such things. I cannot merely tell you that I heard someone else had the experience and though I cannot prove it, someone else can because that isn’t enough credible enough information to convince anyone. That’s merely heresy.Living in a haunted home has challenged my beliefs and caused me to look into paranormal research further. I wanted to know what I was up against. Can spirits touch you and affect the physical world? Yes absolutely and they can also harm people and, though very rare, can kill if they wanted to. Luckily, my spirits aren’t all that menacing, for which I’m grateful. I’d hate to have knives thrown at me or my family. Just like people in our living world, spirits range from very bad to very helpful. It depends on the person they were before they died.

Now, all that said, I don’t think they should exist in our physical world and I think many people get trapped here when they’re supposed to go to a heaven or hell. In my research, EVPs often depict the spirit asking for help. I think these are trapped spirits looking for the light to get to the other side. Spirits often get trapped when their deaths were sudden or they had such strong emotion that they were caught up in the physical world and not ready to move into the afterlife. When we die, our consciousness continues because we all have souls.

There are three types of entities that I know of - spirits, elementals, and demons. Spirits are souls of the deceased. Elementals and demons are very rare to encounter but they do happen. I learned of elementals because my house/property has an elemental co-existing with us. It was conjured through Native American ritual. The simple way to describe where elementals originate is that they are spirits of nature. Many cultures and religions throughout time have incorporated the concept that nature has some type of spirit that is unseen by the living. There’s not a lot of literature about the nature of Elementals available. It’s largely found in much older texts. The only modern reference I’ve seen was in a book by Ralph Sarchie, who is a demonologist who talks briefly about elementals. He’s encountered a lot of demons but hadn’t encountered elementals.

Demons, while rare, are very destructive and powerful forces that have the ability to do a lot of harm to people. Just to be clear, I consider entities like the succubus, Incubus, and jinn to be in this category. It might be a bit overly simplistic but I feel like they originate from the same place and have the same sinister intent - to destroy mankind in some way.