How not to get mugged by ghosts.

Another long and rambling post, I'm afraid. I won't hold it against you if you don't reach the end.

Inside each of us is a ghost.

What? You hadn’t thought of it that way?

Well, it’s true. We are the future dead. We are ghosts who, for the moment, have physical bodies. The dead remember what it was like to see, feel, hear, smell and taste the physical world. A few of them are resentful that they can’t have that any more. They hang around and try to recapture physical life, instead of moving on or accepting their new way of being.

The Haitian Loa are the ghosts of ancestors. They are permitted to possess a priest's body for a short time, to experience a good cigar and a brandy, in return for ancestral advice. There are others, however, who would never be satisfied with such temporary gratification.

You will have met people who suffer from IASEF syndrome (It’s Always Somebody Else’s Fault). There are a disturbing number of them. These people take no responsibility for their own actions. They are never to blame for anything. They have never done a thing wrong in their lives—in their eyes—and cannot understand why people insist on blaming them for the things they ‘didn’t’ do. This trait often goes hand in hand with things like manipulative behaviour, vindictiveness and wanton cruelty.

When they die, they have a better than average chance of becoming vicious and resentful ghosts. It’s someone else’s fault they can’t see, feel or touch properly. It’s someone else’s fault they died. They don’t see death as a natural process. They don’t see why they should be deprived of physical interaction. They make no attempt to adjust to their new state. They don’t want it. They didn’t ask for it. It’s someone else’s fault.

Ghosts have no physical bodies. They have no eyes, ears, tongue, nose, fingers, no cellular structure at all. The spirit has no form.

They can appear to us as they were in life by projecting an image of themselves. Some are good at this, others can manage only a vague outline or shadow, if that. I suspect, in many cases, the image is placed directly in the minds of those viewing. That might explain why they sometimes don’t appear on film even when the camera is aimed right at them. Photographic images of ghosts are rarely more than outlines. I think that might be the best they can manage to push through into the physical world. What you see is what the spirit can project. The spirit himself has no fixed form.

They perceive our reality without eyes. How that works, well, we might not know until after we die. They pick up vibrations, hear sounds, without ears. I have no idea whether they can smell or touch, although some are able to make tapping sounds and move objects. They can make sounds, occasionally they can form audible words, sometimes they place their thoughts in a living person’s head, and there is a lot of evidence that they can produce sounds on an audio recorder. Digital or analogue, it doesn’t matter. I suspect they can affect the movement of the microphone diaphragm.

So their view of our world might be clear or hazy, depending on how well they have developed their abilities. Older ghosts can appear as whole-form spectres, and interact in a way that suggests they see what’s happening. More recent ghosts rarely appear in full form, and tend to be confused and nervous.

The resentful IASEF ghost won’t attempt to practice with their new senses. They will do all they can to get back to physical reality. When they find they can’t, they will take out their frustration on whoever they can get at. Remember, it’s someone else’s fault, but they have no specific ‘someone else’ in mind. It might as well be you.

Why don’t they run rampage? Why aren’t we continually pinched, slapped and tormented by these petty-minded psychopaths?

Because we are encased in a physical body. The body is surrounded by an electromagnetic field, sometimes referred to as an ‘aura’. Some people claim to see these auras. I have not, but the description of the general shape of the aura agrees with what I would expect an electromagnetic field to look like, and descriptions provided by different ‘aura-seers’ suggest they are all seeing the same thing. The electromagnetic field has been measured, and is definitely there.

It’s not a powerful field by our standards. You’re not going to become a human electric-eel, and you can’t charge your own batteries with it. Pity. You can use it to operate a theremin though.

For a ghost, composed (probably) entirely of electromagnetism, the field around the human body is like the ‘shields’ around the ship in Star Trek. They can’t get at us. They can’t even get near us.

Unless we let them in.

Now, I don’t know how well this has been studied, if at all, but since the electromagnetic field is generated by the body’s own activity, then it follows that adjusting the body’s activity will adjust the field.

It is possible that we can strengthen or weaken the field, either consciously or unconsciously. Perhaps both.

You can currently buy alpha-wave feedback monitors. These are devices which measure brain activity. They are intended to allow you to ‘train’ your brain to relax.

It’s not so easy to measure human electromagnetic fields, particularly since we surround ourselves with mains-powered devices. Measuring only one of the fields among those in the average house is beyond our current instruments. If we could find a way to do it, it should be equally possible to train ourselves to adjust the strength of the field whenever we want. So far, it isn’t possible.

We can’t see this field, we can’t feel it, so we don’t know for sure when it’s strong or weak. I suggest that ‘opening up’ to the spirits corresponds with a weakening of the field, so the spirits can get through. I would like to see a lot more research on this subject: I suspect that we can specify which spirits we let through by adjusting the field around us, and that mediums do exactly that, but unconsciously.

Opening ourselves to a general contact probably involves dropping all defences. We might do this inadvertently through meditation, or through the playful use of things like Ouija boards. We become off-guard and let the bad guys through. Similarly, if we attempt to call a particular spirit, we can be fooled into letting through the wrong one.

It’s my opinion that the electromagnetic field surrounding the body is our defence against the dead. Inside, we are ghosts too, but we have something they don’t. We have a body, with a shield around it.

Many people go through life with their shields on full, all the time. These people never experience the supernatural. They’ve shut it out.

Those of us who go looking for ghosts need to pay attention to this defence. We are deliberately opening our shields, in order to see what others don’t see. We must learn how to close them again. Nobody's going to do it for us.

Our best defence is, and always has been, ourselves.