Spirits are a staple of mysticism and magic all over the world but our modern society tends to regard spirits as fantasy and delusion. This view of spirits and the spirit world tends to come down to the assumption that they just aren't "real." Of course when we say "real" here we mean it in the materialist sense of physical existence, strings and pulleys, visible causation.
What about the mind though? It should come as no surprise to any mystic or magician that the mind is the fundamental tool of the occult arts. The mind is also how we perceive and interpret our world. I think most people would agree that the mind is very real even though it's rather hard to quantify in the materialist sense. Does something happening in the mind or being perceived solely through the mind make it any less real? The mind has a level of "real" all its own.
Most spirit communication relies on an altered state of consciousness or a level of trance in order for it to take place. These very altered states that make working with spirits possible are the same things that make spirit communication seem so improbable to most people. We've been conditioned to believe that our minds are fallible, cannot be trusted, and are prone to leading us astray. All of this may be true to a point but it cannot be absolutely true as we experience everything through our minds and most of us have come to a consensus about things that are true and real despite being perceived through the mind. The fallibility of perception and the mind is an easy way to explain away things we don't want to exist or are difficult to accept while still relying on our perceptions to understand the more desirable parts of our reality or the things that just can't be ignored.
So do spirits need to have an objective material presence to be considered real? I would say not considering that the very label of "spirit" has connotations of an incorporeal existence in the first place. We've just been conditioned to accept anything not solid, material, and objectively verifiable as being false. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, this skepticism toward unverifiable claims or experiences. However, belief in objectively unverifiable phenomena or the belief that phenomena that happen solely in the mind are still real are not threats like they seem to be perceived in some arguments and debates.
In my opinion, just interacting with an entity or intelligence that could be considered a spirit, whether it exists outside of the mind or is just an expression of the mind, makes the spirit real. Charging a spirit with a task and then reaping the desired outcome makes the spirit real. Whether the outcome was coincidence makes no difference from a pragmatic perspective. This isn't going to satisfy staunch materialists but those are the types that usually aren't going to delve into this area of study in the first place.
Believing in a spirit world or in the existence of spirits does not undermine empirical evidence or scientific achievement. The very unverifiable nature of spiritual phenomenon, how illogical it seems to be, means that science and those that tout it as a superior epistemology shouldn't be all that concerned with it anyway. Whether it's "real" or not doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. People will continue to have experiences with spirits, work with spirits, and espouse the existence of a spiritual world whether the materialists like it or not. Hopefully this musing has given you something to think about.
I think it should also be noted that it's been one year to the day since I started this blog. Thank you to everyone that stops by to read my posts. It's the readers that have kept me going with this project whenever I'd thought I'd run out of things to say or when I wondered if it mattered at all. My only hope is that whatever I have to say gets others thinking about these subjects and maybe inspires them to take the information further.
I think the challenge most people have about the idea of spirits is that they are scary. If they were concretely proven to exist, people would be more fearful because of our belief systems tell us to fear it rather than understand it. I have never sought them out, but I have had experiences with them at the least expected times. Like the feeling of a cat rubbing its body on my leg and then I look down certain that some cat has snuck into my house only to see nothing. No I didn’t have a cat at that time. Or when I did have a cat, be one of three people to watch an energy walk into the house and sit down on a sofa leaving an impression - that was an odd experience – needless to say the cat staring at what we were all looking at with its fur and tail all fluffed out made it hard to deny. So far my theory on it is that we are all energy and in spirit form we are just less dense than in body form. Some people are more conscious of it than others and some people just deny their experiences. I have never been in a trance or meditation to have these experiences. I was just chatting with friends in my living room or making breakfast or walking from one room to the next. Just my thoughts on it.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences. I think that sometimes people don't have to be in an altered state of consciousness to have an experience with spirits either because they have a natural talent or because the spirit in question is particularly powerful in terms of manifesting.
ReplyDeleteI'm doing a science fair project on entities and i wanted to know some real facts. I'm not looking for religion so if you could help me out that would be great
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