Spirit Worlds

There are two main models of the paranormal, apart from the materialist view that it is all rubbish, and  philosopher David Chalmers has shown in his studies of consciousness that materialism  cannot be true.  The first model is that paranormal phenomena are all products of the action of our  unconscious mind and the second that paranormal phenomena are the work of spirits. Here I concentrate on the spirit model, though the two are not  mutually exclusive.


    Some people  think spirits are  sentient entities, others that they live entirely in the depths of our subconscious,  and some believe we create spirits. Chaos magicians think it doesn't matter which model you use if it works.  Jungian Psychologists  tend to assume that the things we call spirits are  live in  the collective unconsciousness. Some think spirits do not exist. And some tend to believe all these theories and more.

The universe is full of beings we cannot detect with out special equipment: bacteria and  parasites come to mind.  The problem with postulating bodiless spirits is mainly a failure of imagination, and modern physics at the quantum level postulates far stranger things than spirits, such as particles that  can arrive before they depart or travel backwards in time to escape back holes,  or that pop in and out of existence. We do not yet have a complete physics of   how spirits can exist or interact with our world but this may only be the result of a mainstream  science  taboo  on studying these matters. Remember also that much of our current knowledge would have been declared impossible by a physicist trained only in Newtonian Physics and Newton's ideas were dismissed as magical by some of his contemporaries.
   
    Physics does not exclude the possibility of  spirit worlds. The branch of Quantum Theory  known as Many Worlds theory allows for parallel universes and over the last few decades theorists have eliminated flaws in the original version of the theory. The  frontier technology of Quantum Computing  is based on this theory. And if  multiple universes exist then  they should  be able to communicate. If not we are effectively in a  single universe.

    To sum up so far. Physics allows the existence of  “spirit” worlds. Our world we may contain sentient beings we cannot normally detect. The evidence we have is confused and contaminated with wish fulfilment and  fears arising from the subconscious. Untangling all this is a fascinating challenge.   The final conclusion may be that there is no evidence spirits exist.

There is. however, suggestive evidence, from folklore,  spiritualist seances , poltergeist phenomena, and various apparitions – many of which may be hallucinations, that spirits exist. Any item of this evidence may be debatable but the totality is harder to dismiss, and if you are devoutly religious you HAVE to believe they exist.

    On the other hand many “spirit” phenomena can be explained by Super ESP.  This assumes ESP of a level much higher than observed in a laboratory and is equally unacceptable to  the skeptic tendency who fall back on fraud and self delusion as explanations.

    A personal experience indicates a third possibility. A while ago I was alone in the house and kept getting the sensation someone was present in the public areas of the house. I retreated to my room and had a disturbed night's sleep. I had been dreaming of ghosts previously and a friend's suggestion that this was  my Jungian “shadow” seemed much more likely than the possibility a ghost had  suddenly invaded my home.  After some meditation  and a rather harrowing bout of what Jungian Pychologists call “active imagination” these feelings went away.

The evidence about the nature of spirits and the spirit world is contaminated by wish fulfilment,  images arising from the subconscious and distortion  resulting from premature efforts to interpret the phenomena . It is not valueless,  just very hard to separate wheat from  chaff. Raudive voices for example  are suspect because the human brain  has evolved  with very strong pattern recognition algorithms and, as with reverse speech, the hearer tends to  hear what they want in random noise.  When we look   at transcripts of a séance  it is almost impossible to rule out the possibility of telepathy  and clairvoyance.  But the evidence cannot all be dismissed on  such grounds

The rest of this article assumes spirit world(s) exist. My mental picture is the various planes of existence in Michael Moorcock's Multiverse.  There is a theory, not yet fully accepted, known as Quantum Loop Gravity that postulates a multiverse of space time bubbles, a sort of foam of universes like  the sea foam  said to have given birth to Aphrodite and each  world may be such a bubble.

    I think, but cannot  prove, that some spirits  existed  before humanity existed, though the nature of time in this world and the spirit world may make such a statement meaningless. For example time in the spirit world may flow along a dimension perpendicular to ours.  Indeed many would say that space and time are illusions.  It  may be however  that  time and space may be  necessary for consciousness to exist

    Some spirits  are personifications of the unconscious mind. Sometimes figures appear in dreams and give answers that are unknown and in some cases unknowable to the conscious mind.  Many but not all of these can be explained as the unconscious mind presenting a solution in symbolic form in a way the conscious mind can understand.  These 'spirits' are something like mental complexes, like the tune you hate but cannot help humming. They exist in  the mind but often  seem to act independently, beyond the control of the conscious mind.  An example might be a dream of a ghost, representing suppressed aspects of  the personality, or  of a house with hidden rooms that may indicate unused talents.

    Then we have  the world of the Jungian  Archetypes, the so called collective unconscious. This region contains beings  ( there is no other word for them) that are independent of any one human but  would probably cease to exist if humanity  ceased to exist.  Again they are probably beyond the control of the conscious mind. This is a vast and contentious field  and the relationship between  say the Trickster archetype and  certain gods and spirits such as Loki, Ghede or Eshu is wide open for research and full discussion is beyond the scope of this article.

    Finally we come to the created spirits,  which  I will deal with in  more detail in a future post.   It is generally accepted by thoe with unbiased eye that Humanity created God in their own image (if the reverse is true I would like a word with the “creator” about the design flaws that led to low back pain, short sight and  the andropause). But there is evidence that humans can create what  magicians call thought forms which can  act independently of their creator.  The most famous case is that of Alexandra David Neel, who while in Tibet created a thought form that later began to  change and needed a great deal of effort to be “reabsorbed”.  Her thought form was  consciously created but others may be unconsciously created  and maintained.  The Toronto spiritualist group that  created a fictitious character, complete with a biography and managed to contact him found the “spirit” was volunteering details not in the biography they had created, but no evidence they had accidentally  picked up the life of a real character previously lost to history.  Which leads me to wonder  whether, had I not   bonded with my shadow, I would have begun to experience poltergeist phenomena. 

    Perhaps the most dangerous type of created spirit is that created unconsciously.  I have a feeling poltergeists that are linked to a place and seen by successive occupants may have been created in this way, though mobile poltergeists who follow an individual, may be creations of that person's unconscious . Similarly  some of  anomalous animals  ( and alien beings) that are seen but leave little or no  trace may be a creation of the collective  efforts of the unconscious minds of a local or national community.  Perhaps we can  put the posthumous sightings of Hitler and  Elvis Presley to this effect.

    To sum up  I noted  that an “invisible world” is logically possible, and that there is evidence  from a wide range of sources that such worlds exists and are populated and I touched on evidence that the human mind can create such  beings.  As usual much more research is needed.