There are two things I know to be true:
- The Universe is much weirder than we’ve been taught to believe.
- A real thing doesn’t stop being real because you choose not to believe it.
In the general population, these two things collide all the time.
The average person, in the western world, experiences an apparition, and their first instinct is to explain it away. They’ve been taught that this isn’t real so they process the phenomena in a way that is culturally acceptable. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a trick of the light. I didn’t hear someone call my name. I must just be overtired and hearing things. Yes, it is chilly right here. There must be a draft. I didn’t really just smell my mother’s perfume. It’s a coincidence that I was thinking of him and that song came on the radio.
Maintaining the illusion, that our perceived physical reality is all there is, can be quite comforting. There is no challenge to our foundational beliefs about the world if we can file the weirdness away in a safe place. It’s a culturally promoted form of dissociation and for most of us it works most of the time.
Some of us, though, don’t play along. We don’t pretend we didn’t see what we saw. We talk to our dear departed and then keep an eye, or an ear, out for the response. We know there are things living in the woods and wild places who don’t leave tracks behind. We know that for millennia humans communicated with the Others and that we can too … if we’re careful. We know some of these things can be very dangerous if we’re not. Most importantly we know that training and respect are required to do this well. We also know that if you don’t know what you’re doing it might be best to pretend that was just a breeze you felt.