I know I’m about to open myself up to attack with this post, but sometimes a good attack feels good!
My relationship to the paranormal has changed a few times over the course of my life. Growing up in a new-agey household where close family members would play with Ouiji boards regularly, and where strange stories were the norm, I grew up believing in pretty much every kind of paranormal possibility (ghosts, aliens, psychics, etc.)
As I grew up I began to have a more mature understanding of the paranormal and skepticism became my standard response to the paranormal. Much of the stories and interpretations of paranormal experience are inaccurate and unnecessary, many glorifying the sense of self. That being said, the paranormal is extraordinarily normal, and many people have had direct experiences with interesting unseen energies. Of course, the interpretations and the experience are hard to sort out. An example of this can be seen in Discovery channel’s program The Haunting. There is some very interesting information contained in this show, and there are many commonalities that can be recognized across the different stories. Common experiences with regards to “entities” have to do one person being targeted, loss of memory, feelings of nausea, and strange physical events happening in the environment, as well as strange behavior from the targeted person. What is also common, if people are lucky enough to have the entity released, is that people with psychic abilities seem to help facilitate that process.
One interesting point is that almost every (if not all) religious traditions have some reference to unwanted spirits. That doesn’t of course verify that what I’m describing is “real”, just that there is a long-standing, and cross-cultural reference to these types of things.
