Recognition

Our gift to the spirit World

hi friends. Before launching into this entry I want to acknowledge those who have subscribed in the past few months. Your attention and time are incredibly precious gifts.

I am departing from my biweekly publication habit this week because 1. I happen to have a finished essay and 2. some of the ideas I am playing with in this essay have been trying to find their way to the surface for some time now.

OK, on with the show.

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A few weeks ago, Susan saw a “ghost”. She told me about in the morning. A figure, seemingly male, walked through our cabin carrying some object. By the way he carried it it appeared to be ceremonial and not terribly heavy. The afternoon before this “sighting” I happened to hear a tapping sound against the back wall of the cabin near where the ghost appeared. I hear such sounds often as birds like to build their nests near the air vent where it is warm. In this particular case, however, I felt compelled to turn toward the sound and tell what ever was making it to please calm down. I had nearly forgot about this tapping until the next morning when Susan related her ghost sighting.

Every structure has its characteristic sounds. Houses “settle”. Our cabin came lined with a heat reflective bubble wrap that makes a soft crackling sound when ever a change in temperature or pressure occurs. We also hear a lot of birds. Sometimes a squirrel will leap from a branch onto the roof. Sometimes a wasp will get stuck between the insulation and the wall making periodic buzzing sounds with nearly the pitch and cadence of speech. After a while we become familiar with such sounds and don’t give them a second thought.

We have lived in our cabin for over four years now. The first summer we spent in it, I noticed a lot of tapping behind the back wall and a lot of insect noises behind the insulation. Because I was yet unfamiliar with the causes of all the noises the cabin might make, it was easy for me to make the imaginative leap that allowed me to hear “ghosts”. There is lure surrounding the valley beneath our cabin that suggests the possibility of many restless souls. There are also a lot of “land spirits”, ancestors (ours and just people who have lived in these hills before us), there are the deities and guides we work with. We expect occasional visitations from discarnate entities so aren’t surprised or particularly freaked out when they show up.. And of course, there is a lot of wind, there are a LOT of birds, insects, squirrels, possum, raccoons, stray cats, chipmunks and all manner of “natural” explanations for weird sounds. Perhaps ALL of the unfamiliar sounds we hear have natural causes. But does this mean there are no ghosts, no land spirits, no strange, discarnate entities seeking our attention?

Absolutely not!

As a diviner, I have trained myself to see meaningful patterns in “random” arrangements of cards or fall of coins. True Scryers, such as those who see meaningful patterns in tea leaves or plumes of smoke, are masters of pareidolia (the tendency to see faces and other things in wood grain, for example), but even divination by sortilege, such as Tarot or I Ching, require the same imaginative leap as seeing a witch in an old coat on a hook. Things, whether a spread of cards, a wisp of cloud or an old coat on a hook are the result of normal, material causality, but the significance we sometimes recognize in them is something else.

Imagine you are thinking of an old friend from high school, someone you shared key life experiences. Perhaps you haven’t thought of them in years but for some reason you have thought of them a lot lately. You go to the supermarket and a song comes over the sound system that reminds you of your old friend. Perhaps you have heard this very song in this very market many times and barely registered it. But because you are thinking of old times and old friends the song now transports you back to those times. Memories that have been fleeting, barely noticed images now flood you with nostalgia and vivid, immersive memories. A few days later, you sadly learn that the old friend has died. Did you experience a “haunting”?,

Now, imagine the same scenario but with one difference - at the end, you hear from that old friend. Should you interpret this as precognition or telepathy? What if you have all the same memories, same experience in the supermarket with the old song opening a flood gate of memories and long ago emotions and nothing happens, no sad news of your friend’s passing, no surprise phone call or letter. Was this a haunting, telepathy or just a bout of nostalgia with no obvious cause? What if your old friend did die or happened to be talking to someone else about you and you never learned about either? Was your bout of unaccountable nostalgia some sort of supernatural communication or mere coincidence? Is there a difference?

Or suppose we are making our way home at night and get a creepy feeling about a certain street. We decide to take an alternate rout home. The next day, we hear that some unfortunate person was attacked on that same street around that time. Did we experience precognition? Suppose nothing happened because no one else was on that street at the time. In that case was our creepy feeling simple hyper vigilance about the kinds of things that might happen on such a street? In that case our foreboding could be chalked up to simple common sense (or paranoia). Or suppose there had been a person with ill intent hiding in the shadows who simply failed to find a victim this particular night. Since nothing happened, we would have heard nothing about it. Does this mean that everyone who might have walked down that street felt the same reticence? Maybe everyone just had good sense. Maybe there has been news recently of crime in that area and people simply avoided it.

Finally, imagine that you pull three cards from the Tarot pack: The Three of Wands, The Tower and Death. Perhaps you were contemplating travel. You might conclude from these three cards that something terrible will happen and you cancel your plans. If you do not travel and life goes on as normal you have no way of knowing if some misadventure would have occurred had you taken your trip. Or perhaps you decide to go against what you thought the cards held. Your vacation is wonderful but while you are gone, something unexpected happens back home. Maybe your apartment building burns down or your job is lost. After the initial panic subsides, you decide that you might stay where you are, seek a new job there, a new home, make new friends, reinvent yourself. The Death Card is often interpreted as radical personal transformation. Perhaps you may have dismissed the cards because things were going so well. But now you think you may have simply read them wrong.

In all of these examples it is virtually impossible to disentangle what might be paranormal communication from events ruled by normal causality and probability. I want to suggest that while some events ARE imbued with significance beyond coincidence, ALL of them are governed, at the level of material reality, by completely mundane causality and probability. The tapping on the wall is a bird (or heat expansion, structural settling etc.). but this tapping, what ever its cause, is sometimes correlated with the presence of some discarnate entity. The booger RIDES the “natural occurrence” in exactly the same way that spirits RIDE the bodies of spirit mediums.

Some suppose that spirit mediums are undergoing some sort of seizure, that shaman are experiencing some kind of psychotic break from reality, that diviners are victims of confirmation bias. Such assertions rely on the idea that there must be some material explanation for these weird phenomena. This is likely true, BUT, to the extent that they are true, it is the occurrence of these anomalous brain states that occasions the entrance of the spirits. This is not much different from what happens in the brain when we dream. We report all manner of things that seem to be happening out in the world, but everything is happening within our sleeping heads. A swirl of electrochemical activity happens in our brain. Upon waking we know that something happened. We read this something our of the kaleidoscope of brain activity we experienced in sleep in the same way we might see a rabbit in an ink blot, or a face in an old knotted tree. The significance we grant to a dream is not reducible in any obvious way to the brain activity that produced it. The interpretation of dreams is, as it has always been, an oracular practice.

Significance, meaning, a narrative is something we grant to natural occurrences as we would a gift (or curse). Whether we are receiving messages or casting spells we are framing natural events and material substances in such a way as to tell a story. As a painter does with pigment or a poet with words we CAST the chaotic onrush of the material wold into a shape which bares the form of our visions. This is what magik IS.

It is also a form of gambling. What makes gambling different from other (at least potentially) productive activities is that the outcome is not entirely dependent on the skill of the gambler. There is always an element of luck. Luck is, so to speak, the presiding spirit of gambling. By her nature, she can not smile on everyone at once. This is why the gambler tries to catch her attention trough skillful strategy or simple boldness. It is the same with magik. Outcomes aren’t guaranteed. Whether you are reading out a meaning, from cards or curling smoke, or writing out meaning in stones and herbs and sigils, you are petitioning a spirit which dwells, but for a moment, in the happenstance swirl of the material universe. If you are lucky, the cards will yield an answer, the spell will bring results.

If it is in any way true that we live beyond our current physical form, that what ever in dwelling spirit (soul) we may posses fits (or does not) in the body. This body which is “merely” the inevitable end product of billions of years of completely causal physical processes. The forms we take are as waves to the sea or spreading curls of smoke. AND YET, each of us manages to be someone. The spirit haunts our body as our soul. What ever we have received from heredity, culture, experience gains significance from this indwelling soul. Normal material causality is solely responsible for what we are, but the indwelling spirit is responsible for WHO we are. When we appeal to another for information or assistance, guidance or love, we petition this indwelling spirit in exactly the same way we inquire of an oracle or incorporate plants and stones into a spell to bring about a desired condition. Further, in knowing another, some of their soul becomes incorporated in us. This is why I see my father in the music he loved, my grandfather when ever I use a stencil or straight edge to form a sigil. This is why a spirit can haunt a house or a river can speak to us if we can hear it.

When we sense a pattern of events which seems to have a meaning, let us be bold. Let us tell it that we see it, grant the gift of significance which is, in the end, the gift of recognition. If we are wrong, if the face in the cloud or the voice in the wind doesn’t answer, if the world rejects the song we sing about it (enchantment), perhaps there was no one there after all.

In certain ways the thing I am talking about is a kind of animism. The world is filled with spirits disguised as mundane things. The trees and mountains may have things to say even if not to us personally. This is one of the best reasons to care for the material world, it is the vehicle in which spirit becomes visible to itself. It is the plane of incarnation. It is the root of the “I / THOUGH” relationship. So, if you think you see a ghost, there is a good chance that it is just passing through like a face in the crowd. Even if it is only a passing shadow or a burst of neurotransmitters in your visual cortex, say hello and tell it you mean it no harm. As I have said before, the dead are far less dangerous to us than we are to them. The danger, to the extent that there is any, comes from not granting wandering spirits the same regard you would a person passing in the street.

As far as nature, the material world, is concerned, it has its own agenda which we are not privileged to know. But this material world with its myriad forms arising from causality and probability, offers its services as a cradle for the spirit world, a stage upon which it plays its roles. Some of these forms are our animal bodies, some are rocks and trees, some are the “random” arrangements of things which carry omens. We will not find spirit in the world of matter but we can only know it through this world.