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| I don't see anything because I'm not looking to the left. OH NO! Shapeshifter! |
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| Ghosts/phantoms permeate European culture through and through (telegraph.co.uk) |
It’s the time of year [the dead of winter] -- a little before that other time of year -- when many people’s minds turn to spooks and ghost stories. Once, the parish bells rang out on Hallowe’en to scare away such prowling phantoms and demons speeding forth from what M.R. James, the Victorian ghost-story writer, would call “sequestered places.”
But now, a commercialized Hallowe’en presents itself, imported from the United States, which in turn took its antecedents from an Irish Catholic celebration of seasonal misrule.
Up to the 19th century, it was often said in rural England that none but a “Popish priest” could lay -- or exorcise -- a ghost, and much of traditional English belief in ghosts comes from the unquiet spirit of hidden Catholic traditions.
In earlier centuries, for example, to say you believed in ghosts was to identify yourself as a Catholic, or at the very least a religious dissident, since early Methodists believed in the same thing also.
The infamous Cock Lane ghost that so convulsed London in 1762 was very much gingered up by a parish priest with Methodist inclinations; all of society, including Horace Walpole (who wrote the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto), flocked to a house in Smithfields to hear the ghost that scratched out pronouncements on the living and dead.
The founder of the Methodist faith, John Wesley, came from a haunted family. The account of the Epworth Poltergeist in 1716 is one of the classic ghost stories in the canon, and it took place in the Lincolnshire rectory while 14-year-old
Wesley was away from home. In letters to John’s brother Sam, his mother detailed how the arrival of two new servants at Martinmas (the feast of St. Martin on Nov. 11) was the beginning of... a whole panoply of terrifying sounds, groans and crashes that not even a sceptical father could explain. John Wesley’s father, a bad-tempered man who was constantly at war with his own parishioners, finally decided that these sounds came from Old Nick himself.
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Real "ghosts" (shadows, poltergeists)
(COMMENTARY)
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| Seance faked hand image (Museum archive 1920) |
Ghosts (Sanskrit
pretas, Pali
petas) are real, though
mostly harmless. They are unfortunate "spirits" (with subtle physical forms and often the power to appear in various shapes and guises). All of them lived before -- like all beings everywhere, just revolving and revolving in endless cycles of
samsara.
It is rebirth that can be brought to an end and, with it, all suffering (dukkha, disappointment) once and for all. But people are not interested in that. We're interested in trying to get ahead on this plane of existence. Just below us are the animals suffering terribly. No one cares. The ghosts have it even worse, though not nearly as bad as the ogres (yakkhas), cruel titans (asuras, "demons") and hellions (narakas).
Just the other night I was accosted by "ghosts" due to the "
Old Hag Syndrome." The female ghosts (not old, not hags) held my hands down against my will while I was conscious, upset, awake, and struggling. Because there was sleep paralysis, people will say
d'uh it was "sleep" and therefore a dream. While dreamlike, it is not semiconscious, closed eye sleep. We can trigger paralysis through deep relaxation without actually being in a sleep state. The struggle to come out of paralysis lasted for what felt like ten minutes.
Of course, it couldn't have helped that Mesmerist/hypnotist Rick Collingwood (
mindmotivations.com) was on Coast to Coast talking about
Hypnosis and Evil Spirits. He was not a believer until he hypnotically exorcised a "speed spirit" (a possession resulting from the use of speed such as meth or cocaine), which so weakens a person as to make him/her susceptible to entities seeking to attach or to behave parasitically as energy vampires).
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| The fireplace will keep them away |
As usual, these usually-unseen beings seemed more mischievous than malevolent. But they are very happy to scare a person, as if to feed on the distress. If there are shining beings on the
Abhasvara Plane who feed on joy, why not miserable eaters who zap energy away? So I cultivate compassion and annoyance rather than fear or actual malice ready to banish them with positive and protective energy.
The many activities help us remember we did not grow up with, like listening to traditional music, Irish food and drink, and many other engaging aspects of Irish culture. Can Irish Americans play the Irish bodhran, commune with the Fay (faeries), dance like the island youth, or shop for Irish crafts? They can now.
![Coup or Revolution? Ukraine seeks arrest of ousted president [now hiding in Russia] following deadly street protests](http://www.democracynow.org/images/story/36/24336/medium/Ukraine-protest4.jpg?20140227)
Coup or Revolution? Ukraine seeks arrest of its ousted president [now hiding in Russia] following deadly street protests
Investigative journalist and radio host George Knapp shares several news items that have recently caught his attention, including articles on the Viking apocalypse, DHS's quest for a national license-plate recognition database, tsunami "ghost" stories from Japan, and the possibility of alien life inside of atoms: 
