Love? It's Ultraviolence! (sutra)

Ashley Wells, Crystal Quintero, Amber Larson, Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; Lana Del Rey; Korn

Lana-of-the-King, when did he stop treating you like a princess?

(BBC, June 28, 2014) Devi Lana Del Rey performs "Ultraviolence" at Glastonbury 2014. For more exclusive videos and photos from the show, go to BBC.co.uk/glastonbury.

 

(Psst, Lana, the Lorde says your music sucks and is bad for girls to listen to, like, a bad influence keeping them waiting for some "Prince Charming"). 

"He used to call me DN/ That stood for Deadly Nightshade/ Cause I was filled with poison/ But blessed with beauty and rage/ Jim told me that./ He hit me, and it felt like a kiss./ Jim brought me back/ Reminded me of when we were kids/ With his Ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence Ultraviolence/ I can hear sirens, sirens/ He hit me, and it felt like a kiss/ I can hear violins, violins/ Give me all of that Ultraviolence/ He used to call me poison/ Like I was poison ivy/ I could have died right there/ Cause he was right beside me/ Jim raised me up/ He hurt me, but it felt like true love/ Jim taught me that/ Loving him was never enough/

(Clockwork Orange) England, Germany, USA, Israel, the "West"

loves killing on an industrial scale. It's ultra-violence.

Zombies: abused learn to abuse.

We could go back to New York/ Loving you was really hard/ We could go back to Woodstock/ Where they don't know who we are/ Heaven is on Earth/ I would do anything for you, babe/ Blessed is this union/ Crying tears of gold like lemonade/ I love you the first time/ I love you the last time/ Yo soy la princesa, comprende mis white lies/ Cause I'm your jazz singer/ And you're my cult leader/ I love you forever/ I love you forever/ With his Ultraviolence (Lay me down tonight)/ Ultraviolence (In my linen and curls)/ Ultraviolence (Lay me down tonight)/ Ultraviolence (Riviera Girls)/ I can hear sirens, sirens/ He hit me, and it felt like a kiss/ I can hear violins, violins/ Give me all of that Ultraviolence...

(Korn/"Thoughtless") Thumbing through the pages of my fantasies/ Pushing all the mercy down, down, down/ I wanna see you try to take a swing at me/ Come on, gonna put you on the ground, ground, ground/ Why are you trying to make fun of me?/ You think it's funny?/ What the 'uck do you think it's doing to me?/ You take your turn lashing out at me/ I want you crying with your dirty a-s in front of me/ All of my hate cannot be found/ I will not be drowned by your thoughtless scheming/ So you can try to tear me down/ Beat me to the ground/ I will see you screaming/ Thumbing through the pages of my fantasies/ I'm above you, smiling at you, drown, drown, drown/ I wanna kill and 'ape you the way you 'aped me/ And I'll pull the trigger/ And you're down, down, down// All of my friends are gone, they died (Gonna take you down)/ They all screamed and cried (Gonna take you down)/ I've got my body, got my body back against the wall/ I've got my body, got my body back against the wall/ Gonna take you down...

(Evanesence/"Thoughtless" live at Rock am Ring (Germany)

Maybe in the future women won't stand or fall for it? So long as the mainstream media defines our "feminist" or "progressive" views, the status quo is likely to remain largely unchanged. The TV is not our friend. We have to think and question and search for answers. They rarely come prepackaged with nice bows on top.

(Diamante) Hey, Jim, you got a kiss for me? I'll "Bite Your Kiss"!

Sutra: The Abusive Brahmin Husband
Acharya Buddharakkhita edited by Wisdom Quarterly from Positive Response: How to Meet Evil With Good, Akkosa Sutta (SN VII.2)

Hey, you bald-pated offspring of..!

Thus have I heard. Once the Buddha was staying in a sylvan grove nestled in the foothills surrounding Magadha's capital city of Rajagaha (modern Rajgir). This royal pleasure garden just outside of the gated city, known as the Bamboo Grove (Veluvana), was offered to the Buddha by his great patron, King Bimbisara, who was delighted to have such a remarkable sage nearby.

The king built a monastic residence just outside of the gate -- equipping it with a large number of meditation huts, where at least 1,250 monastics stayed and countless more lay devotees, spending their time in meditation, hearing the Dharma, and intense spiritual endeavor. The Bamboo Grove was neither too far nor too near the city, but at just the right distance from it for the large number of devotees who flocked there every morning and evening to pay homage to the Enlightened One.

Practicing leads to mind/heart's freedom!

A certain Brahmin (India's high caste, priestly class, social elites) belonging to the Bharadvaja clan had a great prejudice against the Buddha since he thought a member of the nobility (warrior caste, kshatriya) had claimed to be a saint.

Yet as it happened, the Brahmin's wife was a great devotee of the Buddha. On a certain festival day when everybody, including his wife, had gone to the Bamboo Grove hermitage to hear a discourse (sutra), the Brahmin, coming to know of it, became furious.

Fuming with rage, he rushed to the Bamboo Grove to give both his wife and the Buddha a piece of his mind. He forced his way through the crowd and began shouting foul abuse. He headed straight to where the Buddha was seated. People were aghast. Even the presence of the king, nobles, and ministers did not deter the enraged Brahmin from reviling the Buddha to his face.

When the Buddha remained completely undisturbed, radiating powerful feelings/thoughts of loving-kindness, the Brahmin stopped abusing him. But he was still aggrieved.

Then the Buddha asked him in a kind and gentle voice full of friendliness: "Friend, if somebody visits you, and you offer food which that person declines, who gets that food?"

"If the visitor does not accept what I offer, I will get it back because I offered it."

Then the Buddha came to his point: "If I do not accept your abuse, to whom will it return?"

The Brahmin was so moved by the tremendous implication of this analogy that he fell at the feet of the Buddha and sought to be ordained as a Buddhist monk. Soon after his ordination, depending on the Buddha's instruction for his path-of-practice, the Brahmin attained full enlightenment. The Buddha had transformed him by his positive approach. More

World's most famous Irish Buddhist (video)

Dhr. Seven, Pat Macpherson, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; UCCIreland

Prof. Brian Bocking, The Study of Religions Department, University College Cork, Dec. 2010

Los Angeles' Big Irish Fair Music Fest

The entire Irish population of Los Angeles has drained into the seaside shantytown of once bucolic now industrial Long Beach City, made famous by Snoop Dogg as "The LBC!"

It is the site of this year's Big Irish Fair and Music Fest. The Moon hangs high, and songs of auld are sung.

Few in this Buddhist town -- full of Cambodian and Bangladeshi Theravada, Tibetan Vajrayana, Chinese and Vietnamese Mahayana temples, and even an American Zendo and yoga studios galore, now overflowing with Ireland'ers, Irish expats, and the massive diaspora -- will know that the most famous Irish Buddhist in history is Ven. Dhammaloka from Dublin.

He was the first Westerner to ordain in the Buddhist tradition of Asia.

A tiny island of magnificent world import

Who was this "hobo," this wanderer, world traveler, spiritual pioneer, the most famous Occident in the old Orient who blazed a trail for us all? Ignored by history, this enigmatic freethinking Dubliner used various aliases, with the Buddhist name Dhammaloka ("Dharma World"), the "Irish Buddhist," who came before Brits Alan Bennett and H. Gordon Wallace and other credited as the first Westerners to explore Buddhism as monastics.

He converted from Catholicism to Theravada Buddhism around 1900, and became widely known throughout Asia in the process. He managed, as a good Irishman, to eventually fall afoul of the colonial establishment and its Christian missionaries.

Uncovering Ven. U Dhammaloka's unique story has taken some inspired detective work on the part of UCC's Prof. Brian Bocking and his colleagues. But their efforts have not been in vain. The Lost Irish Buddhist emerges after all these years as one of the earliest Western Buddhist monks, pre-dating many others who have claimed the title. Prof. Bocking takes us through an amazing odyssey.

Emerald Isle: sunset across Lower Lough Erne Fermanagh, Ireland (ayay.co.uk)

 

The First [Western] Buddhist monk

John L. Murphy (Fionnchu)

I drove out to UC Riverside [on May 16, 2011] to hear a professor in from Cork, Ireland talk about perhaps the first Irish Buddhist monk -- at least the first one we know of, who took robes in Burma fighting Christian incursions [British hegemony], defending the Dharma after his ordination, appointing himself "the Bishop of Rangoon," Burma.

His birth name is unclear because of the aliases he used in life, so his birth and death, to date, remain speculative (1856-1914?). He's a predecessor, combative if genuine, of more refined and less cantankerous Western converts. His appearance, suddenly in 1900, and his fading out by 1914, makes up a rather Zelig-like "hobo" bohemian character in Asia, where he covered considerable territory. He garnered fervent press -- some generated by his alter ego/nom de plume "Captain Daylight." He's a character worth getting to know.

The 2011 issue of Contemporary Buddhism featured Prof. Brian Bocking's article alongside scholars Thomas Tweed, Alicia Turner, and Laurence Cox (see his initial research). They hosted a UC Cork Dhammaloka Day Conference on Feb. 19th 2011 highlighting their research. More

• VIDEO: "The Man Who Lost Ireland"
• VIDEO: "Buddhist Porn" (lol Jakemitra)

ZEN: Who in the world is Alan Watts?

Dhr. Seven and CC Liu (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; AlanWatts.org

Zen Birthday Card: "Not thinking of you." (Piraro/bizarro.com)

  

Early Alan Watts, London (colorized photo)

Alan Watts was born in London in 1915, at the start of World War I. At a young age he became fascinated with the Far East, and at 14 he began to write and was published in the Journal of the London Buddhist Lodge before writing his first booklet on Zen in 1932. He moved to New York in 1938 and then to Chicago, where he served as an Episcopal priest for six years before leaving the Church. In 1950, he moved to upstate New York before going on to San Francisco to teach at the Academy of Asian Studies. Among Alan Watts' earliest influences were the novelist Sax Rohmer and Zen scholars D.T. Suzuki and Christmas Humpreys. In late 1950, he visited with Joseph Campbell and composer John Cage in NYC.

 

Worldview

Alan Watts was profoundly influenced by the East Indian philosophies of Vedanta [the "best of the ancient Vedas"] and Buddhism, and by Taoist thought, which is reflected in Zen poetry and the arts of China and Japan.
 

"Why cats are awesome" (RantsRavesT)

After leaving the [Anglican] Church, he never became a member of another organized religion. And although he wrote and spoke extensively about Zen Buddhism, he was criticized by American Buddhist practitioners for not sitting regularly in zazen. Alan Watts responded simply by saying, "A cat sits until it is done sitting, and then gets up, stretches, and walks away."

• Don't be like Alan, kids. Here's how to zazen
• VIDEO: Be like Alan, kids: Watch cartoons

Expect the unexpected, and you won't be disappointed ("Zen Comics"/Ioanna Salajan)

  

1950's and early '60's

Later wild-eyed Alan Watts, Berkeley

After teaching at the Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, he became Dean and began to give regular radio talks on KPFA FM, the Berkeley free radio station. In 1957, he published his bestselling Way of Zen, and in 1958 returned to Europe where he met with C.G. Jung. He was an early subject in pioneering psychedelic trials and, after recording two seasons of the public television series "Eastern Wisdom and Modern Life," traveled to Japan several times in the early sixties. By the late sixties, he had become a counterculture celebrity, and traveled widely to speak at universities and growth centers across the US and Europe.
 

The adventures of a doctoral candidate in "PHD ZEN" (phdcomics.com/Jorge Cham)

 
Later Years

The animated Alan Watts is not just for kids

By the early seventies, Alan Watts had become a foremost interpreter of Eastern thought for the West and was widely published in periodicals including Earth, Elle, Playboy, and Redbook. He appeared on CBS television's "Camera Three" in 1969, and in 1971 he recorded a pilot for a new show titled "A Conversation with Myself" for NET, the precursor to PBS. When the series was not produced, he recorded the shows with his son Mark and his long-time audio archivist Henry Jacobs in 1972. Overall, Alan Watts developed an extensive audio library of nearly 400 talks and wrote more than 25 books during his lifetime, including his final volume, Tao: The Watercourse Way. Alan Watts died in his sleep in November of 1973, after returning from an intensive international lecture tour. More

(Wiki featured article, May 15, 2014) Mycena aurantiomarginata, commonly known as the golden-edge bonnet, is a species of agaric fungus in the family Mycenaceae. First formally described in 1803, it was given its current name in 1872. It is common in Europe and North America, and has also been collected in North Africa, Central America, and Japan... More

Meeting NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden (video)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman

 

Intercepting the National Spying Agency

In part two of Democracy Now's extended interview, Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the inside story of meeting National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met Snowden in Hong Kong last June, going on to publish a series of disclosures in The Guardian, a venerable 190-year-old British newspaper, that exposed massive NSA surveillance to the world.

Host Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Greenwald has just come out with a new book on the Snowden leaks and their fallout, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Recalling his first encounter with Snowden, Greenwald says: "The big question was: 'How are we going to know that it’s you? We know nothing about you. We don’t know how old you are, what you look like, or what your race is, or even your gender.' And [Snowden] said, 'You’ll know me because I’ll be holding in my left hand a Rubik’s cube.' And so he walked in, was holding a Rubik’s cube, came over to us, introduced himself, and that was how we met him." More

More from The Intercept

British spies face legal action over secret hacking programs

The United Kingdom’s top spy agency is facing legal action following revelations published by The Intercept about its involvement in secret efforts to hack into computers on a massive scale. Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has been accused of acting unlawfully by helping to develop National Security Agency surveillance systems capable of covertly breaking into More

• British spy chiefs begged to play in NSA’s data pools

British surveillance agency GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year, classified documents provided NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal.

• Der Spiegel: NSA put Merkel on list of 122 targets

Secret documents newly disclosed by the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday shed more light on how aggressively the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have targeted Germany for surveillance.

• Inside the NSA’s secret efforts to hunt and hack system administrators

Across the world, people who work as system administrators keep computer networks in order – and this has turned them into unwitting targets of the NSA for simply doing their jobs.

• Foreign Officials in the dark about their own spy agencies’ cooperation with NSA (Glenn Greenwald)

Top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations’ cooperation with the NSA, as well as their own spying activities. Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be?

• How the NSA plans to infect "millions" of computers with malware

Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.

• The NSA has an Advice Columnist. Seriously.

An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has served as a Dear Abby for spies. One of her most intriguing columns responds to an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.

• New details of DRONE attack on Yemeni wedding prompt more demands Obama explain assassination policy

A new report on the U.S. drone missile strike that killed 12 members of a Yemeni wedding convoy has renewed calls for the Obama administration to make public its own investigations into the incident -- and explain how such strikes are consistent with international laws of war.

• UK Court: David Miranda [Greenwald's partner] detention legal under terrorism law

A British lower court has ruled that London police acted lawfully in employing an anti-terror statute to detain and interrogate David Miranda for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport last summer, even while recognizing that the detention was “an indirect interference with press freedom.”

• Snowden documents reveal covert surveillance and pressure tactics aimed at WikiLeaks and its supporters

Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.

• SHOW MORE TOP STORIES

It's Shakespeare's Birthday (video)

Ashley Wells, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; BBC; Delahoyde; Anderson; de Vere S.A.

Whoever it was who wrote these words must be remembered as world heritage (BBC)

There are tell-tale signs of the true author (de Vere Society Australia)

Shakespeare Unlocked

(BBC) William Shakespeare, the pseudonym of a British writer (likely the historical Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) and/or writers, wrote many popular and widely studied plays. They are unlocked by actors and directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, a fantastic resource for students and teachers of Shakespeare. More

• E-BOOK: The Hyphen, the Mask, the Daughter
• E-BOOK: Shakespeare by Another Name (view)
• What the world loses because of sexism as explored in Reincarnating Shakespeare’s sister: Virginia Woolf and the “uncircumscribed spirit” of fiction. The tension established between the writing subject and this vital “spirit” or “reality” has implications for the relationship between women and fiction Woolf imagines in A Room of One’s Own. For the movement of the writing subject beyond the self and towards the vital “spirit” of the “real” proves to be essential for the reincarnation of “Shakespeare’s sister,” that is, for the creation of a genuinely feminine literature (not the other SS).
• VIDEO: Shakespeare's Restless World
  
  Neil MacGregor explores the world of Shakespeare and his audience through 20 objects from that turbulent period.

Edward de Vere (Oxfordian theory of authorship) rivals France's Moliere, Spain's Cervantes, Latin America's Garcia Marquez, North America's plain Jane Austin, England's Virginia Woolf, China's... well, everyone gets the picture. But who was "the Bard"? According to Dr. Delahoyde of Washington State University: 

 

The Real Shakespeare

Prof. Michael Delahoyde (public.wsu.edu)

Remembering literature (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dtvpl)

 

J. Thomas Looney [Loan-ee], an English schoolteacher early in the 20th century for whom the Stratford myth [referring to Shakespeare's alleged birthplace] seemed worse than unsatisfactory, went back to the start of the logical process. 

 

From the works themselves he constructed a list of [at least 18] traits that must have been associated with the true author:...

Looney found a perfect match in the Dictionary of National Biography when he read about Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Looney published his discovery in 1920; unfortunately, therefore, some would like to dub this the Looney theory (though his name is pronounced Loan-ee, like Roosevelt). But Freud was convinced by it; Orson Welles was; Leslie Howard, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons, Supreme Court judges, scholars, and more and more have been ever since.

The de Vere family, originally from France, settled in England before the Norman Conquest. In 1066, Alberic (or Aubrey) de Vere sided with William the Conqueror and afterwards was rewarded with many estates. The youngest son of William, Henry, appointed de Vere the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England -- involving duties associated with coronations.

De Vere is the Bard without getting credit.

The fourth successive Aubrey in the 1100s was created Earl of Oxford. An Earl of Oxford was a favorite of Richard II (and therefore is excised from that history play), another was given a command at the battle of Agincourt, and Earls of Oxford supported the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses in the 1400s. One accompanied Henry VII in 1485 and proved himself invaluable at Bosworth Field. More

This is clearly a mask covering a face

Lady Susan de Vere (1587-1629), Countess of Montgomery, was the producer and "Grand Possessor" of the First Folio (1623), the Collected Works of "William Shake-speare," the pen-name of her father the Elizabethan courtier, poet, and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

 

Considering that more shelf space in book stores and libraries is dedicated to Shakespeare, and more movies cover the subject than any other, that makes Susan de Vere the most important person in history.

Yet, she has been completely erased from the picture by the elitist snobs of the Stratford Sham Industry. Until the de Veres came along there was no book, no Wikipedia page, no documentary, and no movie about this very resourceful woman, who despite the social constraints of the time, cunningly figured out a way to send us the ultimate "message in a bottle."

 

Still unpublished before Susan de Vere’s First Folio and otherwise lost to posterity were:... More

By Another Name
Mark Anderson (shakespearebyanothername.com)

Shakespeare by Another Name (Anderson)

The debate over the true authorship of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that it was Wm. Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from [the hamlet of] Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man, who apparently owned no books and never left England, wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility.

Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford -- an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive, and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shake-speare" disguise.
 

Yes, I was wearing a mask! (DVSA)

"Shakespeare" by Another Name is the literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the story of de Vere's action-packed life -- as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer and, above all, prolific ghostwriter -- finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works.

Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere’s personal copy of the Bible (in which he underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references). More

Wanderlust: surviving off the grid (video)

Pat Macpherson, Xochitl, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly

American Nomads: Wanderlust (Gnostic Warrior/GnosticWarrior.com) BBC documentary about Americans in the Southwest who roam around living free from the bonds, dust, and chains of ordinary workaday life. (See the "Buddhist" at 4:45).

Les Stroud, the "Survivor Man," builds a life off the grid where his
family can be less dependent on city living (PrepareUK/facebook)

• Wild flours (eat the weeds and other things, too)
• Healing vegetable foods for a Calm Sutra
• Weed Appreciation Day, Mt. Hood (Weather Channel)
• How to make your own yucca shampoo, soap (video)
• Natural "soap" (saponin) roots
• Herbs to herbs, what are saponins?
• Chilean soap bark (Quillaja)
• Healing poison oak with coyote brush herb
• Buckbrush, a native Chumash soap, shampoo
• The Joy of Chaparal (Cal Poly Pomona) 
• VIDEO: How to make a wilderness oven/fireplace
• VIDEO: When molested 3rd graders go crazy
• VIDEO: Survival: How to make a Chippewa Kitchen
• Riddle of the Desert: Caucasian Taklamakan Mummies
• PHOTOS: Alleged "Bigfoot" body mocked by media
• Everything we know about the new physics is psychic

Everyone loves a good ghost story

Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Roger Clarke (Telegraph.co.uk)

I don't see anything because I'm not looking to the left. OH NO! Shapeshifter!

Ghosts/phantoms permeate European culture through and through (telegraph.co.uk)

 

"Hungry ghosts" (pretas) depicted in Asia

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.

 

Ghosts are real. Just ask Dr. Gabor Mate.

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. 

 

Ghosts can cook (M.A. Winkowski)

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. More

Real "ghosts" (shadows, poltergeists)

 (COMMENTARY)

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).

Shapeshifting "Old Hag" ghosts

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.

(paranormal.about)

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).

 

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.

• BOOK: A Natural History of Ghosts (Roger Clarke)
• Hungry Ghosts Eat Dead Bodies, Skin Flakes, and... (tofugu.com)
• The Hungry Ghost Realm (Tibetan Buddhist Altar) The following is an excerpt from a teaching by Jetsunma Ahkon Lhamo called Why P'howa? The next of the lower realms is the realm of the...
  
• The Realm of Hungry Ghosts (China Buddhism Encyclopedia)Hungry ghosts (pretas) are pictured as beings with huge, empty stomachs, but they have pinhole mouths, and their necks are so thin they cannot... 
  Hungry Ghosts: The Diet of the Dead among the Grigori... (esoterx.com) The Realm of the  Hungry Ghosts, Hindu/Buddhist... Take for example, the Hindu preta (a Sanskrit term meaning “departed, deceased, a dead...”)
• What are "Hungry Ghosts"? (Barbara O'Brien)
• VIDEO: Black bear loose in Pasadena
• Jim Earl's big page of poop
• Jimmy Dore Comedy