Many of you might not know this about me, but I have been into "paranormal investigations" and researching the unexplained for most of my life. I have experienced many unusual things throughout my almost 36 years and have always sought to understand these events. Studying the sciences of Parapsychology and Noetics has helped me tremendously in keeping my mind free from superstition and undue speculation, yet allowing me to be open to the unexplained.
I wanted to post this article written by the nation's leading Parapsychologist, Loyd Auerbach entitled, "Just Say "No" to Demons!" which touches on an issue that is very important to me. There are MANY "paranormal investigation groups" that promote theories about ghosts and hauntings that have nothing to do with the scientific evidence that has been compiled by parapsychology for over one hundred years, especially mixing christian dogma into their investigations. I was going to do a blog on this topic when I saw that Loyd had already done it for me, so here it is.
As a last note, though Loyd - in his professionalism - does not name names in this article, I will. The Sci-Fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters". This show has generated much interest in researching and investigating the unexplained, but I believe it has in a negative, sensationalistic way that pretends to be scientific (because they use "technology" in its investigations) but ignores the real science of true "ghost hunting" - Parapsychological Investigations. This show spreads misinformation about hauntings and spirits in too many ways to explain here. Why do I care? I guess because I am tired of superstition and sensationalism being spread in one of the most important fields of research that we can concern ourselves with: Life After Death.
Let me know your thoughts! Thanks!
John
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Just Say "No" to Demons! by Loyd Auerbach
This is a long one...
I know this may be an unpopular thing to post, but ...
Frankly, I'm troubled. I'm troubled by the kinds of training (or lack thereof) people who call themselves "ghost hunters" have received (or not received). I am troubled by the perpetuation of misinformation about ghosts, hauntings and poltergeists on the internet, and amongst ghost hunting groups – who have completely missed the over 130 years of field work and investigation of such things from the earliest days of psychical research through the inception and work of folks in the field of Parapsychology. I am troubled by the sentiment that using technology is the same as doing science (it's not).
But recently, I have been troubled by the rising tide of "demonology" connected to investigations of the phenomena which exists and is experienced in connection with consciousness, and the suggestion that studying demons is somehow "scientific."
Many use the word "demon" to refer to apparent non-human entities that have "evil" intentions, and the word "angel" for those entities who have "good" intentions.
It has not been established (scientifically) that human beings have consciousness, though the opinion is that we do. It has not been established (proven, scientifically) that consciousness is separable from the body (ghosts and such), though the evidence certainly points that way.
The idea of non-human disembodied beings is one step even further removed. Only living people's perceptions, what they experience, points to disembodied consciousness and only those perceptions and interpretations of those perceptions might suggest "non-human" beings (other than ghostly pets, of course). We've got enough to deal with human consciousness without leaping to conclusion that some entity or other is "non-human" for whatever reason.
Further, what is "good" and what is "evil" is subject to our interpretations, biases, and beliefs. Is a shark evil when it attacks someone? The result of the attack is certainly not a good thing, but the shark is what it is: hungry.
Is an earthquake "evil"?
Things can be very dangerous without being "evil." That label attributes motive – a conscious motive to do harm merely for the sake of doing it (see most DC and Marvel Comics super-villains).
There are two questions here: are there non-human entities and are they malevolent or evil?
The answer to both depends on looking deeper into the perceptions, psychology and experience of the folks encountering things they believe fall into these categories.
From the Parapsychological perspective, while there might be non-human disembodied entities (essentially, beings of pure conscious energy), they falls into the realm of belief and speculation even more than ghosts do. The experiences with such things can be explained by other psychic models (apparitions, hauntings, poltergeists, telepathy, etc.).
If there are such beings, are they evil?
Using the word "demon" to describe them already puts them in that category, regardless of what their intentions are or who they are. But more dangerous than that, using the label "demon" puts a religious spin on the entity and experience.
If one takes the word "demon" to mean those entities which started out as angelic beings, caught up in some rebellion against God (losing side) and thrown down to the "region" that became known as Hell, and perhaps their progeny, then we have a simple problem: God, or gods, and beings of that hierarchy, including the "low" (demons) are seen as unknowable.
How do you prove God exists? If you can't prove the existence of God, how do you prove the existence of lesser yet associated beings such as angels? How do you prove the existence of a Devil, whether you call him Satan, Lucifer, Ahriman, or Loki, when he is said to be part of God's (or the gods') hierarchy?
What's that you say? Why should Science have to prove the existence of God or the Devil at all? It's all a matter of belief, of faith. If you believe, fine. If not, shame on you. Or so people say.
Belief -- in whatever you believe in -- is a guiding principle for our lives. Beliefs come in many forms, from what we've learned in the educational process (you believe in "atoms," but have you ever seen one?) to what we're taught to believe as tenets of our religions, from basic, culturally transmitted ethics and morals to the prejudices we learn from our parents and immediate social group (positive and negative, likes and dislikes, loves and hates).
The existence of demons and evil entities is relative to our belief systems.
More than that, not every religion or culture in the world believes in Satan or demons and angels (in the biblical sense). Gasp!!
In fact, let me disclose that I grew up reformed Jewish (I'm more of a Jedi and a Foodhist these days), and we had no Hell and no Devil. Stories of the heavenly battles were taught as allegory – stories with lessons to them, not literal truth. I don't have to worry about behaving myself because if I don't I'll go to Hell – I have to worry about behaving myself because it's the right thing to do!!
Gods, demons and other supernatural beings have always been held responsible for the events of the natural world, whether we're talking about the weather or the functioning of the human body. Most of such explanations derive from the sense that humans have a hard time with the unknown, so we have come up with some forms of explanations, however groundless in fact. So, in some cultural belief systems, drought occurs because people have offended particular deities or demons, while rain comes when they are again pleased. An individual gets sick because of the direct influence of a magic spell, an evil spirit, or a demon.
Most of us do not still believe demons are responsible for drought, pollution, disease or a simple headache. Why? Because science and medicine have learned otherwise.
Speaking from the perspective of anthropology, the word possession is applied whether the spirit inhabiting the living person is good or evil, demon or saint. The practice of inviting in spirits or demons or other beings is not uncommon around the world, though, unlike channeling and mediumship, the entities are part of the religious or cultural pantheon of supernatural beings. The practice is often sanctioned by the culture and its belief systems, as the possessing being provides guidance for the people. In this form, it is pervasive throughout the world, and has evolved into something slightly different even in more technologically advanced Eastern and Western cultures.
Possession by invited spirits and supernatural beings may be considered a very different matter than what we think of as possession in this culture. Shamans of all traditions invite in spirits, gods, and other entities, from Native Americans to practitioners of voodoo (itself a derivative of West African pre-slavery belief systems combined with Christian elements), from practices of the shamans of Siberian aboriginal peoples to those of believers in Santeria (a variant of Voodoo). These possessions are more akin to channeling the way we now define it, and are rarely (if ever) harmful to the person possessed.
Looking cross-culturally at the idea of any sort of personification of evil such as a "god" of evil or a real Devil, one must first back up and look at how evil is defined. Evil, and what constitutes doing evil, is very relative to each individual moral and ethical system. Doing evil is to do things at odds with, or against society's norm -- things that are wrong. It is wrong to kill a human being, unless, apparently, that human is not a "person" (does not belong to one's own "group," whatever that would be). It's wrong to kill, even in self-defense, although that's generally excusable. And in war, "all's fair," so as long as you believe you're at war with someone, you can do lots of things that would otherwise be socially unacceptable. Thankfully, even in wartime the morals of many still prevail so that prisoners are generally well-treated, and children and other noncombatants are kept out of things as much as possible. (Of course, such rules didn't fit in the Holocaust during WWII or the Vietnam War).
So is there an evil that is personified as a "devil" or "demons"? The answer to that completely depends on what your religious or cultural beliefs are.
Over the years, I have spoken with and met many people who claim to be either possessed by spirits or demons, or under attack by psychic forces, living or disembodied. I have little doubt that most of those people were sincere and often genuinely frightened. While I am not a psychologist, my parapsychological background (which has included working with psychologists and licensed counselors) at least has given me some skill in assessing whether the people are just confused or disturbed, or if they need referral to more appropriate counseling and therapy. Most are confused about their experiences. Some need real help, and not the kind that comes from sprinkling holy water around the home.
When I say that most people are confused about their experiences, I mean that there may be confusion generated by something they are experiencing, that confusion causing them to mislabel the experience as "demonic" or "possession" when it may be a psychic experience of another sort or merely a "mistake." Many of the potential cases I screen have turned out to be misinterpretations of "normal" events. Odd sounds in one's home (say, from the house settling or a squirrel in the attic) may be mistaken for "ghosts" or "poltergeists" if the person hearing the sounds has just seen a very scary horror film or is someone who believes a lot of the supernatural propaganda that appears in the tabloids.
I have also found that confusion accompanies paranormal phenomena. For example, if objects are flying around your home, you might believe a demon is attacking you and trying to possess you. You contact one of those self-professed "demonologists" out there, who of course will verify that there is a demon in your home. If they call themselves demonologists, their beliefs have already predisposed them to assess such situations as demonic.
They may not be interested in any other explanation, and I've been informed by many people who first brought a "demonologist" into their home that there was no checking for alternatives, and no equivocation – the experiences were demonically caused. Interesting, since in some of those cases there absolutely, positively was a normal (though misinterpreted) cause. In others, the phenomena was halted by either speaking with the ghost (in apparition cases) or dealing with the stress of folks (in poltergeist cases – note that the additional stress brought on by the pronouncements of the "demonologist" caused an increase in PK activity).
Keep in mind that various religious beliefs of many people not only do not support psi experiences, they also teach that such abilities and experiences are either tools of the Devil or are signs that the Devil or lesser demons are out to get you. If I believed or even considered that, I'd be hard pressed to be studying the experiences at all, let alone writing about them.
Biblical Demons are unnecessary when it comes to explanations of ghostly phenomena. We have enough within ourselves – us humans – to cause all of the reported phenomena, whether from a psychic or purely psychological/perceptual perspective (and the combination of the two is incredibly powerful). Blaming certain activity on demons is to avoid taking personal responsibility. Possibly the most important lesson I've learned about the implications of psychic abilities (for the living or the dead) is that we must not only take responsibility for our physical actions, we must also take responsibility for our thoughts, whether those thoughts are conscious or unconscious. This goes for ghosts as well – ghosts are people, too…they're just people without a body (hmmm….do ghosts have an unconscious mind?).
It's tough enough (AT THIS POINT IN TIME) to study consciousness since there's no consensus of what consciousness is. That's what you're doing when you study ghosts, by the way – studying consciousness and how it interacts with the world around it.
It's tough enough (AT THIS POINT IN TIME) to understand why some people do evil acts, but to automatically blame their activities on influence from some demonic entity is to take away from both free will and personal responsibility.
Such forces were responsible for bad weather, failed crops, earthquakes, and disease – until we learned they were NOT responsible (due to our understanding of how the world works, an ONGOING process).
If you go the way of the demonologist, you leave Science behind.
If you go the way of belief in demons as causing these experiences, you take away human responsibility.
If you go the way of demons, you face the danger of justifying your own potentially harmful (dare I say evil) actions if you need to "deal" with the demons.
More people have died in the name of their own version of God (protecting their beliefs from non-believers) than for any other reason. It's still happening – terrorism for the most part is religiously based (or utilizing religious belief as their rationale).
I worry about people buying into the demonic belief system. I worry that some will go too far to protect people from "demons," as a couple whose trial I testified in as an expert years ago. In the trial I was involved in, they had killed their housemate because they believed she was a "witch" and had cast a spell on the wife. By the way, they were up for another trial for killing a man they stated was a "demon." They argued that their religious text told them it was good to kill witches and demons, that they were only doing the work of their God.
Neither victim had done anything negative to this couple, other than perhaps not being friendly towards them as their beliefs got more and more fanatical.
Demonology, studying demons, is inherently non-scientific. Approaching such experiences and supposed entities from this perspective IS religious, and a particular religious approach.
For ghost hunting groups to incorporate such things into their "investigations" means approaching the experiences of people from a religious perspective. Unfortunately, I've seen too many websites for groups that do include demonology, and in the same site profess to be going about their investigations "scientifically" with no acknowledgement that demonology is inherently from religion (and generally the Catholic/Christian religion).
More than that, it can mean that you are going to scare the s**t out of people having paranormal experiences (telling them they have a demon attacking them). This is inappropriate and does not respect the people one is trying to help, or the phenomena/experiences which need explaining.
I have had cases over the years (and know of many more) where people had a "ghost hunter" tell them they had a "demon problem." They got more frightened than they were, the ghost hunters were unable to help them (other than to refer them to some clergy who could not help them), and the experiences continued. In too many of those cases, there was NOTHING paranormal happening – the people (and I assume the ghost hunters) had misinterpreted normal occurrences as "supernatural."
In the cases where something paranormal was happening, not everything they reported was paranormal…just some things. We dealt with the experiences, we dealt with the fear they felt, and the phenomena stopped. But they needed counseling because of the stress and fear the "demonologist" ghost hunter had put into them.
If you are truly interested in the human spirit – in ghosts – and whether it survives in some form after death, drop the demon angle. Too much confusion, too much bias, and too much religious mythology (which I acknowledge may be religious fact to you, but not to Science) can lead to pain and suffering.
It certainly doesn't lead to understanding what these experiences are that we link to apparitions, hauntings and poltergeists.
It certainly doesn't lead to any sort of application of Science – which is the search to understand how we and the Universe works.
But most of all, looking for evil demons where there are other, non-religious explanations will send you off track and create emotional problems for those who report their ghostly encounters.
Just say No to demons!
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