Can We Learn To See Ghosts?
Honestly, I have no idea
what I’m supposed to write about for my blog post on the sixth sense. I’ve
never seen God, an angel, or any otherworldly entity. No one has ever paid me a
visit. I never remember my dreams, so if they’re prophetic I would have no
clue. I’ve never partaken in any form of magic, and I’ve never traveled through
space and time. I’ve never even been hypnotized. In terms of the sixth sense,
my time thus far on Earth has been pretty anticlimactic, and I can only help
but wonder- is it my fault I’ve never experienced something science can’t
explain?
The phrase “Use it or
lose it” applies to the first five senses. People only notice what they pay
attention to. I can scarf down an entire plate of food and barely taste it if I’m
not paying attention, but there are people who are able to train themselves to
detect all of the ingredients in a complex dish. It is possible to orient
oneself through sound, yet many struggle to notice the majority of the sounds
around them. If a sense is ignored, it has no reason to grow stronger, so it
doesn’t. Perhaps this is why I never have had a sixth sense experience. For one
thing, I am skeptical about many things associated with the sixth sense, so I
never look for them. The thought of having an such an experience is also
intimidating to me, so I may have trained my senses to never observe anything
to protect me from this fear. Perhaps the reason I have never seen a ghost is
that I have never particularly wanted to see one.
Because I’ve been
neglecting my sixth sense for so long, is there a way to bring it back? According
to David Abram, in his book The Spell Of The Sensuous, yes! Abrams
writes that, in his observance of spiders his “senses first learned of the
countless worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that we
commonly inhabit, and from them I learned that my body could, with practice,
enter sensorially into these dimensions.” According to Abrams, the world that we
perceive is interlaced with other worlds of all the other existing entities. By
paying attention to the ones we can perceive, such as ants or spiders, we can
begin to enter their worlds. By allowing our senses to transfer into these
easily accessible worlds, we can eventually train our sixth sense to grow even
more powerful.
I found this post to be such an incredibly insightful idea. As I began to attempt to right my blog post on the sixth sense I was right in your shoes, literally, when I had no clue where to even start or what to even write about. However, you branch this off into an idea whereas it could be your own fault that you haven't experienced anything beyond the ordinary. Which is a very different way of thinking, however, backed up with a very detailed explanation as to why one might think that. This post made me go back and think about ways that I, myself, could have prevented ways in which that I may have prevented anything out of the ordinary from happening to me.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth, maybe you don't have a 6th sense, or at least not one as what we read or discussed defined it. You give a pretty good account of your own experience, or should we say, lack of experience of the uncanny. And I like your point "use it, or lose it" as an explanation. The idea of 5 senses is a standard Western Euro-American cultural perspective, but other cultures number them differently, more or less than 5, or consider different things as senses. So I wonder if we don't call something a sense, if it's possible to "sense" something with it. In any case, your observation that you've never known anything through a 6th sense resonates with Kripal's explanation why paranormal experiences aren't often taken seriously - because in the dominant, scientific rationalist culture, they don't count or exist as experiences. How can you sense something with a sense that doesn't exist, as far as you know? But it also suggests how culturally constructed our own sense of our senses is. Of course we humans all more or less have or potentially have the same physiological sense organs. But do our brains process everything we "pick up" through them as a particular sense experience? Your post raises some very interesting and challenging questions!
ReplyDeleteSo yes, as you suggest, maybe we have to _learn_ to see ghosts. Tanya Luhrmann, our Religion Dept. Martin Lecturer this Fall in her book When God Talks Back makes a strong case that American evangelical Christians' hearing God talk back to them is a learned behavior.
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