Of hauntings and ghosts

I feel I’d not be wrong in saying that all of us have had some experience with ghosts and the phenomenon of hauntings. And before you roll your eyes and tell me very patiently to stop believing in ghosts and that reasonable, rational, scientific people don’t believe in ghosts as a rule, much less have experience with hauntings… let me hve my say.

What exactly is a ghost? I know that the question would be absurd to a non believer… but let us just pretend to be believers for a moment… or rather, let us put ourselves in the role of an open minded cataloguer of phenomena. What are the various beliefs regarding ghosts? You might have heard of many different ones, but let me just put down the gist of what I have come across about these partcular creatures… :)

As an aside, assuming that ghosts are the imaginings of a fevered mind, or the projection of our personal fears, (though there are proponents enough that would try their level best to refute this particular theory) isn’t it amazing that the concept of ghosts exist in one form or the other across cultures of the world? The various scientific (or pseudo scientific) explanations for this conformity run along a handful of lines. (As a note, I’d add that I’m not putting forward anything new at this point of time, and you would probably have come across at least a varation of this stuff at least a million of times :) )

One of the prominent ones among them is that of the eternal quest of humans across all cultures to come to terms with their mortality. Cessation of your life, your individuality, is after all a chilling concept once you confront it. That thought, by its very nature, cannot be culture specific, and is the reason for the development of so many theories of what happens after death. The fear of the unknown is the most terrible, and what can be more unknown than what comes (or doesn’t come) after death? Conveniently there is nothing that can prove or disprove the many theories, they might be all equally true and might be equally a bucketload of moonshine.

However ghosts are a different matter. They have crossed the boundary between life and death and still operate (or at least are believed to operate) by rules similar to the world of the living. As opposed to the soul, ghosts are traditionally assumed to have personalities bearing relation to their living counterparts. Most cultures opine that the personality of the ghost would be essentially similar to what it was while alive, barring circumstances of revenge, regret, penance etc. However another interesting theory is that as in all things, a personality must be balanced. If a human was essentially “good” while alive, his ghost would be essentially “bad” and vice versa :). Anyway almost all agree that only those personalities take the ghostly path (if such a one truly exists) that have strong attachments to the living world. The variations arise as to how these are resolved… One path leads to ghosts, the other to rebirth. :)

Anyway that wasn’t the direction I actually wanted to go in… I was thinking that it’s almost agreed that ghosts (if they exist) are people who are particuarly attached to something in this world, which doesn’t let them move on. Just as an intellectual exercise, consider the implications if we extend the concept and look beyond mere people.

What if we consider ghosts not just of human beings, but also of ideas, situations, dreams, desires, ambitions; not just those which are dead or no longer exist but also which are just without a concrete existence… I’m fumbling for words again… I mean rather that all the things or rather entities that existed once upon a time, but somehow got divorced or disassociated from their realities. They are all ghosts.

The idea being that if we dream a dream, it gains it’s existence from the amount of energy we put into it, the degree of desire for its fulfillment that it is associated with… in other words, how real it is for it’s dreamer. Then if that dream is suddenly abandoned for some reason, even if it was not through through the death of the dreamer… wouldn’t that dream hover ghostlike till it found another being who could embrace it and try fulfilling it? I believe that dead dreams, broken dreams have their ghosts as surely as people do.

And haven’t we all been haunted by memories of a past gone by, a situation, a person? They are memories, but are they any less ghostlike? And what of the paths not taken, the decisions not made? They haunt us often enough. They are probably more worrisome than human ghosts!

I know this is a nebulous theory which needs more work for it to be halfway articulate… It is not in a shape for it to be understood effortlessly :) But even if no one feels that way, I believe in the existence of these ghosts more strongly than human ghosts. And afterall, a century or two hence, ghosts might turn out to be a commonly accepted “natural” phenomenon! :)

Happy hauntings...