Ghosts Are Real

By Jack Tanner

Scientists once laughed at people who believed in invisible waves. Then the theory of electromagnetism demonstrated that we are immersed in an ocean of invisible waves. Scientist sneered at people who believed in invisible energies. Now scientists say that 95% of the universe is made of dark energy and dark matter that are wholly invisible. It won't be long until scientists have accepted the reality of ghosts. Imagine a soul phone for contacting the dead, such as Thomas Edison believed possible. Would it be the most popular invention ever? Whom would you call? - famous figures from history, saints and prophets, or your dear departed ones? Or would you try to get through to God himself, and hope you didn't get a crackly connection? Atheists always get "No Signal."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244073138

Book preview

Phoning the Dead

I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us. – Thomas Edison

I have been thinking for some time of a machine or apparatus which could be operated by personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere. – Thomas Edison

It is possible to construct an apparatus which will be so delicate that if there are personalities in another existence or sphere who wish to get in touch with us in this existence or sphere, this apparatus will at least give them a better opportunity to express themselves than the tilting tables and raps and Ouija boards and mediums and the other crude methods now purported to be the only means of communication. – Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison, the great American inventor and businessman, admitted that he worked on a device for contacting the dead.

Imagine a soul phone. Would it be the most popular invention ever? Whom would you call? – famous figures from history, saints and prophets, or your dear departed ones? Or would you try to get through to God himself, and hope you didn’t get a crackly connection? Atheists always get No Signal.

Imagine a spiritual internet that had nodes linking it to heaven, purgatory and hell. Would you prefer to receive messages from the damned or the saved? Who would have the most exciting Facebook page: God or the Devil?

There was a time when almost the whole human race believed in ghosts. Now most people are generally skeptical. What has changed?

Did we once have a natural ability to communicate with the dead? Have we lost this capacity thanks to evolution? After all, people obsessed with the dead would have much less productive lives than those preoccupied with the living. It’s essential to the march of progress for us to be able to leave behind the dead, to filter out their ethereal voices and spectral appearances.

Think of all the people in the world who spend their time praying and meditating. They achieve nothing. No religion contributed to landing men on the moon. Mathematics, science, engineering and technology accomplished that astounding feat. If humanity consisted only of those who pray and meditate, we’d still be living in caves. It was imperative for humanity to leave behind religion and spirituality, and embrace reason and logic. Sadly, only about ten percent of humans have managed this evolutionary transition to any useful degree. Most humans have lost the ability to see and communicate with spirits, but they have not gained the ability to think intellectually. They are therefore lost souls, caught in No Man’s Land.

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Nietzsche wrote, In the ages of the rude beginning of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dreams, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dreams; likewise, the idea of a soul’s apparitional body: whence all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods.

Nietzsche committed the classic error of assuming that our dreams were like those of the ancients. He regarded primitive man as being deceived by his dreams, while we, sophisticated and knowing moderns, are not. He did not consider that we are the ones being deceived. The modernist fallacy is that we have the same minds as the ancients. We don’t.

Nietzsche wrote, [In ancient man], hallucination was extraordinarily frequent, and sometimes simultaneously seized entire communities, entire nations.

How would Nietzsche know that the ancients hallucinated? That’s just his interpretation. An obvious alternative interpretation is that the ancients didn’t hallucinate, and actually encountered a spiritual reality, full of real ghosts and gods. Modern dreams are but a faint, impotent echo of the glory of ancient humanity’s dreams. We have closed off our ability to see a much wider world than the one now available to us.

The ancients were much more religious and spiritual than we are because that was their lived experience. We have replaced real otherworldly encounters with pretend encounters (dreams), although now and again real encounters penetrate our dreams and provide us with prophetic information.

The entities that undergo the strongest effects of evolution are not our bodies but our minds. The Bible is obviously not a book by and about people with minds like ours. Someone such as Abraham (founding patriarch of Judaism, Christianity and Islam), is an unrecognizable character in the modern world. No parents would admit to being willing to slaughter their own children if a voice in their heads ordered it. The ancient mindset is now largely unrecognizable in the Western world, although its traces are still evident in many African nations, and in Islam and Orthodox Judaism.

The culture that surrounds you either helps to support the ancient mind, or to nullify it. If you are not raised religiously, you will lose your affinity to religion. If you are raised religiously, your whole identity may revolve around your religious beliefs and be infected with superstition, fanaticism, and hostility to mathematics, science and philosophy. Look at Muslims. Many of them have the same kind of ancient mentality possessed by their prophet Mohammed. They obsessively read his Koran, which indoctrinates them with ancient ideas. They cut themselves from modernity. Their whole outlook is backward-looking. They do not intend to be part of an evolving society, shedding old, failed beliefs and fantasies.

The ancients had religious minds. Moderns have atheistic minds. Moderns don’t see the world as ancients saw it. In today’s world, how many Westerners can even begin to imagine how Muslims look at the world? It’s as if we are dealing with two different species.

Religious people see ghosts. Atheists don’t. It’s not that ghosts don’t exist; it’s that they’re invisible to certain minds, and visible to others.

Is it possible to bring back the reality of ghosts to those who have seemingly left behind that strange world? Evolution demanded that we abandon ghosts, but higher evolution demands that we find them again in order to better understand ourselves and our world. Reason and logic need to be turned towards Ghost World because only by understanding that world will we understand the fundamental nature of the mind, and why it’s so different from matter.

The mind, like ghosts, is not part of the physical reality studied by science. To gain knowledge of the mind, we must move beyond science. The rational subject that lies beyond science is mathematics, and this, believe it or not, is the subject that can explain the reality of ghosts!

Ghost Genes

The spirit world shuts not its gates. – Goethe

Imagine a time when most humans had ghost genes, meaning genes that allowed them to detect the presence of ghosts. Perhaps these genes were linked to the condition of synesthesia. Wikipedia defines this as a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Let’s say that a spirit could whisper to you, triggering you to perceive a ghostly aura in front of you. Because of this direct sensory experience, you had no doubt about the existence of a Spirit World.

If you lived in medieval Europe, under the hegemony of the Catholic Church, you would have been raised in a culture that proclaimed the definite existence of ghosts, spirits and souls, hence there would have been nothing odd about encountering such things. You might well have been expecting to see ghosts. No one would have doubted you if you said you did.

However, as philosophy and science eroded religious belief, expectations started to change. People became skeptical. The culture switched away from spirits.

Genes and Memes

Let’s, for argument’s sake, link genes and memes. Wikipedia says, A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

If matter can affect mind, and mind can affect matter, then a change in genes could alter the transmission of certain memes, and a change in memes could activate or suppress certain genes.

Ghost genes could be repressed because the meme culture that once supported them had become less successful and useful. New memes would arise associated with different worldviews e.g. the materialist scientific perspective. People would stop seeing ghosts, and start seeing the natural world in much more detail. We could envisage a rise in autistic genes. Autistics are highly unlikely to see ghosts. They never encounter liminal phenomena since they are so strongly attached to the blatant sensory world (rather than the subtle sensory world). Most scientists are clearly on the autistic spectrum, and generally have poor imagination and intuition.

British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow spoke of The Two Cultures – namely the sciences and the humanities – and said that the intellectual life of the whole of western society was divided into two by these two rival worldviews, and there was almost no understanding of each by the other. Non-scientists are invariably totally ignorant of serious science, and scientists are almost invariably uninterested in literature, art, poetry, classical music, opera, ballet, theatre, and so on. Snow wrote, So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had. This is horrifically true. The chatterati, the people who set cultural trends and the cultural tone, are about as scientifically literate as chimpanzees. Science, mathematics and philosophy are almost wholly absent from mainstream culture.

We could equally talk of autistic culture (the sciences) and non-autistic culture (the humanities). As religion declines, autistic science rises. Our world of computers, technology and materialism reflects autistic values. Although the content that appears on the internet is non-autistic, the technological infrastructure that supports the content is almost exclusively autistic. You never find Arts graduates inventing new technologies. They are the users of technology, not its creators.

In an autistic culture, you get zero points for mentioning ghosts, spirits, souls and minds. Autistic scientists go as far as to deny that we have free will, thus relegating us to soulless machines.

The British philosopher Gilbert Ryle derisively referred to the ghost in the machine in relation to Cartesian mind-body dualism and the idea that we have a soul that exists independently of our body, and survives our bodily death. Well, if you remove the ghost, all that remains is man as machine, and this is very much the prevailing scientific worldview.

There are five ways to understand reality: 1) religion (structured, authoritarian, judgmental spirituality; very popular in the past); 2) spirituality (unstructured, non-authoritarian, non-judgmental religion; very popular in the present, especially with New Agers); 3) philosophy (based on careful thinking about the world); 4) science (based on the senses and sensory experiments); and 5) mathematics (based on the language of numbers rather than words). These different systems may actively affect your genes and memes. You are extremely unlikely to see, or even consider, anything incompatible with your chosen worldview. Number humans are radically different from word humans. Wordy people often find numbers baffling (math is the most hated, feared and alienating subject on earth), while numerical people find the stories that wordy people tell themselves silly and preposterous. No numerical person can read the Bible or Koran, or any of the texts of Hinduism or Buddhism, without a shudder of revulsion. None of the sacred texts of the human race contains a single equation, or a single reference to mathematics and number theory. No prophet or guru was ever a mathematician, scientist or philosopher. All prophets were wordy, and never numerical. The Angel Gabriel never passed a single numerical insight to the prophet Mohammed.