The Problem with Teaching People About Ghosts
Is That They Obsess & Elevate Ghosts' Powers
#ghostschool101 series
The hook:
1. Ghosts’ nature is Weak, not strong.
Because of this weakness, a ghost’s strength is to convert strength into weakness (undermining) or exhibit strength-via-weakness (oppressive victimhood/powerful helplessness- you should begin to see the contradiction).
A ghost is cold, damp, sticky, stuck, frozen yin energy. (Earth/water symptoms)
To make matters more complicated it can also appear as hot, dispersed, spaced out. (Wind and fire/heat symptoms)
This yin is same yin that is basic space and represents the ground or matter, but appearing in quite destabilizing ways. Sometimes even a “stable instability”.
But in healthy cycles, yin is circulated via yang. Yinyang is the true word for this concept. In truth, there is no “yin” and “yang” as separate entities. Yin becomes yang, yin births yang, and this yang moves yin, becomes yin. There is only yinyang. However… there are superficial complexities in the dual world.
Yin, when circulated via yang, is normal and not ghostly. It has qualities such as magnetic, receptive, yielding, cool, reflective, soft, merciful, hidden, spacious, smooth, dark, obscure, mysterious and pervasive.
Yin, when insular, isolated, frozen, stuck, stagnant…
do you start to get the picture yet?
Even now, if i say, “imagine a ghost”, where does your qi go? how does your qi move? can you perceive that? do you give the ghost a lot of power? do you start to feel afraid (kidneys) or anxious (heart)? does your mind become intoxicated and pulled around by high-intensity storylines?
In fact, when i say “imagine a ghost” you should feel a bit of pity for the ghost, not be afraid of it.
With even more correct training you would feel compassion for the ghost and have strong boundaries against becoming possessed or haunted by the ghost.
That is, unless you have already engaged in a very long addictive fetish with the ghost(s) in which you leak all your qi away in the presence of it.
are you starting to get it?
If you can step back and perceive the big situation you might see that America, colonial history, whiteness, loss of homeland, manifest destiny, racism, sexism, anti-nature, climate change and dozens of other “normal” cultural qualities and behaviors are the long and unexamined fetish affairs with ghosts. (Psycho-erotic abuse & co-dependency)
Your mother’s wine addiction, your father’s violent outbursts, your brother’s cigarette habit, your sister’s vanity…
All of these are the untended and exaggerated energy exchanges we already have with ghosts and ghost patterns.
The strength-via-weakness is the undermining of radiant, righteous qi which vitalizes and circulates generosity, compassion, mercy, discernment. Undermines it into arrogance, pride, false modesty, false humility, victimhood, “trauma” stories, ignorance, greed, binging, excessiveness, deprivation, martyrdom, scapegoating, gossip, distraction, “ADHD”, isolation, alienation, addiction, ungroundedness, uncenteredness, possession… need i go on?
In western psychotherapy we can call this chronic dissociation and dopamine culture, we can call it depression, anxiety and a murderer’s row of assorted addictions.
In neuroscience we can call this “the negativity bias”.
In systems theory we can call this “the meaning crisis”.
The exaggeration of ghosts into something stronger than they are is one of the hallmarks of the modern age. The incessant need to “tell the story” over and over, entrenching and engraining it into a quasi-religious mythology. The addictive bio-chemical opioid release that comes from touching the open wound again and again. Of deifying the “trauma”. Summoning the pity party, conjuring futility.
2. Ghosts are Weak, that’s their strength.
We make them strong, by perceiving that their weakness is strong. (My craving for ice cream for example 🙃)
We misuse our perception, misperceiving, which IS the foothold the ghost already has in us. (All humans are prone to being haunted by the ancestors)
Our misperception is an act of intent and magic, misused in order to squander qi.
This squandering is the reflection of ghosts in our ancestral lineage stream.
It has become normalized via culture to do so.
Even when other intact cultures have tried to teach us what to do about this, we co-opt their teachings and misunderstand using deceptive language to turn our perception back in on itself again, reifying the ghostly situation.
Ghosts are NOT strong, they are weak.
To the extent that we believe this weakness is strength, is the extent by which we are part ghost, haunted and possessed by sad, greedy, unresolved patterns in the ancestral stream.
3. Teaching westerners about ghosts is one of the saddest experiences.
As westerners, living in a ghost-nation, we feed ghosts with our qi even when we think about the word.
We are morbidly obsessed with ghosts.
We place them on pedestals and secretly worship them.
We are in lust with them.
We are already on our way to becoming them.
We sing the ghost song.
We dance the ghost dance.
But not to exorcize, heal or resolve.
No, we do this because we feel confused, desperate, futile.
Addicted to ghosts.
Our entire western cosmological understanding of time, space, history, and nature is based upon ghost ideas and ghost desires.
Our politics is a ghost politics.
Our recreation is a ghost recreation.
When I talk about ghosts, it is NOT to give them more power.
It is NOT to elevate a binary, dualistic good vs evil story.
That story is also a ghost story.
Ghosts are weak in so many ways, that even some things we think are good and rational and strong are actually ghosts.
4. To de-possess the ancestral lineage —the body, the mind, the spirits — requires a decolonial somatics.
This is the antithesis of co-morbidity.
This is the vitalizing of acting and being.
The practice of generating open radiance, while also stabilizing into the center and into the ground.
The practice of generating and transforming states at will, with nature, as nature.
This models the behavior and process that the ghost appears to be obstructed from.
The caveats are many, the pitfalls numerous.
We can have ghostly yang. Aggressive, desirous, excessive. The inability to show mercy, compassion or grace. The craving to transcend, accumulate and hoard. The rage of an infinite victim. The ignorance of an eternal narcissist. Arrogant about our perceived humility. Zealots in the battle “against evil”. All of these and more are ways we succumb to the easiest path imaginable.
If we were exposed to another way, would we take it?
What would we be required to sacrifice in order to do so?
Suffice to say, in this floating world of red dust, we cannot “have our cake and eat it too.”
We cannot “be whatever we want to be”, as they lied to us in the white ppl indoctrination camps called public school.
The decolonizing process is painful because we don’t know what our replacement reality is.
We may not have one.
This is okay, but requires courage and creativity.
This is the point in the sermon where you want and expect me to give you a magical alchemical meditation to practice. Perhaps breathing through your genitals or pretending to be a mycelial web.
No.
Sobriety isn’t about a new drug. It’s just about relaxing around all the cravings and pain and fear and dealing with it, moment by moment.
If you can be okay with not doing the thing, not running to some high-intensity “self-care” routine, only then would i feel good about sharing any of the other practices.
Touch grass, help others, chill out. Listen (but do not believe or obey).
But then, do you know how to listen? Not just be an open wifi signal to a million disembodied voices. Not just be a dullard either. Be sensitive, but not too much. Be kind, but not too much!
for my first 25 years of life i felt tormented in a particular way. due to my exposure to western psychology concepts, i thought it must have been caused by something that had happened to me during this lifetime, even though that really didn't match up with my own memories of my life. i thought that i needed to "accept" it as part of "my story" in order to resolve it. but that didn't work, and eventually a friend gave me some good advice that helped me stop identifying myself with it.
suddenly, i noticed that this previously-terrifying thing was really a lot like a toddler throwing a tantrum: it lacks agency, doesn't know how to take care of itself, and lashes out with a lot of intensity to get what it wants. it thought it needed unlimited candy, but what it really needed was a nap, yknow? relating to it more like a child making an untenable demand really demystified the situation. it allowed me to step into the role of a caring adult, which provided me with a context for how to listen with care but not feel beholden to the demands that were being made.
once i understood the power dynamic, the whole thing became easy to handle and was even kind of sweet. but man, learning not to identify with the ghost...that part was hard. western psychology isn't doing us many favours on that front. having a concept of ghosts is useful to de-identify with these forces, but to your point, the idea of "ghosts" is automatically heightening to most westernised ppl's systems! we don't have an everyday, normal relationship with subtle beings. for me it was necessary to relate to my ghost situation with a very mundane framework (i.e. a kid who is having a meltdown cus there's no more candy) because at the time, that was the only way for me to stay sober throughout the process.
This writing is another level - instantly accessible whilst wisdom-unveilingly re-readable. Surely, I'm not the only one who once had a fetishized contract with a roommate that went ghastly awry... Then, all of a sudden, we're looking at America. (Thanks again, Dare.)