Psychological Perspectives on Reality, Consciousness and Paranormal Experience

Tony Jinks

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030289010
• eBook ISBN: 9783030289027
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Philosophical Metaphysics
• Index: Psychology

This book explores variousexplanatory frameworks forparanormal encounters. It opens with the story of an inexplicable human figure seen crossing a secluded hotel corridor, interpreted as a ghost by the sole witness. The subsequent chapters explore the three most important historical perspectives accounting for this and other types of paranormal experience. Each perspective is examined from first principles, with specific reference to what happened in the corridor, how it happened, why it happened, and who might be responsible.

The first perspective considers the experience to be legitimate – to be something real – and various possibilities are presented that are grounded in the paranormal and parapsychological literature, among which a "ghost" is one putative explanation. In turn, the second perspective treats the experience as being wholly illegitimate. With reference to psychological theory, the ghost sighting is a product of erroneous consciousness. The third perspective is different yet again, and considers the sighting to be authentic, but argues that explaining the ghost requires a radical departure from conventional models of reality and consciousness. By contrasting these three paths, the book provides a valuable resource for readers interested in the philosophical and psychological origins of explanations for paranormal experiences, from the 19th century to the present. It will appeal to general readers in addition to students and scholars of parapsychology, anomalistic psychology, and consciousness studies.

Part IParanormal Experience

© The Author(s) 2019

T. JinksPsychological Perspectives on Reality, Consciousness and Paranormal Experiencehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28902-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. What Is a Ghost?

Tony Jinks¹

(1)

School of Social Science and Psychology, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW, Australia

Tony Jinks

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

I’ve chosen Tom’s ghost story as the centrepiece because it is so humdrum. There are plenty of more interesting (although much rarer) examples I could have used that reside on the other end of the ghost-story spectrum, such as this one from a 56-year-old man named Dan;

In December 2002, just a few days before Christmas, I woke up about 5:30 or 6 a.m. and walked over to the bedroom window. I parted the vertical blinds and cursed under my breath because it was still raining like it had been for days. As I turned away from the window, my body chilled from head to toe. Standing right in the middle of our bedroom doorway was this huge ghost dressed in a hooded brown robe. The guy was at least seven feet tall and filled the whole doorway. Where his face should have been in the big hood was just like a swirling mass of energy, and you also couldn’t see any hands or feet – but he totally filled the whole doorway. As I looked at him he extended his arms forward like he was offering me this short staff or rod that he was holding – it was maybe 24 inches long. Then I turned my head away for a moment, and when I looked back he was gone.¹

This unsettling tale is too dramatic for me to use, as it distracts from the book’s primary aim to summarise the origins of “everyday” unusual witnessed events that are far more commonly reported, like Tom’s man-in-a-suit.

At this stage it is worth taking a brief pause, and recognise that attributing Tom’s (or even Dan’s) story to a “ghost” is unhelpful. It begins at the wrong end. Instead of starting with this label, there should be a slow and methodical examination of the details of Tom’s sighting without any reference to what a “ghost” might be. I’ll be laborious and detailed and overly systematic at times, but I think that’s necessary as this is not a method commonly employed—after all most books on “ghosts” (or anything else strange) set out to argue a particular case from the beginning. I’m not doing that, for I have no particular perspective to favour, and they are all of equal significance.

So back to ghosts.

While Tom’s audience relied on this particular word to discuss the sighting, they might instead have used “apparition” to characterise the experience as something visual—that appeared. Apparitions can be in the solid human form of Tom’s entity, known prior to the nineteenth century as the “living dead” because the ghost looked just like a real flesh-and-blood person until it disappeared. Alternatively it might seem substantial but be of the much rarer “living cadaver ” type if its physical appearance showed signs of decomposition.² Luckily for Tom’s state of mind he didn’t see a rotting corpse. Then again, an apparition might be as elusive and insubstantial as a cloud of steam,³ the typical representation being the wraithlike and shrouded “phantom”.

Other words available to describe the ghost were “spirit” and “presence”, and yet all these terms in the manner in which they are used imply the same thing. In the words of Welsh philosopher Henry Price,⁴ rightly or wrongly Tom’s friends are referring to the pre-scientific idea of a dead human being in a duplicate form to the human body still lingering on earth.⁵ That idea is expressed in various ways, with degrees of additional information. For example, in the words of long-time ghost hunter Andrew Green, a ghost specifically refers to the earth-bound essence of a deceased person that for whatever reason continues to haunt a particular location, and will do so until they are persuaded to “pass on”.⁶ Indeed, by Gary Schwartz’ definition a ghost is a combination of a spirit and a presence;

…. spirit is used to refer to the hypothesized continued existence of the consciousness and information (and associated energy) after physical death…. [whereas] presence is used to refer the potential hypothesized localization of the consciousness, information, and energy/spirit of the deceased person.⁷

Ideas like “passing on” (alongside “apparition”, “spirit” and “energy”) are intuitively understood, even if the mechanisms underlying these states, and how they could transpire, remain a mystery. A listener might even fill in the missing gaps in Tom’s story, concluding that the ghost (or whatever label they use) was indeed someone who had died on the hotel’s second floor at some undisclosed time in the past, perhaps tragically. Feasibly, he committed suicide in one of the end rooms because of a business decision or an affair gone-wrong, and has never “passed on” to the afterlife. That’s why the ghost was seen by Tom—he needs assistance in the passing on process!

Taking this idea further, a ghost traipsing the corridor as a man, albeit in a diminished form, is a sentient active spirit presence.⁸ This is arguably the most popular contemporary conception of what a ghost is. On the other hand, maybe we’re giving too much clout to Tom’s ghost? The ghost-concept has been intensely studied for well over 100 years. Indeed the best work was done prior to (and just after) the turn of the twentieth century by illustrious names associated with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR); Barrett, Sidgwick, Myers, Gurney, Lang, Crookes, Rayleigh and Lodge. They each provided alternative (and creative) theories about what ghosts are, that don’t require them to be “active”. For instance, the seventh President of the Society, Frederick Myers, suggested a ghost need not be sentient (or even partially sentient). Rather it is a veridical after-image , meaning the entity doesn’t force its perception onto the witness. In Myer’s words;

Instead of describing a “ghost” as a dead person permitted to communicate with the living, let us define it as a manifestation of persistent personal energy, or as an indication that some kind of force is being exercised after death which is in some way connected with a person previously known on earth.⁹

And further;

…there is strong evidence for the recurrence of the same….figures in the same localities, but weak evidence to indicate any purpose in most of these figures, or any connection with bygone individuals, or with such tragedies as are popularly supposed to start a ghost on its career. In some of these cases of frequent, meaningless recurrence of a figure in a given spot, we are driven to wonder whether it can be some deceased person’s past frequentation of that spot, rather than any fresh action of his after death—which has generated what I have termed the veridical after-image —veridical in the sense that it communicates information, previously unknown to the percipient, as to a former inhabitant of the haunted locality.¹⁰

Applied to Tom’s encounter, his ghost is merely residual. It is the impressions of a former guest or worker imprinted onto the built environment through some habitual and emotion-charged activity they undertook when they were alive,¹¹ and that can be visually “played back” to a living witness until the imprint of this energy has dried up. An alternative name for this notion is the stone-tape effect (or stone tape theory¹²), although in this case “wood-tape” or “plaster-tape” might be more appropriate in deference to the composition of the structure that the remnant is perceive...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Paranormal Experience
• Part II. The First-Path
• Part III. The Second-Path
• Part IV. The Third-Path
• Back Matter