Talking to Spirits

It is hard to believe I was an atheist less than a decade ago. I was raised to be a casual Christian. I was baptized as a baby and confirmed at age 14. My parents took us to church when my brother and I were little. By the time we were adolescents, my brother and I would often walk to church unaccompanied by our parents. We were both confirmed around the same time.

I felt strung along by the Christian church. There was always the promise of being saved or “hearing good news” followed by empty posturing or rote recitation of mostly inscrutable Bible passages that I felt had no relevance to my life. It did not help that the most avid churchgoers in my life were also the most pushy, hypocritical, and obtuse. The deal breaker for me came at age 16, when the church had zero answers concerning the night terrors I suffered on a regular basis.

In my opinion, the average Protestant church has not been spiritual for a long time. By “spiritual” I mean within regular touch with the spirits/in contact with them. Catholics and Greek Orthodox have the advantage of saints and rituals items like rosary beads; casual Protestants have no such advantages. There is also the common Protestant assertion that any contact with non-corporeal entities other than Jesus himself is Satanic and/or witchcraft. Such an assertion, whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the Bible, excludes and shames anyone who seeks to experience the spirit of place. Those who develop the ability to recognize the differences and overlaps between the spirit world and our own are kneecapped by the insistence that all spiritual experience belongs to Jesus and Jesus alone.

Nah. From my experience, Jesus is truly great, however, he is far from the only god and he’s most certainly not the only spirit. To ironically paraphrase Carl Sagan, J.C. is but one of “billions and billions” in a complex ecosystem.

The Extremely-Haunted World

Most of us have been brought up to believe that if ghosties and ghoulies exist, then surely they must prove it by using their unseen hands to move furniture at night, to win lotteries for humans who beg and plead the right way, and to possess ugly dolls and teddy bears and make them prance about in a demonic yet amusing fashion. That’s not the way it works. Everything and every place is haunted nevertheless. Anyone who has ever sensed that someone doesn’t like them or that a place feels “bad” or “good” for no apparent reason is sensing the spirit ecosystem. The ecosystem is there whether the person astrally blind or profoundly clairvoyant.

Personally, I don’t usually physically see or hear spirits. Every now and then I do, for instance I saw my first full-body apparition in a forest preserve in 2020. I thought it was a man until I got close enough for it to disappear. I usually don’t see spirits. I’ll catch one of my many ghost cats out of the corner of my eye and sometimes ghosts will make a lot of racket in my house. These are not common occurrences. My usual experience is a kind of awareness. For instance, right now I have several spirits hovering nearby. One is always with me -- it’s my Holy Guardian Angel or HGA. Others come and go. Some have bad intentions and are thrown off by my daily Sphere of Protection. Most are just there, like birds in the bushes and trees and insects on the ground and in the air. No big deal. Places also have spirits. My music studio has a spirit. The piano has a spirit who I have named Rex. The desk calendar has a spirit. The elderberry lozenges have spirits. The plastic they are wrapped in has a spirit. The list is endless.

When people ask me “Is this place haunted?” my answer is always “Yes”. Haunted is the natural state of everything. What they mean is “Is one of the entities who lives here disturbed or angry?”

The key realization here is that nobody is ever alone. Manly P. Hall’s Path of the Lonely Ones is only genuinely lonely if non-human entities cannot be perceived, and most people who study the occult find that studying occultism opens the inner eye that perceives the world for all of its genuine weirdness. The supernatural isn’t all that super because it is perfectly natural; it’s just that we humans have fallen into severe blindness.

The Ancient Seers

I believe people used to be able to see the astral plane nearly as easily as we see the physical plane. Over thousands of years, humans lost the second sight. I have always been afflicted with a feeling of sadness and longing for the pre-industrial world when nobody worried about radiation, toxic dumps, or plastic garbage. I don’t feel I am anywhere alone in this or the sense that the world of fairies, angels, ghosts, and other non-corporeal entities has been beaten back. The clincher is that it wasn’t beaten back at all -- it’s just that we have beaten back our ability to perceive it. We are so vain as a species that we came to assume that because we invented our own apparatuses and systems, they can have no consciousness apart from us. The first step to perceiving entities is admitting that humans aren’t so great and special. We are cogs in the machine just like anyone else. We may be creators, but we are also the created. The second step is to try and make contact.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The primary way to begin to sense the rich, unseen world is to thank it. Grateful people are the best sort of people: everybody wants to hang out with them, including spirits. That’s why I suggest genuinely thanking household objects as a first exercise in spirit communication. The next time you shut your front door for the night, thank it as if it was another person who was your devoted personal security guard. Say Hello when you get into your car and Thank You every time you get out of it. Say thank you to the washing machine and dryer for your clean clothes. Thank your bed after you sleep in it. Once you have started thanking the objects you used to take for granted, you might just notice they appreciate being thanked. It’s a subtle, almost indiscernible feeling, but once you start a habit of thanking objects, you’ll sense that it grows and that an aura of protection grows with it. A wise entity once told me that gratitude sublimates what it touches to the power of seven. I took this to mean that the thank-er and the thank-ee become improved and encouraged by gratitude in at least seven ways.

Bad Practices

I don’t use or recommend Ouija boards or seances to contact spirits. Ouija boards are a good way of inviting a demonic infestation, and here is why: they are like giant nets that do not discriminate in what they catch and bring through. Demons want nothing more than to get a foothold on the material plane where they can proceed to wreak havoc upon their enemies (us humans). The Ouija board is usually piloted by a group of know-nothings who seek contact with dead relatives or dead famous people. A bunch of people create an amorphous blob of astral energy that is easily detected and commandeered by demons. It’s not that dead grandma doesn’t want to get through, she cannot get through because the demons will push her out of the way.

The seance is another extremely ignorant practice that invites the demonic from portals on the lower astral plane. Once again, we have a bunch of random-intentioned people creating an amorphous blob of astral energy through which demons may happily travel. Seances are the astral equivalent of going to a seedy bar and then stripping oneself naked and taking a roofie. Though it is possible that nothing will happen, it is more probable that something bad will happen and that it will have at least one VD. To add insult to potential injury, seances are not bookended with any form of banishing rituals.

One of the types of entities I used to see in my unprotected astral travels is the Impersonator. Impersonators are spirits who form themselves into mock-ups of your loved ones and then try to get your attention by using that person’s form to torment you. Let’s say you dream of your aunt and in the dream, the nice old lady you know suddenly seems menacing and sinister. Her form seems to bulge at the edges, rearranging itself. The arms are too big, the head is too small, the eyes seem wrong. My guess is that you didn’t dream about your aunt; that was an impersonator. Impersonators love to play ghost and many ghost sightings of dead “people” are not people at all.

The Rudeness of Humans

Many entities don’t want to connect with humans because let’s face it, we can be very rude. When I was an atheist who believed in The Science, I truly believed if a demon or angel didn’t manifest as a humanoid creature and march up to me and shake my hand, it couldn’t possibly exist. When a bunch of humans sit in their stupid, unbanished seance and demand that spirits make knocking sounds in order to prove their existence, the spirits have every right to be pissed and angered. Part of me doesn’t even blame them for infesting houses and apartments and making the cupboards vomit dishes and flatware onto the floor.

Let’s say I was stricken blind and deaf. Just as I wouldn’t march into someone’s home and demand that people living there prove they existed by doing an impromptu tap dance so I could feel the vibrations, I no longer presume I can force astral beings to do my bidding, nor do I want them to do my bidding. I wouldn’t dream of thinking of contacting spirits as a game (many Ouija boards are made by Hasbro) because that’s freaking rude.

The Beauty of Talking to Trees

The Druid Tree Ritual, which really isn’t much more than an elaborate way to sit up against or hug a tree, is a wonderfully polite way to introduce oneself to the world of the unseen. Though not every tree is friendly, most trees and plants in general love to chat and exchange energy with humans. The Ritual is simple: 1.Spot a tree 2.Ask it if it wants to exchange energy 3.Sit with back against tree for whatever amount of time seems right 4.Thank tree and exit the scene.

You won’t hear a literal voice from the tree, but you’ll probably feel all sorts of unexpected and odd sensations. Paying attention to them and more importantly contemplating them later is an excellent way of opening the avenues of spirit communication. The ritual has three key elements: the asking of permission, the opening of oneself to possibility, and the all important gratitude afterwards.