March 16 - Liminal spaces and ghosts

I listened to the podcast of yesterday's Late Night Live with Philip Adams. He was speaking with English author Owen Davies about his book "The Haunted, the social history of ghosts".

Owen has studied the belief in ghosts from a historical perspective and makes the following oservations -

500 years ago ghosts were seen as rural folk and now they're urban, so it seems that observers see them through the lens of their own cultural perspective

ghosts manifest themselves as pale beings, generally at night, which could possibly indicate that what the viewer is seeing has more to do with moonlight reflecting from something than a physical object.

visible ghosts are in the minority and non-visual phenomena are more common: for example, a feeling of clammyness or the smell of someone's perfume.

the Anglican church is more likely to have exorcists than the Catholic Church.

opinion polls tend to indicate a distinct rise in the belief in ghosts and this trend is consistent with a decline in religious beliefs.

demographically English ghosts are more likely to appear in churchyards.

very few ghosts appear as infants or babies which is surprising as there were so many infant deaths.

the desire to believe in an afterlife prompts the belief in ghosts and this wishful thinking has resulted in many movies about ghosts.

Owen spoke of the state between life and death and referred to this as the "liminal" space. The word derives from the Latin word līmen, meaning "a threshold" and refers to a conscious state of being on the "threshold" of or between two different existential planes. In an anthropological context this state is the time for a rite of passage which involves some change to the participants, especially their social status. For ghosts it's the line between life and death and folklore says it's a porous space that allows travel between the two, hence the appearance of ghosts among the living.

According to Abraham (via Esther Hicks) the transition from life to death is instant and the consciousness rejoins source energy from whence it came. At this point we become fully aware of who we really are. For more information on this see http://www.abraham-hicks.com/

I believe that there are more "beings" in existence in our vicinity than we can see through our lens of "reality". If this is the case then it may be that sightings of ghosts are actually examples of our picking up on the vibrations of these beings. It follows, therefore, that our minds interpret these vibrations through images of familiar things because they have no other context to relate them to.