BREADCRUMBS: /home/zuihitsu/singularity/release/i11Eleven.1
so now kill the reader
Do you believe in ghosts? I don't. I don't believe in ghosts in the same way you don't believe in the table that's right in front of you. The table just is. Belief and faith don't enter into it. It's the same with ghosts. They just are. Belief and faith don't enter into it.
As with any thing that just is you edit out any complexity and accept it. When you get down to it a table, for instance, is unbelievably complex. It would take a whole host of scientists to define a table. To tell you about the elements which constitute its physical essence, to explain how these elements are organized. Indeed the scientists would eventually have to admit that beyond a certain level they are just as unknowing as a child would be about the physics of the table that they've just spent a lifetime attempting to describe.
Yet assert the existence of ghosts and you find yourself being asked to prove it. Which is just as hard as it would be for a child to define a table it couldn't see. Ghosts are. For me they have always been, as with anything that just is I edited out the complexity and accepted it. A fact of reality I grew-up unaware of. Not exactly something I could even begin to describe. Until recently that is. And even now there's a degree of uncertainty urging me to silence. For having attempted to explain more than once it's becoming increasingly annoying that what I say is taken as nothing but clear and present evidence of psychosis.
It's when questions asked of self weeks before begin to resolve themselves that you begin see the shape of the thing. Not as words but as mechanisms of affect. Things beyond what's there you consciously recognize as happening before they happen. It's not until you get beyond third-stage thought that you can see what's going on. Then you find a way to pattern the forces in operation. Thoughts overlaid onto realities which outer reason insists must be unconnected. Tricks of mind patterned on to whatever happens to be. Giving yourself, finally, a way to affect the unseen.
These ghosts are not a psychosis. It just sounds like it. Language breaks down when attempting to describe it. A Cassandra complex operating in the realms of the spoken word. Words like /seeing/ and /hearing/ become metaphors, introducing confusion. With no way to quickly modify shared semantics the spoken word becomes useless. Even the written word becomes problematical.
My overt conscious awareness of the ghosts stems from a specific trauma. And in it's way that only makes it worse. A moment in time I find myself reliving. Again and again, over and over, looking deeper and deeper for an explanation. A way to highlight what changed and how. Comparing before and after. Looking for a way to cope in the here and now, and a way to understand the before: the things which must have been there; and were; yet were continually occluded. Even chance events of daily existence have been known drag me back to that moment. Prompting me do dive even deeper looking for answers.
The closest I've come to defining the effect of that trauma is synesthesia: one sense to bleeding into another. If you imagine perceiving everything you taste as including a shade of brown you'll understand how odd this can be. Now close your eyes and tell me which sense can see your face, or your fingers when they move. Now try coping with what the world throws at you when in a very real sense you can sense an identifiable outside presence bleeding into that place.
You become aware of the senses you never knew you had. Senses that sense neither inside nor outside but, for want of a better word, between. You begin to learn to see beyond that blind spot the world taught you to accept. Begin to map the parameters of effect as they operate here and now. Finally seeing how your past life was constrained. Identifying forces that didn't so much dictate the course of this life as dictate the way you feel about your life. Forces designed to build fences around your mind to grant others the ability to profit at your expense.
Ghosts with the strongest presence correspond to an extant identity; the spirit of a living person. I can spot them, see exactly who they are, mitigate their effect. Others I see indirectly in the subtle shifts of emotion and behaviour I've experienced but not understood. Moments of the past I become mindful of, allowing me to identify veiled spirits. Then there are the ghosts I sense before they appear. The ones that break the silence, saying things I'm often uncomfortable with. These come from the elsewhere. Driving me to discover the truth of the things I hide from. There's a degree of uncertainty with such spirits, after their passing they're more probability than certainty.
It's where the voices and the ghosts intersect where I have problems. A voice spoken in my mind is a voice of my mind, or so I once believed. When a voice and a presence correspond it's a hard belief to maintain. The surety of inner thought I once enjoyed is replaced by doubt and uncertainty. Thinking becomes a struggle, movement even harder. For I've begin to see there are ghosts that may slide into my mind unseen. Ghosts with the power to affect my voice, disrupting the illusion of free will. Leaving me in a place where mindful inactivity is the safest course of action.
For me, now, ghosts are something I have to live with. Adjusting my behaviour and patterns of thought to compensate for their effect. It's unpleasant in so much as so much of what went before is called into question. For as I review the past through the eyes of now I'm able see moments where ghosts were operating. Moments which challenge the very concept of individual identity. For if an individual self is to assume they be the sum of their experiences, of their actions and inactions, how can I be me when so much of my experience is tainted by the unseen actions of these others?