Food For Thought

Anyways, that's the week, folks. I asked quite a few questions and, regardless of what the original intention was, don't really seem to be any closer to a codification system for the things I may encounter in the field here soon enough. However, I think that even coming up with the right questions to ask at all is the first step to even being able to wrap ones head around something new like this. I remember a linguistics teacher mentioning once how difficult it was to turn people onto the beauty and diversity of language, because if a society doesn't have a word for something it makes it next to impossible for someone within that society to try and conceive of it, which thereby makes trying to open your mind a much more difficult prospect than one would expect. Anyways, I'd like to think that by even trying to think of these paranormal phenomenons as something beyond "ghost story" and instead look at them as something that -can- be classified (or at least attempt to classify them), that in and of itself it the first step to maybe opening up the concept of a "ghost" in a way that hasn't been looked at in such a way. And yes, I don't have so much hubris as to think that I'm the first to ask these questions, but dang it, cut me some slack. o\One has to be able to run to the nearest Circle K before they can run a marathon, right? :P

Party Lines

I suppose a perfectly viable question for a reader to be asking right now is 'does he personally believe in the paranormal?' Well...yes and no.

Just as a preamble, I'm doing my best to go into all of this as unbiased as I possibly can. However, I do have two major sources of skew that luckily, courtesy of being from opposite ends of the 'believer-skeptic' spectrum, should just about cancel each other out. 

In the 'believer' corner, growing up I absolutely -devoured- anything I could find on mythology, folklore, the occult and unexplained, you name it...and I actually cleaned out the entirety of the six local libraries and most of the university's collection as well. So, put lightly, my working knowledge of what's supposedly "out there" is pretty freaking set. 

However, in the 'skeptic' corner, I have over seven years of working in some capacity (ranging from research assistant to primary investigator) with actual, honest-to-goodness research in both an academic and grant-funded sub-department setting. This experience has instilled me with a zero tolerance for unprovable hypotheses, appeals to emotion, and other "evidence surrogates" that I may come across...

So if we're talking about what I'd -like- to believe in, then the romantic in me wants to shout out "EVERYTHING!" as loud as it can for everyone to hear. The pragmatist in me, however, tempers that idealism with a healthy dose of "where's the proof?". So overall, I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to different phenomena (psychic, spiritual, etc.), with the notable exception being cryptozoology. When it comes to cryptozoology, I think that there's a much greater chance of proving that there is/was an undiscovered creature than an undiscovered form of consciousness or mental energy. So, if you're asking me if ghosts exist as such, my answer would be "maybe?". If you're asking if I believe in telepathy, I'd respond with "I dunno". It you're inquiring whether the Lindwurm could have ever been a real creature, I'd be much more optimistic. No matter what though, you better have something more solid than a good story to go off of.