Standardization… or not?

Another three am night, laying in bed with the brain buzzing and sketching out paragraphs and details. Tonight it’s for this blog. So it’s now sitting up in bed, typing, brain buzzing still. But there’s a cool breeze through the edge of the window. The room isn’t yet cold. I’m still awake and classes don’t start til noon. So I’m writing.

Today, I got a post on my facebook wall from a guy who I think has written me before about some kind of group that is looking to standardize methods within the field of paranormal research for groups across the nation. Upon reading my answer, I felt that I came off a little too harsh. Now, I’m not sure the OP even saw my response, as I noticed he’d hit about twenty other walls at the same time, I did want to throw the issue out to you guys.

Standardization. What of it? 

We’re talking about multiple paranormal teams putting together some set of “professional” rules for conduct, method, and technique for approaching paranormal research situations, to (I’d imagine) bring more credibility to the field and likely more progress toward becoming established as (what? A science? A reality?) at least a, we’ll say, field of credible research.

I’m putting words in mouths now, but I believe that these are implied or at least tangential issues relating to standardization of the field. I see there as many ways of approaching this, and as toward what I lecture on, we have to put it in context.

Context first:

Of where the paranormal field stands today in the public eye (because we’re seeking credibility, refinement of image, acceptance). And in the public eye recently, the paranormal was at first an oddity, something undiscussed, something that our society had done away with with the advent of science and progression in technology and medicine. Equally so, with the progression of colonialism, the “forward” progress of the West (capital W), we saw our way as the right way, our knowledge as True knowledge, and all other ways inferior to our own. Any reflection of different cultural or spiritual belief that wasn’t in keeping with “refined” or “modern” thinking was noted as sub-par. This kind of thinking echoed into and through the late nineties, where in pop culture, the supernatural began to again rear its timely head.

We all know the story. Ghost Hunters hit the television market and brought exactly what the field needed as the first step in credibility; down to earth people studying in a down to earth way what finally could be seen as a down to earth phenomena. It revolutionized public thought toward the matter. It became alright to discuss these goings ons. Hip, even. Teams sprang up across the nation. Thousands of teams who wanted the cameras and the EMF readers just like TAPS. Before long, Ghost Hunters had a monopoly on the market of budding research teams.

Equal to this fad and acceptance was the excitement on the homefront. People thought they were being haunted right and left when in fact, they weren’t. How many times did I go on a residential case and hear a homeowner say that they knew something was going on because “they watch all those shows on TV.”

As if to balance out the worry of the reality of ghosts was TAPS’ undying skepticism and method of systematic approach. Unfortunately this alienated a whole slew of different approaches to the field, many of which carry some credibility and history. The animosity toward psychics and mediums generated by misunderstanding of TAPS principles bordered on hatred. Which still strikes me as ironic.

But that’s been leveling out lately again. Right now, other shows have sprang up successfully that illustrate different approaches. The dialogue has begun on public forums and at various paranormal events and conferences across the nation. This is wonderful. We’re dealing with a realm we know very little about. To decide that we know how to investigate it and draw firm theories is presumptuous.

The Personal Level:

To say that approaching this subject with anything different than “scientifically” or “technically,” is to have the mental state of being Scientistic (assuming that we can not truly know anything that isn’t empirically valid–which essentially discounts direct experience).

This area may possibly be from a plane that isn’t completely scientifically documentable. The same way we might never be able to put God in a laboratory or weigh True Love on a scale, we might never be able to document a ghost. Indeed, much of our interaction with the other side might be inherently personal, and in so being might contain many different methods of approach. To shut down these methods with standardization would be very wrong.

But that’s on the personal level. That’s for those of us who want to experience more directly this field we’re researching, who aren’t in it to help people, who aren’t in it to prove it scientifically, who don’t care about the general acceptance of the community at large.

The Paranormal Level:

As a community of researchers looking to help people, yes, standardization may not be a bad thing. TAPS does it and it certainly seems to do more good than harm. When most cases are debunking or spreading simple awareness, then yes, there are many very effective methods that can be semi-standardized. TAPS has already done it, building their “approved” family member teams across the nation. It’s done them well and they have a solid network. If someone (like the man who wrote on my wall) was interested in doing the same thing but with different specifications than TAPS, then so be it. It’ll be a long climb, but certainly can be done if you feel it necessary. First you need to establish a very well-reputed team and then begin to network with other teams that share similar thinking.

But be wary. We just emerged from a period of narrow-sighted, narrow-minded thinking, to the exclusion of other very possibly legitimate processes (that need further study, in their own way). Whether that be psychics, mediums, the processes of astral projection, out of body experiences, or study of different planes of consciousness, or even mysticism. We don’t want to go back to that.

The World:

Now then there’s the larger community in general. The world. This comes to issues of “progress” and “advancing the field,” which means to legitimize the work. To bring realization to those on the fence and non-believers, to confirm that something is happening. In the world we live in, better or worse, like it or not, that means scientifically. If we want to “prove” something to the masses, it must be done in a laboratory. Because, unfortunately, we are a scientistic community. In which case we would need results, publishable, applicable (to steal from the opening monologue of A Beautiful Mind), and replicable results. To do this, there needs to be not standardization but four to ten years of college education. Process. Tests. Publications and repeat, verifiable testing.

And to do this, no standardization of homebrew hometown teams is going to matter one bit. A unified field of researching working claims of residential hauntings hasn’t in the last ten years and will not bring further legitimacy to this field in this scope. What this field needs is a serious and reputable scientist (or, frankly, many) to get serious about the real science of it (not the waving-an-EMF-meter-around-stuff we like to call science).

So regardless of what was on my wall, regardless of what was meant when different people discuss the issue different times, it matters in one of these three ways, be it on a personal, on a general, or on a wide scale, discussion of the issues of “standardization” need to be very explicit and very specific, if they even need to be discussed right now at all.

But that’s just what I think. Love to hear from you guys too. As always, feel free to sound off in the comments section below.

The Problem (or lack thereof) with Apple’s Digital Publishing

Yesterday, Apple announced brand new software called the iBooks Author Program, which is an OS-X Program you can download in which authors or indie publishers can design and format digital books or textbooks for the ipad. This came on the heels of news about Apple’s new bookstore, where you can now buy textbooks on the ipad like any other books, often with cool new features, like interactive videos and demonstrations and whatnot.

More info on that can be found here; http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apple-announces-ibooks-author-app-for-os-x/

But today I read an article tweeted by one of my more favorite authorly types earlier today here; http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539 about Apple’s EULA, the End User License Agreement (those pages and pages of text we all just click agree to and never think twice about).

What Apple has done with this new software is to say that legally, the book produced by this digital publishing app belongs to Apple if your book is priced other than free, and that the author gets a split of the profits 70/30. Which is essentially the same as app designers for the app store. The problem here is that Apple also reserves the right to deny your book publishing, to which you cannot then use the exported material from the app (which produces a file, just like a music file or a Word file) to then sell somewhere else on the web.

This book is different than your content. I’m a novelist and a writer. If I format my novel for digital publication on Apple’s website through their iBooks program, Apple only owns that file produced by their app, the “book,” not my content itself. I can still go publish my content as a new book in a different format all I want.

Why this is an issue: 

Hubbub arises because no other software puts these kinds of restrictions on the files produced. Microsoft does not say that you can’t use a powerpoint presentation because its through their software. This, critics say of Apple, is an unprecedented restriction, and is ultimately very, very greedy.

Also, people are misreading Apple’s legalities and think that if you publish your book through Apple, they take the rights to the entire content, which would mean you couldn’t sell it anywhere else, and so would mean if Apple turned down your work, you’d be screwed out of publishing your content. This isn’t true.

Why you would care:

Digital publishing is the future. Books aren’t going anywhere; there are too many fanatics who love that experience of reading a bound book, myself included. Legalities like this are paving way for the future of digital publishing, exclusivity, and the implications for independent writers and publishers. And if you’re an independent writer looking to take advantage of an easy publishing format, well–this is important.

But mostly this is a huge step in digital publishing, and many people think its an ugly one.

Why this isn’t a big deal:

Through zdnet, Ed Bott writes

Dan Wineman calls it “unprecedented audacity” on Apple’s part. For people like me, who write and sell books, access to multiple markets is essential. But that’s prohibited:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

Point one: “Essential access to multiple markets” is only prohibited if you’re so lazy that Apple’s publishing software is your ONLY means of formatting your digital book.

Point two: In software this practice is unprecedented, perhaps, but not in the publishing world.

Apple is publishing a book that you took the time to format through their device. This is publishing. This is a business. In the world of real books, you send your material to a publisher, and they cut a deal for the rights to publish that book, and tell you that you can’t do it anywhere else until your contract is up.

Obviously digital publishing is a bit different, especially with all the variety of outlets and file formats. Nook, Kindle, and Apple all have different formats. (The market right now is essentially a slow-moving format war that really just needs to find a universal, the way that .mp3 finally took over for much of the music industry). Because anyone can format a digital file for free these days, there are no big publishing companies snatching up all your digital rights for only one format.

Apple isn’t even doing that. Which makes them less “greedy” than industry standard for print books.

But Bott continues:

The program allows you to export your work as plain text, with all formatting stripped. So you do have the option to take the formatting work you did in iBooks Author, throw it away, and start over. That is a devastating potential limitation for an author/publisher.

Devastating limitation? No savvy author or publisher would want to put all their eggs in one basket with Apple, and producing the only formatted copy of your book through Apple is just ignorant business. Also, it’s not that hard to reformat your book for other file types.

With digital publishing, sites that I use like smashwords.com tell the author how to format your story to be published on any number of digital devices, which the independent author then creates through Word, submits it to the independent digital publisher, who then turns it to downloadable content for most industry leading formats. This cuts out the middle man working for the company and leaves it to the author. It’s not that hard. For short stories, this can take an afternoon. For novels, perhaps a couple days. They distribute your work anywhere you like and take a small cut of the profits. You can also take the formatting elsewhere if you like.

But Bott continues:

I’m also hearing, but have not been able to confirm, that the program’s output is not compatible with the industry-standard EPUB format. Updated: An Apple support document notes that “¦iBooks uses the ePub file format” and later refers to it as “the industry-leading ePub digital book file type.” But iBooks Author will not export its output to that industry-leading format.

My longtime friend Giesbert Damaschke, a German author who has written numerous Apple-related books, says via Twitter that “iBA generates Epub (sort of): save as .ibooks, rename to .epub (won’t work with complex layouts, cover will be lost).” Even if that workaround produces a usable EPUB file, however, the license agreement would seem to explicitly prohibit using the resulting file for commercial purposes outside Apple’s store.

Of course this is the case! It’s Apple. It’s how they’ve always done it. Their files (which, doing a lot–containing images, videos, and audio as well as text–necessarily demand their own file type) are always for their own devices. Remember when iTunes first got big? .aac has always only worked on Apple devices. It’s always been their business strategy, this is no surprise. And of course if you change the format you’re going to lose your formatting. .Epub can’t handle this new file design. And of course Apple wouldn’t let anyone else sell their media outside their store. It’s Apple.

What the future looks like:

This situation is only a minor hiccup; people love to hate on big business crushing self-starting artists. No little man is being crushed. Any publisher or author who has any idea what they’re doing in the publishing world (even the brand, shiny, new digital one) knows better than to fall into whatever “problems” might come from using this software.

Apple might be setting a new standard here for book publishing, but it’s no different than what they’ve done for digital music.

Digital publishing is exciting. It makes publishing so easy for indie authors or publishers. Its wicked cheap. What we authors need is an industry-leading format and marketplace, the go-to place for digital stories the way iTunes and Amazon are the go-to places for music downloading. We need somewhere that new authors can introduce new material, and where, if it’s good, it will thrive.

This well could be Apple. I hope it’s Apple. iTunes is great and this needs to happen for authors as soon as possible. And this new way to get published is easy and should be celebrated. The legalities are only a limitation for lazy authors who don’t want to format for the rest of the market right now and don’t understand that this is still publishing. It just looks a little different.

Whistling Through the Graveyard

It’s been over twenty investigations now. I’ve been across the state of Colorado. I’ve been up and down the East Coast, in England, abroad. I’ve been searching to quench that desire to experience a spirit in a way that I can’t deny, in a way that validates everything I’ve felt so drawn to for the entirety of my life.

You go through cycles when you put yourself in a situation like this, when looking for a truth you can only find through personal experience, knowledge found immediate. There are ups and downs as you search, there will be moments of doubt. No search for truth can be without them. You’re first discouraged, then drawn back again, excited, perhaps to fall discouraged again, only to bounce back.

It’s been like this for the last two or three years for me, since I’ve been seriously investigating. I’ve been to the most haunted places in America and I never found that experience. It’s not a joke when those experienced in the field say that you can go for years before finding a satisfying haunt. It’s true. Sometimes the spirits do not come out to play. Sometimes still they don’t play with you. And further still after that, they don’t play the way you want them to. They don’t act on command.

Lucky for me that a series of events has led me to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, and I’ve found my first experiences there, and everything has changed.

It’s like a cycle, between the amateur and the intermediate investigators, the expert above all else. I became fully intermediate, well versed in the stale residential haunts – those haunts of enthusiasm and fear. I walk into buildings. I carry on one-sided conversations with empty walls. I listen to hours of empty evidence over and over. And I’m be asked in interviews and by friends, “Do you ever get scared?”

No.

I never did. Sometimes I’d feel unsettled, yes, generally only for a documentable period of time. A few minutes in a corner that struck me as funny – perhaps a spirit was communicating in the only way it knew how. Perhaps the dark had finally gotten into me, if just for a moment. Perhaps I finally let my thoughts run too far and away.

But it was that skeptical mindset and lack of experience that kept me in control. The place wasn’t haunted until it impressed me. And none of them impressed me, and likely they wouldn’t.

The Stanley changed that. I gave summary in an early blog of my first experiences there, the near constant bangs circling around our rooms, the flashlights blinking on and off with a timing too well to doubt, the table tipping sending the flashlight nearly rolling. Since then, I’ve had more and better experiences, ones to validate with audio and video I’m still analyzing, looking to put into words and another blog forthcoming at the end of this week.

I’ve been in the presence of spirits, and for the first time, I’ve known real fear on these investigations.

It’s so easy to sit back at home and watch the doors close on television, hear the disembodied voices and long for the experience. It’s so easy to walk into a building and ask to be impressed, to feel comfortable enough to sleep. You echo to the homeowners to talk to their spirits, to treat them as just unseen people. That there’s nothing to be afraid of.

And most times, there’s not. But fear is still their instrument.

The dark can be a scary place for many. An endless depth of the unknown. A face could be inches from your own and you’d never know. It’s the fear of the unknown, Lovecraft and many others have reminded us, that’s the greatest. It is. In the darkness for the skeptic, the darkness may well not hold an unknown. it’s easy to think of those spirits, should they be there at all, as formless, abstractions, imagination.

I’ve heard the kind of footsteps over my head that can be nothing other than a person having broken into the building walking with slow step, one, and then another, above my head, but with no body there. When you hear their voices and you know that the sounds they’re making can be not of this world, there comes a face in the shadows. Perhaps moments from manifestation, a touch away, real.

The investigation becomes not just a waiting game, but a game of tensions. The sound in the hallway coming closer, the footsteps louder, and nearer. Your equipment is moving and something is about to happen. Your nerves stand on end.

Your physical responses change. I’ve had them change in perfectly calm settings, when tension hasn’t been building, when the ghosts are being playful, that lead me to believe there may well be a feeling that comes with certain spirits, a passing of emotion and energy manipulation that scares us. It’s not rational, it’s not from within, but it can move you to your bones.

The hardest part as the skeptical investigator faced with a true haunting? Keeping your skepticism, keeping your imagination and your control in check. Just because a place is haunted, without argument, does not make those sounds spirits, when in any other place, they’re settling, natural sounds.

It’s become a new step, to regain footing again. These spirits, many of them, are people, and there is nothing to be afraid of. But that’s what makes it more difficult. Calming yourself and keeping a sane head on an investigation is all the more challenging when the sensations are from beyond you, or are not of your mind, but instinct.

It’s not like it is in the books. It’s not like it is on television to actually be there. The black shadows flicker and the unknown has moved from the question of whether they exist, to the question of whether they are who and what you think, and not something we’ve come to associate with the night, and the black, something dark, something that wants to harm us that we cannot see.

It’s hard when a faceless black shape fleets in hallways just out of sight, making sounds never on command, but skirting immediacy. They can mess with you. They do.

Lucy or Paul, two of the resident ghosts of the Stanley, are happy to play with the flashlights and close their doors. There’s little fear there. You’re communicating with a friendly spirit, but the fear is what takes you when you hear the distant sounds and no one says hello, when possibility comes formless, dark and watching.

It’s my next step. Overcoming the fear of the supernatural. The fear that comes from inexperience. I love it. It’s something the investigator needs to master. You should not run. You should not lose control. Your team needs that, and you need that. But fear is good; that excitement that knots your gut, the anticipation. It means something’s happening, and that’s the feeling you look back upon when you’re done. That’s the feeling I’ve been waiting for all my life.

Finally the dark has looked back and said hello.

And I come back each week for more.

So be patient, and the spirits will come. But be prepared. It will get scary.

I don’t care how seasoned you are. Just be chill about it and stay. Take those deep breaths, whistle through the graveyard, shake the feeling when the feeling gets too much, but remember when you’re there that it’s when you get that feeling that means it’s happening, what you came for; it’s this feeling that you’re going to remember the next morning, that you’re going to be unable to put into words for your friends when they ask you how it went; and it’s going to be this feeling that you’ll be looking for when you go back again.

I don’t know what’s next for me. I’ve found experiences I cannot argue with. That have shocked and surprised me. Perhaps next will be the pinnacle, the apparition, the feel of their touch. And then what? I don’t know, but you bet you guys will be there with me.

Copyright 2010 Karl Pfeiffer

That Bastion of Calm –

So I’m finally home after two weeks on the road – half of which I feel like was getting back from England.

I can’t speak much about the details of working with GHI, you guys will just have to wait until round about June to catch it on the tv, and keep your eyes peeled for some little tidbits between now and then over at syfy.com. But what I can say was that it was truly a brilliant experience. The case was fantastic, the team was fantastic, the crew was fantastic, England was fantastic – the whole thing.

The entire experience has been a humbling one. I like to believe there’s Reasons for everything, and from day one when I sent in my email and picture and heard back with a request for a video, the process went out of my hands and beyond me. Out of some six thousand applicants during that first round, I was so lucky to have been picked. To have made it through the process to finally get the go-ahead phone call was a near-spiritual experience. Never moreso in my life have I so fully given myself up to exactly where I was supposed to go –

And now on the road, I’m doing my best to be aware of the why. Why me? Why here? Why now? Why has my life been propelled in this extreme direction? I’ve met some truly amazing people on the road, some of the finest people I’ve known. Some of which I’ve connected with on a deep, reverberating level that I don’t understand. Be they just very like souls or be there something deeper, something that speaks to past-lives, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to your individual spiritual sensibilities. But something’s happening here. And not only was it interesting to watch and pay attention specifically to, but to embrace experience and new friends as fully as I could. Realization or not, that alone elevated the experience to something magical.

Getting home was not such a magical experience. When I wasn’t exhausted and longing for a bed, I surprised myself by staying in a decent mood. Anticipating the six to seven hour flight from England, I stayed up all night before (no difficult task, a last night in town, goodbyes to new friends and conversation until the dawn, I was scrambling to shower and pack by the time I hit the lobby to catch my ride). Three hour car ride and Heathrow like an ant colony, I managed to catch the flight just fine and we got off in time.

New York was experiencing wet weather. Thick clouds, strong wind, and heavy rain made the approach miserable. I felt like Jack Ryan trying to catch the USS Dallas. Next time I shoulda just sent a freakin’ memo. As soon as we broke into our descent the plane started hopping and rocking. One dip lasted about twice as long as expected and elicited some yelps from the passengers. Sitting in the furthest back row I knew we were in for it when the attendant grabbed the sides of his seat and said, “This is going to be a rough one.”

But I managed to smile through it. Perhaps some blend of sleepiness and a touch of Irish music a few tracks before, and I enjoyed the bumps, taking confidence that that day would not be my day, and if it was, well, that’d have been random.

Upon passing customs and immigration at JFK, my duffel in hand, I went to check in for my connecting to catch the suggestion that it was cancelled, only to wind up at a closed terminal, crossing the street in gusting wind that had me pressing down on my cap and bent 45 degrees. If that wasn’t enough indication, I hit terminal two, stood in line for thirty minutes, and got final confirmation that indeed my trip to Denver was cancelled, no, I said, I had no one to stay with in the New York area, and the soonest flight was Monday – nope, actually, Sunday has a connecting through Minneapolis. Book it, I said, and wandered into the grimy terminal to curl up on my bag and get some rest. Around eleven I stood in a much shorter line, made sure to smile and ask if the workers were rested and doing okay (they weren’t on both counts, but I made an effort to be easy and sympathetic – I thought I hated bitchy customers at a movie rental store, I could never do their job), got the okay and wandered through security to sleep at a gate. Woke up to bustling crowds and airport food too expensive for my hunger.

I finished the Sweedish novel Let the Right One In (a wonderful and brilliant novel. Everything I wanted it to be, and better than the film – which is fantastic in and of itself – it truly does the work of real horror literature, studying childhood, love, coming of age, playing with themes of light before a deep, rich darkness. I highly recommend it).

Twenty minutes before the flight I found I was at Gate 20, not B20, and ran for the shuttle to terminal 4, only to discover Delta had botched the seating assignments and had people just sit wherever. They wouldn’t check my bag and I had to stow it, the whole while waiting for a petite and perky woman with sticks in her hair to ask me to check it from my kung fu grip. Another half hour waiting on the tarmac, we finally hit the sky. Minneapolis was quiet and pleasant after the bustle of JFK, and after only two hours took off for a remarkably bump-less flight into Denver, where it was snowing thick flakes. But the landing was smooth (I recommend snowstorms to rainstorms tenfold). I managed to collect my bag at the claim (which I fully expected to be lost, considering all else that had happened, as the icing on the cake), spun through the doors and caught my lovely girlfriend, and we drove off into the snowy night.

A hottub and a full night’s rest on an actual bed again, and I’m human once again!

Edit to add: I should mention I flew Virgin Atlantic from England. They have a very pleasant way about them that I can’t complain about. The entrance was just bumpy as hell due to the weather. They were fine. It was as soon as I hit Delta for the connecting that I ran into my little problems…

Is there advice here? Yes, I think so. No, it’s not to avoid Delta at all costs (just rainstorms). Even if you’ve spent forty eight hours traveling home, it makes for a good story and odds are your fit at the people trying to rebook and reorganize is just one of thirty, and you’ll likely feel better to take it slow and be polite. Maybe I’m odd, but I like spreading a little peace and being the calm guy while around me the world spins in chaos.

Also, go with where you feel like you should be. Pay attention to what life has for you. It’s fun and enriching, and I can guarantee, no matter how rich and colorful already, will make the world around you even more so, perhaps adding even a touch of sparkle, like that sunlight on fresh snow as it melts on a spring Monday morning.

Poor Forgotten Short Stories…

Starting as a comment, this thought grew too long, and I decided to turn it into a short blog.

Mark Rushing commented on the last post, expressing that he’d never much cared for the short story form, where he used to think that it was lazy writing, too wordy for poetry and not digging the way novel writing does. And he’d continued this thinking until reading a short story that I wrote and passed along called Dreamland Crocotta after which he reconsidered his entire standpoint.

First of all, Mark, what a compliment! Thank you very much for that.

Otherwise, I agree, I think there is a prejudice against the short story with many. I’m not sure why the short story is losing popularity rapidly of late either. It’s a question that I don’t think will appear for its final time here. You’d think with our shorter attention spans the short story would be huge, entertaining in small doses, but it’s not. It may be because television shows are easier to watch, considered easier to engage with, but I’m not sure that reading in general is declining as quickly as the short story – so who knows?

There is a sincere history of true brilliance in the short story form. As I’ve said in my last blog, it’s a study of a moment or instance, a situation. More than an image or series of images in a poem, but short of the character and societal study of a novel or novella, the short falls in between. I didn’t realize how much fun and how exciting it can be to write and read short stories until college. I began my writing career with a novel in high school and worked hard on that for years. It wasn’t until my freshman creative writing course that I was really introduced to the writing of it, and now, engaged, writing novels and shorts alike, I’m playing catch up as quickly as I can, a stack of anthologies and collections waiting to be read on my shelves. (Likely this will be my traveling reading – something tells me short excursions into easy, quick stories will be nicer with the rapid changes in traveling abroad. And if you must know, those collections are likely Stephen King’s Just After Sunset, Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things, and the two I’m probably most excited about, Peter Straub’s study on the evolution of the horror story in his two volume collection of American Fantastic Tales).

Advice: Give short stories a chance. Theres a very real, very true brilliance within. I’m saddened that it has taken me so long to discover them myself. They’re fast, they’ll keep your attention, and they’ll leave you as satisfied as much on television. So dig up a collection or grab one of the few literary mags on the rack at your local bookstore – trust me, it’s worth it!

To Trust Our Eyes

Last night I tried to write about the people amidst the paranormal field and their intentions, trying to get a feel for the direction the field is moving – it was an utter failure.

Today on Twitter, @Koogiemyster asked my opinion on reality and people’s perspective. This is a good question, albeit broad, and addresses a really fascinating blend of religion, philosophy, and science all amidst the supernatural.

Reality is defined as the world around us, occurrences that are fact and not simply perception. In philosophy, “existence that is absolute, self-sufficient, or objective, and not subject to human decisions or conventions.” It’s the world beyond our eyes, not necessarily what we see.

Human perception of the world is awfully fragile. Most of our looking at what around us is in memory. The “present” moment of perception is instantaneous. The moment that you read this for the first time, it is gone as quickly as it came. We view the world, as clearly as we ever will, for an instant, and we analyze through memory alone.

Memory is something you can’t trust as far as you can throw. It’s fact that memories are moldable and subject to manipulation, though many don’t think so, trusting inherently. In crime, while witnesses can be the best leads on a case to point the police in the right direction, their testimony is weak in a court of law. All too often two witnesses of one instance will report different memories. The color of the suspect’s shirt, the kind of car he drove. My psychology teacher in high school recounted a memory of his childhood – one of his earliest. He vividly remembered riding his tricycle down a very steep driveway in front of his house in Germany, but later, when he finally got a chance to see pictures of the house, the driveway was flat. Did he make it up? Consciously? No. But the brain constantly does this.

Perhaps most clear of the brain’s inability to clearly handle memory is on a Paranormal Investigation. You’re in a dark room, you hear a strange sound in the hallway adjacent. As soon as the sound goes, your brain fumbles around the memory of it, what exactly did it sound like? Sometimes, by the time you get back to your evidence and hear it again, it may sound completely different from your memory.

Matrixing puts what we know to unknown or jumbled sounds, making noises sound like words. Our brain is an interpreting device. Even direct vision is largely extrapolation, the brain studying the points of light around blind spots and assuming what fits best in between.

So can we trust our memories of what’s happening around us? To a degree, of course. Depending on our focus, our brain records these images and sounds with more detail. Repetition builds stronger memories, molding with more force.

As for the actual nature of reality and our perception of it – the whole concept is a can of worms. In Philosophy it’s called Phenomenology, it touches on Epistemology, it’s an important element of Psychology. I took an intense class on Religious Experience a year ago, studying each of these philosophies in turn and how they relate to the supernatural – at least in terms of religious experience.

It’s a raging debate. You can run in circles all day at the finest phenomenological approach, that we can never trust what we see because everything we experience is experienced through our senses. We have a tree, we see the tree, we interpret the seeing of the tree as seeing a tree. We touch it to verify the tree, but we must first feel the tree, interpret our sense of feeling, and decide that the tree exists.

You can never validate reality by sense because your mind can lie with your senses. The world around us could be an elaborate fraud designed by our brain and our consciousness.

To make progress at all, many in the philosophical community and the scientific community have to put aside a few exceptions. We must assume that we experience the world directly, and we must assume that others also experience the world as directly. Then we seek validation of experience by comparison and documentation.

It cannot be taken completely at face value that we perceive directly, or that we see in the same way that a camera can see. Science has focused rather exclusively on the trusting of our five senses, that our way of perceiving the world through each of these five is the only way in which we can experience. Philosopher William Alston wrote a book called Perceiving God, in which he addresses Mystical Perception versus Direct Perception, how we cannot look at the two in the same way, how our experiences build to beliefs, epistemology, and how with those beliefs we form Doxastic Practices. The practices and beliefs of our day to day lives are built on our senses, and we cannot compare the extra-sensory to basic sensory because the two are radically different and have conflicting belief systems.

I could go deeper but I feel that it would stray from the point. If you’re looking for further reading I highly recommend Alston’s Perceiving God, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, and Anthony Steinbock’s Phenomenology and Mysticism. The three deal exclusively with religious experiences, but they’re studying perception, reality, and the fringes of the sensory, horizontal world that we experience every day, which is not so different from any other border-pushing discussion for the nature of what may lie Beyond, and how we see that world.

What do I think about reality? I think I can’t know as much as I think. I think perceptions can be flawed and must be approached critically. I also think we need to trust that we see directly to the degree that we need to chase it down with documentable science, to continue pushing at that border with the technology we presently trust. But I also feel that in our pursuit toward that which rests unseen, by nature of being sometimes seen, we must consider that there are different ways of perception, that our everyday senses may not be enough or all that there is. And in this way I think it’s important to consider not only the supernatural, but reports of Religious Experience, mystical perception, and psychic phenomena.

Advice? Maintain healthy skepticism about experience, staying “scientific,” for we know our pursuits as scientists are not in vain, and do present evidence, but be sure to balance it with staying open to possibility, for there is more here than meets the eye – or for that matter, is interpreted by it.

Thanks for the topic, Koogie, it was fun and I liked the direction it went. A full one-eighty from last night.

Feel free to share comments below on your own thoughts, further questions, or field-furthering perspectives.

And if you have any other questions in mind that you’re interested in my blogging about, feel free to send them to me here, on twitter, facebook, anywhere really –

On Reaching the Front-Lines

I’m not sure if it’s the writer in me or the narcissist or the kid with the new toy (though it’s likely all three), but I’m quite excited to get this blog moving and hopefully generate some interest, discussion, idea-sharing and general merriment here.

I posted to twitter that I was interested in public opinion on blog topics – be they questions, queries, general thoughts to respond to or whatnot – and I’m thinking I’ll reply to one tonight. It’s only two thirty in the morning, I’ve a tumbler of cran-grape juice, the interwebz are quiet and I’m decently awake. If you have anything on your mind that you might want to query, please, feel free to share, here or there works fine by me.

Tonight, Mark Rushing (@adaptiveoptics) asks how my thoughts/beliefs in the paranormal may have changed after more rigorous investigation:

I thought this was an interesting question, not only for content, but because it’s been the second time I’ve been asked in two days.

To date, my perspective on the supernatural has not been particularly swayed one way or another. Ghost Hunters Academy was indeed more rigorous than any of my prior experience, which included a smattering of local cases, no personal experiences, and limited training. During much of the show there was heavy, heavy focus on the technical side of things, efficient setups (both botched and butchered, but successful too), and the education of proper procedure, which in many ways detracted from the full-on focus on the spirits. Our experiences and evidence were limited. There’s nothing at all wrong with this – we in fact got some neat evidence for a few cases. But nothing revolutionized my way of thinking.

I’ve always been a believer in the supernatural, it’s a faith that has stuck with me since I was young, coloring my interests, pursuits, and study. I’ve never had a significant personal paranormal experience before age twenty-one, but I’d always dreamt of a career within the field. Of course in the last few years I’d come to terms with the fact that there is no money in monsters – only the select few can cash in on it, let alone make a living. In 2007, I went to college to get a Liberal Arts degree in creative writing, my other sincere passion and best incorporation of the dark into my career, and so scientific pursuit of the supernatural was moved to the back-burner. Though I turned up the heat when I joined a local team, it became a personal curiosity to satisfy, a love still just beyond reach.

If anything then, this remarkable opportunity – a long-shot-turned reality that rocked my world and truly threw my life off the rails – brought me to the hard realization that I’m not only living the dream, but I’m actively at the front of a fluid field that, though at its peak and potentially changing worldwide views on the afterlife, is still living a fragile existence. It’s a pseudo-science that is constantly adapting, constantly changing, and constantly seeking grounding and support in the skeptical, science-minded, horizontal world we live in. It’s brought me to the realization that out of nowhere, I’ve become a part of this on the front-lines. It’s time to snap out of it – to change everything the world had pounded into me. I’m the hippie with his hair buzzed off in a pair of fatigues – my entire outlook is in shock.

I’m in it now.

It’s real now.

Thank god I see a lot of this coming together. My own personal beliefs and pursuits, my writing, my study of not only the supernatural but the thematic darkness (it’s the poet in me), my search for meaning and faith, a brainstorm of discovery. And what better place than a blog to think on it, to share with the community who wants to hear about it and work to sculpt not only the field, but life itself.

I’m not convinced I’ll make a difference, not even a tremor, but I’m a part of it now, and I’m excited to bring my tools to the table, if you’ll have me.

Thanks for the question, Mark. After seeing where this post took me, I’m not sure I could have suggested a better one.

Advice, then: when life hands you radical change, keep your mind open enough to change your perspective in turn and see what you can learn and share.

Thoughts?