The Blackberry Walk

This one's a little schizo, reading back, but oh well, they often are on the dark side. Every now and then, someone sees a ghost. It could be a haunted house, a family member who's recently passed, or the ghosts may be of the land, like fighters from an ancient battle. Ghosts, demons, gods, pixies, faeries, elves: most (but perhaps less than you'd expect) would say you're a bit nuts if you were to recount your mystical encounter; such events are simply unscientific! Our imagination to believe in that which we haven't seen or been told to believe hasn't disappeared. Such fantasies are ever-present in the much maligned "conspiracy theorist" who conjectures based on hearsay and rumour. Is testimony and experience no longer trusted? Will the courts of the future be based solely upon photographic evidence and forensics? Science is a great tool. But as a student of chemistry, I can tell you that it ain't perfect. Much is unknown, including some vital parts if the metaphysical ship isn't to sink. But for the scientist of the past this wasn't an issue. Newton wasn't attempting to create a metaphysics out of the theory of gravity; no, he wanted to discover the laws of God's creation. The task of science is explanation of what is material - it's a model proven through goodness of fit - not reality in of itself. Ghosts and demons not being "scientific" shouldn't make them untrue, since science doesn't explain everything, and also can't explain everything. The scientific method can't reproduce supernatural experiences, since that's not how mystical encounters work. You can't sit a man down in a lab to summon his deceased mother a few more times: she just won't pitch up (if I were a ghost, I wouldn't either). Psychology as it is has their subjects examined in white sterile rooms, resulting undoubtedly in unnatural results. Given that science can't disprove the supernatural, many move to philosophy to attempt to explain away the mystical. The unwitting Cartesians argue that, "the experiences of ghosts and such are in the mind, not the world", but is there any ground at all for that assumption? Some may say that God is in the mind, but how can you differentiate the DVD player from the TV antenna when all you can see is the screen? For the supernatural can either be built into our brains like an appetite, or our brains simply have an eye which can perceive the mystical world every now and then in glimpses. The mind body divide doesn't resolve this dispute either, since there's an implicit assumption that everything in the world can be readily perceived. If a machine hasn't been built (yet) which can see faeries, they can't exist! Modern man fails to trust worldly phenomena. It's as if a pervert designed a pair of X-ray glasses, but spent their time staring at people's organs instead of their bodies. If you look at the organs for too long, you'll forget that the world is living! Love is real. It isn't, as far too many people I've asked have said, just "a chemical in my head". If that's what you think, you're looking through the beautiful bosom of reality to look only at gnarly viscera. The world is good; but it isn't the world of viscera and clockwork that we are taught to think of it as. The scalpels which dissect the world into ever smaller constituent parts like organs, tissues, molecules, and atoms (a tomos - that which can't be cut), should only be wielded by surgeons - the average man would make a pig's breakfast of any such operation. Instead of cutting up the world into parts haphazardly, can't we trust it is how it appears? Can't we trust that love and emotions are real, beyond merely being your brain's algorithms and instincts? Can't we believe that there are some things we can't sense with our first five and instead need the hidden five-hundred more? Can't we simply trust our first five senses, believing our experiences are real and not merely projections and shadows of reality? Our Gnostic doubt of the material world only divides us from it. Like Shinji, we struggle to connect with others since the world is made arid through the sowing of seeds of doubt. Nay, it's not through instrumentality - the rejection of the world - that we can connect with others: it's through trusting and loving all of creation.