Creating dichotomies splits reality where it cannot be split, and establishes conflict of energies where integration of energies is what is needed. Fragmentation happens, and it always creates problems. The problems, however, are not solved by codifying the fragmentation as a permanent condition.
“Evil” is not a cosmic force of permanent standing alongside an equally separate good. This literalizing creates a duality that blinds you to the nature of energy and its proper use. Consciousness, deriving from the Divine always, is good. When you do not understand its true nature, or become forgetful of its source, you fragment that which cannot be permanently, or finally fragmented.
If you believe in a reified, permanent evil you cannot understand the essential goodness of consciousness or energy. What we call the “shadow” side is the unintegrated aspect of your own consciousness. The shadow and its contents are not static, but shift as consciousness shifts. Acknowledging the shadow is not acknowledging Evil with a capital E. Instead, it is acknowledging your need to be aware of, and to integrate, split-off parts of the self that represent energy and insights you need for your own wholeness.
When the shadow goes unacknowledged and is reified as a separate and independent cosmic force, it creates problems for you, for you do not see what you need to see to achieve a necessary phase of wholeness in your evolving. For example, it is easy for you to condemn others who, operating out of ignorance, create disasters in your world. Many of you assume that terrorists, with the beheading of innocent hostages, embody acts of pure, unadulterated evil. What are the terrorists doing? They are using an ideology of good and evil to justify acts that are clearly barbaric. What you may not realize is that if you see the terrorists as agents of Evil with a capital E, you are taking a step in the same direction.
Need we remind you that your bombs in Iraq have killed and maimed numerous innocent people? Are these acts then “good” because they are aimed at annihilating “evil?” Your own unacknowledged shadow is just as dangerous as that of your “enemy,” in fact more so because it lurks behind you, intimately poised in the moment. Now we are talking about energy and its use, so the danger is quite real. Unacknowledged negative energy, especially when it is rationalized as good against a reified evil, can kill and maim. It can also make you sick, directly undermining your own wholeness.
Good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, body and spirit, being and nonbeing – whenever such dualities are given cosmic status or are considered to be permanent conditions of being, you are asking for trouble. Whenever you label others – any others whatsoever – as Evil with a capital E, you are cultivating fragmentation, conflict, violence or the misuse of energy. Indeed, at such moments it is precisely the time to look at your own shadow, and see what is hiding there. It may be waiting to catch you in a moment of weakness, ready to wreak havoc with energy in need of recognition and integration.
What about the seeming evidence for “evil forces” such as dark spirits, demons, etc.?
My friends, read what we have taught you about the imagination and its use, and about your field nature. Do you wish to empower such forces, hypostatizing* them by your own beliefs? When you do so you project your own shadow outwards, joining energy links with others of similar beliefs, co-creating and energizing the very forces you fear and wish to defeat. To be blunt, not only are Christian, Muslim and Jewish fundamentalists unwittingly in league with each other, any of you are also in league with them whenever you knowingly or not, reify or hypostatize evil, granting it substantial, independent being. In each case the irony is tangible and potent, for such “Evil” exists only by reason of the individual or mass belief in it. The displaced shadow, whether of an individual, a tribe, or a nation, whether of traditional religion, cult or new age sect, is energetic and will affect the one or the many whose shadow it is.
What we are counseling is not an unrealistic denial of the many “evils” you experience and witness. On the contrary, we counsel a tough honesty and lucidness, a willingness to face squarely your own shadow, to see through artificial dualities to the actual use of energy that is obfuscated by such literalized beliefs. It is only by understanding the most basic terms of being, including the creative capacity of consciousness to shape energy in a given field, that you will truly evolve and begin to experience the peace and wholeness you all seek.
(*hypostatize: “to ascribe substantial or distinct existence to; to consider as real.”)

©Harry C. Stafford

Barbara Billiot Stage recently took this photo while on GhoSt Augustine’s Haunted St. Augustine Tour.
Awesome photo and thank you for sending it in!
Make sure you check out one of our ghost tours while in St. Augustine. You never know what might show up in your photos.

ASSESSING THE PARANORMAL:

by Harry Stafford, Ph.D, Director of Haunted St. Augustine – Nighlty Investigations of
the Paranormal

                                           THE ROLE OF THE MIND I

        There’s a familiar saying “it’s all in the mind.”  All of us have experienced the power of suggestion.  We know how rapidly our attention can be riveted to something of appeal or significance to us – such as someone consuming an icy beverage on a blisteringly hot day.  Parapsychology recognizes how easily the power of suggestion can evoke the paranormal experiences that so many strongly desire. This is evident in many supposed sightings, interpretations of what we hear on EVP, or just the feelings evoked by eerie accounts of paranormal events.  What about a decidedly spooky setting such as a cemetery filled with broken and weather-worn monuments?
        On an even more fundamental level, we are learning the potent role mind can play in the very ways we construct reality.  The Placebo Effect has proven how sugar pills can contribute to healings if we believe these pills to be some powerful drug.  Demonstrations of psychokinesis or telekinesis in the laboratory illustrate how the mind may directly affect material objects apart from any ordinary physical contact.  What is most relevant to the paranormal, however, is the view of many physicists today that mind is at the basis of all reality.  Sir James Jeans once remarked that our understanding of quantum physics makes the world look more and more like a great idea (mind) rather than a great “thing” (matter.)  Most of the founders of quantum physics – such as Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, etc. – held similar views, views that are even more commonplace today.
        All of us — and all “things”– are manifestations of a vast, integral field of energy that is more like “mind” than “matter” as it is traditionally understood.  Our observation and interpretation of what we see and experience cannot be neatly separated from what we think of as a world or events existing objectively apart from us. In a real sense, there is no such separately existing world.
        Consider what this means, for example, for encounters with the paranormal. If we do not exist separately from the ordinary world, how much more true is this of the paranormal?  If we in part construct the ordinary world through our senses and our beliefs and interpretations of events, how much more true may this be for the world(s) of the paranormal?  If we project reality outward onto our everyday world (a well-known fact of modern psychology,) how much more may we do so with the paranormal world(s)?  For example, what is an “intelligent haunting,” really? We shall return to these intriguing and perplexing issues . . . Paranormal riddles are also riddles about the nature of reality itself.

©Harry C. Stafford, 2010

The most direct means of encountering the paranormal is through the use of the five senses. Ordinarily, because of the physical orientation of the senses, they block out far more signals than they bring to awareness.
The senses are often quite acute when danger is present, linking us to the instinctual world of our primal ancestors. Sensory data then seems intensified or heightened, even riveting.

It’s probable that at one time in human evolution what we think of as paranormal encounters were far more commonplace. The boundary between life and death, between the ordinary physical and the realms of spirit would have been far more permeable. This seems to be the case even now with psychically gifted people.  As our species chose more and more to literalize physical experience, granting it an independence that it does not possess (for all is energy,) the closely linked living energy field we share with all else became seemingly more dense, opaque and separate. We conceived a world of objects rather than an animate realm of interdepedent subjects.

Primal peoples around the world have generally maintained their intimacy with nature as a participant living framework. What we think of as heightened sensory abilities or psychic/intuitive awareness remain far more commonplace. There is no abrupt break or chasm between what we call the paranormal and the normal. Evidence suggests that most of us can extend the use of our senses and psychic awareness with some training in harnessing these natural abilities, for example through meditative or similar practices. Learning to explore the paranormal is also learning to know ourselves more, including a wide range of abilities we probably all possess that remain latent until called into service. The paranormal is certainly one trajectory for expanding our consciousness, and deserves our respect for that reason alone among many others.

Harry C. Stafford
Copyright 2010

Just last week another photo was submitted by one of our tour guests. A moving orb was captured in a photo at one of the cemetery stops on our Haunted St. Augustine Tour.