Ghosts

I should have done a post about "Ghosts" around Halloween but for one reason or another it slipped my mind and never got done. I would like to talk a little bit about them because I really believe in these entities, I have personally seen them before and I am not trying to lie about it for attention or whatever. I should really say I don't know what the things were that I saw, but I can only describe them as "ghosts."

To start with, my mom has always been sort of the spiritual type, not the religious type in the sense of a churchgoer but the spiritual type in the sense of their being room in the imagination for the supernatural and the unexplained. I grew up in a household that never gave much thought to science or rational explanations of things at all, so this non rational way of looking things was something I was brought up with and it has never really left me. I still don't care much for science or scientific things and actually enjoy alternative explanations of things. That is probably why religious Buddhism, with all the things some Western interpreters think are irrelevant, appeal to me.


Just last January my best friend and I went out to Cedar Key on the Gulf looking for ghosts. We never saw anything but I might try my luck again this year since I might go out there again for the Thanksgiving holiday. A room overlooking the Gulf sunset for only 70 dollars is a hard deal not to take regardless of any supernatural experiences. Now I'll get to the story.

Back when I was a small boy I remember being in my moms house alone and looking down the hall where I shared a room with my younger brother. My moms room was directly across the hallway. I saw with my own eyes a bright flash of light, but it was sort of like a human-like shape with legs and everything. This "thing" literally flashed across the hall and into my mothers bedroom. I bolted for the front door and sprinted across the street and down the sidewalk to the neighbors house where my mom was out of fear. Looking back now I can't say what it was, only that I saw it and I know what I saw.

It's strange because I mentioned this to a good friend who had a similar experience as this and it did involve a death in the family. She was visiting family in Bogota, Colombia for a spell when she saw a strange light flash and go under a bed. She told me that she was so sure it was her aunts dog that ran under the bed she got up and looked but found nothing. She asked were the dog was and someone said that she is downstairs eating. It couldn't have been the dog. She claims that soon after the phone rang and the news was passed on that a family member had just died, someone she hadn't seem a whole lot of. Was this a final visit before her next birth? The thing that is plausible about this one is she is a very good friend of mine and pretty much someone who is very scientific minded and not the slightest interested in religion, at least not that I can tell. Now it's back to my story.


What is interesting is that all the members of my family say they have heard strange things in the house over the years. My mom talks about the sound of exploding light bulbs in the basement that are just fine when she gets up and checks on them as well as the unmistakable sound of someone sort of sliding down the stairs to the basement, sometimes during the day. I looked for evidence of these things when I was there a few weeks ago and found nothing, I even spent time alone in the basement looking at old memories and felt nothing, not even a little bit uneasy. I trust my family on these things, but I can't say that this was ghostly, only it sounds like it could be. My brother is far more the rational thinking type in certain things then I am, so I tend to believe it more when he gives weight to something my mom or sister said.


The next story is something that actually happened to both my mother and I. I want to say it happened sometime in the early 90's on my way to a Tae Kwon Do lesson. It was cold outside and there were very few people on the road. I grew up in a small community and took lessons in an even smaller one, so few cars were not a big deal. My mom turned our vehicle onto a road that was fenced in on one side that went down to a dead end. The martial arts school was about a mile or so down the road. We saw an older model Lincoln Town car or Cadillac box type car in front of us going really slow. It wasn't out of place really, but what made it strange was that it was going so slow. We weren't in a hurry so we stayed behind it thinking about when the driver would turn. It turned into the Tae Kwon Do school, a converted barn with a dirt road parking lot.

What happened next confounded both my mother and I. This car simply turned into the lot and vanished before our very eyes. I say that I saw this with confidence because despite being maybe back in 93' or 94' my mom and I both saw this thing disappear. We still mention in sometimes in conversation to this day and there is no explanation for it other then this was a ghost car that we both saw.

When we entered the school we sat for a moment and talked to the instructor, mentioning this to him. "Do you know anyone in a brown Lincoln or Cadillac?" He thought about it for awhile and then mentioned that his father used to drive a car like that, only he had passed away some time before. I always found the story interesting because of the fact he said his father drove a car like that and the fact that my mother and I both saw the car literally vanish in front of us. If my memory doesn't fail me then I seem to think that we hadn't mentioned the car disappearing until after we asked him whether he knew anyone with a similar vehicle. Was this his dad on some ghostly visit?


What does this have to do with Buddhism? It doesn't have much to do with Buddhism, but I think we can at least speculate a bit. There are supposed to be ghost realms after death for beings that are lower then the human one. Isn't it possible that whatever ghosts may be out there are really just beings that have died and probably not cultivated a practice well enough to take another human birth? This is a possibility.


We live in a hyper rational scientific age, but for folks such as myself, sometimes speculating about these things or digging up old memories of things that the rational mind can't really wrap itself around is fun. The Buddha said not to look to much at this sort of thing, but I find it grounds me when it seems the whole world has turned to explaining everything through the lens of materialistic and deterministic science with no room for anything beyond that.

Growing up in such an carefree environment that was not at all concerned with science makes it hard for me to fully adjust to the dry science that is all around in many ways since it runs so counter to the world I inhabited growing up. Sometimes I feel like I imagine a Native American would if he came back from the past and saw a huge 21st century city on the land he used to live in and tried to make sense of it. Cars, noise, buildings, no trees at all, gadgets everywhere...


I know some of my readers don't believe in ghosts and they would be correct in saying that the Buddha didn't make that a criteria for the practice, but despite that I can't deny what I saw and the memories and questions surrounding those incidents stay with me to this day. Just thought I'd share.