Right wing ghosts, and more

I don't read Ace of Spades, although a lot of right wingnut types seem to.

But I do check in on Michael Prescott, and he noted this entry at Spades in February about how the blogger is convinced the house he has just left was haunted by an obnoxious ghost.

Interesting.

This also reminds me, I was talking to a friend on the weekend about the conflict between Freud and Jung, and how the former saw his task as one involving a crucial cultural fight against "the black tide of mud" - occultism. Jung couldn't accept this: he was always interested in paranormal stuff. One of his early studies was to do with a spiritualist medium. He went on to be too interested in too many esoteric things, though, for my taste, and his thinking about it always seemed to be too woolly. Still, I have much more sympathy for his approach than that of Freud.

What I forgot to mention in my Saturday night conversation was that the current version of the purely scientific materialist view of the universe that most people hold is actually pretty fragile when you think about it. I mean, if you have just one personally convincing paranormal experience, this "black swan" of an event should really shake up your idea that only white swans exist.

Of course, people could always dismiss the event as a trick of the mind, and some are no doubt easily dealt with that way. (Sounds in the night are easily mis-interpretted, as are fleeing glimpses of movement and light.) But living in a house that seems persistently haunted, particularly with things involving physical movement, like lights being turned on when it was clearly impossible for a person to have done it (which Ace of Spades seems to be saying happened) - wouldn't that be a "black swan" for most diehard materialists?

I've never had a black swan experience myself, and it's kind of a sad thing that a person like me who would love to have one seems to repulse any hint of the paranormal. But who knows, it could happen yet.