In the course of studying Chinese medicine and philosophy, I learned some interesting viewpoints on this subject. Some Chinese philosophies believe there are "yin souls" trapped between lives (some good and some bad) that infiltrate people's lives. According to this belief system, the invitation to these souls often comes in the form of desire on the part of the living. If I desire sex with my married boss, the very act of desire is enough to invite a yin soul into my life. The yin soul may be of a supportive nature to help me, but it will more likely be a yin soul of a darker nature with destructive intent. Since this concept was presented to me ten years ago, I've been aware of these energies coming in and out of my life. The awareness of these presences has caused me create and recite the mantra, "Watch the unseen." By watching the unseen, I have noticed forces coming in and out of other people's lives as well. When it happens to a friend, it's as if someone has moved into his or her head. One day, the friend seems fine, and the next day, he or she is acting like someone I don't know. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say that someone is just not himself or herself today.

Hall brings up how we partake in a paradigm without realizing it. She discusses how we unknowingly practice occult activity everyday, by doing spiritual exercises like meditating, and by mentally asking for things like job promotions, a soul mate or hailing a taxicab. In Hall's perspective, no matter how small and shallow our life may feel, we cannot help but practice spiritualism. Even the person whose entire life is comprised of nothing but days of work and nights of television calls forth things from the universe when they desire something. This is part of the problem, according to Hall, who says that we are constantly inviting both good and bad energies without conscious knowledge of our desires or behavior. It's this unconsciousness state that gets us in trouble. Suddenly, we become physically ill or mentally challenged, and we don't know why, although we're quick to find a plausible reason. Essentially, we reduce our world to our thoughts and come to doubt our senses and feelings. If we feel something negative, we slough it off or we blame ourselves or someone else - never thinking that there may be a deeper energetic cause. This is precisely how our worldview differs those who believe in unseen forces, spirits and energy. Instead of considering a deeper energetic cause that's occurring at an unseen level, we cling to the belief that there must be a scientific, clearly explainable reason behind everything.

Our modern, industrialized society is a collective disbeliever in parapsychology and the likes. It may be fun to watch the television shows "Supernatural" and "Medium" or even to ponder past life experiences, but that's the primary depth of it. We look at the unexplainable as something to play with, like a Ouija board you bring out for a party game and then put back in the drawer when you're through. Culturally speaking, we are not believers in physic warfare. Maybe it's too frightening to consider, not in a creepy, monster sort of way, but because it's something we can't control or easily explain. Life is much simpler if I narrow my point of view to a manageable size. The less I have to think about, the less I have to worry about. I can barely protect myself from the evil I can see much less things that go "bump" in the night. What's fascinating about the difference between the believer and disbeliever viewpoints is that the same energetic protection techniques that protect us from psychic attacks from the living protect us against unseen forces as well.

Another paradigm blindness that exists with regards to the need for psychic protection is the belief amongst the mental health professions that there is no such need. I attempted a discussion about the nature of evil during one of my classes and was shut down by another classmate with a protestation of how we were trying to save the world and focusing on such things was of no value. Unfortunately, evil doesn't go away when we ignore it. In fact, it continues to grow unchecked, like a dark mold in a forgotten closet. I think our current political state speaks to that. For us spectators who've watched the unseen in these events, the carriers of evil appear to find their greatest satisfaction in sucking the lifeblood out of gifted healers, who are often ignorant of their opponent's mere existence, much less their power to create global havoc. By ignoring (or underestimating ) the presence of such powerful forces, we set ourselves up for small thinking.

Fear keeps us from confrontation and prevents us from looking beneath the surface. Once a seemingly horrific event has passed, we lose our opportunity to find any good in it by creating excuses not to examine it, from using old clichés like "Let sleeping dogs lie" to employing new-age wisdom, such as, "Stay in the moment." But how can we learn from our past experiences if we don't reflect and if we're unwilling to look beyond the obvious? This narrow-mindedness is reminiscent of the story in Alcoholics Anonymous about, "the farmer who came up out of his cyclone cellar to find his home ruined. To his wife, he remarked, 'Don't see anything the matter here, Ma. Ain't it grand the wind stopped blowing?".

References
(To view, roll mouse over the "References" heading; to hide, click on the heading)