From my teenage years to rapidly approaching my sixth decade, I have seen the public chronicles of the paranormal evolve from dime store paperbacks and pulp magazines to tabloid television and infotainment without ever having left the marginalization of being a field left to those who want an existential and vicarious shot of addictive adrenalin or an indirect affirmation of faith outside the confines of organized religion, in the defacto "miracles" of the strange. The public forum within the confines of commercial media outlets has always been a dicey proposition when it comes to the paranormal especially in terms of the marketplace, where the theatrics of sensationalism have always tainted and stereotyped an interest toward it as a sign of both emotional and intellectual immaturity. Perhaps the popularization of the paranormal is in effect what keeps it safely ensconced away from prying eyes. The popular culture in effect is defining it's paradigms through mass merchandising in a self referential feedback loop which, for the most part, may have nothing to do with what is being looked at. If one tracks the amount of interest and attachment in the paranormal by an indicator of cultural upheaval, it spikes up and down in relation to the free floating anxiety derived from our cultural institutions inability to reassure the populace that their prescriptions actually are effective beyond theory and as a result we create our own mutated variants of popular opinion toward the paranormal that are molded more by our psychological needs than an honest appraisal. One wonders if the same amount of energy were focused on serious research as on popular culture we may have seen ourselves make a proportional amount of progress.
The cultural mirror of early space exploration and the optimistic and necessary openness to new ideas opened the door to a Golden Age, wherein Dr Vallee, Dr McDonald and Dr Hynek shone the bright light of cultural institutional respectability upon ufology only to have it descend into the paranoiac alternative universe best exemplified by The X Files upon their departure.We saw a shift occur in their wake which also had a strong political pull which melded the two together as if they were one and the same thing and still absorbs a great deal of interest in conspiracy theories rather than the object of interest at hand.
The proverbial Second Coming saw the absconding of any number of subtopics in this field into the improvised pseudo religious movement of the New Age, which is always a portent of entropy and fossilization descending ever deeper into emotional dogma whose free floating platform of conceptualizations knew no bounds nor field work. "Crystal Therapy became entangled and considered (pardon the pun) a facet of Ufology in the hive mind.
This extension became the menu of regionalism's para normality where the demarcations of abductions in America, goat suckers in South America, dinosaurs in Africa,lake monsters in the North, and the Skin Walkers of the Southwest were proverbial regional cuisines, each with their own cultism of adherents, while no one apparently noticed all of these were variants of the same quantum phenomenon.
We walk through the wax museum of semi professional Contactees, and see the re emergence of the art of vague prophecies and abstracted mythical histories which all pro ported in their circular logic, a alternative vein of knowledge. The Sears chicken coop straight out of the catalog was put to imaginative uses and became the calling card of their craft in more ways than one.
You walk into the Metaphysical section of a bookstore and are lucky to find one original and\or non derivative tome that is not a variant of A. Atlantean Speculation, each cribbing from the other or all from Gurdjieff B. The Great Conspiracy of your choosing, or C. Compilations of Old Antedotes, (choose your interest).or the great fall back of Bible Aliens. This is a dark age, where the best minds can be found mining old veins of historical artifacts. Not much original thinking to be found, of course with rare exceptions cropping up every few years or so. As it is with popular culture, so goes the amount of serious effort to determine the validity of any paranormal claim in accordance with public opinion. We find ourselves in popular culture, chasing our own tails.
I am constantly amazed at how many variations of the same book can be produced essentially using and repackaging the same source material, which, in turn, is a form of faux credibility. There should be a disclaimer;WARNING: YOU HAVE READ THIS BOOK BEFORE. Things have gotten so worn, that one over priced book by a "respected" expert ( I don't know what makes one a paranormal expert..kind of silly) that strained so hard to give a patently half baked possibility from third hand sources a "break" that I threw it in the rubbish can before I read it halfway through.
What makes one an expert may be more the result of the capitalism found by self aggrandizement and the resultant volume of sales rather than any original insight. In other words, a feedback loop within another loop.
In other words, the usual suspects. One cannot help but wonder and observe how so many profound insights into the paranormal were wrested from oneself prior to the advent of global commercialization of what was once considered,a valued and at times, sacred quest as evidenced by a Siberian Shaman or for that matter, a John Dee.
There are so many unsourced rumors now that I don't bother to read them any more since 99.9% of them are obvious rubbish. Some have made a career out of turning optical illusions into an entire field of serious study as if we were studying the ruins of Pompeii. I for one am tired of old ruts being retread ad infinitum. The last straw was a show I caught called UFO Hunters which was the biggest piece of tripe I ever attempted to digest,,at one point these fellows were left to dig out a rubbish hole saying "This might be it!" Ugh. Perhaps the show title should be The Rubbish Hunters. Is this how far we can sink? Probably not.
I recall one time I was involved in a hobby where certain things were hard to come by and once one of them was produced, I found it was a shoddy cheaply made and overpriced piece of junk. I went on a forum and said as much. Someone responded that I should be grateful it was made at all. I begged to differ. I still do.
Paranormal State is another step backwards into the mire of the pseudo mythos of Demonology..and cribs a faux Catholic bestiary based upon the dualism of good and evil.Someone should buy them a copy of Alan Watt's "The Two Hands of God" for a good introduction into metaphysics. I would give my right arm to sit them down and have them explain in precise terms what a "Demon" is, and why chasing troubled spirits with holy water and crosses does them any more good than when these poor souls were living. By extension, this sort of unenlightened tampering and the assumptions it makes lead us back to self flagellation, the rack and the Salem events, if taken seriously in it's dogmatic portents.At times they seem to act as if they were part of some vaguely defined priesthood. Someone should remind them of the considerable number of murder victims.. children as well as adults that have tortured to death due to an unfounded reliance upon exorcism. They seem to psychologically exorcising the alleged victims rather than the entities, from their own projected angst. Especially telling was the episode concerning the cemetery keepers wife who did not want to spend her married life living in a graveyard. The ooohing and aaaghing is too juvenile to comment upon. Oh that was a good one wasn't it? If this is your modus operandi, try fly fishing.
The other psycho babble show is the ham fisted Ghost Hunters, the Bowery Boys complete with Huntz Hall..(Yikes What was That!) whose testosterone driven flashlight chases of our youth shares an important facet with Paranormal State as both agent provocateurs claim to have had a life changing experience prompting them to vengefully torment ghosts but they "cannot talk about it" Give me a break. We are all grownups here, aren't we? Some psycho therapy may help both of our host\ experts. The issue here is one of the personalities involved become the focus of the presentation rather than the material at hand. Squabbles, "who did what and who sat on his butt," and so forth are largely the context which is provided which does a disservice to the enormous ramifications of this phenomenon. In other words, it is being trivialized by subtext.Another issue is best exemplified by the lack of nuance in terms of recognizing that what appear to be phantasms, if truly ghosts of once material sentient individuals like ourselves are treated as though they were pet seals, what does that tell you either directly or indirectly about the intent and aim of their modality of communication? Does this not have an over riding reciprocal effect? if so, they largely appear to be unaware of this. If you view the episode which took place in Ireland and compare directly the paradigms of the owner and the Irish investigator, who were natives, you immediately grasp that they not only respect and accord these events with the same amount of propriety as they would a "living" sentient being, they attempted to warn against "stirring things up" Despite this one fellow stood and insulted the spirit to the degree he was knocked on his ass. What does that tell you? If you watch a repeat of this show, listen carefully to the home owner's comments toward the end. He clearly recognizes and respects a dynamic relationship rather than an isolated bag of effects, reactive phenomenon or "tricks." Well we have evolved from tabloid coverage to infotainment without having gone anywhere at all.
Perhaps it just takes a great deal of fertilizer to make a garden grow.
