Forgive me for pointing it out, but your understanding of spirits
is pathetically crude. They are not physical beings, or energy
beings.

Considering that spirits have a consciousness and a soul (after all,
we're not talking about wine spirits here) then there would have to be
some sort of energy existing within that soul. How could a spirit
reason, project its voice onto tape, manifest, or insert itself into a
dream if it wasn't energy?


If you know what a soul is, then you are ahead of me and most of
the philosophers of the past two thousand years. I cannot refute
that spirits have souls because (a) I have no sense myself of what
a soul is, and (b) I have no way of knowing what you mean by "soul."

Spirits are the same as us, except they do not usually have
sustained control over bodies of flesh and blood. Are we energy? I
put it to you that if we were stripped of all our flesh and bone,
we could not be measured, any more than the essence (soul?) of a
dead person can be measured after it "leaves" its corpse.

Similarly, spirits cannot be measured directly by machine, and
therefore cannot be said to possess energy or be made of energy.
What they can do is affect the human brain and nervous system,
just as we can. Their control is (usually) not as extensive or as
refined as our own. We learn to control our bodies from birth,
whereas spirits only get a chance to drive a body of flesh during
partial or complete possession (which is quite common, by the way).

While a spirit is controlling a body, partially or completely, it
can affect that body, and can use that body to affect its
environment. These effects can be measured and recorded, and have
energy.

Point is, all things tangible and persistent about a spirit
require a body of flesh. It is our memories that define our
personalities, our very identities. Spirits outside flesh do not
have memories. Hence they have no definite identities. They can
develop identities only when they begin to interact with living
minds encased in flesh. This interaction may be passive -- they
may do no more than observe -- but the interaction allows them to
acquire a sense of self.


They manifest and express themselves through the human
mind, which projects their expressions outward (so to speak) and

One theory behind EVP was that the voices were actually coming from the
experimenter's mind. Experiments using conscious manipulation proved
futile and there was no telepathic link from the mind to the recording.
If you are talking about something else (through who's human mind -
ours or theirs?)


It's simplistic to say that spirit voices come from the mind of
the perceiver. The mind of a human being is used by a spirit to
enable it to articulate itself. It does not speak, even though it
may seem to speak -- it creates the illusion of a voice by
manipulating the inner perceptions of the hearer.

The only way a spirit can speak is to possess its host, and then
use the physical voice of that person to express itself in words.
There is no such thing as a disembodied spirit voice, although
there is often the very real perception of a disembodied spirit
voice. Just as the image in a dream is not seen with the physical
eyes, a disembodied spirit voice is not heard with the ears -- it
only seems to be heard with the ears. The illusion is perfect.
Often times a spirit voice cannot be distinguished from the voice
of a physical speaker.


translates them into terms human consciousness is able to
comprehend. White noise provides a convenient matrix for them to
communicate, since the human mind is ever anxious to pick
recognizable patterns out of chaos. However, they are not able to
physically impress their voices on recording devices, since they
do not have voices, in any mechanical sense.

You're referring to a physical voice? It's hard to define a voice since
a voice isn't a physical object, but sound waves. Then you have voices
travelling through radio waves which you can't detect unless you have
an antenna and the proper gadgetry. According to EVP theory, there are
two ways a spirit can communicate - telepathically and *through
speaking* - we don't hear them because we can't see them, though
sometimes people do hear voices and instantly dismiss them as an
overactive imagination. Again, this goes more into the "how" - which if
anyone easily knew the answer, then there would be no debate.


Spirits do not rely on radio to speak. Rather, they rely on the
white noise of static to supply a kind of textured background that
allows them to more easily manipulate the auditory perceptions of
the listener so that the listener gets the illusion of having
heard spoken words. When I refer to white noise, I mean any
chaotic background of an audible kind.

they cannot be photographed, since they do not have physical bodies.

Images of the deceased (not including orbs or other white anamolies,
but actual facial images) have shown up in photographs for centuries.
Many were hoaxes, but many more cannot be proven a hoax. You can't
dismiss *every* photograph because you believe they can't be
photographed.


I can indeed dismiss all spirit photographs, because I know that
spirits have no physical bodies of any kind. They are no more
physical than the figures we see in our dreams. They cannot
impress photographic film with an image. What they can do is
convince suggestible individuals that vague shapes in photographs
are spirit figures. They are able to modify perception so that
what to one person would seem no more than a meaningless blur
appears, to a susceptible person, the face of a spiritual being.
It is all done in the mind. Spirits manipulate human minds, not
the physical world.


In fact, cameras pick up *many* things the human eye cannot, and stuff
like different nanometers of light which we don't see aren't exactly
physical.

Jeff



Energy is physical. Matter and energy are, at root, one and the
same. What is not physical is a pattern. A pattern requires a
physical matrix, but it is independent of the matrix upon which it
is based. Letters of the alphabet, for example, must be inscribed
on something to be perceived, or at least imagined in the mind,
but they are not a part of the base that supports their manifest
forms. They are ideals in the Platonic sense. They exist apart
from matter -- however, apart from matter their existence cannot
be measured or recorded.

Or think of it this way. A spirit is like a piece of music. It is
a pattern that requires physical media to express itself, but is
not the physical media by which it is expressed. Music is not the
sound -- the sound is only its vehicle. Similarly, spirits require
human minds to express themselves, but they are not a part of
human minds -- yet apart from human minds they lack form or
identity. Their abstract nature becomes manifest when they are
filtered through our brains. On their own, they don't have bodies,
they don't have forms, they don't have voices. Exactly what they
are is beyond our comprehension, since they are unlike everything
we think we know. My belief is that they are beings of higher
dimensions who are able to insert themselves into our awareness
(what we think of as reality) via our minds. They put on forms,
identities, voices, to interact with us, but they put them on as
we would put on a suit of clothing.

However, it is a curious property of spirits that the identities
they assume become truly their identities for them. Just as our
identities over time become us. Spirits do not often lie about who
they are -- they truly believe they are the poses them adopt in
order to interact with human beings.