The rules are .... there are no rules
There seem to be a lot of unsaid rules within the paranormal and spiritual circles. I was never really one for rules. I like to walk my own path and not the same as others. It has always been my way and worked for me. If I want something, for example, I work to get it. If I want to do something, I do what it takes to be able to do it. All legally of course. There is a difference between not following rules and not having morals. The thought of this concept when it comes to the paranormal came to me when I was playing with a new tarot deck I had purchased. As you may have seen on my page, I love collecting Tarot. I am not a psychic medium nor a person that does Tarot readings for people, it is just something I enjoy learning and doing for myself. For me divination in the true sense is not about fortune telling, but self refection and often it allows me to dig deep within and get clarity or even think about a situation from a new perspective. Anyway, one of the 'rules' of Tarot I was told many years ago was that you had to be gifted a tarot deck and that you shouldn't buy your own. I always thought this was ridiculous and it is probably more of a myth than a 'rule' but a number of people told me this when I expressed interest in wanting to see what tarot was all about. It didn't matter how many hints I dropped, not one person gave me a tarot deck. Even when I dropped the hint to the very people telling me this rule who themselves were Tarot readers, no one once even offered to gift me a deck. I wasn't going to sit around waiting, so I went out and bought my own. And so began my ever-growing collection. As I was sitting and admiring the new deck I had purchased, that silly comment so many people had uttered to me in the past popped into my head. It made me then think about paranormal investigating and the 'rules' that many people imply you have to follow to be a paranormal investigator or dealing with what they refer to as spirit communication.
Of course, we must remember, there really are no 'rules' when it comes to paranormal investigating, no matter what anyone tells you. Protocols or controls are a bit different from rules and we will get to that a little later. There are also rules you may need to adhere to when attending a tour for example which again is a bit different. It is a general rule of most venues for example to not allow anyone under the influence of drugs and alcohol to attend a tour. This would apply to most tours, not just a paranormal tour. It is a general rule to turn off mobile phones to not distract or interrupt the tour as another example. These are not the kind of rules I am referring to as they are in place for good reason and not following them could get you booted off a tour. I am talking about a lot of the statements that people tell those entering the paranormal field that hides under the guise of 'rules'. I myself was told many of these when I first started out and quite a few didn't make sense to me but being new to the field and hearing them from people who had been investigating for such a long time I thought there must be some official rules that everyone follows. You even see them mentioned on some paranormal reality tv shows so at the time it felt like it was an unsaid code. It soon became clear that a lot of these rules were not based on anything other than a person's belief system or possibly what they have learnt from someone else. While these may be part of a ritual or routine for one person, doesn't mean that everyone has to follow. It seems in the paranormal field many people follow what the see on TV or what their fellow investigators do and often we don't question it (especially early on).
An example of one of the 'rules' I was told was: "You must tell the spirits at the end of the night to stay at the location or they will follow you home". For probably the first year of paranormal investigating, I did this because that is what I was told you had to do from my very first investigation. I soon started to question it because it wasn't matching up with my own experiences and what I personally believed. Now if this is something you feel you have to do to assert and protect yourself or even just for your own peace of mind, then absolutely do it! You have nothing to lose by saying those words. By telling people this is what they have to do, you are instilling fear in them that a spirit is going to follow them home. By telling people this 'rule', you can be causing unnecessary distress. The human mind and the power of suggestion is so very strong that a person could go home on edge worried a spirit has followed them. Any noise at nighttime suddenly feeds into this fear. I have had a person on a tour once tell another guest that they had a demonic attachment. Now luckily this person didn't actually believe that and laughed it off. What if it was someone else that was more impressionable? These kinds of comments can wreak havoc on a person's life and mental state.
As paranormal investigators, we have to be extremely careful about the statements we make to people, especially if we are visiting someone in their private home to 'help' them. I can't tell you how many people in the past I have spoken to who have had paranormal teams go into their homes to help with reported activity and treat it like a 'free investigation'. They will go in and have a play with the equipment and make some statements and then leave. They get to go home and sleep. The people in the house are left with the aftermath and scared of the statements which are made. They end up terrified in their own home because of throw-away comments from the paranormal team who have visited them. They haven't done anything to help and left the family with no answers and even more fear than before. Telling people they have negative attachments and then heading off on their way is something I have heard happens quite a lot. I personally don't deal with private cases for my own reasons, but I hear about these sorts of scenarios all the time. I even have friends of mine who had someone who said they were a medium come to their house. They were just someone that felt they had abilities and it wasn't something they had really explored. They hadn't even gone to the house for a reading, they were friends and went for a coffee. Upon entering the house, this lady went on to tell her friend in front of the children living at the house there were negative entities in the house. The children who at the time were completely unaware and perfectly happy suddenly became scared to be in their own house. They could not sleep at night, had to have lights on and the situation in the house soon became one of fear. All was fine until this woman planted the seed that something was happening. Now every sound was these negative entities she claimed she had picked up. She didn't offer any advice or assistance to be rid of it. Her throw-away statement caused so much fear and distress that was completely unnecessary. She literally created a haunting with her words.
There is not a set way to investigate
There is no official rulebook when it comes to paranormal investigating. What works for one person, doesn't work for another. It depends on your belief systems and what you are looking for. Of course, a lot of different methods have 'controls' or 'protocols that have been suggested over the years to assist in trying to make the field of investigating a little more credible when it comes to presenting evidence. Even so, this is not a 'rule' that has to be followed. Think of it more like a set of guidelines. You can use them if you want, but they don't have to be followed. You may come up with something better that works for you. You may even find a better solution to bringing in said controls and tightening them up further. The thing of course to remember is, if you are going to be presenting your evidence for peer review, this is where controls are needed. When in doubt, the Scientific method is a good place to start.
Rules were made to be broken. Just because you see someone investigating a certain way, asking certain questions, that doesn't mean that is what you have to do as well. A lot of people talk about paranormal protection for example. The problem is, protection is only as good as your belief in it. If a religious person tells you that you have to do a prayer at the end of each investigation to protect you but you don't believe in that religion, then it is not going to be of any benefit to you. We can give people suggestions, we can tell people what we do in that scenario and we can offer advice, but we cannot push our beliefs onto others. The paranormal is based on our own experiences and belief systems. We cannot make belief statements and push them as facts. We also need to be compassionate and understanding that our way is not the only way. There are people that think differently from us and investigate in completely different ways. It doesn't make one of us wrong and one of us right, it makes us different.
If we are going to get any closer to answers, we have to work together using our different belief systems, our different methods, embracing our different thoughts, and trying new and different things. I am not much of a spiritual person, but I am not going to go ahead and tell a spiritual person they can't do what has worked for them all these years. In the same token, I expect that same respect back. We can all happily coexist with our different belief systems. In fact, we can use it to our advantage. When you think of what you are able to achieve on your own, think about what you could achieve if we all worked together?
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Comments
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Kd Foreman 4 years ago
You are right, there are no set 'rules', but there are some ethical guidelines and some expectations that help the investigation run a bit smoother :)