We began our new home search in late 2011 following the last flood evacuation I resolved to ever participate in. We did not have a lot of money - far less than any house meeting our criteria was likely to cost but we found one anyway. The downside was that it needed loads of work! We moved in in 2012 with only the bedrooms and den finished (and the downstairs bathroom in progress) and wrapped up the living room and loads of odds and ends after we had settled in. 

Delayed by other (really big) projects, we have just finished our home office and are now starting the kitchen.  As is so often the case my attention is focused on what remains to be done (front hall, upstairs bath, kitchen, and assorted bits and pieces) instead of what all we have accomplished.  So I wanted to take a moment to remember the work that has been done here. Current pics of our home office follow with a shot of the original room at the end of this post. 

I love Bohm even when he is talking over my head :) Fortunately, however, he is usually quite good at explaining complex material (a skill no doubt honed by a lifetime spent as the smartest guy in almost every room).  In this interview he makes many subtle and to my mind important points about science and wholeness.

I found Bohm's comments on electrons particularly significant. It seems that they divide (not individually but as a group) and then reform much in the same way a ballet dance diverges and reforms.  This opposes the notion that everything is moving in a essentially unordered pattern - like a crowd of people, each with their own agenda and, in a greater sense, many accepted beliefs of mainstream science.

This notion of choreography is apparently integral to the idea of wholeness and not dissimilar to Sheldrake's idea of biomorphic fields.  From wholeness and harmony - indivisibility and unification.  An idea that not only ventures in the realm of spirit but correlates with what I understand of Bohm's thoughts on the problem of fragmentation - a condition which bothered him in terms of the modern approach to science.

Bohm's vocabulary, like his science, is precise.  Fragmentation, he says elsewhere, means not to take but to break apart.  It is not an orderly division into parts but rather a state of disorder.  Not a good approach to understanding or reason!

I will attempt a short article on Sheldrake and the biomorphic field in an upcoming post.

We are currently in the process of selling a house.  I haven't lived there for several years but a good friend of mine still does, renting the upstairs apartment where she both resides and reads Tarot for a steady stream of clients.  In her apartment the energy is vibrant and bright.  Downstairs, particularly in the basement, the house has a completely different feel.

I experienced a range of paranormal events on the first floor of that house.  Some were light and others were dark and in some ways it was the dark events that were most valuable as those experiences taught me that  spirit is not necessarily all heavenly choirs and sunbeams but instead a continuum from darkness to light.

My last experience in the house was telling.  It occurred shortly after we had accepted an offer from a buyer and entered into a contract.  The pre-sale inspection had been scheduled and I visited the house on the day before the inspection to tie up loose ends.  Walking down into the cellar  I saw that we had a leak, a bad one, coming from one of the big old iron drain pipes leading out of the house.

This was not the first thing to go wrong on the verge of a deal and I wondered if this was an indication of continued paranormal activity. I reminded myself, however, that the old iron pipe was corroded, undoubtedly weak and therefore susceptible to rupture.  We notified the buyer, called in a plumber and made the necessary repairs.

After the repairs were completed I visited the house again to take a picture for the new would-be buyer.  The moment I took the picture, the screen went white (a first time ever occurrence) and while I was able to click another picture I couldn't see it.  A hard restart was required to get the phone to function again but it was not really restored. 

From that point on the phone was glitchy and within the next several hours it became completely unusable.  I was unable to download the blurry plumbing pics I had taken initially but did eventually reclaim them.  There is nothing that I can see which is out of the usual and I can't say definitively if the pipe and the phone provided evidence of spirit or not.

My intuition however is that the event was a paranormal occurance.  This isn't really the point of the story, however, as there was nothing in the events that provides any sort of hard evidence.  What was significant to was what these events had to say about the general nature of paranormal energy.  

Certainly not all 'ghost' energy is created equal, but it does seem to share some specific characteristics or qualities.  In the same way that it is the nature of fire to be hot, dry and mutable - it is the nature of spiritual energy to be subtle, diffuse, enduring and pervasive. When this subtle energy acts upon the physical, it appears to best exert influence on matter that is already susceptible or inherently mutable—a rusty pipe for example, electronic white noise or relatively fragile electronic equipment.

I have yet to see paranormal energy act with a strong physical force—as is seen in moives. And it is my opinion at this point in time that ghost energy is usually physically subtle.

This is a good thing to keep in mind when dealing with paranormal phenomena in research or otherwise. And while this observation does not discount the paranormal or dismiss it, it is my contention that the kind of overt phenomena we see in films like Poltergeist or the Exorcist is unlikely.  

This is the main reason why I'm not afraid to investigate on my own. Some energy, like whatever is watching people (and reportedly misplacing things) in our new rental property, does have a decidedly creepy vibe. But I judge the safety of a location by human standards.