Ghosts and Spirits

Upon the "very strong recommendation" of a recent acquaintance at the UUHK, I attended a gathering of a group which meets regularly at a vegetarian restaurant somewhere in Mongkok. That was  yesterday afternoon. Before the meeting, my acquaintance told me that that would be a talk by a retired doctor on "homeopathy". I have heard about the word and also some hazy notion about it but do not know what it is precisely. It sounds interesting. So I went. 

 

When I arrived at shortly after 3 p.m. I found a group of about 10 were already seated around a table. It appeared I was the last. I got one character of the Chinese name of the buillding wrong and paid the penalty of a 10-block walk before I got to the right one! My friend was already there. There were  5 familiar faces. They belonged to people who attended some the functions of the HKSHP or the UUHK. There was only one seat left, the one next to the speaker, Dr. X, the retired medical specialist who had emigrated to Australia. So I sat down. It appeared that most of the group already knew each other. But apparently a few faces were new to the speaker. So Dr. X asked that we introduce each other and to explain a little why we came. She pointed her finger at a giggling young man sitting some 5 seats away from her left. She obviously knew him and was just asking him for the benefit of the newcomers. He just mentioned his first name sheepishly and didn't explain why he came. The next two, who also appeared to be familiar with Dr. X, followed suit.

 

Then we came to the fourth, apparently a newcomer, a girl with an oval face, small eyes, white skin, medium length straight hair neatly combed back and in her late 20s. She identified herself as Maggie. She explained that she came because she had been told she could meet some interesting people in this group and that her curiosity was piqued because she had been told a lot about Dr. X and therefore decided to come. Then without rhyme or reason, she suddenly said she just had a dream and could not understand it. Upon hearing that, Dr. X appeared very excited and immediately said, "Tell us about it. Tell us about it. I love to hear dreams." The girl said that ever since a child, she had a dream that she was being chased by someone whom she could not see but felt to be merely a certain presence, ( about which more later) up a flight of steps and could not understand what it meant. Then Dr. X said that she had a book on dreams but at that moment she could not remember what "going up a flight of steps" meant.  A thought occurred to me immediately: she was perhaps being pushed to study, work hard and make it in the rat race by her family. She was not alone. However, I did not tell her that. I thought that since I was not asked, I better shut up. Anyway, the girl said that that did not matter but then she got another dream and would like to find out what it meant. Then Dr. X said, perhaps unconsciously, "Me too, I also have many dreams. One of the dreams was that I was sitting for an examination which I had already passed. And later I thought that it was impossible. I already passed it! That meant I was facing another big challenge at that point in time.".The unconscious really is intelligent. She was, perhaps without being aware of it, already answering the girl's question for her, but indirectly!

 

Everybody was interested by this talk about dreams. Then my friend chipped in, "Me too. I do not know why. I often dreamt that I could fly, like a bird.", his eyes narrowing a little as if he were making an effort to recall what he previously saw in some of those dreams. Then the young man sitting next to him who is also regular attendee at the talks of the HKSHP, said, "Yes, yes. I also frequently dreamt about flying. It was funny, I could just stretch out my hands and I could fly. My body acted like a ...glider.". Then Dr. X also chimed in, "Yes, me too. I often dreamt about flying. I don't know how but I found that I could somehow simply glide in the air. But I don't know what it meant. But if it's up, then it's good". I too have dreams about flying. I believe I know what they meant and by implication, I believe that had I been given more information, I probably can tell what all those flying across the sky meant. The context of the flight is important: it really depends on the physical environment in which the relevant flight occurs. It is the nature of that environment which gives their dreams meaning at the point in time those dreams occurred. But I did not say so. It was Dr. X's talk, not mine.

 

Then perhaps prompted by the interest which her talk about her stair-climbing dream aroused, the young lady said she had another dream. She said was being followed from behind by someone. " Although I did not know who it was that was following me and I was running away very hard to escape. I had a feeling that it was my boy friend!". Had she paid attention to the sound of the Chinese word "chase", the meaning of the dream could not have been more obvious! She somehow felt threatened by the hot pursuit. Maybe she was not yet ready. Then she blurted out with another of her dreams. She said she was working at the office. She was opening a file cabinet, and lo and behold, she found a snake, hidden amongst the files!  She said that she did not know what to do. She was shocked. "But I felt that I was being watched from behind. So I turned left and then right and then turned around. There was no one!" To me, the meaning of the dream could not have been more obvious. Then Dr. X interposed at this point. "I don't know what it meant but left is bad, right is good.". She did not explain in what way it was good or bad. The true reason might be that the left indicated her rational mind and her right her holistic and emotional mind and she was somehow fantasizing in her subconscious mind how good it would be if one of her male superiors whose files she was then working on were to become her lover but discovered that she couldn't identify who it might be or if there were any one who would match with her desire! 

 

After that, perhaps because Maggie remembered all these dreams about being watched from behind, she related another experience about being watched or feeling a certain presence. She turned to one of her "encounters" with ghosts or out of body experiences (ODE)s. She said that she went to her friends house one evening. She was in the verandah, and suddenly saw some green light outside another room next to her friend's room. She looked in that direction. It was the image of her friend! That image was staring at her! For some reason, her friend stayed inside her room, busy with something or other and was not yet ready to see her.Whilst she was pondering over what she saw in that flash, she looked in the direction of the kitchen, which was just next to the bathroom whither she was minded to go and there was that green light again! Again, it looked like her friend standing there staring at her! But her friend was still inside her room. She later asked her friend if she went outside of that second room or into the kitchen at the moment when she herself was in her friend's verandah. She was told that her friend never went outside of the second room nor the kitchen but that her friend had thought of going into the second room. With this, Dr. X could restrain herself no longer. She related how "feng shui" or evil spirits might affect people's fate! To me, what Maggie was "seeing" might be an "illusion". She was standing there all alone in that verandah. It was not a good feeling to be all alone by one self. One felt a sense of pain, a certain sense of failure at not having succeeded in showing sufficient attractiveness in the eyes of her friend to entice or seduce the latter from leaving her room to come out to meet her. When we feel bad, what do we do? We want that kind of situation to come to an end as soon as possible! Besides, what was the purpose of her visit that night? To see her friend! She must have a very strong desire to see her friend!. Yet her friend was otherwise engaged and was not there to see her as she originally expected. So her self-protective instinct literally "created" that image of her friend to prevent her "ego" from being hurt further by an even longer wait! And why green? The factor may be circumstantial. There might be some green light shining into that particular spot from either some light source or other inside her friend's apartment or from outside which might have escaped her attention at that point in time. A full "reading" will definitely require further evidence, which unfortunately is not available in that kind of social situation with a group of people all wanting to express themselves around that table. 

 

Whatever might have been the true cause of Maggie's "strange" experience, Dr. X told us that it was what she did which might have cured her mother of about 70 who suddenly got sick, was sent to hospital and had all kinds of tests done upon her by all kinds of experts who were not able to tell what it was and suggested that they opened her up to find out but she objected, so they ended up doing an endoscope but still could not find anything. Her symptoms appeared so rare that they had to go back to all kinds of medical literature to flush out the various possibilities. But in the meantime, her mother had become hysterical at night and on many evenings, she would say things to the effect "Don't come near me, Don't come near me." as if she saw someone threatening her when there was no one around! Then one day when it was again raining cats and dogs after maybe nearly the whole week (it being the summer of 2005) whilst her mother was still at the ICU, an idea struck her, as if it were a flash of lightning! There was too much water! She knew that her mother's life is governed by "fire" (one of the quintet of metal, wood, water, fire, earth) calculated according to the traditional "5-element" method using her birth date and Chinese "hours" . So she took the only ruby she had and asked the nurses if they permitted her to tie it somewhere on her mother's body but was denied permission. Then she finally decided to have it placed inside a small cloth bag and tied it to the bedpost at the head of the bed. She said that the very next day, her mother's condition immediately improved and she ceased to have those ravings asking the "spirits" not to approach her! I sugggested to her that sometimes, people can have spontaneous remission, usually when normally tense or nervous people cease to struggle and maybe that by the time she thought of that particular "method", that time had come and her mother's immune system clicked back into action again as a result of the nervous tension upon that natural immunological system having been lifted and the time it had taken for her to arrive at that "desperate" measure seemed to be consistent with my theory: her mother's body  had struggled for such a long time without effect that it simply gave up any further struggle and the apparently "miraculous" cure then occurred all by itself. She said that was possible too.  

 

She then told us how "feng shui" might have an effect on people's life. She said her parents bought a big flat for which she paid for the mortgage. Since buying that house, her parents had never had good health. They have had all kinds of minor health problems and her mother was always complaining about having headaches and her brother, a returned computer expert from America who came back to Hong Kong to work, lost more than a million HK dollars in one of his investments. So after the her mother nearly lost her life, she had the house looked over by one of her relatives who is a Toaist "feng shui" master. He told her which were the bad positions in that house according to the year and what had to be done each year to avoid the relevant bad consequences. He told her without knowing who slept where that anybody who slept at the place where her mother slept would probably have serious problems with his/her head! Her mother slept there, in that position! And her brother's room was singled out as the second worst room in that house . He said that whoever slept there would meet with all kinds of setbacks! Since something had to be done each year to help avoid the adverse consequences, she felt that  that was far too bothersome and finally decided to sell it but not after she had had a most serious quarrel with both of her parents who thought nothing of of her  "feng shui" reasons and said that they could continue to live there forever! Who is right? Who is wrong?

 

Whilst Dr. X was recounting how there were ghosts and spirits in various hospitals in Hong Kong, another lady in her late 30s, in a floral pattern black and white shirt and black jeans with a pair of huge sunglasses hanging over her nose arrived. She appeared to be quite familiar with Dr. X and some the other people sitting at that table. I asked the others to move their chairs a little further away so that I could make some space for her to sit beside Dr. X. When she heard Dr. X telling us all these stories about how "feng shui" and ghosts and spirits, she said that she herself had some personal experience and told us how a spirit which affected one of her boyfriends when she was then running a disco in Wanchai was affecting her and how one of her relatives, also a Taoist priest, helped her got rid of the evil spirit after two of his pupils failed to exorcise it. She said she yelled and screamed when the Taoist master was doing the exorcism. She had since become a devout follower of all kinds of fortune telling and is now a Tibetan Buddhist! By the time she finished all her stories, it was already 6.30 p.m. and she had not yet begun her second encounter with such spirit which she promised to tell us after she went to the lady's toilet! Throughout those three and a half hours, there was not single word about "homeopathy" for which I came. It had literally become a "ghost" session about "homeopathy". So I excused myself and left the party to their ghosts and spirits!