Exploring the Reality of Ouija Boards

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Jonathan zoobyshoe: I disagree, my experience with the insane has shown me that they are far more dangerous than many think.

If you want to make an accurate statement about the dangerousness of mentally ill people in general you can't simply use your own experiences. Lots and lots of statistics have been gathered about this from people who treat the mentally ill and the fact remains that the majority are not dangerous.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by benzun_1999
It is just a board with word in the begining, then when you get hooked it changes into everything in your life (a power), and finally when you find that it is wrong and try to destroy it, it trys to kill you.

So there is nothing to fear right?

It is psychologically dangerous for some people to get involved with ouija boards. I don't believe this has anything to do with evil spirits.

Some people are more prone than others to irrational emotions and psychotic thinking. These people have trouble with ouija boards, horoscopes, fortune tellers, all manner of charlatans, not to mention gambling, and drug and alcohol abuse. Getting involved with a ouija board could indeed, push someone like this over the edge into psychosis, but because it would be the result of them deliberately engaging in a fantasy state of mind over and over until it became extremely difficult to stop, not because of spirits.

 

[Jonathan]

zoobyshoe: Oh, well, you can't be sure who this minority of dangerous and insane are, can you?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Jonathan
zoobyshoe: Oh, well, you can't be sure who this minority of dangerous and insane are, can you?

Why not?

 

[Jonathan]

I think I wasn't clear. Given a group of people known to be insane, it probably wouldn't take you long to figure out which are the most dangerous. But I was thinking more along the lines of a convenience store clerk say in Las Vegas. So many people pass through Las Vegas that there is no way this guy will ever see essentially anyone he mets again, let alone remember them. So if there is someone who just stops by and buys something, he has no prior experience and probably no future experience with this person, he'll never know if they're insane and dangerous unless they are doing something weird right then.
My point was along the lines of the fact that often you can't just look at them and tell they wil go off any second now. Of course if they start trying to kill you, you'll figure it out.

 

[stevenson]

Ouija Board

Hey wasteofo2 nice STORY

Ouija Board is nothing more than a tax on the stupid, sorry.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by Jonathan My point was along the lines of the fact that often you can't just look at them and tell they wil go off any second now. Of course if they start trying to kill you, you'll figure it out.

OK. What I'm saying is that the percentage of mentally ill people who will suddenly lose it and try to kill someone is small relative to the total number of mentally ill.

As far as danger from unknown strangers you are probably more at risk from essentially non-mentally ill criminals, and from "artificially" mentally ll people, by which I mean those on the kinds of street drugs that make people violent.

 

[phoenixthoth]

i've been using a technique similar to the ouja board except that instead of using a board, i just write. a kind of auto-writing and one could conjecture that the communication is with an external spirit, with their subconscious, with their conscious perhaps alter-ego, with a combination of the subconscious and ego, or in other terminology, their higher selves and little selves. the way i do it is i write "what do i need to know at this time?" then i just auto-write a response without thinking about it, trying to explain it, censoring, judging it, reading it, etc. i just let it happen and go with the flow. i absolutely don't assume that everything stated is the truth except that is truly is a reflection of something though i suspect that something to likely be internal. the ouja board is just a slower version of this. sometimes i go through phases where everything i write is in this mode...

 

[zoobyshoe]

I was about to start a thread on automatic writing when I noticed this ouija board thread and figured someone would point out it was essentially the same activity.

Once when I was writing down some thoughts about something I fell into what I suppose was automatic writing. It didn't feel like what I was writing was my own thoughts, but someone elses better organized and articulated thinking on the same subject.

This feeling it wasn't me freaked me out and I didn't finish writing the ideas down.

 

[phoenixthoth]

if you suspect that the source of the words is some external entity, it can be scary for one fears "it" taking over.

in my opinion, it is you. just parts of you not ordinarily tapped into.

to integrate those parts or not to integrate those parts, that is the question...

just as a side comment, i think sometimes "slips" are those parts poking through. one wonders what will happen when those parts do more than just poke through.

you can engage "it" it dialogues. who are you? where do you come from? why are you writing? what can you see from your perspective?

i've heard other people say that they're so terrified of it that they wouldn't even write it down in a locked file no one else could read for fear, however unlikely, that someone else will read it. likewise, i find that upon looking at what I've written, I'm quite reluctant to share it anymore, though some of my posts are from this perspective. a transition can occur to where not only what you write is from this perspective but what you think also is. in some of those cases, what you used to think of as you is but a fading memory though some would say that the lesser is only being exchanged for the greater.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by phoenixthoth
if you suspect that the source of the words is some external entity, it can be scary for one fears "it" taking over.

in my opinion, it is you. just parts of you not ordinarily tapped into.

to integrate those parts or not to integrate those parts, that is the question...

I tend to agree that it is some aspect of myself.

The prospect of this particular "voice" or level of consciousness being allowed to speak onward wasn't alarming. What bothered me was the prospect of getting into the habit of letting something that didn't feel like me talk away, and then having go bad, in a purely psychological version of Benzun's fear of being sucked into the ouija board by evil spirits. I've heard all these same stories about it being cool at first and then turning nasty, both in conjunction with ouija boards and automatic writing.

Did you ever hear about the bzarre happenings with the autistic "facilitators"?. This was a case where the same thing happened but startng out from a completely non-spiritualistic or psychological springboard. It just seems to be a fact of human psychology that when a person starts writing freeform without critical observation that they can tap directly into the subconscious and sometimes into some pretty ugly stuff.[/B][/QUOTE]

 

[phoenixthoth]

in terms of ugly stuff, one could say that that is what i sometimes try to do. probe deeper and deeper, looking for all that ugly stuff. to get to know myself, the real me. who am i? what is my nature? how do i know? am i sure? what am i hiding from myself?

there's a character on the hbo series carnivale who can make people go "insane" by looking into them and showing them some ugly stuff about them. also kinda reminds me of hannibal lectur who analyzes you and psychologically dissects you. would you want to perform explorative self-psychological-surgury? what would be the benefit? can you purge things or can what you don't know not hurt you? or can it? but one also wonders about the fate of curious cats... then again, what else is there to fear but fear?

like i mentioned earlier, this stuff is at least tangentially related to dissociative states. i mention that because it is sometimes the case that you don't know what you're writing at the time and/or you completely forget what you wrote after you're done. and when i go back and read old stuff, i get new things out of it almost every time and most times it seems like i still don't remember what i wrote even though i read it plenty of times...

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by phoenixthoth
in terms of ugly stuff, one could say that that is what i sometimes try to do. probe deeper and deeper, looking for all that ugly stuff. to get to know myself, the real me. who am i? what is my nature? how do i know? am i sure? what am i hiding from myself?

When I'm in the mood to do this I would be more inclined to analyze my dreams. It's safer, and all the ugly stuff is right there.

there's a character on the hbo series carnivale who can make people go "insane" by looking into them and showing them some ugly stuff about them. also kinda reminds me of hannibal lectur who analyzes you and psychologically dissects you.

I haven't seen this show. I've seen all four films with the Hannibal Lectur character.

would you want to perform explorative self-psychological-surgury? what would be the benefit? can you purge things or can what you don't know not hurt you? or can it? but one also wonders about the fate of curious cats... then again, what else is there to fear but fear?

Cliche's , maybe.

like i mentioned earlier, this stuff is at least tangentially related to dissociative states. i mention that because it is sometimes the case that you don't know what you're writing at the time and/or you completely forget what you wrote after you're done. and when i go back and read old stuff, i get new things out of it almost every time and most times it seems like i still don't remember what i wrote even though i read it plenty of times...

This latter part is certainly something everyone should avoid. Anything a person does repeatedly can become a habit, and as such, extremely difficult to stop. Dissociation is not a place anyone wants to be stuck.

 

[phoenixthoth]

When I'm in the mood to do this I would be more inclined to analyze my dreams. It's safer, and all the ugly stuff is right there.

one thing to do is write up a dream and then write, "what does this dream mean?" and then autowrite.

a specific instance of this is when my friend dreamed about a man with a coyote's head who he remembers saying something to him but he can't remember what was said. i suggested writing, "what did the coyote/man say to me?" not only did he not want to try this, he didn't want to know.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by phoenixthoth i suggested writing, "what did the coyote/man say to me?" not only did he not want to try this, he didn't want to know.

Freud went into this in The Interpretation Of Dreams (a great book, if you can still read in your current dissociative state). The parts of dreams that we recall as "vague" are actually intentionally vague. They may not have been while the dream was occurring, but they are upon recollection because they contain key points we "don't want to know".

 

[phoenixthoth]

(a great book, if you can still read in your current dissociative state).

do you mean me right now or potentially someone in general in the habit of autowriting?

perhaps dissocitative states are what occurs during dreams, too... hmm... so if autowriting can uncover what was lost during dreams, then perhaps autowriting can help one recall what is lost in dissociative states in general. but that seems to fall into the same credibility dilemas associated with recall through hypnosis.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Originally posted by phoenixthoth do you mean me right now or potentially someone in general in the habit of autowriting?

I was teasing.

perhaps dissocitative states are what occurs during dreams, too... hmm... so if autowriting can uncover what was lost during dreams, then perhaps autowriting can help one recall what is lost in dissociative states in general.

My own belief about dreams are that their primary function is neurological. Throughout the day all kinds of trains of thought must be stopped before completion for many different reasons. This results in a lot of neurons that are on the verge of firing but don't have all the "go" signals they need to actually do it. The point of dreams in this situation is to create trains of thought that will go through and trigger as many of these trains as possible to fire through to completion, thus resetting things back to neutral. The resulting stories and scenarios are of psychological interest because their content is esentially "repressed" or "suppressed" thinking. Freud, of course, came up with the part about psychologically repressed thoughts coming out in dreams, but the part about the primarily neurological need to dream is my own speculation.
Dissociative states as they occur in mental illness are thought to be defense mechanisms. That is also, really, just speculation. I'm not sure where you would start looking to compare them to dreams and see if there are any provable similarities.

but that seems to fall into the same credibility dilemas associated with recall through hypnosis.

False memories can be a huge problem.

 

[phoenixthoth]

indeed, false memories can be a problem. I've had a problem with one false memory...

 

[benzun_1999]

Please forgive me.

Please Forgive me for not being here during the complete discusion. I had my exams so i could'nt log on. Anyway i am back.

-Benzun
all For God!

 

[phoenixthoth]

I was teasing.

it's kind of interesting that you mentioned it because i thought due to a browser glitch that some posts i made didn't make it to the board and/or got deleted and i completely forgot what i wrote.

 

[cizek111]

I agree with benzun_1999

To engage in a ouija board is stupid in the first place. I think a while ago my parents told me never to use one because of it's connection with the devil. The devil is a loser and he'll burn in hell one day too. So basically my advice is to stay away from them. Yes, I'm curious, but I'd rather be on the safe side. Glory to God. Happy Easter!

 

[phoenixthoth]

this is a joke right?

just because mommy and daddy said so doesn't make it so.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

No debates or preaching about religion please.