Your Strong Heart Frees Old Ghosts

(originally written on November 30, 2010)

by TwoDD via deviantart

The other night I woke up to find a ghost hovering over me. It looked a little like No Face from the film Spirited Away — a white, oval mask with subtle features, soft painted designs fading in and out, a black hood and cloak. As it loomed over me, I felt it was the ghost of everything unmourned in my family, of long-gone relatives and events that still hang around and permeate day-to-day life even though I (and we) might not know it.

Many cultures believe that if one who’s passed away is not properly mourned then their soul won’t have enough oomph to make it out of this world and into the next. Instead, their ghost will begin to devour the life of those still living — which can cause depression, addiction, and a whole range of destructive feelings and behaviors.

In his book Long Life, Honey in the Heart, Martín Prechtel writes

…when a person was buried and not enough tears were shed and when truly felt grief was absent, the soul of the dead person could not make it to the next world and would be forced to turn back. Scared and invisible, it took up residence in the body of the tenderest and most familiar person it could find. To give themselves a feeling of physical substance, in desperation, the ghost would eat the life of that person. For this reason ghosts usually devoured their relatives, especially their grandchildren, jumping into their bodies and eating them from the inside out, consuming the little child’s spirit also.

…Alcoholism, substance addiction, most depression, homicide, suicide, untimely deaths, accidents, and the addiction to argument were caused by the endless hungers of such ghosts. This kind of ghost consumed soul after soul until a whole series of generations had been destroyed.

…The ghost problem, of course, is what makes the uninitiated world of modern times so scary.

I knew this had something to do with this ghost in front of me, and in my half-awake state began sending it a strong wave of love and compassion. Fear would simply have fed the ghost and drawn it closer; sending this love-beam, however, seemed to dissolve it and give it the momentum it needed to make its way to the next world. I don’t know whether this was truly what was going on or…