There are many kinds of ghost and I address several ways in which you may encounter them and what you may do to help, should you wish. Understand that as a human being you are not a sealed unit, but connected to all life, so all life has some effect upon you. The effect of ghosts upon you, therefore, is just one element in the immense array of influences you are negotiating in any one moment.

Let’s begin with the most familiar use of this term: ghosts as beings who have died but not yet left or not wholly left the earth plane and who continue to make their presence felt in some way. Almost invariably this happens when acute anguish or an unfulfilled need or desire has been strongly present at the time of death. Although much of the spirit has become free of the physical at that point, a portion can become cut off by that powerful pain or need and remain attached for a while to the earth plane. Such attachments are often brief, a few days perhaps, but can endure for many years. It is very difficult for such a beingness to exert any direct influence on physical matter, but the human emotional and mental bodies are very sensitive and easily receive their impressions.

This is one reason why conflicts that last over generations can be so hard to resolve. The ghosts from each side may continue to voice their anguish and their need to the living, bolstering whatever pain is already there and making release and forgiveness more difficult. Some of the most evolved beings currently on the planet are those men, women and children living in the troubled places of the world and quietly, day by day, practising forgiveness of those who have brought pain to their families and communities.

In some of these places an additional factor arises. When the voices of anguish, from the dead and the living, reach a certain pitch they begin to form a vortex which draws in more who find a resonance there and for whom such distress is a kind of nourishment. If you find such a notion repellent, pause a moment and consider whether you have ever felt drawn to follow the news of a disaster or tragedy. If so, it may be that some similar hunger still exists within you. It is nothing to be ashamed of; it may be the residue of a much needed survival strategy inherited from ancestors living in more dangerous times.  But it may also be a characteristic that no longer serves you. One way in which you can assist in dissolving such vortices of pain is by gently desisting from feeding on bad news.

The earth plane itself is highly permeable. Energies move in and out of the earth plane with ease. Nevertheless, just as flotsam can affect the flow of water over a weir, the movement of energy in and out of the earth plane can also be affected by residues that linger on its borders. One such residual energy might be called ghosts. These ghosts are beings who have left the physical with a deep conviction that the physical world is all there is or that some particular event must occur before they may move on. There is nothing wrong in such beliefs: you come to the earth plane, in part, to explore beliefs, to discover what outcomes flow from adherence to a belief or set of beliefs. You are creators of worlds in training; this is just part of your training. To believe that this world, this lifetime, this physical body is all there is can have some very valuable outcomes. It may help you really appreciate every moment, for example.

The difficulty arises when attachment to a belief is so strong that there is no room left for any other possibility. Then you can find, around the periphery of the earth plane, beings stuck in a kind of limbo, denying the reality of their experience. This in turn creates a slight distortion in the portals to the earth plane through which beings leave and enter incarnation. If you pass through these portals with rigid ideas you may find yourself snagged, like a log catching in a logjam. So you might consider these beings, caught by their own ideas, as serving a very useful purpose by reminding those moving to and from the earth plane of the value of an open and flowing mental body. You can assist them, should you wish, in two ways. First, by allowing an openness in your own ideas and beliefs, giving room for growth and change, admitting uncertainty as a friend and welcoming wonder into your life. Second, by appreciating the anger and fear from which rigid beliefs arise. You can go inwardly to the moment of creation of a fixed belief in any such being and hold a space of compassion around that moment.

Ghosts can exist within you also. All your past moments exist within. Where in earlier times there was anguish or something unresolved you may find the echo of the self you were then, seemingly alive and present. Such a self deserves your help, and may be calling for your help by amplifying present moments in your life in which you experience something resonant with the moment of its creation. That past being may be very different from you now, altogether other, but still real enough for you to find yourself acting out its experience to some degree. Here too there is no need for shame. Indeed your acknowledgement, recognition and acceptance of such inner ghosts is of immense help in bringing them the healing they crave. Were you to look into the heart of someone whom you have considered a tyrant, a man who has bought great harm to many, you might find a being of great sensitivity who was so horrified by what he found within himself that he sought to empty that inner world by projecting it outwards and to deny and seal it up within. Acknowledging your ghosts helps them and you and your world.

You are complex beings living in a complex world. Within you may also find other ghosts, beings whose presence is unexpected. You are not what you seem. You are an amalgamation of energies gathered from many sources, welded into a presence, given a name, gifted to the world. Part of your purpose is to bring this amalgamation into coherence, to make sense of a ragbag.  Just as your physical body in order to digest food is dependent upon bacteria, beings independent and other than the body in which they live and with which they cooperate, so you may find amongst the snippets of energy you have sewn together to give you human presence are other kinds of beingness.

Amongst these may be some whom we could call ghosts, in that they were caught up in the net of your energy field as you swept through time, space and dimensions, and then forgotten or ignored. In this time of incoming, cleansing and renewing light it can valuable to liberate such entangled presences as you encounter them. All you need do is to set an intention to free any energies that have become entangled with your own. From that, whatever guidance or help you might need will flow. It helps to consider yourself as an energy field of great freedom and to know that the underlying principle that gives that energy field coherence is love. This then gives you a perspective from which you may see all beings as connected to you by love, and that in granting all beings freedom you are also granting them (and you) permission to find the highest form for the expression of that love.

The presence of ghosts in your world is like a cloud across the sun, a momentary cooling, an influence upon you that passes. But a prolonged dark cloud can have a lowering effect upon your spirit and the presence of ghosts in your reality has tended to have that effect upon human consciousness. Now is a time in which you find yourself emerging into sunlight again, and part of how that happens is through the releasing of ghosts from the earth plane.

If you look at the effect of ghosts upon the human energy field you may observe that their principal effect is a damping down of the capacity to choose. At the level of brain function choice is an electro-magnetic process: without the firing of the synapses choices are not made, and limitations upon the electro-magnetic field effectively limit the brain’s capacity to make real the full range of choices available. There is a tendency to reduce choices to the most habitual, for it is here that the neural pathways are most strongly established. The unresolved anguish of those beings who linger on and around the earth plane as ghosts is expressed in part through the electro-magnetic field. Put simply, the anguish generates repeating patterns that overlay the very diverse electro-magnetic field that the totality of human consciousness generates. These repeating patterns in turn tone down the capacity for choice, obscuring more subtle frequency patterns.

Every day millions of animals die to feed humanity. Their anguish feeds these repeating patterns within the electro-magnetic field of human consciousness. Now, this is not an injunction, nor even a suggestion, to stop eating meat. What you eat is for you to decide. What causes by far the greatest part of this anguish in the animals humans feed upon is not that they die, it is the manner of their dying, and above all the absence of gratitude or appreciation for the gift of their bodies. Whatever you choose to eat, you are eating something that was once alive. The gratitude you express to animal, plant or fruit alike is the gratitude of life for life. The expression of gratitude opens those limiting frequency patterns and assists the expansion of choice and the development of human consciousness. Gratitude is one of the energies that also frees the spirits of humans and animals alike from entanglement in the earth plane. When you express gratitude towards any other being, in the knowledge that he or she has done the best they knew, you grant freedom not only to them but to yourself also.

You are not, of course. But sometimes you may have felt as if, one way or another, you are. Perhaps there is a sense of anguish unheard, a purpose you are unable to fulfil, a need that can never be met. Perhaps sometimes you feel invisible, unacknowledged, adrift. You may feel unreal, even that deep down there is within you a fear that you do not really exist, that you are on the outside of everything. Somewhere there’s a party and no one told you, no one invited you. These are deep and real human fears. If you have known any of these feelings, know that, paradoxically, you are in good company. To be human is a strange adventure; you leave behind much to come here. Memories of home can be confused and faint. It is natural to interpret this into the language of loss. But that language conceals from you a deeper truth: that you never really left home, that you are here, now. With love and compassion gently remind yourself of the full wonder of your being and in doing so know that you are helping to reveal the wonder of all that is to yourself and all beings.