That all said … I fully believe in the ability of people of sufficient merit to distort the laws of the world as we know them. Some sort of esoteric shell game I suppose … but I’m of a mind that wants the world to be more interesting than it is.

Divination (Tarot, I Ching, Astrology, etc) is a trick of the mind to establish manners of thinking of things … to give you a handle to control your approach to thinking of subjects that confuse or scare you.

Ouija? I don’t attribute it anything but coffee table conversation/parlor trick status.

Oddly I have had great success in finding things with dowsing rods (sewer pipes, buried plumbing, etc) … explanation? None. it just works … yeah I didn’t believe it either.

Ghosts? … I’ve never seen one and in most cases attribute them to fanciful imaginings of troubled minds … but I’m not averse to the thought of ‘recordings’ of trauma extant in the world. Again the power of the mind to affect its own and others perception. (An aside … one of my thoughts on this is that if I’ve convinced you to see something it’ll never show up on camera … just a thought)

ESP, etc? I think its evident that there is some sort of communication network established between seemingly disjoint minds … this leads to all sorts of things that are hard to explain.

All too often fantasy stories and wishful thinking are confused with science and possibility … just because edgar rice burroughs or jrr tolkien thought something up doesn’t mean it exists (or existed) … it just provides us with memes of things that we wish existed … jungian archetypes that we strive to fulfill with our constantly searching perceptions and imaginations … but then if gene rodenberry hadn’t come up with the communicator in the 60′s would we have cellphones today?

The power of the imagination is … well … unimaginable … countering our own biases to get to the truth is possibly the hardest thing we can do. And that doesn’t even consider the facets of deception from outside sources (intentional or otherwise).