The first time I meet anyone, I ask them if they believe in God, aliens, and ghosts. For the most part, this has told me a lot of what I need to know, and it's consistently inconsistent. My freshman year roommate and reigning best friend Sophia is a hardcore atheist, but a fellow ghost story and alien enthusiast. An on-again, off-again lover who has impacted my life in many ways, including my knowledge of conspiracy theories and magic, believes in all three. We were both raised in our respective denominations of Christianity and went through adolescent years of atheism, only to keep coming back to a ‘thisness’ we can only prescribe a word like God. And lastly, my childhood best friend, Eli, who believes in absolutely nothing. He was raised in an extremely atheist family, where the only mentions of God were outpourings from AA meetings. Whenever I try to talk about the possible existence of ghosts or aliens I’m met with a mocking cackle and enunciated lectures of, “Maria, if any of that was even remotely true…”

When I try to tell Eli about the strange experiences I have had in my life, he can’t even try to restrain his chuckles. The other night he told me that he met a girl who was a self-proclaimed witch at a houseparty. He had asked her in small talk, “What do you do?” And she genuinely replied, “I’m a witch”. Entering into the rest of the interaction, he very clearly stated his stance – it was a load of shit – but asked for a “reading”. She offered a lot of vague musings about independence and alienation and Eli admitted that some of it resonated, but also that none of it was something that couldn’t be explained by psychology. The Witch concluded the reading saying, “and I sense you have the same gift that I do.” Later in the night, she would ask for a reading in return and Eli enthusiastically agreed to this experiment. Tongue-in-cheek, he explained to me how earlier in the night he had heard her talking about some of her family and life in Wyoming, how she is very intellectual, and a couple other general life facts that, when imposed upon with varied assumptions, could reveal a lot about a person. Eli indulged completely, locking into his psychology brain, and began analyzing her person: Independent thinker…very in your head; you feel misunderstood sometimes, or some people have not understood these internal parts of you and it has made you feel very isolated. She declared it the best reading she had ever had, leaving him with the prescription: “Babe, you’re a witch.”

We talked about this for a while, how being perceptive or intuitive can open things up, and can make a lot of your assumptions read true, replicating a sort of psychic quality. Yet I still recognize some things as indescribable. I guess it could be labeled as intuitive, but what is intuition? Eli argued that it is a recognition and prediction of patterns; that we learn and grow and perceptions happen so unconsciously that they begin to grow as “intuition.” I don’t disagree, but it also feels like something much less discernible. Maybe I’m too gullible or optimistic or just truly don’t want to believe it’s all just functional for a productive reason. 

Thinking that way isn’t fun, and it’s so limiting. I appreciate his perspective in my life – even though we always get to this point of disagreement of what is “reality,” and how could ghosts be real? And an attempt to unpack complex physics, when neither of us are qualified and frankly just watch a lot of video essays and like to talk about the inner workings of our minds and the world around us. We both seek out and feel it very necessary to find “truth.” And we recognize that that itch is why so many people turn to “God,” “Science,” or other things. 

Journalist, satirist, and cultural critic H.L. Mencken proposed that “believing passionately in the palpably not true…is the chief occupation of mankind.” It’s a kind of pareidolia, a recognizance of the human in the inanimate: a face in a grilled cheese, or Sasquatch on a tree. We search for connection and for explanations to the seemingly unlikely everyday of our lives: hitting four red lights in a row, grabbing the salt shaker at the same time as a companion, or meeting the gaze of someone two subway platforms away. We assign meaning and motion to the mundane and chaotic alike, whether truly karmic or an attempt to alleviate psychic discomfort is up for debate. 

Spirituality has the quality of the ‘thing’ that transcends, parts of it draw me in for that reason. It’s not that I necessarily believe in it all or that I feel I am subjected to some sort of wrath, but who am I to say that ghosts aren’t real? How do I encapsulate or explain these things I assign ‘spirit’ to? Anthropologist Robert Desjarlais, author of The Blind Man: A Phantasmography, writes: “Nothing is stable or fixed into permanence. In its sensate becoming a body oscillates, twitches, displaces; it alters its powers, the materiality of expression, transformations of ground. The nervous system finds alternate pathways, new possibilities of sensation and perception, ghost vibrations.” Depending on how one interacts and structures their systems of symbols and value, there are ways to interact with the ghostly presence that may not be palpable. The conspiracy and possibility of “extrasensory perception,” or the culturally presumed “sixth sense,” is defined by psychologist David G. Myers as “a weird and wonderful human capacity for reading minds, thinking about someone just before they phone, intuiting what’s happening elsewhere, communicating with the dead.” 

There are people I can feel from afar – a sort of haunting. So entangled it feels like some phantom strain of my endocrine system. My mother, especially in recent months, calls and texts me to say she’s been thinking of me, praying for me, that I would seep into her mind so intensely tears would well. It’s devastating to know my mother has started to feel my grief, after decades of carrying hers. This encapsulates what a lot of magic feels like to me: a constant coming into contact with; a forgetting and a re-learning; a cosmic tail-chase.

Experience substantiates itself, but the systems that we subscribe to must offer explanations for things. If it’s a personal feeling or experience – a haunting – it can be easily disregarded, by others and by ourselves. In Intuition: Its Powers and Perils, Myers references the scientific uncoverings of meteorites having extraterrestrial origins in the 1700s, posing that “When two Yale scientists dared to deviate from conventional opinion after a meteor fell in Weston, Connecticut, Thomas Jefferson reportedly jeered, ‘It is easier to believe that two Yankee Professors would lie, than that stones would fall from heaven.’” In acknowledging a paranormal occurrence, we must face a reality without concrete images. As anthropologist Kassandra Spooner-Lockyer writes in “Ten Things About Ghosts and Hauntings”: “We cannot reckon with ghosts without rethinking our contemporary evidentiary schemes and value systems.” And I am not absolved. I am constantly considering the strange and unexplainable, and how such things can be interpreted or “debunked.” It is all relative to human fault. While I undoubtedly believe in science, there is a constant curvature, an approaching but not an achievement of an objective. 

I think of Henri Bergson’s revelations in An Introduction to Metaphysics: “I could never imagine how black and white interpenetrate if I had never seen gray; but once I have seen gray I easily understand how it can be considered from two points of view, that of white and that of black.” In my perceptions of my life experience thus far, whether tainted or stifled by religion and conspiracy, there is a floating I try to maintain in between this scientific rationalism, while also embracing the capacity for the imperceptible. The true scientific ethos champions passionate inquiry and a core knowing that at any point new evidence could be raised, refuting all known rationalism. No stones are set.