By Rick E. Hale
www.paranormalunderground.net

The folks that I work with know what I do on the side, and many of them find my adventures in the world of the paranormal to be interesting. However, the other night when I walked into work and met a new staff member, I was introduced as “Rick, our overnight staff and an expert of all things that go bump in the night.”

I have to admit, this introduction made me feel a little uncomfortable. Please allow me to explain.

I have always thought that an expert was a person who had reached the highest levels of knowledge concerning a field of research or study. I have to be honest, and I hate to piss on a few parades, but when it comes to the paranormal there really is no such thing as an expert.

I love watching these paranormal shows when John Q Public is introduced as a parapsychologist and expert on ghosts and hauntings, or Joey Bagadonuts is introduced as an author and expert on poltergeists. With all these experts running around, we must really have this whole question of whether or not man possesses a soul, and whether or not that soul survives when we shuffle off this bag of meat and bones, sewed up good and air tight. Allow me to break this news ever so gently . . . we don’t.

Anybody who knows me knows that I am not a religious person; however, I do believe in a spiritual dimension. It would stand to reason, not to mention common sense, that some supermind lives and somehow rules that spiritual dimension. This supermind, whether it be a god or the collective unconscious, is the true expert in matters of life, death, and finally afterlife.

We, as finite beings, cannot fully grasp the pure mystery of the infinite because, unfortunately, we are not designed to do so. It is almost egotistical to call ourselves an expert in the infinite. I always tell people I am nothing more than a tourist trying to figure out, as Douglas Adams author of The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy put it, life, the universe, and everything.

Perhaps those supposed “experts” need to be a little more honest with not only the public, but themselves as well, and join the tour . . . because it is fascinating.