by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

It seems I touched a nerve with yesterday’s blog. I knew I was not alone in my experience with the “mean people.” I’ve seen it over and over. I expected it when the article came out about me in the paper. I wasn’t disappointed.

I’ve interviewed quite a few people in the paranormal field over the past few years, and the negativity from the “outside” is pretty much a common theme amongst them all. As a matter of fact, UFOlogist Stanton Friedman has a name for it that recurred in both interviews I’ve conducted with him. “Noisy Nasty Negativisits.”

There will always be opponents to every idea or way of thinking. Humans are a diverse species with as many different individual belief systems and ways of viewing the universe as there are human beings. It is the nature of our big, giant brains. It is why we use science. And it is why we use religion. Because we can find explanations for what we experience, and we can find people who believe as we do.

It is a lonely feeling – being out in this big world with thoughts and beliefs that are all your own. If you spend enough time with your own belief system, it is only natural that doubts enter into it. I don’t believe that there is a person on the face of this planet – nor has there ever been – who hasn’t at some point in their existence experienced doubts about all of the thoughts that freely flow through their minds. And so we cluster together in groups of the like-minded. Because having others who share a point of view can assuage those doubts. If they believe what I believe, then certainly I’m right.

But we’re not satisfied with that – having a small (or maybe large) group of people share our beliefs. Instead we want everyone to believe as we do. Only in having everyone else say, “oh yeah -you must be right,” can we erase that niggling doubt that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t.

This manifests in every aspect of our lives. Not only in faith, not only in the paranormal, not only in politics, but also in our personal relationships. We want to be right because it gives us some false sense of power and security. And yet….Even if everyone on the entire planet agreed with us – even if everyone on the entire planet not only agreed with us, but worshipped us, would it truly erase those doubts that we harbor in our darkest corners about who we are and how we navigate in this world?

There is no genuine power in having everyone agree with you. There is no genuine power in being worshiped. No matter how many or how few people agree with me, no matter how many or how few like me, in the end the only way that I can live with genuine power in my life is if I agree with and like myself. If anyone is to be totally honest with themselves they will realize that liking oneself can often be a challenge, to say the least.

We go through lives in a struggle with ourselves, never realizing that who we are is exactly who we should be. If we should be someone else other than who we are, don’t you think we would be? It doesn’t sit easy, that belief that we are somehow less than what we believe we should be. And so we turn our back on that feeling. We don’t examine it. Instead we examine who everyone else is. We hold them under a microscope and we judge them, because it is far easier to judge another than it is to judge ourselves.

If only we could approach the world with more compassion. In order to do that, however, we must first approach ourselves with more compassion and understanding. No easy task, since the world that is reflected back to us tells us that we are somehow less than okay. Until we look at directly at ourselves instead of seeing ourselves as a reflection, we won’t be able to see the true beauty of who and what we are.

People are, by nature, divisive. We take sides. We even side against people who believe pretty much the same thing that we do if what they believe isn’t exactly the same thing. You see it in politics. You see it in the paranormal when one group feels that what they know is far superior to what other groups know. You see it in religious sects – or even between religions. I’ve never understood how all of the different religions of the world can’t see that they each believe in pretty much the same God. The devil is in the details. Perhaps that is it – the Devil is in the details. We get so mired in the minutiae that we forget about the common experience. We focus on our differences in order to feel special.

And yet, how can we be anything but special? Each of us is unique. Each of us has something about us that makes us different from everyone else. Until we can embrace those differences, we will continue to lead lives of fear that cause us to squash others before they realize that maybe we are the ones who aren’t so special.

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