OEITH #202 Touched by a Ghost

Exploring an unsettling personal encounter with a “ghost” during a meditation retreat, we mull anxiously over: what "seeing a ghost" means to me; the ghost as a visitor; the messiness of ghostly experiences; why I have never “seen” a ghost, but have heard and felt one; feeling a ghost as perhaps more intimate that seeing one; tricks of memory when recalling ghostly experiences; going on retreat; re-visiting my original notes taken during the experiences, which suggest an altered state; waking inside a dream of someone trying to suffocate me; a malevolent female presence; banishing by pentagram; classic elements of sleep-paralysis; a dream of a nun haunting two children as the seed for what followed; the broken memorial and the nuns' burial ground; the history of the retreat centre; a fantasy of vengeful nuns; the blurring of boundaries between waking and dreams; the reaction of my teacher to the spooky experiences; the Buddha's teaching on how to deal with ghosts; attitudes of the retreat centre staff; a bedroom invader; getting intimate with a ghost; a dream without sleeping or waking; sending the ghost some metta; theories versus mess; effects of the meditation practice; blurring the boundaries between internal and external perception; a psychotic experience; psychosis as an intrusion of the real; sleeping with the lights on; meditating on the nature suffering; the effect of compassion on suffering; the mystery of suffering; the effects of this practice; an encounter with a beast; the effects of metta; beyond banishing; parallels between the ghostly experience and the meditation practice; an entity of many masks; holding experiences and theories lightly; the atmosphere of the retreat centre at night; night-time meditation as listening to night-time radio; last night at the retreat centre; something more than a ghost; apparently physical elements in the encounter; the sense of a farewell; a collision of multiple predisposing factors; ghosts more complicated than an object to be seen.