PRELUDE Inspired by angels, visited by ghosts, and touched by a possessive nymph, I struggle with the relationship of these curious interludes to the less dramatic activities of life. These recurrent anomalous experiences have seduced me away from more conventional pursuits, and continue to command my primary attention. The result of this obsession is this book about where spiritual entities come from and why they differ from one another in action and appearance; it is a theory informed by both firsthand experience and wide reading in a variety of disciplines. All this reading has confirmed that my interludes, while rather suspicious to some, are similar to those experienced and recounted by many people. These fellow witnesses to a world filled with spiritual intruders range from scientists to poets and include both religious and non-religious people throughout the centuries of recorded history.
While I am not aware of another work espousing a similar unified theory of the nature of spiritual entities, portions of this study benefit from the perspective of other authors and theorists. Some of those influential people are cited in the footnotes of this work. While the works of these inspired authors offer helpful insights into the form and action of spiritual entities, their observations and conclusions are not always consistent. Such differences may discredit their testimony in the minds of those who seek clinical, objective or coherent explanations. However, beyond the familiar world of apparent reality, such consistency does not reign.
Recognizing these influences, their sometimes conflicting ruminations, and my own limitations, I offer a description of how reality reveals itself in spheres, each of which influences the others and each of which reveal certain discrete, identifiable entities. I hope that this theory will prove helpful to those who have encountered ghosts, angels, nymphs, or demons and who wonder or worry about that encounter. I also hope the work dispels some misconceptions that have been formed and fostered for thousands of years regarding how people interface with a larger reality both inside and outside of themselves. Ideally, this description will also help discredit the awful notion that a devil exists who punishes those who sin or otherwise fail to measure up.
Although this work deals to some extent with the notion of the devil and the reality of God, its primary goal is not to expound clever new theological insights; and while it touches upon where spirit forms come from and how they relate to humans, it does not wrestle at length with the ultimate meaning of these exchanges. The book explores how humans experience and perceive spiritual entities, rather than the eternal consequences of such interludes. The book may leave the reader with a better sense of why angels have wings or why ghosts are often hazy in appearance, but it will not reveal the meaning of life. I leave it to philosophers and theologians to suggest conflicting theories on such matters.
Human experience of spiritual entities demonstrates that there are two predominant qualities in the world: flow and glow. As this book will reveal, flow is indicative of apparent reality and its offshoots: people, plants, animals, and other created things. Glow, on the other hand, is about extensive reality directly from God. The fact that some spirit forms are created -- emerge from the flow of reality -- while others are radiated directly from God, proves helpful in distinguishing one type of spiritual entity from another. For instance, later chapters of this book will reveal how the dual existence of flow and glow explains the vast difference in form and function between angels and nymphs. This is not to say that the flowing reality we live in each day does not glow to some extent, or that glow never flows, it is simply a convenient way for humans to distinguish certain spirit forms by virtue of their predominant fluent or radiant characteristics.
The introductory section of this book, entitled CONCEPTIONS, provides a theoretical backdrop for the later examination of specific entities, and deals especially with the fluent underpinnings and characteristics of reality. While this section may be of special interest to pneumatologists, it may prove less intriguing to the general reader. For this reason, those specifically interested in one or another entity type, whether ghosts, nymphs, angels or demons, may wish to skip CONCEPTIONS and move right into the section on ENTITIES AND SPECIAL HUMANS. Such an approach will provide the reader with an appreciation for specific entity characteristics and may, as a result, provoke interest in the introductory chapters. Those early chapters provide the basic framework for a thorough understanding of the notions of flow and glow.
The existence of a flow and a glow surely says less about the nature of reality than about the human capacity for receptivity and description. Things are not necessarily dualistic just because they seem either to glow or flow. There are many things that defy understanding. Scientists, for instance, sometimes utilize wave theory and sometimes particle theory to describe the nature of subatomic reality, even though particles and waves possess mutually exclusive characteristics. This does not mean the light is either one thing or the other, wave or particles, only that we lack the capacity to provide a unified theory that reveals the whole truth about light. And so we stumble forward, in science and pneumatology, with theories that do the best they can to explain our experience and observations.
Those who are troubled or dissatisfied by descriptions that do not reconcile fluence and radiance or wave and particle theories in a manner easily accessible to human logic, may find solace in the substantial poetic, philosophical, and theological testimony suggesting the interconnectedness and ultimate unity of all things seen and unseen, known and unknown. For centuries humans have sought to grasp a unity that lies beyond diversity, and mystics have written convincingly about their personal experience of this unity, but the tie that binds heaven with earth, body with spirit, and meaning with life remains mysterious.
Like other descriptions, analogical or otherwise, this book will miss the mark in some respects and its distortions will require corrections by those wiser and more fluent. Studies which pretend that logic is sufficient to access the wondrous, intermingling spheres of reality should be read with suspicion.
So beware of this work, and works like it. Creative action can produce destructive results. The proof is in the doing, the experiencing, the being in concert with that which provokes and warms all of existence.
