Monsters beware, here be humans.

First Published November 25th 1985. From gocomics.com

For almost a year I worked at the Buffalo Gap Historic Village as a maintenance man and store clerk. Every month at the village at the time they invited a speaker to give a talk on a historic topic or one relating to the village. That October for Halloween they brought in a ghost hunter. He said, among other things, that if you believe you are being messed with by a spirit, it is best to acknowledge them and then ask or tell them to go away and stop bothering you. This was colluded in an On Being episode with the Irish mystic poet philosopher John O'Donohue when he was talking about "thin places" and related that he had been told that if he encountered anything weird in such a place he should stop and ask what whatever it is wants. All thins came to mind again when I was watching a youtube video of a Indian mystic Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev answer a question about the effectiveness of astrology where he basically says: don't let the stars bully you.

I loved that. He sums up what the other two are saying as well as what Calvin is doing in the comic above. Don't let the supernatural bully you. There are so many characters in fiction who could have profited from this advice. Hamlet comes immediately to mind. What would have happened if he had said to his father's Ghost "I love you dad, but you had your life, let me have mine." and just went back to school. Come to think of it there were characters that I grew up with that never gave an inch to spirits, spooks, petty gods, faries (the mean kind) or eldritch abominations namely the Witches and Wizards of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, as well as Sam Vimes of the Watch, and Susan Death (who was half eldritch herself and couldn't stand it). Granny Weatherwax is the epitome of this spirit in the books. She once infected a family of vampires with Weatheraxism so that they all craved tea and cared for people when they bit her and tried to make her a vampire (remember that book that kept me up for four hours after I went to bed that I mentioned a couple of posts ago?) Anyways we don't have to be magical to stand up to supernatural bullying. 

Traditionally people are thought of as a mixture of body and spirit. The body actually gives us an advantage spiritually over spirits. What exactly the advantages are depends on the metaphysical system, but the general idea as I understand it is that the body roots our minds and spirits and gives us properties that the supernatural cannot affect, a form of reality, of energy that does not interact with theirs, and is much stronger. There are many stories such as the Fall of Satan where the spirit is jealous of us for this. Possession is a outcome of this jealousy. They want to be embodied, but they cannot handle it and people tend to notice and get the spirit out.  The Ghost hunter that gave the talked mentioned doing exorcisms and he said the key is to be emphatic, use sacred scripture, and be unrelenting until the demon leaves. On a lighter note, in Buddhism it is said that a body is necessary for enlightenment. Demons and angles cannot be enlightened, and are stuck in the wheel of life and death until they are born in a precious human body. 

So don't let the supernatural bully you. You are a human and nothing can take that away from you. Christ showed us this on the cross. If nothing else we can join Simon Peg's character, Gary King in The Worlds End as, belligerently drunk from a twelve pub crawl, he talks alien body snatching invaders into stopping invading the earth in the most amazingly depressingly awesome defense of humanity speech ever filmed by basically saying "Hey, we're human and we don't give up, f*** off."

So now if some supernatural force or entity bothers you, you know know what to do.

Well if it turns out they need help and you can, you probably should. But don't let them force you into it!

Humans rock!

Also watch The Worlds End.