Two Cents on Paranormal TV Shows
As we move into August, I start noticing myself getting more interested in the unknown... it's something I embrace, but not without a certain amount of guilty pleasure... been watching Ghost Hunters and Paranormal Lockdown, running at night, which always leads the way to deeper meditation, slowing down, and just experiencing the beautiful subtle gestures of life in each compelling moment...
Now, I don't believe any of these shows are finding real evidence. At their best, they are explorations in the realm of the human psyche, and perhaps the abnormal psychology of the types of people who host such shows.
Each show does tend to follow a specific pattern of behaviors consistent with their personalities and unspoken but clear agendas...
Ghost Hunters has never found a malevolent spirit in the last 5 years, in fact every single spirit they apprehend when discussing it at the end of the investigation has always been harmless, which leads me to believe their agenda is simply to placate people's fears and runaway imaginations, while still exploiting that fear to make a living, and then get mad when NBC's Syfy channel messes with you.
Ghost Adventures started out strong with a lot of time spent on the people, places, and history of their investigations, but has grown into the Zak Bagans Egomaniacal Douchery Show that is so overly produced as to be embarrassing. Okay it was always embarrassing, but now it's full on cringe, and everything they meet is demonic.
So Ghost Hunters took the scam LIGHT, and Ghost Adventures took the scam DARK.
Paranormal Lockdown stars Nick Groth who left Ghost Adventures for reasons people speculate about, but no one really knows. The official reason is to spend more time with his family, but that doesn't add up because he left Zak's show which does overnight lockdowns to do a show that does 72 hour lockdowns, so basically something else happened we just don't know about, perhaps a battle of wills, Nick wanting to be a bigger host in the Zak show, and Zak wanting to control it all as usual, would be my guess.
That spirit box they use is such a joke, to think that what they hear are actually words and specific to a gender is to what any objective person would hear as aural pareidolia.
People are diagnostic tools, but people also need to understand that those tools are subject to faulty reading, because you are not only the tool, you are the reader of the tool... and people have a subconscious, and identifications with preconceived ideas, ideologies, engrained reactions, etc... so to be a truly pure tool and read yourself objectively, you must be a master of yourself, emotionally, mentally, and these hosts are not Zen Masters, if anything they tend to be reactionary actors, and when recording a show, there are control issues, sensitivity barriers, because one is spending more time observing themselves to put on a good show, then clearly experiencing anything.
This creates a certain lack of honesty in these shows that seem very thick with every show of this type I watch. These shows need to stop controlling, and spend more time just being... honest, sensitive, open minded possibilities...
That isn't to say the shows aren't entertaining, because we bring ourselves to these shows, and if you love these types of old, historical, creepy locations, you can get something from the show, but you'd probably get more investigating places yourself.
<3
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