On spirits....

Had a conversation with my mother about spirits and “manifestations” of deceased people in our physical world. There’s a huge part of me that believes in the supernatural. I recall an experience I had when I was young, maybe 10 or so, where I saw the form of a woman in the bedroom that we were all staying in at my grandmother’s house. I also recall that same summer seeing fireballs in the cemetery behind my grandmother’s house, all happening in the late July, early August time frame which is the festival of Obon in Japan. Of course, I didn’t know what Obon was really about at that age, but it’s likely my brain could have “formed” those images by inference, after all, there was a lot of focus on visiting tombs for dead relatives, etc...

So, the concept of “life” beyond death - if there is such a thing, why would we be afraid of interacting with those that we knew in their previous life? Does the mere fact that a person dies make them more “evil” than if they were alive? Maybe the whole fear of ghosts thing is our built in survival mechanism to fear things unknown to us, fear things we can’t control until we can “master” them? Is that the essence of mankind then? Our need to “master” things? Does that also explain why there could never really be a society as Plato had imagined, with a benevolent and wise aristocracy, a council of wise men that ruled over the unwise subjects? Ultimately, I suppose one could argue that it IS the desire to “master” everything that keeps us from attaining what Plato called utopia...?