Dead People Don't Care About Lighting

image credit: prairieghosts.com

So recently I convinced my husband to try table tipping. I follow a number of Spiritualist groups on Facebook, and have seen a few of them post about participating in this particular kind of physical mediumship, so I thought I would see for myself what all the fuss was about. That's how I roll. I'm a "see for yourself" kind of person.

Now, I confess, I could have researched it more. I perused a few videos on YouTube, and I surmised that even if you could get the table to move, it would be a very slow means of receiving information, as it looked like you could only ask yes-or-no questions, and the table would tip one way or another. Still, I imagined that perhaps in the same way that the leaf moves around our talking board, via a combination of our energy and "outside" energy from whatever entities are present at the time, that the table tipping concept might work in a similar manner.

My husband didn't want to try it, but I talked him into it. "It's total bullshit," he warned me. I took it with a grain of salt; what was going to happen anyway? If it doesn't work, then so what?

So we used a tiny, antique end table we have here at the house. We sat there with our hands on it with about the same level of casual expectation that we have when we use the board. And: nothing happened. I felt a few brief moments of maybe a pulling sensation, as if the table wanted to tip, but didn't have the momentum, and a bit of a vertiginous feeling myself, but yeah, nothing. Oh well.

I'll probably research this practice more seriously at some point, because I have seen other people do it and I would like to see it work in person, even if it's not a technique I'd be likely to use. Perhaps I was not approaching it correctly? I don't know.

So I searched for "table tipping how to" online. One of the first links I came to was from ehow.com. This ought to be rich, I thought, clicking the link.

The article "How to Talk to Spirits by Table Tipping" featured such gems as "Pick up a special table from an antique shop to give your table tipping a little historic feel," and "Take the table to someone else's home or to a more haunted location if you don't get a response." But none of them made my eyes roll back in my head so much as:

"Provide indirect lighting for effect. Have candles around the room or indirect lighting so that you have a spooky ambiance."

Yes, because when trying to talk to dead people, the most important thing is "spooky ambiance."

image credit: companionspirit.com

This is why we can't have nice things. I can recall a few times when I thought it might be nice to share our board with others who had never used one before, and being asked by one of the new participants, "Should we turn down the lights? Should we light candles?" Just so we're clear: spirits, the dead, whatever you would like to call them, don't give two shits about the lighting in the room, or any special "prayers of protection." Protection from what? People who want to help you?

Now, I agree that I am probably being harsh. If someone has never done anything like this before, how should they know what is important and what isn't? I guess I just get annoyed with the misconceptions that are out there about what talking to the Collective entails. It's not a spooky 80s horror movie. These people don't occupy the physical plane in the same way that we do; it's immaterial to them (literally) how bright it is in the room, what it smells like, what time of day it is, how loud you talk, or anything else like that.

You don't need to be in a "haunted location." The Collective is everywhere and yet not physically anywhere. You can talk to them from pretty much anywhere you'd like. The only preferences I have seen them even express so far is that there not be a whole lot of distractions, like the TV being on, or being with too large a group of people, but that seems to have more to do with the energy in the room than anything else.

Talking to dead people isn't spooky. It isn't mystical. It is as normal as talking to any other person, just these people don't have flesh to lug around. Now let's put on our grown-up pants and stop with the movie lighting effects and silly chanting, mmkay?