Ouija Danger
 

Our Employees' Association had a silent auction this week. Most of the stuff for sale was shite, but my eye caught a Parker Brothers Ouija "Mystifying Oracle" talking board. I picked it up for $1.00.


http://www.wildfreshness.com/brian/archives/ouijab.jpg

Anyhow, I put the game box on a chair in my cube, not thinking much of it, until my nutty coworker, Jane Doe, saw it and informed me in hushed tones and with a frighteningly serious expression on her face: "Don't play around with that, especially since you're a Cancer. You'll attract bad things to you, believe me." "You can't be serious," I replied. "Dead serious. I've seen it happen, Brian, just don't play it. Put it on your wall as a decoration but whatever you do, don't play it."

Then today she sent me this e-mail:

"This is not a joke or just another instance of the pearls and the swine. This is a warning. You will be opening a door to forces that you clearly don't understand. You might at least google it and get some additional info before you simply assume that what you don't know can't hurt you, because it can."

And this is what baffles me about Jane Doe; she is otherwise very intelligent and would never strike one as other than a totally rational person, but she goes off on these astrological and UFO tangents that really make me wonder. I've learned that I can't joke about stuff like that around her because she gets so wound up. She really got into that "What The Bleep" movie, and she was convinced that it had "proven" that one can change the form of ice crystal formation with positive or negative mind energy. Crop circles too. What the bleep indeed.

:eek:

Don't forget to tell her to warn the other 25 million owners.

Now Jumanji, that's really dangerous.:lol:

Indeed, oxo'me'lad.

Those rhino's were real killers....

oh, and pangloss.... just remind Jane Doe she's off her f'kin head.

Oh, Lord...I'm going to be one to step in it, aren't I?

Yeah...don't fuck with Ouija boards unless you know something about shielding, psychic defense and just plain not being a dumbass.

Fortunately, you aren't a hyperhormonal teenage girl, so you've got that in your favor, but if you want to commune with the Spirits, there's better ways...more selective, controlled ways, to be sure.

Like Yahtzee.

Jim Beam
Bud Weiser
Jose Cuervo
To name a few. As for control, that's all covered too:cool:

If I believe in Ouija at all (not sure I do) my assumption would be that it's moved by unconscious reflexes from the participants' wrists. Which would mean the greatest danger you face is messages from your own and you friends' minds.

Hmmmm, might be better off with the Jim Beam after all - the message will simply be, "I love you SO much, you're my best friend!"

What Elspode said. I wouldn't recommend fooling around with one.

Doesn't anyone (besides the pagan's here) believe in the spirit world?

Yes, I do...along with a number of other mystical teachings.

I'm with Elspode and Brianna on this one.

Here's why:

I, along with some friends, fooled around with a Ouija board as a teen and we ended up scared witless. It didn't really talk to us or tell us anything amazing, but the board itself refused to go away. We became scared of what we were doing and threw the board away. The next day it was back on the table. So we cut it into pieces, but again, a day or so later it was back in one piece on top of one girl's dresser. It was definately the same board as it had several distinctive marrings on its surface. We decided we were in wayyy over our heads and asked an older, more experienced person to take the board away for us. There were several other odd incidents which occured during those couple of days, but its very possible they were just paranoia from scared teenagers (so I'll leave them out of the story).

In any case, I don't mess around with the spirit world anymore.

Stormie

When I was a teen, a group of us used a ouija board. They all got scared. That might be because I kept making the board spell "kill" over and over again.

Otherwise intelligent people believing in irrational mumbo-jumbo?
I hate to say it, but this sounds pretty familiar. :::leaves it at that:::

But just remember, this time they aren't Christians.

I look at it this way. Have you ever walked up to the door at the back of the movie theatre? There's no handle on your side of the door. There's a good reason for that.

Now, put yourself on the other side, the inside, the safe side. Do you really want to be the schmuck who gets conned into opening it? I mean only one of two things can happen if you open that door: nothing or something. The nothing is pointless and the something is.. well... think about the missing handle.

One needn't suddenly accept the idea of ghosts, demons or spiritual abysses to come to the conclusion that neither outcome justifies opening it. Don't be the toddler who finds a hand grenade - it could just be a paperweight but...

I think a Ouija Board might be a way to magnify the good or bad energies within yourself. Or, it might also be a piece of cardboard. It depends.

If you can prove that something metaphysical moves the ouija marker, you can make $1,000,000 from the James Randi Foundation. Seems like a pretty good outcome.

Yes, my thoughts exactly because my experience was like stormies, only not as weird. Some doors are better left shut.

:D

My only Ouija experience has been with kids I knew who actually pushed the little thingy around and tried to scare the other kids. These are the same kids who would tell you about Bloody Mary and get you to try to go into the closet to summon her, warning you that you would be ripped to shreds in the process. Fun stuff, but I don't believe in it.

But I do believe in the spiritual world. I just don't think it manifests itself in a Hasbro (or whatever) game. If you want scary...play the game of Life! :)

What the Bleep is a recruitment flick. summary the cult salon critique

Which would, I think, explain the rest of the troubles and confusions you have with her: she sounds rather open to misleading psuedospiritual suggestion.

A lot of people have this problem.

The Ouija board doesn't possess any innate mystical properties, any more than any other spiritual/religious item. The problem comes when you open yourself psychically to outside forces. Can you summon spirits with one? You can summon something. Whether it's a manifestation of something in your own psyche or an actual spirit or demon or what have you, it's very possible to write checks with a Ouija board that your mind can't cash.

It doesn't matter whether the object is 500 years old, has a Milton Bradley emblem on it, or is homemade out of stuff laying around the house. Your mind and energy is the mechanism and the fuel for what happens, and stuff actually does happen. Not always, or even often. But it's like splitting the atom -- just because you know how to do it doesn't mean you can control what happens after. You can go crazy with that crap.

And to those who harumph at all things supernatural -- stay skeptical. 90% of it is debunkable. Some of it isn't, but you're not supposed to be futzing with it anyway. You pagans are lucky you don't get bit in the ass hard from some of the stuff you mess with.

Let a man's own ass be bitten by his beliefs, not the ass of his neighbor. At least Pagans don't start bloody crusades, inquisitions, etc.

noodle, I don't mess with those energies. I respect them but I hardly invite negative energies into my body, mind or life. Or, anyone else's.

Christians have the devil--they know he is there but they don't go calling him up. There is no light without the dark.

I love it when you talk dirty [/totally out of context]

Is everyone hot for noodle now?

Well, you know why they call him "Mister NOODLE" right?

As seen on a post-it:
"Mystical forces called. Will call back later."

Sorry Stormie - I know this was your personal experience and I'm not calling you a liar, but to be frank I find the idea of a piece of cardboard/ wood fixing itself back together and jumping up onto a dresser ridiculous.

Isn't it more likely one of your group discovered a way to put the wind up the rest of you and did it themself?

Neither do Christians. Come down off the cross, the heretics haven't needed your pity for several hundred years :D

My apologies, I didn't intend to single out Christianity, but I can understand how you got that impression from my two examples.
To clarify: substitute the flaming hell of the Middle-East clash between two monotheistic religions for "etc." . . .

I'm gay for the whole cellar, I would hope at least some of you were gay for me.


If you guys knew me in real life, you would be laughing so hard. Probably trying to scrub the shame off with a wire brush, too. :haha:

I just enjoy messing with him because we got off to a really bad start and now I think he's pretty funny. Plus, I'm desperate and lonely. :rolleyes:

Anything is possible (:p ), but I remember being petrified because the board that reappeared had the same gouges and scratches as the one we had cut up earlier. The board was very thick and it took several of us to cut it. I can visualize the trashcan we threw it into and how we kept eyeing it the rest of the evening. There was a lot of accusing each other of trickery as well /shrug. I honestly don't know how or what happened, but I've never messed with a Ouiji board since.

<Better safe than sorry>

Stormie

Ok, I admit - that would petrify me too.

I did not believe in any of the 3 Ouija sessions I attended, but I managed to convince myself once that the rug in my living room was possessed. So I guess people in glass houses etc :)

Noodle nails it. The MB game itself holds no inherent powers...its users, however, do. Everyone does. Some of us are more able to access the energies of the Universe, some are less able, but all have the potential. Good, bad...makes no difference, because it is all energy. You can't have dark without light, negative without positive, good without bad. They are two halves of a whole.

When I watched "What the Bleep...?" , I did come away with the feeling that there was a certain agenda or group responsible, but the underlying information is perfectly valid. We are a part of the Universe. We aren't separate, outside observers. We are made from the same stuff, and are inextricable from it. The possibilities that this revelation opens are endless.

Or it's all a load of imagined hooey. You decide.

Some of the things which are made clear by shunning convention and following logic are not what you would expect.
Skepticism, when applied with a pre-determined agenda, shoots itself in the foot, IE "garbage in, garbage out" . . .

I didn't come to Paganism easily. I finally gave in when I had enough things happen to me that couldn't be readily explained by science. I can't say that spirituality has explained it all, either, but it has taught me that I cannot and should not expect to be able to express everything as an equation.

Some things you simply must experience and accept that they happen.

I said it before and I'll say it again. Elspode's posts are truly among my favorite.

I sound like a nutjob when I get in a hurry...
 

I firmly believe that everything has an explanation. There are definitely some things which are un-knowable from our limited persepctive, but giving up on a rational explanation is the antithesis of my philosophy. If any part of science or spirituality was in conflict with the other, for me, I would know that there is something which needs to be rejected. If it doesn't fit in my picture, then either it is wrong or my picture is wrong. It just needs to be hashed out. I believe that everything can be expressed as an equation, but it's all the same equation, and most of the complication is created by our own inner struggles. There is one universe, and everything is part of it, or X = 1 where X is everything (including science and spirituality...)

That is the history of humanity: we experience something, we don't understand it, we are highly uncomfortable NOT understanding, and so we ASSIGN some explanation to it. Maybe even assign meaning to it.

Unfortunately, as the mistaken explanations firm up in society, they are passed along in lieu of the real explanations.

But now we know: the stars aren't pushed by Gods, they only appear to, because the Earth rotates. It isn't an earthquake because the beings are mad at you; techtonic plates shift below the surface of the earth. You don't get sick because you were bad; you get sick because you get a virus or infection or other type of disease. (edit: which of course you could get by being "bad", but you get the idea)

"Accepting", in my case, is

A) expecting that probability will cause a number of strange things to happen in one's life, and that no further explanation is necessary;
B) admitting there are indeed some things that science doesn't explain, but this doesn't mean there isn't a reality-based explanation;
C) humans are inexact, faulty, moody and full of error while reality is harshly exact.

It's not hard to do once you get the idea. And it allows you to bypass an incredible amount of bullshit. Such as almost everything in this thread. Frightened by a Ouija board? What are you, children? Are you afraid of the dark too? Do you get scared on Halloween?

There's nothing irrational about the spiritual world, we just haven't created the mechanisms yet that render it measurable and quantifiable on a purely physical level. A lot of it is hooey, some of it isn't. There are too many objective, unrelated accounts that point to the same thing to be able to discount them all. If science is eventually able to figure it all out, it won't be because it's able to squish everything into its current template of how the world works.

When phrenology was big, do you think that any of the scientists involved could have grasped a concept like modern neurology? And what we know today will seem laughably crude in 200 years.

I would substitute for harshly: serenely, implacably, and indifferently

A common problem occurs when "reality" is conflated with the neuro-chemical illusion we are designed to experience.

Depends on what costume you're wearing. :ghost: :reaper:

I had a Ouija board as a kid ... everybody did, didn't they? I never had one bit of success with it ... not sure if that was lucky or unlucky. I was more of a Magic 8-Ball girl, and had my first fortune telling deck at 10 years old and my first tarot deck at 13.

I did have to do an exorcism on a friend's kid's Ouija board once, though.

Ouija boards? Meh. That's kid stuff.

On the other hand, some truly dreadful, terrifying things can be conjured using nothing more than a bottle of tequila and a copy of Chutes and Ladders.

I'm pretty sure that's how Barbra Streisand was able to cross over into our plane of existence.

You have a very, very good point.

I often wonder about Hillary Clinton. Clearly 8th Circle of Hell material.

Long time no see, HB!!

:lol:


:lol:

What is reality? It is your reality that doesn't include spirits that push the glass around a ouija board ... that may not be the same for everybody.

Oh, and yes, Elspode's posts are one of the things I keep coming down these steps for, too.

It's a tricky passage, because only tw has the power to define "reality" . . .

Hm. Everybody is hot for noodle and Elspode. You dirty bunch of wenches, you!

Don't forget Flint! :D

Are people hot for me?

My Magic 8 ball says: Decidedly so.

:::struggles to create massive pun involving balls, 8-balls, reading tea leaves, and tea-bagging:::

I think that, with this statement, UT is acknowledging that, just because we don't know why certain "supernatural" things occur, doesn't mean that we won't someday discover an underlying scientific, provable mechanism for the event or force in question.

I for one believe that implicitly. Remember Clarke's Third Law - Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I despise the word "supernatural" . . . it suggests a silly two-tiered nature, which would, after all, just be nature anyway.

You only want me for my vocabulary. Sniff.

My wife is always telling me that women like guys who make them laugh. I don't mind it when women laugh. I do get sort of upset when they laugh and point at my Johnson, though.

Flint has it. Just saying the thing is "supernatural" applies some layer of meaning preceding understanding. "I don't know what it is, therefore it is supernatural," is exactly like the current intelligent design approach, in which everything we don't have an ironclad scientific explanation for is conveniently filled in by God. "I don't know why it happened, but it was a supreme being's will."

That said, Spode, I mean no disrespect even to point out that our belief systems are inherently different. After all, I am often wrong.

And I am wrong at least as often as I am right. No one needs to apologize to anyone for their belief system, as long as they aren't shoving it down the other person's throat.

What the hell are you guys talking about? I'm never wrong!