Believe it or not

Recently I happened to watch the 'Viswasichalum Illenkilum" show in Asianet. It was all about the ghost of a lady being present in the Universty College Campus at Karyavattam , Trivandrum. The people who got interviewed as part of this confirmed that they had seen the spirit. The psychology professor the channel interviewed also confirms the presence of some thing unknown to us. Ridiculous ! How can such a popular channel promote such blind beliefs ?

Many a times , when I see the films centered on lady ghosts , I used to wonder why all these ghosts are of ladies ? Any film you take , only lady gets portrayed as ghost. And the other interesting thing is , they get into the bodies of only ladies and not men.

I remember an incident which happened during the first year of my first job. I was living in a working women's hostel at that time .

One night , around 10 PM , I happened to go to the next room and I saw a big crowd inside the room . Just wondered why ? They all were sitting infront of the Ouija board .

For those of you who dont know , an Ouija board is a board which has english alphabets , numbers ( 0 to 9 ) and "Yes, No" printed on it . This is used to communicate to spirits. The planchette ( a 3 legged device which is used for movement on this board) or a coin is used for moving from one alphabet to another alphabet. The team using this board would keep their forefingers on the coin , invite a spirit , once the spirit gets inside the coin , the coin would move. Then the team can ask questions to the spirit. The spirit in the coin would start moving by itself from alphabet to alphabet depending on his/her answers..In short the spirit spell the answers.

I just could not believe how the coin moves from alphabet to alphabet. Sometimes , the movement was so fast that my friends holding the coin were finding it difficult to still have the grip on the coin. After the team finished all the questions , then it was farewell time. The coin moved out of the board by itself indicating that the spirit had gone.

Initially , I was very very scared about the whole thing .After seeing this Planchette game for 2- 3 days , it gave me the courage to be part of the team to call the spirit. I was n't married at that time. Every girl was interested to know the name of the guy whom they would marry. The spirit invited like this once ,told me that I would marry a guy called "Vikas".

I became more friendly with spirits . I used to tell my friends in office about this game. I even told my cousins about it . My cousins and I played this oncewhen all of us were there in our "Tharavadu". After playing this game twice or thrice at my "Tharavadu" , I realised that the answers had some thing to do with my presence. I was ofcourse not moving the coin. That I was sure. But , the answers were probably those which I had in mind or in some cases my wishes or dreams what ever. But the force is ofcourse not my physical force. I could realise that it is probably my mind which could move this coin. Some power which is there inside us which moves the coin..It is true.. The moment I realised this , I stopped playing this game. It could be dangerous to play with your mind.

I investigated a bit on this . According to scientists , this movement of the coin is due to
ideomotor effect. Now , what is Ideomotor effect ?

Thanks to Wikipedia ..I have just copied and pasted it here..

The ideomotor effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action. For instance, tears are produced by the body unconsciously in reaction to the emotion of sadness, usually without any intervention of conscious will.
Stage hypnotists exploit the ideomotor effect for entertainment value, convincing volunteers to perform some action without consciously deciding to do so. The volunteers usually have no memory of their performance, much like sleepwalkers who are unaware that they are acting on stimulus existing almost entirely in their own minds. More subtle unconscious physical reactions are often used by magicians and illusionists to perform "mind-reading" tricks

So do we still have to continue to promote and propagate such blind beliefs ??