Ghosts are beings without bodies. There is nothing fantastic and irrational in imagining beings without bodies.

If there can be water inside a bottle and water outside a bottle, there need not be so much apprehension about the existence of ghosts.

Ghosts are actually not interested in the validation of their existence. They never claimed to be real. They can’t be. A spook is more often a symptom of a weak heart and a healthy imagination. Ghosts have nothing to gain from revealing themselves. They are desperate creatures that crave a hiding place and are very particular about the level of transparency and opacity that they want to maintain. They actually design their camouflage very carefully and ensure that their veneer is uncompromisable.

Why do ghosts exist? Ghosts exist not just because they have unresolved issues or latent desires but because they have discovered new material after they died that they want to share. Unlike popular belief, death is not silence and death is quietude. Saints for example find it almost impossible to die because they are constantly invoked, constantly remembered. To be able to die fruitfully, and be able to go back into the grinding assembly of the universe, the cosmic source code that reassembles people into people.

Ghosts want to die and to successfully die you need to be forgotten and to be forgotten fully you need to tell your story. So, ghosts want to tell stories.

But ghosts do not have a body, how do they tell stories? They seek channels. Channels are doorways to extra-dimensional activity. How do you access what is not in the here and now? How do you remote your senses effectively? Channels provide the answer. They hold the singular capacity to allow ghosts to move in and out of their head. These ghosts pick threads of storied landscape and weave them together into stories. Channels allow ghosts to tell stories.

Ghosts need not always be of other people. Sometimes ghosts linger from different time-zones. So there are ghosts of the past or of the future.

Ghosts are not always of people, sometimes ghosts are of ideas, histories, memories. Ideas need to be forgotten fully to do justice to ideas. How do you forget ideas? You let them tell their stories. Cultural landscape sometimes prevents certain stories from emerging because of layers of politics. Ghosts learn how to avoid this politics.

In ordinary ways of looking at the world, ghosts are thought not to exist. They are out-rationalised, not given the right to exist. They are instead requested to sneak behind myths, mystiques and falsehoods. They are asked to go away because to accept them we have to re-calibrate our world-view and we don’t want to do that. Books have been written, systems devised and they cannot be undone and denied at this point. From where we are, we would like to just go ahead.

So, ghosts are left with no option but to haunt us and seek channels.