I was waiting impatiently at the closed-door of my friend’s room with an expression of irritation caused by the delay in opening the door. It was one of those late evenings during the period of transition from a fun filled college environment to a stressful working environment. The only times I had fun then were during those evenings spent with my friends in the working women’s hostel cracking jokes and talking nonsense.
As there was no response, I knocked the door once again, this time with a little more force. The door slowly opened and my friend came out with her forefinger on her lips conveying me not to open my mouth. The room was almost dark, but for the dim light of a candle. I kept wondering why they had not switched on the lights. To kill my curiosity, my friend uttered in my ears that they were trying to call a spirit.
Calling a spirit – it was something new to me. I peeped in from the door itself. Few of my friends were sitting in a circle. In the candle light, all of them looked like spirits to me with their wet and open hair and was wondering which other spirit they were trying to call. I moved a couple of steps forward into the room and screamed all of a sudden– a reflex action triggered by the sight of something awful. As you know, in a reflex action, brain is not involved. It is all done by the spine. At the end of the scream, my brain made me realize that the awful thing was my own reflection in the mirror hung on the wall - in white dress and with long straight open hair. Soon another voluntary action occurred . I was thrown out of the room by my own loving friends as their spirit,who was almost there, suddenly withdrew after hearing my loud scream.
“I am scared of spirits. But they say the spirit is scared of me. Is it that both of us are scared of each other?” I went back to my room asking myself.
Next day, my curiosity grew like a mountain after listening to the stories of interesting conversations which my friends had with spirits. Fed up with my repeated requests,they finally agreed to let me participate in those adventurous conversations with spirits. But the role given to me was that of an observer because I did not have any prior experience of interacting with spirits. I did not even know about their culture, their language, and their behaviour. So, I had to undergo a mandatory on the job cross cultural training before I could converse with them.
All my friends sat in a circle with an Ouija board at the centre, their fingers resting on a one rupee coin kept at one end of the board.
“Any good spirits passing by please enter the coin”. My friends repeated this request many times in a low voice. Slowly the coin started moving.
“Have you come?”
The coin moved towards “Yes”, confirming the presence of the spirit.
They asked the spirit about its age, sex, and location (ASL). It was a candlelight chat with a spirit in the mid-1990’s when Yahoo and Google did not exist.
In response, the coin took them to different alphabets to provide meaningful answers. It was the spirit of a young man who died in a road accident. My friends competed with one another to ask questions. They knew the answers of some of the questions. But still they posed those questions to him to confirm his knowledge and capability levels to provide the right answers. Their eyes lit bright upon receiving satisfactory answers. To my surprise, the spirit,even gave the name of my brother correctly which I did not remember telling any of them.
Then there was a flurry of questions which were related to their future - questions about marriage, the names of persons whom they would marry, career prospects and so on and so on. I observed each movement of coin with growing surprise and suspicion. Sometimes, the coin moved slowly. Sometimes it moved very fast in spirals with no intention of stopping on any alphabet, making my friends struggle to keep their fingers intact on the coin. After an hour-long conversation, it was time to bid goodbye to the spirit. The spirit left through the way it entered.
Our chit chats in the evening gave way to chat with spirits. I got promoted from the role of an observer to a meeting participant. We must have met some four -five spirits in a week who embraced death due to various reasons – accident, suicide, illness and so on. But, unlike the filmy ghost stories-one of the few story themes in which mostly women get a chance to do the lead role - our spirits were all young men. (Which other spirits other than those of young men would want to come to a women’s’ hostel in the late night!)To our luck, no lady spirit turned up. Otherwise, she would have sucked our blood out for those secret meetings with their boyfriends. The communications with those spirits were open, clear and crisp. It was easier to communicate with those bodiless souls than the soulless bodies we come across in the world.
During that weekend I reached home and met my cousins only to boast about my experience with the spirits. Cousins being cousins did not trust me and they wanted a live demo with all of them participating. They got so excited after the demo and insisted to play the Ouija board game again. The second time, the spirit became so powerful that none of us were able to catch up with the pace of the coin. I had to literally throw the coin away with a lot of force to get out of the game.
I was a bit confused and some thoughts started to creep into my mind. The answers of the spirits were related to my ideas, my thoughts, my aspirations and my dreams. I was taking the lead in both games as my cousins were new to the game. The very thought that I myself could have been the one who moved the coin haunted my mind. But I was pretty sure that I did not make those moves consciously. I somewhat reached a conclusion that the spirit was me - my unconscious mind. That realization made me break up with the spirits.
Years later, Google confirmed to me that my thoughts were on the right lines. Movements on an Ouija board are due to ideomotor effect. As in reflexive responses to pain, the body sometimes reacts reflexively with an ideomotor effect to ideas alone without the person consciously deciding to take action. The spirits who answered our questions were not supernatural powers. They were within us, they were us. We were not ready to accept or rather we were not aware that those visible movements made by us are ours. We believed that it was supernatural and only they could give solutions and answers.
The human mind is mysterious and powerful. It is our own ideas (idea to motor (action) - ideomotor) which translate into movements on an Ouija board. This means , strong beliefs in our ideas,thoughts and dreams could definitely influence us positively to turn them into actions and reality.
The Ouija board spirit spelling out my brother’s name was not a surprise. I must have told his name during some casual conversations with any of my friends, which her mind would have picked up and stored somewhere in her memory. The answer came from those vague memories of one of my friends.
Like those vague memories, all of us have hidden talents or talents which got suppressed in us in the course of time. It is up to us to look deep into us, retrieve those talents and abilities and revive them to attain the spirit of confidence and the spirit of winning. It is not that only some are fortunate enough to taste the peak of success. Our ideas ,talents and above all , the belief in ourselves can take us to the pinnacle of success. But the path towards success may not be easy. Like in an Ouija board, we may be caught in vicious circles, leading us nowhere. The time, the environment and even the whole world may conspire against us from achieving our goals. But we need to have faith in ourselves; we need to have the immortal spirits within us – the spirit of confidence and the spirit of fighting. It is the indomitable spirit which enabled Hanumanthappa, our great soldier, to endure adverse conditions in Siachen (A big salute to him!). He is remembered for his never-dying spirit of fighting. Outcomes are sometimes not fully in our hands. But it does not really matter whether the outcome is a success or a failure. A failure is a good opportunity to strengthen one’s repository of knowledge, one's humbleness, one’s ability to fight and one’s chance for success. All that we need to do is believe in ourselves!
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