It's not as though these blogs have been consistent but I didn't make this website to be a blog, I added one because I'm adept at stringing together words and using correct grammar. I've had a lot of practice having earned a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology, North American Archaeology and a Minor in Religious Studies from SUNY Oneonta, and then earned a Master's of Science in Northern European Archaeology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. There's hard, irreversible records in place with both universities of my attending and completing the degree programs.
Hot splash of extra here: When I attended Edinburgh, the school was listed within the top 5 universities in the world. IN THE WORLD. Somehow, I was accepted and made it happen. Who knew!?
Yet, the amount of people spewing forth their thoughts and opinions in the paranormal field continue to baffle me, as they seem incapable of even a basic sentence structure or coherent thought. You've seen the insanity if you're a fan or active participant in the field of the Strange and Unusual. You've seen the back and forth of arguments in comments, the disparaging and sometimes just cruel statements made.
Academic, the paranormal field is not. But here's the clincher: it doesn't have to be to create the trends and hot topics we see swirling within the ether of social media. That's pretty much where the public and consumable parts of the paranormal live, and it is obviously not an academic or even vetted space yet the subject matter thrives in those places of individual supply and individual perspective. Social media is used by and for everyone, and so, boundaries of acceptability within the field of the paranormal are null, void, and nonexistent. I mean, you can damn near say anything, and stand by it. Every piece of it is inherently valid before it is not. I'll explain.
The looseness of the parameters and the unfettered wildness that can course through any paranormal theory can be taken to the extreme, surpass any limit, and defy any logic. The very nature of the paranormal lends itself to that looseness, it is indefinable as it is. It falls within ideas and not facts, perceptions and not prerequisites.
I have written a 70k+ dissertation for an accredited European academic institution, and much of that precise writing has stayed with me professionally and personally. However, what I'm conveying I will say in a much less highbrow way: you can be full of shit and still be a leader within the paranormal; an admirable character, a source and scion of reason and intellect. All while being fully, completely, and irrefutably full of shit.
You know what that means? That means the hard part, the onus of interpretation when it comes to anything paranormal, is on YOU. You have to vet and verify before you believe, or take in the words and ideas of another person in this field. You have the control over whether you let someone else affect your beliefs and knowledge within the paranormal. And YOU might not be very adept at that, or you may have mastered critical analysis of information. You might be intelligent enough to disseminate between disinformation and misinformation, opinion and fact. Or not! The boundary of perception within the paranormal is as loose and baseless as the boundary of information being sent out into it.
Do you know how wibbly-wobbly that makes the entire paranormal field? That means interpretation of anything concerning the paranormal is subjective for all of us, every single one of us. The entire trajectory of our lives and how we've come to form the logic that exists in our brains (it gets better as an adult, or, it should), is all we have to base our interpretations on. That which the paranormal is, is literally within us.
The standard of any definition, and qualification of any aspect, is within your own individual understanding. What that means to me, specifically, is that everything is then on the table of possibility within the paranormal, until it is not. Try everything. Hear every wild theory (even the demon ones, even the directly and formally religious-based ones), it all applies until it doesn't. That, is up to me. And up to you.
Thanks for reading,
Amy L Bennett-Bradway
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