Seen a Ghost Lately?

That the spiritual world exists is accepted by almost everyone excluding, perhaps, atheist's.  If you believe in God, by almost any definition, and/or belong to an organized religion, you believe in a spiritual world. Yet that world is an enigma.

We are where the Europeans were before Columbus, where astronomers were before Galileo and Copernicus, where we are today with regard to the Universe.  Before Columbus, the map makers went so far and ended their depiction with the note, "Here the darkness begins."  Before Galileo and Copernicus, the Earth was thought to be the center of the Universe and everything rotated around it.  And now, in spite of our orbiting telescopes, our radio wave receiver antennae, and our math and physics, we are still discovering new, and wonderful, things about our Universe.

So it is with the spiritual world.  The Greeks, and then the Romans, had their Olympian gods and others for almost every situation; they may not have been all that far off.  Catholics today have the Holy Trinity, the Virgin Mother, the martyrs and other saints, many of whom have a special function; such as St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, or St. Anthony, the patron saint of things lost. Then there are the books, the Old Testament, New Testament, Koran, and the writings that inspire Buddhists, and those who follow Hinduism, those of the Tibetan monasteries, and probably many others.  The pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas and the American Indians also had their description of a spiritual world as did/do the Polynesians, Aborigines, and Maoris.

The whole shebang is testament to imagination because all of these writings and beliefs are that and only that.  They are sometimes called "inspired" to give greater weight to the words but, in fact, they are the result of  someone, or many, thinking it up and then writing it down or passing it along orally.

Nowhere is there a definitive description of the spiritual world, that is the world that exists outside of the physical realm, that isn't the product of imagination.  And to my point above, even the well observed and the well defined physical world is still full of surprises as to its content and manifestations. We are all the Indian blind men feeling different parts of the elephant and describing the entire animal.  For anyone to tell us otherwise is fraud.

It is also to say that we should keep imagining what is the spiritual world and make it our business to find out more about it, even participate in it.  We, and this is my elephant description, are in the unusual position of having a mind that uses part of a physical brain to imagine the spiritual world.  As long as we don't make this imagination "law" we will continue to progress.