The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
A question: is anyone aware of any study about connection between the answers obtained using a Ouija board and the human psyche?
I’ll explain myself: over the years I’ve talked with many people who have used the board and allegedly obtained answers from "spirits" or "entities".
A question: is anyone aware of any study about connection between the answers obtained using a Ouija board and the human psyche?
I’ll explain myself: over the years I’ve talked with many people who have used the board and allegedly obtained answers from "spirits" or "entities".
One thing that got me intrigued is the identity of these "entities". In the vast majority of cases the "entities" claimed to be either the spirit of a child/young person or a malevolent creature (which usually identified itself as "Satan", "Devil" or simply "666").
Very rarely the "entities" claimed to be, say a recently deceased grandfather or an historical figure (I’ve talked to a person who claimed to have been contacted, and I am not joking, by Cleopatra herself. And before you ask "she" didn’t spoke any form of Ancient Greek).
Recently I have heard a few more accounts and, again, the child/malevolent entity was again the most frequent "visitor" by a far margin.
Now: I personally don’t believe the Ouija Board to be a "portal" as otherwise claimed, but I do believe the involuntary movements are somehow triggered by the participants’ inconscious.
Since my knowledge of psychology is pitifully limited I have no idea what could make people prefer to be contacted by the Prince of Darkness Himself or a small child instead than, say, Marilyn Monroe or Albert Einstein. For myself I’d prefer to be contacted by a bucaneer telling me where he hid his stash of gold and silver coins. đŸ˜‰
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
HI Mauro,
When much younger I had a pretty bad experience while using the ouija board, so much so that I was a walking wreck for a period of time. I will not go into the details but suffice to say that I was out of work,bored and smoking weed. Now I fully understand where I went wrong and if I was to be so bold as to venture that road again I would most certainly carry out protection rituals prior to the session .
One does not know truthfully whom you are in contact with as the energies are from the lower astral realms and you can be given a lot of misinformation. . It’s the higher realms that you want to contact where possibly your own spirit guides are .
Sooty.
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
I have already related in the past how a friend of mine had a very similar Ouija experience. He was scared silly and thought he was haunted by the "entity" which identified itself as "Satan".
As I’ve already said I didn’t believe for one moment he was haunted by a demon but his condition alarmed me: a small car accident he had during the period (which of course he blamed on "Satan" since he had the board with him at the moment) was clearly a sign he was near breaking point. So I devised some kind of "purging ritual" which involved burning the board and everything related to it. I don’t recall the details because so much time has passed.
But it worked and it’s all that matters.
At the time he was hanging out with a large group of girls (some chaps have all the fun) and he convinced them to try out the board and the results were what got me thinking: why was everyone being contacted by either a malevolent spirit or a small child who died an untimely death?
I have always maintained a passing interest all this time and as the cases piled up it was always the same: small child murdered/killed in an accident/died of illness, malevolent spirit threatening/cursing/swearing.
Surely there must be something to it.
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
I don’t know of any study but the connection between the ouija and ‘evil’ is set out repeatedly in its fictional representations. When someone starts using a ouija, it is likely to trigger unconscious memories of similar scenes they’ve seen in horror movies and on TV.
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
Interesting idea. Perhaps it could be related to the "taboo" of dabbling into the occult?
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
I recently found this quote from Ian Wilson’s book on a Facebook Group’s discussion board (Psican – They are pretty good and support Mysterious Britain, check them out). I think it shows how boards can effect some users, sometimes with tragic consequences. Of course I am not suggesting this is supernatural in any way.
"Recently there was a rather less happy outcome from dabblings with an ouija on the part of a 21-year-old Essex mother, Sandra Killington. Her contact appears to have been an historically known seventeenth-century businessman, ‘Thomas Fanshawe’ whose family home, Valance House (now a museum) is only a short distance from where Sandra Killington lived. Because of her communication with ‘Fanshawe’ via the ouija, Sandra became so obsessed with this character that she frequently used to visit the Valance House Museum in order to talk to his portrait. Ultimately she became so unhinged that in 1981 she walked with her daughter on to the railway track at Upney in Essex, and lay down on the rails in the path of an express train, her avowed purpose to join Fanshawe beyond the grave. Sandra was killed instantly, but her four-year-old daughter Nicola just managed to roll clear in time, though not without some injury."
Source: Worlds Beyond, By Ian Wilson (c) 1986 ISBN 0-297-78604-0
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
There was an interesting bit about Ouija boards on QI XL(stephen Fry) recently in which it was explained they were originaly a game to which the game company (can’t remmember which) still holds rights – anyway Stephen Fry commented that studies had been done where they turned the board around without the users knowing (they were blindfold) and the planchet just spelled out nothing as the words were now upside down showing that it needed users to see the board – it would be interesting to track these down and see what the studies involved.
I have spoken to lots of peope who have had very odd and disturbing experiences with them.
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
Thanks Ziaira, that was interesting reading. Sorry for not replying earlier but I have so little time these days it took me a while to find a minute to keep up with my old posts!
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
This article entitled ‘Ouija Board Helps Psychologists Probe The Unconcsious’ by Clare Wilson appeared on the New Scientist website.
Beloved of spiritualists and bored teenagers on a dare, the Ouija board has long been a source of entertainment, mystery and sometimes downright spookiness. Now it could shine a light on the secrets of the unconscious mind.
The Ouija, also known as a talking board, is a wooden plaque marked with the words, "yes", "no" and the letters of the alphabet. Typically a group of users place their hands on a movable pointer , or "planchette", and ask questions out loud. Sometimes the planchette signals an answer, even when no one admits to moving it deliberately.
Believers think the answer comes through from the spirit world. In fact, all the evidence points to the real cause being the ideomotor effect, small muscle movements we generate unconsciously.
That’s why the Ouija board has attracted the attention of psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Growing evidence suggests the unconscious plays a role in cognitive functions we usually consider the preserve of the conscious mind.
Take driving your car along a familiar route while planning your day. On arrival, you realise you were not in conscious control of the car, it was your "inner zombie", said Hélène Gauchou at the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness conference in Brighton, UK, this week. "How can we communicate with that unconscious intelligence?"
Gauchou’s approach is to turn to the Ouija board. To keep things simple her team has just one person with their finger on the planchette at a time. But the ideomotor effect is maximised if you believe you are not responsible for any movements – that’s why Ouija board sessions are most successful when used by a group. So the subject is told they will be using the board with a partner. The subject is blindfolded and what they don’t know is that their so-called partner removes their hands from the planchette when the experiment begins.
The technique worked, at least with 21 out of 27 volunteers tested, reports Gauchou. "The planchette does not move randomly around the board; it moves to yes or no. It seems to move almost magically. None of them felt responsible for the movement." In fact some subjects suspected that their partner was really an actor – but they thought the actor was deliberately moving the planchette, never suspecting they themselves were the only ones touching it.
Goucher’s team has not yet used the technique to get new information about the unconscious, but they have established that it seems to work, in principle. They asked subjects to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to general knowledge questions using the Ouija board, and also asked them to answer the same questions using the more orthodox method of typing on a computer (unblindfolded). Participants were also asked whether they knew the answer or were just guessing.
When using the computer, if the subjects said they didn’t know the answer to a question, they got it right about half the time, as would be expected by chance. But when using the Ouija, they got those questions right 65 per cent of the time – suggesting they had a subconscious inkling of the right answer and the Ouija allowed that hunch to be expressed (Consciousness and Cognition, DOI: 10.1016/j.concog.2012.01.016 ).
The team now plan to refine the technique, as a normal Ouija board can take too long to deliver an answer – up to two minutes. "We’re trying to develop a reducted friction device," says Gauchou. She’s even developing a "Ouija app".
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
So what are Ouija boards then? Are they a portal in to the subconcious or a portal to the otherside?
Either way they are dangerous I think and I would never play with them.. !!
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
I have read all the above comments and would recommend that anyone read some of Colin Wilsons books – they deal with many aspects of the Subconscious and amongst them, Ouija Boards and their consequences and their association with Poltergeists.
Also Guy Playfair is another author who has a good working knowledge of this subject, particularly about his time spent in South America.
Wilson has written many books about Psychic subjects and I recommend them all, as, in them he discusses and recommends other reading of books written by many well-known ( and some, not so) researchers into these subjects and gives his own very erudite comments.
My personal opinion about Ouija Boards is that they should be left well alone, having spoken to several people who have had nasty experiences connected with them. I believe that the Ouija Board is a way of voluntarily allowing your mind to be accessed by either elementals or bad spirits out to do mischief.
This opinion has been arrived at by a life time’s reading of psychic phenomena and I have no doubts at all that the dangers are very real.
I have been highly psychic all my life and KNOW that this world is not all there is, in fact, that there is so much that we do not understand but that that does not make it unreal – we just do not know, how to access in a correct way the knowledge that IS there.
Re: The Ouija Board and the Subconscious
Wow, a wonderful question. As to me dream and human ideas are the most magic thing in the world. Sprit is powerful, you can’t amage how great it is!