Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement

by Buster Benson

this book. I’ll get into that in a little bit. But if you asked me a year ago if I believed in ghosts, I’d say that I didn’t, not even a little bit. I’ve even had a few heated arguments in recent years with friends who can back this up. More specifically, I’d say that I strongly opposed the idea that ghosts exist but was open to new information about them. If a ghost appeared on my favorite talk show and answered a bunch of questions to my satisfaction, yes, I’d be swayed by that evidence. If you go back further into my past, I haven’t always been a nonbeliever. In fact, I once experienced a “being” during meditation that could be considered in the category of ghosts. At the time, I 100 percent believed I had seen a spirit of some kind. Now I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Experience and memory are complicated, right? When I was in second grade, a few of us neighborhood kids were playing with a Ouija board and it “instructed” us to search for something in the hills behind our houses. We found a buried box with some junk in it, and our minds were blown. In high school, I got into tarot and had a habit of hanging out late at night in diners and reading cards for other people in the restaurant. One time, a man I read some cards with burst into tears because he believed the cards had sent him a message from his recently deceased horse. I was also very interested in near-death experiences and really wanted to communicate with angels and other beings on “the other side.” One afternoon ...