I never know what is a 'ghost', nor a 'spirit'. I won't say I don't believe in ghosts or spirits, but I won't say I believe either. I don't know what do people mean by 'ghost'.
When I read Shaman King, I just treat the spirits as a special type of character... and 'oversouls' as an example of graphical accessories in accordance to the world view in Shaman King used to produce similar visual effects as magic.
I didn't gave it more serious thought until AKIDA Yamakusa came to me and insisted that these flashy settings are made from reality.
1. Normal people can't see spirits. Shamans or people having shamanic potential can. But some can only feel them, while others can see them clearly.
2. Normal people can't see oversouls. Shamans or people having shamanic potential can.
3. Oversouls have effects on physical entities.
4. Oversouls are produced with shaman and the spirits the own("Mochi Rei"), using their Furyoku (literally meaning Shamanic force) which somehow produced Reiryoku (literally meaning spiritual force).
5. Power of oversouls is directly dependent on the Furyoku put onto the oversouls. However, the strength of the oversoul can also comes from the Mochirei's Reiryoku, but how much the oversoul can be strengthen is limited by the shaman's Furyoku.
6. Furyoku and Reiryoku are quantifiable.
7. Shamans can fight with oversouls with each other and the result is largely dependent on the strengh of their overouls, which depends the amount of Furyoku they have, as well as tactics, including psychological attacks.
8. Furyoku is something associated with the strength of one's heart, particularly the grandness of one's dream and the determination to acheive the dream.
9. Ghosts are a type of oversouls.
10. Spirits are defined as the remaining thoughts, memories, desires and emotions of the deceased.
After listing the above points out with Yamakusa, I understood why Yamakusa insisted that are some reality in this seemingly outdated system of beliefs.
Even if you don't believe in determinism, taking Shaman King away you can still see that 'ghosts' and 'spirits' are words and concepts which are planted into most cultures so deeply that even the scentific attitude so prevalent (or not?) nowadays cannot wholly removed these stuffs and we are constantly nagged from behind by 'ghostly' ideas.
Is this all just the barbaric desire of living beyond death, and the instinctive fear reaction to the unknown which sustain such concepts?
The connections I propose down here might seem faint, but I have my humble faith in it:
Before I pour my (and AKIDA's) theories to you, there are some belives/assumptions which I want to list out so that you might understand what I am talking about later.
First, I believe that people do differ in their ability of perception, and the difference not only lie in the more physical levels (e.g. resolutions, minimum amount of energy required by a signal to be detected by the sensual organs etc), but also in the 'higher' level, in the ability to remember, associate, and interpret the signals received. Some psychologists like to call these higher perceptual processes as 'cognition'.
Second, I do believe that people make things up to satisfy their own desires or sooth themselves from fear. I believe that people can make concepts up to convince themselves and others so that they might feel better about something.
So what is my theory? Let my write them down in points
1. Some people are able to perceive the desire/motive/emotion of somebody through objects/details of expressions which people don't usually use to derive other's desire/motive/emotion from.
2. Such extraordinary ability of perception (actually cognition would be a more accurate word to use here) allows these talented ones to realize other's mind when others don't expect them to be able to. And most of such talented ones cannot explain why they can do so.
3. This rare ability of cognition always let these people with it feel things that others don't. If the culture has no existing theory (e.g. ghosts/spirits) to explain such phenomenon, these people might ignore their feelings and they might misunderstood themselves to be an emotionally unstable person. E.g. they might feel strange emotions due to objects/expressions they perceive but as they don't recognize it's caused by an external stimuli they might interpret it as their own internal fluctuations.
4. A tiny fraction of this rare type of people managed to master (some of) the causality of such unusual perception and could even transfer complicated knowledge as well as intricate feelings by their own creations which is often artistic works from pictures, sculptures, movies, anime, manga, fictions to architects or daily-life objects. The effect of such creations might be so big that most people might be shaken psychologically by it.
5. On the other hand, the people with such extraodtinary ability of cognition might be able to learn a lot from the special creations mentioned in 4.
6. Many of the people who had this special type of cognitive ability learnt to control the use of this ability, and they only use them when they want to e.g. to extract knowledge from those special creations.
Uhm, you still don't see why this theory has something to do with spirits and oversouls and shamans and ghosts mentioned and defined in this manga?
Well, then, I will try again next time. Feel free to email me or AKIDA (who gave me most of these ideas) and discuss on this issue...
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