Baba on spirits

"Higher spirits are actually agents of God – with powers and certain duties. They have physical forms in order to work in the world according to the directives issued by the Perfect Masters.

"Lower spirits are those beings without physical forms whose sanskaras remain to be wiped out. They cannot progress after death until their unfinished sanskaras are worked out; as a consequence, they wander about on the lower astral plane. For this reason, they are a source of harassment to living people. Suppose a man is destined to have a life-span of forty years, but he commits suicide when he is thirty. Consequently, for the remaining ten year period of unexpressed sanskaras, his spirit inhabits the lower planes and, at times, is seen by some people as a spirit or ghost.

"To hold seances or to talk with the dead is no great thing, because such spirits are always among us on this living plane. There are advanced yogis and munis who converse with these ghosts who have committed suicide as well as with the spirits of the higher planes. These advanced souls communicate without using a medium; they live on both levels." (LM 724)

What appears to be an orb in a photo
of Meher Baba

I only recently learned about "light orbs."

A few months ago, while surfing the internet, I found a phenomenon called light orbs. They are said to be ghosts or spirits, and indeed seem to show up in photos in assumed haunted places.

I pointed them out to my daughter to see what she thought and she told me she had taken several such photos on a trip with her girlfriend to a famous haunted hotel in Eureka Springs. I asked her why she hadn't shown me them and she said she thought I would just dismiss them as nothing. Which is a bit odd. She took them on a ghost tour after the tour guide told the visitors to take all the photos they could because it is common to capture light orbs there. Interestingly the viewer on Megan's camera died just before entering the hotel. Another surprising thing she hadn't bothered to tell me. She is so unsurprised by things that she doesn't see it as important. She's always been like that. She had viewed her pictures at her friend's mother's house on their computer, but then never showed them to me.

Anyway, she still had the memory stick and she brought it to me to download. And sure enough the pictures were full of light orbs. I include a couple here. She had about a dozen images with orbs.

Photos by Megan Ott taken inside the famously haunted Crescent Hotel in June 2008

Photographic lens flare

These orbs don't appear to be sun-spots, lens-flares, or any kind of camera defect. Lens flares happen when you face a light source, either in the image or reflected in the image. These don't have that. They are also not a phenomenon of digital camera technology because they can be photographed with either digital or film cameras. One possibility is that they are dust particles, I don't know.

Now I thought this was just an interesting novelty. I even posted Megan's pictures on a fun scary website for her for a while. But then I found something else. Below are recent photos taken at Meherabad in India by young Baba loves. Two different Indian photographers took the images with different cameras.

Photo taken at Meherabad in 2007 by Bhanu with a Fujifilm FinePix A500

Photo shot at Meherabad in 2007 by Noble with a Canon PowerShot A520

Now below is a picture of a light orb following Meher Baba at Meherabad (year unsure). It is not shot with a digital camera of course (they were not invented yet), but a film camera.

"A spirit always accompanies me wherever I go and in whatever I do." (Meher Baba, October 1922, LM 417)

Also see: More Light Orbs