Michelle Belanger on Paranormal TV and The Psychic Energy Codex – Paranormal Podcast 776

Michelle Belanger talks about the current state of paranormal TV and her new edition of The Psychic Energy Codex. As always, Michelle is a provocative and fascinating guest.

You can find her website at michellebelanger.com and The Psychic Energy Codex at Amazon: https://amzn.to/3KPT4Dd

Thanks Michelle!

This post contains Amazon affiliate links that benefit Jim Harold Media when you make a qualifying purchase. Thank you for your support!

TRANSCRIPT

JIM HAROLD: Hey! Jim Harold here, and I have a major announcement! I’m announcing Jim Harold’s Campfire Live: Stories From Around the Campfire. We’re doing a tour starting this summer, and we’re going to start out with four cities, and hopefully more to come:

June 21st in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, at the City Winery. Then June 22nd, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at the City Winery. June 24th, New York, New York, at the City Winery. And wrapping up, June 25th, Boston, Massachusetts, at City Winery.

I’m very, very excited about it. I think it’s going to be a great time. We’re really going to try to put something together for you that’s kind of different. Rather than just a podcast recording, we want to make it a real, live Campfire experience in your town. It’s going to include some of my favorite stories, including exclusive, never-before-heard tales, some of your stories, interactive segments, an exciting Q&A, and more. We think this will be an experience that every Campfire fan will love, and we hope that you love it very much as well. We’re excited about it.

Tickets for everyone go on sale this Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern at jimharold.com. That’s this Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern at jimharold.com. There’ll even be a very limited number of VIP Meet & Greet packages available.

And then, if you are a loyal member of my Jim Harold Paranormal Plus Club, even better news: we have an exclusive presale. The presale starts Wednesday, April 12th at 10 a.m. Eastern, and we’ll have all the details on the audio of our feeds of our various Plus Podcasts. So look for that. That’ll include a password that will allow you to get into the Campfire Live sales site and buy your tickets on a presale basis so you get your seats first and you make sure you’ve got them – because these are not huge venues, so we expect that they will sell out quickly. So that gives you a little bit of leg up if you’re a Plus Club member.

Again, all that information will be on the Plus Club feeds for the Plus Club shows, and then everyone will be able to buy tickets as of this coming Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern at jimharold.com. We think it’s going to be a lot of fun. I’m very excited about it. I hope you’re excited about it. It’s Jim Harold’s Campfire Live: Stories From Around the Campfire. Again, Stories From Around the Campfire, a live Campfire experience. Been wanting to do this a long time. Almost got to do a little bit of it in 2020, but we all know what happened. [laughs] But this time I’m really excited about it because we’ve really taken our time and built something and thought it out, and I think it’s going to be great.

Hope you’ll join me for Jim Harold’s Campfire Live: Stories From Around the Campfire. Tickets go on sale for everyone this Friday, 10 a.m. Eastern at jimharold.com. And again, Plus members, tune in to those Plus feeds to get that presale on Wednesday. We thank you so much for your attention and hope to see you in your town.

And now, we’re going to get to the Paranormal Podcast.

[intro music]

This is the Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold.

JIM HAROLD: Welcome to the Paranormal Podcast. I’m Jim Harold. So glad to be with you once again. We have one of our favorite all-time guests on the show. She’s been with us many times over pretty much the whole history of the podcast, which is bearing down on 18 years. I’m talking about Michelle Belanger, psychic TV personality, author, expert, medium. She does it all, and really – when you talk about someone who knows their stuff, that is Michelle. We’re always so glad to speak with her.

Her latest release is actually kind of a reprise; it is I believe a second edition of The Psychic Energy Codex: A Manual for Awakening Your Subtle Senses. And she’s got a lot of other things going on, too, of which we will speak. Michelle, welcome back to the show. Always glad to have you on the program.

MICHELLE BELANGER: It is always glad to be here, and it’s always a delight when your name comes up elsewhere because then I can crow about how cool Ohio people are.

JIM HAROLD: That’s right, that’s right. There’s something in the water, and in this case it’s good. [laughs]

MICHELLE BELANGER: Our water is “Erie.” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: That’s right. Somebody just pointed that out to me. Lake Erie is eerie, that is correct. Well, I wanted to ask you about something real quick because it’s in the headlines, as they say, and I thought we could just address it and then move on to other topics and this re-release of this book.

There’s a lot of controversy out there about paranormal TV these days, a lot of shows not being renewed, a lot of finger-pointing, those kinds of things. I don’t want to get into the muck; I know you don’t either. But since this has directly impacted you – Portals to Hell, as I understand, as you said on your social media page, has not been renewed – I would just ask you this. Any comments about that? And what do you think the state of paranormal TV is, and what would you like it to be?

MICHELLE BELANGER: To definitely confirm, yes, Portals to Hell has not been renewed. It got the axe, along with a bunch of other things. We had a pretty good sense that that was happening because by this time we would’ve been pretty much wrapping the new season. Just because there’s a lot of scuttlebutt that happens, I did reach out to Jack to be like, “So for real, right? That’s a thing?” So no more Portals to Hell. We’re not the only ones.

And yeah, there’s a lot of finger-pointing. The paranormal, especially paranormal reality TV, is a community that can be rife with tight friendships but also frenemies and also a lot of rivalries. I think anything that has money involved can get bitter. If there’s a problem, look to the recent buyout and the way things are being upended with the Warner Brothers, HBO Max. Everything is getting reconsolidated. There’s a couple of people at the top who have opinions about what sells, what doesn’t sell. They do seem to have a bias against things that have too many not-white guys in them. That is something you can see if you look at what got kicked out. Just if you go through Cartoon Network things, other shows, people who are being removed from producer and EP and director and writer stuff – it’s a whole – I don’t know, it’s playing to what they think their main audience wants.

Which leads to the next question, which is, if you’re not looking for just a bunch of white guys yelling at ghosts, what do you do? Where do you go? Or if you’re looking for niche content that is not a cookie cutter like everybody else’s thing – because the networks are always going to go with what they believe is a sure thing.

The future of paranormal TV is going to be in indie spaces. Independent creators. It’s going to be in spaces where we have to crowdfund stuff, where it’s a little bit more bespoke, where we probably won’t have the same level of distribution, but we’re likely to have a lot more heart because we won’t have random people way up at the top of things telling us we can’t do that because they don’t understand it.

JIM HAROLD: I agree. I think that the future is definitely – there’s always going to be network shows of one type or another, and it’ll ebb and flow. I used to work in commercial radio, and I would often say that the big conglomerates that control commercial radio – it’s not unique to this. I know people are so close to it in the paranormal, they think it’s just the paranormal. It’s not. I said that if one of the major radio conglomerates could run a feed 24 hours a day of somebody gargling and they could sell ads against it, and it were successful, they would program that in a minute. [laughs]

To the people who count the beans – I’m not talking about the people who create paranormal TV – it doesn’t matter what it’s about. It could be about the benefits and abilities and fascination with toilet paper. If that’s what got eyeballs, that’s what they would program. They don’t care what it is.

MICHELLE BELANGER: And also they don’t care who’s authentic.

JIM HAROLD: No.

MICHELLE BELANGER: When I first started working with Paranormal State, I had this very naïve idea of like, “Yes, everybody who’s involved in this show has the same belief as the team, which is like we’re out here exploring things and learning and helping people and expanding everyone’s else awareness.” No, the folks way up top, they didn’t think any of it was real. They just knew that this was popular, and they were making a show that they wanted to sell.

That’s the disheartening reality of reality TV, especially for the paranormal. At the top, they don’t care about ghosts. They don’t care about the quests. They don’t care about uncovering the truth or whether or not people are faking. If somebody faking stuff makes them money and makes a big show, they will totally roll with that. Nobody’s trying to prove, disprove, debunk. They’re making television.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. I think you have to remember in any form of media, particularly controlled by large conglomerates, the number one, two, and three priority is making money. I’m not talking about the teams. I’m not talking about the investigators. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the higher levels. At the higher levels, the programmers, those kind of people – again, they’re looking at the profit.

I’ll give you an example. I don’t want to dwell on my experience, but when I used to work in advertising and radio, there would be people who would approach the stations – and there was a local station, a classical station I worked for that was not like this. But all other stations I worked for, it doesn’t matter what it was; if the check cashed, you run it. There was stuff that I was like, “Are we really going to take this? This seems kind of…” It’s like, “Yeah, you’ve got to take it.” And if you didn’t take it, they would find another sales rep who would take it and you’d be out on the street. So people have to remember that.

But I think there is hope in independent content creation. I look at the things you’re doing with your Patreon, I look at what many podcasters are doing, I look at people like Seth Breedlove, another Ohioan, Monsters Among Us and all the stuff that he’s done with these great cryptid documentaries that he does. He’s basically created a little movie studio in Ohio, and I think that’s great.

And to be honest with you, I’d say to the creators out there, don’t wait for somebody to call you up to do a show. Do it yourself. Put it on YouTube. Do a podcast. Publish your own books. That’s where I think the opportunity is in both trying to further the paranormal field and also to get a place to put your content and those kinds of things. That’s at least my thought.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah, I would say don’t make yourself beholden to the randos behind the desk who think that your success is how much money they can make off of you.

JIM HAROLD: Right. Now, that doesn’t mean – if the phone rings and you get an opportunity to be on a larger platform, I think it’s smart because it can expand your visibility and help you do your work. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t look down upon anyone who does that. But don’t let that be the only game in town for you.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Also, I would say if it’s a big thing, absolutely get an entertainment lawyer. Get somebody to go over the contract with you. Do not sign a contract just because somebody gave it to you. Reality TV is probably one of the most predatory and exploitative types of television, and it’s really easy to go in naïvely and get in over your head, and suddenly you’ve got an NDA and it doesn’t matter what you actually want; you will end up toeing the line.

JIM HAROLD: Words of wisdom from Michelle Belanger. Well, enough with that stuff.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah. That’s the tough stuff. Bleh. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: The Psychic Energy Codex: A Manual for Awakening Your Subtle Senses. As I understand this, this was previously released, but you got the rights back – which, again, speaks to this idea of independent creation. Can you talk about that a little bit?

MICHELLE BELANGER: My first big publisher contracts were with Wiser Books in the early 2000s. That was The Psychic Vampire Codex, The Psychic Energy Codex, and Psychic Dreamwalking. There’s a reason they all have “psychic” in the title, because they put that there thinking it would sell better. None of the titles that I gave those books stuck. None of those were the titles that I gave those books. But I just rolled with it because that seemed to be what happened. They were not good contracts. They were the first contracts that I got; I didn’t feel like I had an option otherwise. It was a three-book deal.

The Psychic Energy Codex is basically my workbook. It’s a compilation of all the classes that I’ve taught on psychic development, energy work, honing your abilities, but also developing a keen sense of objectivity. Like how to keep yourself in check, how to assess your abilities, how to not go down the rabbit hole and think that everything is psychic and paranormal.

I wanted to release a new version once we got the rights back. It was a long process. This was 2004-2005, so nearly 20 years. When I went back and reread it, there wasn’t a whole lot that I felt I could improve upon. I could add a couple of classes in there and a few things, but it’s a solid book. So we spruced it up with a much better cover, went through, changed some language, updated it, brought it into the 2020s.

And now it’s all mine. I get to decide how things get said in certain passages and what pronouns get used. Pronouns were a weird thing back then. They went through and took all of my they/thems out of there. I was trying to be – yeah, that experience is why, if I seem a little bitter and also sharply worded when I’m talking about make sure you go over your contracts, make sure if you’re going to deal with something that you really know what you’re signing up for – that’s one reason why. I didn’t have the best experience.

JIM HAROLD: I learned very early on, through an experience I had when I was in radio – I’m not speaking to your situation; I don’t know the particulars of it, but I’m just speaking what happened to me. There was this agreement I had with this one company, and it said “thus, thus, and thus.” When I signed the contract, somebody in the organization said, “What about this?” It’s like, “Eh, we’re not going to enforce that. Don’t worry about that.”

MICHELLE BELANGER: Oh no, never going to do that.

JIM HAROLD: So I went to a family friend, a lawyer, and I showed him the contract. I said, “They said it wouldn’t be a problem if things went a certain way.” He said, “Always remember when you have a contract, you have to look at what’s called the four corners.” And again, I’m not giving legal advice. I’m just telling you to be careful. I’m not a lawyer, don’t play one on TV. The four corners of the contract. In other words, if it’s in there, they can enforce it. Doesn’t matter what anybody said, it’s not what anybody told you. If it’s in there, they can enforce it. They may choose not to, but chances are they will if it’s not in your favor. [laughs]

And that was an expensive lesson, but it was probably worth it. I lost a couple thousand dollars, which at that time was a lot of money for me. It had nothing to do with the paranormal field, but it was a lesson that I could’ve taken a class to learn, so I guess that was my class. [laughs]

MICHELLE BELANGER: What they always taught me is management, producers, people who manage talent – they’re not your friends. They want to make money off of you and your product. You are, in fact, somebody who is producing a product for them. In every aspect. What you need to do is advocate for yourself, and if there’s something in a contract that you don’t like, push back. Nobody is going to advocate for you except you.

There’s a point where, especially when you’re first starting out, you feel like you don’t have any other options. If I went back then, I think I would still sign it because, for the vampire stuff especially, there were not a whole lot of options, and that really needed to be out in the world. And also, for the subsequent books, I would’ve pushed a lot harder.

JIM HAROLD: The other thing is that there weren’t as many options back then. Self-publishing was totally looked down on at that time. But now –

MICHELLE BELANGER: Back then, self-publishing was, do you have a spare $4,000 and a nice dry semi-warehouse attached to wherever you live? Because you are not just doing print on demand. That did not exist. You had to set up the whole thing.

JIM HAROLD: Carry inventory.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Buy all of it, carry the inventory, do all the distribution yourself. And if you lived in an apartment, you were just sort of hosed.

JIM HAROLD: Yeah. It’s a whole new world now. My first book was published by a traditional publisher. I didn’t care for the way it went. I didn’t think it was marketed properly. Any of the marketing that was done was done by me, and I’m like, why am I doing this? So I hired a layout person for my next four books, and it looks like it was made by a major publisher, but it was Jim Harold Media. And those went very well. I’ve just been so busy, I haven’t been able to do more. But that was a way better deal for me.

And that’s the same thing with audio, podcasting versus radio. If I had gone into a radio station in 2005 and said I wanted to do a show on the paranormal, they would’ve said, “Yeah, we’ll sell you time. $500 a week and you’ll be on on Sunday morning at 7 a.m. or Saturday morning at 7 a.m.”

MICHELLE BELANGER: It’d be like the [unclear 00:20:04] show. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Yeah, like an AM radio station. And same with TV, we’re seeing now. There’s other options out there. It’s such a great time.

When we get back, I want to talk more about the book itself and some of the themes that you cover. We’ll be back with the always knowledgeable, always insightful, and always delightful Michelle Belanger right after this.

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If you love the Paranormal Podcast, be sure to check out Jim Harold’s Campfire, where ordinary people share their extraordinary stories of ghosts, UFOs, cryptids, and terrifying encounters. Find it for free wherever you listen to this podcast. Tune in to Jim Harold’s Campfire today. Now, we return to the Paranormal Podcast.

JIM HAROLD: We’re back on the Paranormal Podcast. Our guest is Michelle Belanger, and we’re talking about the old but new book, The Psychic Energy Codex: A Manual for Awakening Your Subtle Senses. Michelle, if I’m correct, people were really clamoring for this. There were a lot of people wanting this, and the old editions were selling at a very high price. It seemed like it was really an idea whose time had come, again.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah, this was one of my top sellers. When we did get the rights back, the one downside was we bought all the remaining inventory, and as soon as folks realized that it wasn’t coming from the publisher anymore, I started seeing copies of it up for $300. I’m like, “It’s still in the store! It’s okay!” Then I think Damian Echols did a class with it as one of the things. A lot of people will use it as a workbook, as a backbone for their classes, especially on energy work and psychic development.

The initial concept for the book was I’d written this book The Psychic Vampire Codex, and energy work and some pretty deep, strange stuff is in there. A lot of energy workers, Reiki folk, Qigong folk, had been like, “I really like the ideas in this vampire book. Vampires are not my thing. What if you wrote a book that enlarged upon the way that you work with energy and all the rest of this stuff?”

I opted to go one step further and be like, if I needed to hand to somebody, like, “Mom, here is what they’re doing when they talk about energy work” – somebody who’s got no background with it whatsoever – I wanted a book that a complete beginner could pick up and really get the concepts behind it, that also was deep enough that you could go back to over and over again, and all of the exercises are things that beginner, intermediate, and advanced, you’ll still get stuff out of.

JIM HAROLD: That was going to be my next question. I think a lot of people are interested in these things. They might be a little intimidated, though. It’s like, “Ooh, I’m not an expert in this.” So they could pick up this book and it could start to bring them into this world, right?

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah. It starts first with what I mean by energy. What are we talking about? How does that play into psychic sensitivity and our perceptions of spaces? It goes into different topics that we will encounter with energy work – auras and chakras, and what is the energy body. There’s a lot of history in there, too.

The chapter that I’m most proud of – we hear in especially the New Age and little TikTok witch world “chakras” and “energy body” and “clearing your energy” and stuff, and they’re sort of this rainbow thing, from violet on down. That’s not where they started. That’s not how they started. There’s not a single system that really agrees on what they look like. And that whole rainbow chakra thing dates only back to the ’70s and is a really good indication that a lot of our perceptions, a lot of the models that we work with, are a matter of perspective. They’re a matter of interpretation. And most psychic stuff is that. We’re looking at everything through our own lenses.

So knowing that just because this system over here only sees like three major centers in the body and they’re mauve, puce, and sepia, and over here it’s vivid rainbow colors, doesn’t mean that they’re not talking about the same thing. They’re just coming from a very different perspective of symbolic language.

So I dig into the Hindu roots of this, Tibetan Buddhist stuff. I really bring my background in comparative religious studies and my love of rabbit holes for research and put it all in some neat charts of “Here’s all the different systems and here’s what they have in common, here’s where they diverge, and here’s probably why. And also, at the end of the day, trust your perceptions because they’re speaking to you in your language, and that’s the most important thing.”

JIM HAROLD: So it doesn’t necessarily mean that one is wrong or is right. In other words – in my background here, I have my fake jellyfish that float around. If I described them in Spanish, I would describe them one way; if I described them in English, I would describe them another way. If I described them in Chinese, I would describe them yet another way. None of them are incorrect; they’re just different ways of getting at kind of the same thing.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah, the words sound different, talking about the same thing.

JIM HAROLD: How far back does the concept of something like that go? You think about mankind and you think about cavemen and cavewomen on up, but where did these kinds of spiritual ideas start to emerge, like the chakra system and all of these different things?

MICHELLE BELANGER: When it comes to specifically being called chakra, that is Hindu, in India. You’ll find it in the Vedas and the Upanishads. There’s a very unpleasant history for how that got moved into Western tradition. I actually managed to track down the first, in England, presentation to Parliament of “Here is this strange concept that we have come across from this people that we have colonized.” The language is honestly kind of nauseating. It’s rough to read when you look back with the lens of like, wow, this is just being really bad to people that you’re taking ideas from. I go a little bit into some of it.

I will try personally to use the word “energy center” because the idea that there’s organs of your energy body or your subtle body, you find that in a lot of different systems under a lot of different names. There’s cognates for the idea in Ancient Greece and Rome. Arguably there are references to similar concepts – they’re not like wheels of light, or at least they’re not described as such, but you can find stuff with different parts of the soul in Ancient Egypt.

So the idea that we are more than just a physical body, that there are components to this beyond our physical self that have different aspects that influence how we think, how we feel, how our health may be presented – that’s very ancient. How absolutely old it is comes down more to the limits of what was written down and what’s survived.

JIM HAROLD: Another thing I want to talk to you about is the human aura. This reminds me of that ’70s mentality, “She has a good aura, he has a good aura. I can see it in your aura.” We have that pop culture kind of feel about it. You specifically talk about the human aura in this book; can you talk about what it really means and what you can really see or feel? Or can you? Talk to us about the human aura.

MICHELLE BELANGER: From personal practice and experience, the aura to me is – if a human being is like a candle flame, you’ve got that core of energy that is around the wick, but if you look in the dark at a candle flame, there’s layers of color. There’s a point where it’s sort of not the flame anymore, but you can still see the waver of the excited electrons and the energy. For me, that part where it’s no longer quite the flame but it is still part of the light and the heat and the energy being given off – that’s the aura. It’s the part of our energy that extends beyond the limits of our skin and bone.

Especially in the ’60s and ’70s, there was a big push that this was all sorts of psychedelic colors you could see, and every color had a key meaning. No two books that you pick up will tell you the same thing, in most cases, and a lot of those color interpretations are pretty clearly cultural. Black in a lot of Western stuff is like, “A black aura is a terrible, terrible thing. White is the best.” But if we go into Asian color associations, white’s the color of death. [laughs] So some of that comes down to the lens, again, through which we’re perceiving stuff.

How far back does the idea go that there’s a part of us that extends beyond us, that some of us have a shine – arguably, and I’ve seen this in several books argued pretty well, the idea of halos, not merely for Christian saints or angels, but the idea that certain people had a shine to them, that there was an emanation around them of their light and power, you’ll find in a lot of mythological systems. So this notion that we’re beings of more than flesh, that there is some sort of energy or radiant power that we carry not only within us, which under circumstances and with certain people literally shines beyond our skin, is a thing that you’ll find cross-culturally.

My favorite bit about auras was an experiment I got to do at the Rhine Institute.

JIM HAROLD: Oh, cool.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Several years ago. The Rhine Institute tries to be very careful about attributing language and specific terms to things that they’re experimenting with because they are keenly aware so many of those words are a matter of interpretation, and they are cultural and they are temporal. So all they were trying to measure was, does the human body under any circumstance emit measurable light? And anyone who considers themselves to be an energy worker or a healer or someone who works with that force, can they control that? Can they do something to make that shine more?

Now, we know for a fact that the human body does in fact emit small, miniscule, levels of light. Not that our physical eyes are going to pick it up. But they had this piece of equipment that was tuned so finely, it measures individual photons of light. It’s typically used in quantum mechanics experiments. If you’ve ever read about that one where they’re looking at one photon of light going through the slit that’s A and the slit that’s B –

JIM HAROLD: The double slit experiment, yeah.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah, that’s the type of equipment. It’s a very expensive piece of equipment. So they had a double dark room, which is a room that everything is draped in black. Everything that could possibly be shiny is covered with matte black. There is no light in that room. There is a little antechamber that is also lightproof. The door is lightproof. You go in, after being – basically anything shiny, anything that could be reflective, your phone, anything that’s got a light on it, everything goes. You go in, you sit down in front of this thing, and they just take a reading, like the tone of the room, to see how many photons of light are bouncing around just because you’re sitting there. That goes to a computer and they measure all of that.

Then they ask you to do your thing, whatever that thing is. If it is Pranayama, if it is Reiki, if it’s Qigong, if it’s Hands of Light – do your thing in the general vicinity of this piece of equipment, and in real time, they will measure, does the light in the room get brighter?

And it does. [laughs] It does. The one thing it can tell you is through an act of will, we can make ourselves brighter. So the idea that we speak culturally, cross-culturally, and describe this as light – that’s true. Anything else about it – does it heal, can it move mountains, can it change the world? That’s kind of hard to measure. But what we can measure is, with sufficient intent, humans can increase their output of light on a spectrum that’s measurable. To me, that’s pretty cool.

JIM HAROLD: That’s very cool, and I love the idea they were able to get to it in a scientific manner. Let me ask you this: do you believe – well, I’m not going to put words in your mouth. When you say you get a sense about someone – maybe you meet someone and you get bad vibes, going back to that ’60s and ’70s talk. “I get bad vibes from that person,” or “I get good vibes from that person.” What is that? Is that real?

MICHELLE BELANGER: For me, it is, and it’s hard to pick through all of the information that goes into that “I get a bad vibe from this person.” Because to me, it is a combination of data. Some of that is the person’s body language, just very normal things, like how they carry themselves, what their expression looks like, whether or not they remind you of someone that you’ve had a bad experience with before, whether you’re conscious of that or not. So there’s plenty of mundane physical cues.

You’ve known me for a long time; it’s been a personal quest to try to find, where is the lien between all of that physical input and then the stuff that I can’t explain that way? Which is why I do the blindfold for a lot of the TV stuff.

At this point, at least for myself, I cannot deny that there are other layers of information that are not easily explainable as physical. I suppose we could get down to the level of like maybe their pheromones are telling me that they’re bad. That would be a much harder thing to measure and would feel paranormal. It’s not something you can physically see. But the point at which, at least for me, that information also comes with little bits and pieces of music, emotion, images, things that don’t seem related at all to how this person physically looks, which nevertheless carry information that I shouldn’t otherwise have, that tells me there’s something else. Some other layer of perception.

Actually, I think it’s not just a sixth sense. I think that there are multiple additional senses and ways in which we perceive one another and the world around us. And the trick is, all of those are actually so natural to most of us, we never think about where that information comes from. All of it is one big lump, and that lump tells us “Bad, probably shouldn’t trust that one.”

JIM HAROLD: [laughs] I think most of us have had that feeling, and the other feeling too. We just sometimes mesh with people.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah, like “I know you. I’ve known you forever and this is the first time I’ve met you.” That’s a glorious sensation.

JIM HAROLD: It is, it is. I want to ask you about this one thing, and I have a partially selfish reason for asking, but I’ll ask you just in general. Then we’ll go down my chosen rabbit hole on this. You have a section here about “Starting a Psychic Study Group.” I guess not exactly a ghost club, but a psychic study group. It does strike me that if you’re interested in this, and maybe if you feel you have ability, it could be a very lonely place. So it seems to me that it makes sense to do something. And now with the internet, I’m assuming this would even extend to Zoom groups and different things. Can you talk a little bit about how and why you would do such a thing, start a psychic study group?

MICHELLE BELANGER: For me, the most instructive experiences I’ve had were with other people who I trusted to both share with me honestly about their experiences and also call me on my bull**** if they thought I was misinterpreting what I was doing, and that I would also be able to do the same for them.

At this point, lord, for years I would faceplant into groups like this – from the time I was like 13-14 and running séances and playing with Ouija boards and reading Tarot cards for my friends, we would just sit and talk about, what do we believe? What do we experience? The first primary useful thing about that is finding out something that you think is extraordinary, strange, something so weird you couldn’t possibly ever tell anyone – I guarantee someone else experiences it too. The exact same way. That gives you insight into it’s not that strange. Maybe you could trust it. Maybe at least you could explore it without fear.

So having a study group, having a group of friends – and it doesn’t have to be 15 people. It doesn’t even have to be more than like two or three. If you’ve only got one friend that you trust like this, having someone that you can engage in experiments with and have honest conversation with will teach you more than anything else – any book, any class. It teaches you so much about how you experience the world and especially that you’re not the only one who experiences it that way.

JIM HAROLD: Now for my selfish question, because I know you know more about this stuff than pretty much anybody. I always cite this Philip experiment from Toronto from the 1970s, a group of psychics or people interested in psychic studies, and they did something interesting.

In fact, you could probably describe it much better than I did, but I always love talking about this, particularly on my Campfire show because people haven’t thought about the idea of tulpas or thought forms. I had a call today; somebody was telling me something and I said – oh, I know what it was. It was a great story. It was a guy who told a ghost story about a ghost story. He’s another podcaster. This may or may not be on – I don’t know which show it’s going to be on first, basically.

But basically, the premise was he had heard this legend, this ghost story, while he was at camp. He went out looking for this legend, and he found it. I said to him, “Okay, maybe it wasn’t really the ghost per se, but it was your creation of the ghost. Not that you imagined it, but you actually created it as a thought form.” You could see him go [makes exploding sound], mind blown. [laughs] But I mean, this has been shown to happen. The Philip experiment. If folks haven’t heard of that, can you tell them about it?

MICHELLE BELANGER: Oh, absolutely. I had the great privilege to meet Al Peacock, who was one of the people involved in the Philip experiment, and we had some candid conversations about this. And I’m sure you became aware of it probably the same time I did, because they had it on That’s Incredible and the little weird paranormal shows in the ’70s. They would come on and they would have their little table go bouncing around all over the sound stage.

The Philip experiment, the idea was – table tipping, Ouija boards, all of those, there is a factor called ideomotion effect, which is to simply say our bodies are in constant motion whether we’re aware of it or not, and we can cause unconscious movements. So anything like a pendulum or a planchette, if people are involved, there’s a certain amount of unconscious movement that is happening to make this thing move, over and above whether there’s paranormal activity or not.

But that raises the question of, why or how are there instances of Ouija boards and pendulums and whatnot that seem to give us information that the people sitting there couldn’t possibly have known? What else is going on there?

This group in Toronto, I believe, sat down and decided, “What if it is the people and they just don’t totally realize that they have collectively created their ghost?” So they sat down to make a ghost. One of the key things they did was to give this ghost, Philip, a very elaborate history with several key elements that were completely wrong, ahistorical, and everybody would know that this would be incorrect information. But it went into the building of Philip, so it was kind of like his script. It was like writing code.

JIM HAROLD: Right, world-building, almost.

MICHELLE BELANGER: Basically building AI. That’s what a spirit construct is. You’re basically coding something that can become AI, and might become independent of its creators, which – spoiler – Philip sort of did.

So here’s this group working on building a thought form. The goal is to have it interact with them, and their focus is table tipping, so they’re all around a card table, trying to get Philip to move the table and respond to questions. Philip happily starts to. A key thing: this is where groups come in really handy, and I think a lighthearted approach helps. When they were sitting and were super serious and like, “We’re going to try to make this work!”, the atmosphere would get heavy and would get tense, but it wouldn’t usually get a lot of response from Philip.

They would start getting response when the group started to just screw around. Their attention flagged, they started joking with one another. There was levity in the room. There was a different type of energy, and they really weren’t thinking too hard or concentrating so much and, I think, also then focusing so hard. So it could happen in that semiconscious place. They started to get a lot of reaction.

So they learned to have fun with Philip, and Philip would play back. I think the thing that was extraordinary was Philip also started to extemporize on his story. He started to add things to it. There would be information that he would make up that wasn’t part of the initial programming.

When I talked to Dr. – not Dr. I want to call him Dr. Al Peacock because he had the manner of an older college professor. He was very quick to point out, not a PhD, not a professional. I think he was just a blue collar worker sort of thing. I don’t actually remember what he did. I think he said electrical engineer. I could be totally wrong; it was many years ago. Anyway, he was very serious when he was like, “It’s us. It’s just all us.” After the Philip experiment, he firmly believes that pretty much anything that we view as paranormal – it’s still paranormal, but the human element, the people who are perceiving and interacting with stuff, has a profound impact on anything that can manifest.

It’s super exciting. We did a version of the Philip experiment with the Paranormal State crew at Hotel Conneaut, and it really cheeses me off that as far as I know, all of this footage is lost. We had a roomful of lawyers and doctors and professional, otherwise fairly stoic people chasing this little three-legged table around the room. We had a fellow from South America, I forget which country, who decided to have it play football with an empty Mountain Dew bottle. So they were playing Kick the Can. I mean, it was moving so fast around the room, just this little side table, it was unreal. On one hand, they’re aware that clearly, it wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for them, but this table would just keep moving. It ran ahead of people. It was off the chain.

But the whole point was to just create – we did it. We made a character, and it worked. What I can say is at Hotel Conneaut for three days, there were people who were glued to this room for hours and chasing around a table and talking to a ghost who probably didn’t actually exist until that moment. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Wow. We’ll have to recreate that. We’re both in Ohio. We’re going to have to get that together, get some people. [laughs]

MICHELLE BELANGER: It was so cool.

JIM HAROLD: That is awesome. I knew you would have something about that. I knew it, and I was right. I recommend everybody check out everything Michelle Belanger does. I mean, you’ve got Patreon going, you do virtual sessions. I know you were doing something recently on Scrying, and I think something else on remote viewing. You’re really very active these days. So the TV thing may not be continuing at this point, but you’ve got plenty going on and plenty for people to tap into in addition to this book, right?

MICHELLE BELANGER: Absolutely that. Also, it’s only the network TV stuff, because I’ve been working with Katrina and Heather Taddy on Travel the Dead, which is their YouTube show. And I recorded with a very bespoke team in October of last year. We’re still working on how we will edit and distribute that. We meant it to be a one-shot thing, but it looks like it’s going to be a mini series if not an entire series. It’s digging into my personal practice, and we just followed what happened, whatever that was. It was a pretty interesting experience. So there are definitely indie projects on the horizon. Lots of books, lots of writing. That’s just sort of my thing. And so many classes I’ve lost track. Fortunately for me, I have a wife who is in love with writing spreadsheets, because I would not be able to keep track of everything I do. [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: Michellebelanger.com is the place to tap into everything. I know you can get the book on Amazon, The Psychic Energy Codex, and they can also buy it from your site, can’t they?

MICHELLE BELANGER: Yeah. Everything that you buy from my site comes signed, and I hope you like swag because we always have stickers and stuff that I just throw in there, and I’m just like, “Here, have some postcards that I had printed for conventions 10 years ago when people wanted you to sign a postcard sitting at your booth, and now I just have a bunch of postcards – and now they’re yours.” [laughs]

JIM HAROLD: There you go. Michelle Belanger, the book is The Psychic Energy Codex: A Manual for Awakening Your Subtle Senses. Also, michellebelanger.com is Michelle Belanger central, so be sure to check that out. Michelle, it’s always a pleasure to speak with you. I always have so much fun.

MICHELLE BELANGER: I will also say if Michelle Belanger is hard for people to spell, patreon.com/haunted.

JIM HAROLD: Always great to catch up with Michelle. She always has great insight and information and she always speaks very frankly, and I appreciate that very much. Thank you for joining us today. We’re going to reiterate what we said at the beginning about the upcoming Campfire Live Tour, and here it is.

I’m announcing Jim Harold’s Campfire Live: Stories From Around the Campfire. We’re doing a tour starting this summer, and we’re going to start out with four cities, and hopefully more to come:

And thank you for joining us today. We’ll talk to you next time. Have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye, and stay spooky.

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