24.08.2026
File 5. The Ouija board
The name comes from OUI, yes in French and JA, yes in German. In case you’ve never seen one, here’s how it goes. A round table. Several people. Cards with big letters laid around it, and a glass upside down in the middle. Each person puts an index finger on top of the glass, and you ask a question.
You’re supposed to be calling spirits. People who died. To make it easier there are two more cards, one for yes and one for no, and you start with the simple one: are you there? Then the glass moves. It stops at letters, and the letters make words.
And the glass does move. That doesn’t have an easy physical explanation: eight people with a fingertip resting on top, not pushing, and the glass travelling across the table. Explain that.
We did it as one test among many, to explore what can’t be seen. The visible part interested us much less than the other one, the part you can’t see but know is there. And we came to the ouija board after studying the astral planes, which is another matter and I’ll tell you about it another day: a subtler plane, with beings who have no physical body but do have a mental one, and who carry their mind and their desires with them.
The odd thing, and this is what stayed with me, is that when you start doing this you enter a low plane. Souls without a body aren’t generally wise or virtuous. That place is full of ignorant beings, and whatever answers on the other side of the glass comes from there. Not from above.
We were in it for the thrill too, of course. But what we were after was knowing, not playing at let’s-see-what-happens, and not asking after a dead relative. We also studied the spiritists, people who live for that: convinced they must contact their dead so the dead will guide them. We’ll talk about that another day.
Back then I was only learning one thing, and it wasn’t who was on the other side of the glass. It was that there is something beyond what you see. That we are not this body. And that what a person needs doesn’t end with what the body needs.