i see dead people

I've now watched 5 episodes of Six Feet Under. I can see why it's so popular. The humour is sharp and beautifully dark - and the characters are wonderful.

The family that this series revolves around (The Fishers) own a funeral home. For some reason, each member of the family appears to be able to see and talk to the deceased. Whether this is literal or not, I'm not so sure, it's still early days in the series yet but it got me thinking about ghosts. If people could really see ghosts, (that's not to say that I don't believe the accounts of people who claim to have, but as I have not seen any myself, I leave it open for debate), would we see them as a true representation of their dead bodies, or would we see them as they were when they were living - ie a manifestation of what the spirit remembers that they looked like when they were alive?

Say that a guy has a car accident and ends up decapitated. Would his ghost be headless? Is there any reason why it would be? Would the ghost have a choice over his appearance in spirit form? On paranormal investigation programmes such as Most Haunted, it seems that 'spirits' appear on camera as an orb of light. Yet people have claimed to have seen ghosts as people. Is there really such a strong link between our spirit self and our physical self? Or is it just that our spirits persist the memories of our previous lives even though it has left the vessel in which it resided?

I do believe in ghosts. I believe that we all have something in each of us that differentiates those that are 'dead' and those that are 'living'. Yeah sure we might be made up up electrical impulses but it's not like a radio where you can turn people on and off at will. I also believe in reincarnation. We all know that there is no such thing as destruction - energy cannot come from nothing. So when something dies, something is born. Somewhere there is a pool of 'life fabric' which is ceaselessly recycled. On death, the fabric returns to the pool - but sometimes, it gets a little lost. [geek mode] Like zombied processes in a massive computer. [/geek mode] These lost pieces of fabric are the ghosts - lingering where they died, with no purpose or owner. They remember what they looked like, everything up to the point that they died, and hang around until somebody discovers them.

Much like a core dump ;)