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Has anyone experienced the supernatural?

Apparently at one time ouija used to be wholesome, harmless fun, that is until The Exorcist (1973). Then suddenly ouija became the gateway to hell.
 

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It seems to me, but I might be wrong — and I probably am because I (as empirical, rational an level-headed a chump as ever pottered about this world) don’t have the least interest in, or affinity with this topic —, that the supernatural and spiritism often gain in traction after things have turned pretty grim and dire on this planet of ours. No? It’s never “I feel happy, I whistle while I work, zip-a-dee-doo-dah, let’s find out what’s happening on the other side, shall we?”, it’s always “things are bad, I feel down, I miss my departed loved ones, the future is grey and hopeless, maybe there is some comfort to be drawn from seeking contact with another dimension”, isn’t it?

As I said, I don’t know much about this, but I do know that, for example, spiritism in England saw a big rise in followers immediately after the First World War. Unable to make sense of the horrors that had occurred the previous four years, people began looking for answers elsewhere, with a fast-growing interest in paragnosis and all things supernatural as a result. And there are many other examples to be found throughout history (frequently also showing that institutionalized religion never hesitates to move in on the turf of the spiritist movement in order to win souls in times of darkness).

The climate today, during what is hopefully the aftermath of the worst that Covid has wreaked on us, is not entirely dissimilar, I believe — the majority of the people simply unable to grasp the impact, scale, suffering, cost, and biological logic of the pandemic — creating a fertile environment not only for all sorts of conspiracy madness and ideological extremism, but also for trying to lift the veil on the unknown in the hope of getting some form of knowledge or enlightenment.

_
 
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There's been an interesting mix of responses to this question, but for what it's worth I'll offer two instances which to this day have left me wondering:

1. Whilst long-term house sitting for my Grandmother years ago, I was sitting up in bed reading one evening, and my wife walked into the room asking me a question about our car, and the old heavy brush from my Grandmother's hair brush & mirror set slid from one side of the sideboard/dresser with such force that it flew through the doorway and landed in the hallway. We both stared at each other with mouths open and didn't know what to say.

2. We live in a Victorian era house which was built in 1896 in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. We bought the house from developers and relocated it to a 3/4 acre block about 20 years ago. One evening when our two sons were being particularly annoying by not settling at bed time, we gave them a final warning that they just needed to stop messing about and go to sleep. We shut their bedroom door and the door of the lounge room in which we were sitting, across the hallway from the bedroom our boys were sharing at the time, but left the hallway light on. About 45 minutes passed, and we both clearly saw the distinct shadow of feet in the gap under the lounge room door, silently walking past down the hallway toward the front door (old house with uneven wooden floors). I flew out of my chair and into the hallway, ready to yell at the junior culprit, but found their bedroom door closed, and when I immediately checked on them the boys were fast asleep.
 
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There's been an interesting mix of responses to this question, but for what it's worth I'll offer two instances which to this day have left me wondering:

1. Whilst long-term house sitting for my Grandmother years ago, I was sitting up in bed reading one evening, and my wife walked into the room asking me a question about our car, and the old heavy brush from my Grandmother's hair brush & mirror set slid from one side of the sideboard/dresser with such force that it flew through the doorway and landed in the hallway. We both stared at each other with mouths open and didn't know what to say.

2. We live in a Victorian era house built in 1896 in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. We bought the house from developers and relocated it to a 3/4 acre block about 20 years ago. One evening when our two sons were being particularly annoying by not settling at bed time, we gave them a final warning that they just needed to stop messing about and go to sleep. We shut their bedroom door and the door of the lounge room in which we were sitting, across the hallway from the bedroom our boys were sharing at the time, but left the hallway light on. About 45 minutes passed, and we both clearly saw the distinct shadow of feet in the gap under the lounge room door, silently walking past down the hallway toward the front door (old house with uneven wooden floors). I flew out of my chair and into the hallway, ready to yell at the junior culprit, but found their bedroom door closed, and when I immediately checked on them the boys were fast asleep.
There is always a rational explanation for everything ....

 
Thank you for your thoughts.

My personal experience is that it is partially a cultural thing and conditioning is the most important deciding factor when it comes to this. Genes play a part and in my experience the person's incarnation history has a role; in my experience I see us as ageless beings who incarnate here many times in these body suits to develop the soul, or what term you want to use in that context.

There is a part that dissolves in death and there is another part that stays and integrates with the timeless being, which evolves and develops through the experiences that come from living here in this physical, human form. In my journey I went through a phase where I suddenly remembered a lot of my past lives and events that were significant in larger context and how they were connected with different lives and the life that I am living now.

In average I think that humans carry quite a potential in themselves regarding these things. One has to unlearn what he/she has learned to get rid of the conditioning and start to develop a deeper relationship to self; who am I, what am I and learn to silence the constant, compulsive thinking, which is making it difficult for the consciousness to tune to anything outside the mind or the ego of that person.

During the years I have taught or guided a bunch of individuals privately (for free) and found out that there are lot of resources and potential in a normal human being. I'd like to emphasize that in that I have concentrated of gettind rid of the obstacles, not to make people think or experience life like me. A sovereign human being is well capable of forming his/her own thoughts and views about things.

Thank you for your thoughts.

My personal experience is that it is partially a cultural thing and conditioning is the most important deciding factor when it comes to this. Genes play a part and in my experience the person's incarnation history has a role; in my experience I see us as ageless beings who incarnate here many times in these body suits to develop the soul, or what term you want to use in that context.

There is a part that dissolves in death and there is another part that stays and integrates with the timeless being, which evolves and develops through the experiences that come from living here in this physical, human form. In my journey I went through a phase where I suddenly remembered a lot of my past lives and events that were significant in larger context and how they were connected with different lives and the life that I am living now.

In average I think that humans carry quite a potential in themselves regarding these things. One has to unlearn what he/she has learned to get rid of the conditioning and start to develop a deeper relationship to self; who am I, what am I and learn to silence the constant, compulsive thinking, which is making it difficult for the consciousness to tune to anything outside the mind or the ego of that person.

During the years I have taught or guided a bunch of individuals privately (for free) and found out that there are lot of resources and potential in a normal human being. I'd like to emphasize that in that I have concentrated of gettind rid of the obstacles, not to make people think or experience life like me. A sovereign human being is well capable of forming his/her own thoughts and views about things.
You've said it all. I wanted to say to unlearn the things you have been programmed to believe as true and revert back to your natural self will get you more in tune with your spirit. And then you also have to seek it. It is also true that people are born with more spiritual capacity than others. I've had mine since birth but I didn't quite understand it back then like I do now. After 2013 I consciously started unlearning (I called it uneducating myself) everything and reverting to my natural self. The way it works is that the more you listen to your inner voice/intuition the more it develops, and your intuition can instruct you to do some of the most ridiculous things (everyone around you will start thinking there's something wrong with your choices) Around 2015, 2016 I had travelled to the city and was returning to my village which is about 4 hours journey. Even when i got to the big city there was this feeling I couldn't shake off.. When I got to the station where I'd pick the bus back to my village, immediately I got down at the station the area around my head like I a circular form started vibrating like I'd never felt before (I told someone and he referred it to spider man's senses) I knew something would happen but I didn't know what. I ignored it all and even when my intuition was telling me to go to the other side of the station to pick the bus there instead (because there's two places that you can pick the bus at the station to my destination) I still shook it off and entered the bus at the first place which I was closer to and because the car was almost full too.. So what I did was recite psalms 23 all through out the journey, just after an hour or so after the car had taken off with the driver driving at top speed and refusing to slow down even though the passengers kept complaining, his back tire burst and the car almost seemed like it would somersault uncontrollably but it's like a force held the car in place. It turned on its right side and skidded on the road till it came to a stop. The people sitting at the right side of the vehicle sustained minor injuries. I was seated in the middle and only got slight bruises. I took this as a sign that my intuition was developing fine and that all the listening I did to it though people around me didn't approve of my choice actually paid off. Take it like this God is like a radio station, you are the radio, if you don't tune in to God's frequency you will never hear that radio channel. Radio stations won't tune in to your radio, you have to tune in to the station. We are all capable of connecting to God some people more easily than others just like people are good at playing football better and so on.
 
It's funny in this day and age when everyone has there camera running 24/7, and 12.000 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube daily, that the most convincing video's showing supernatural phenomenas are either fake or can be explained otherwise.

The human mind play tricks on us, and we are often convinced of a vision of sorts, but plenty of things can cause this, like sleep paralysis, pareidolia, electromagnetic fields, carbon monoxide poisoning etc.
I bet there are thousands of videos that have not been debunked or can hardly be explained otherwise, I could just link some random ones.
Btw, being able to "explain" something doesn't mean that explanation is right.

There are hundreds of hours of many people (not silly teenagers or youngsters, but many VERY believable sounding and sometimes sceptical adults) telling very much unexplainable stories fairly authentically on the podcast Campfire. There is no way that 100% of the unexplainable ones are fake. Only a single story has to be true for the supernatural activity to be true ;)

I also wasn't aware that everyone has cameras running, even an hour in the day. Complete bollox!
And if something odd like this happens you may well forget to film it in the moment.
 
Alright, I’ll share. What the worst that can happen, public humiliation and ridicule?

I’ve felt like I have encountered angels on 3 occasions. My mother passed away of a brain tumor when I was only 10 years-old, and from that moment I’ve constantly heard music within my head. My father remarried when I was 15 years-old, we moved into my stepmother’s house, I had to sleep in the living room because there was no room for me, and it was the 1st time I experienced depression. Late one night I could not sleep, tossing and turning, I felt a presence thinking my father came into the room to check on me. I even turned and said, “What,” thinking he was there, but as I turned I saw a man all in white with short dark black hair with the color of his skin liken to an Native American. I saw him for a few seconds and then he disappeared. I felt a rush of calm and fell asleep shortly.

The 2nd time was when I was a senior in high school at 18 years-old. I was at school where you have to climb a flight of stairs to get to the gym. As I was coming down the stairs I slipped and felt 2 hands on my back guiding me down as I landed safely near the bottom of the stairs on my 2 feet. I can still feel the touch to this day.

The 3rd time, and the most recent, was in 2009 while working in my studio composing a piece around 11:00pm at night. I felt someone looking over my shoulder literally an inch from me. I turned to see who it was and a women all in white with absolutely no color looking like a marble statue carved by Michelangelo leaned over my shoulder to see what I was working on. Then she turned to me, smiled for around 3 seconds, and vanished. I never felt such peace in my life.
 
I don’t want to believe in anything supernatural, because it scares the living crap out of me. However I have had one episode in my life which was odd. It was in 1997 or 1998; I was studying & living in a dormitory. One afternoon in my room, completely out of the blue, I got a bad bad feeling, kind of knowing with certainty, that something was very wrong at home with my parents. I got the impression that my dad had died. Of course I phoned home immediately and my mom answered, in tears. I asked what was happening and she told me my dad, who was battling dementia at the time, had been aggressive towards my mom, which he never had been before - he’d been throwing books at her and more. That’s it. Weird as hell! Could just be a coincidence of course, but still it was weird to get that sensation, that feeling of almost knowing 100% that something was wrong back home. Oh well.

It just occurs to me I’ve experienced one other episode. I have had surgery in my right ancle for a running injury, and unfortunately the operation was with complications, leaving me with various problems with the ancle afterwards. I tried everything to make it become better, i.e. I went to physical therapy more than 100 times paid by myself to see if I could inprove on the ancle. Nothing worked though, so out of desperation I went to a “healer” someone recommended. It was an old lady (isn’t it always!) and I remember I should sit with my right leg stretched out while she put her hands on my bad ancle. Then after a little while, I felt extremely warm, not just in the ancle, I remember getting thirsty because I felt so warm. I could also feel I got very red in my face. Kind of like you can feel it if you’re blushing. When time was up, the old lady said I should expect to come and get a number of treatments before it got better. However at the time I had already been to various different kinds of treatment, and they all said “come and pay some more money for a while, then it will get better”, but of course it never did. So I didn’t go to this so-called healer again. I must admit the reason I didn’t go again was also that it was too weird for me. I don’t believe in that kind of stuff at all, or maybe I should say, I don’t *want* to believe in it. Don’t want to hear about it or learn about it either. If something supernatural can come into play here in this life, I prefer to live happily without any knowledge of this!!
 
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Reality is stranger than we can suppose. The mind is both a marvel and easily duped thanks to hundreds of thousands of years of evolved heuristics, most of which have served us extremely well, but regularly falter when they are confronted by atypical inputs. The ways in which our minds can fail us -- pareidolia, the ideomotor response, the myriad cognitive biases we all share -- are not adequately understood by most (counting myself among those numbers).

Think of the things the layperson today shrugs off without a second thought that were the basis of religions thousands of years ago (weather phenomena and the germ theory of disease, to name two).

I'm not saying the supernatural doesn't exist, but I do know that it's depressingly common for people to appeal to the supernatural before even a cursory attempt to explain their experiences by natural causes, which includes an honest admission of the ways that their own brains can fail to accurately represent reality.
 
I'm not saying the supernatural doesn't exist, but I do know that it's depressingly common for people to appeal to the supernatural before even a cursory attempt to explain their experiences by natural causes, which includes an honest admission of the ways that their own brains can fail to accurately represent reality.
Your brain can definitely play tricks on you, and it's been proven in the lab:
They blindfolded the participants, and asked them to manipulate a robot with their hands. As they did this, another robot traced these exact movements on the volunteers' backs.
When the movements at the front and back of the volunteer's body took place at exactly the same time, they reported nothing strange.
But when there was a delay between the timing of the movements, one third of the participants reported feeling that there was a ghostly presence in the room, and some reported feeling up to four apparitions were there.
But then again there is the 'life review' or near death experience where people see their whole life flashing before their eyes, and apparently this has been reported not by a few hundred or a few thousand, but 8 million people in the US alone! Something is astoundingly consistent, yet unexplained.
 
Your brain can definitely play tricks on you, and it's been proven in the lab:

But then again there is the 'life review' or near death experience where people see their whole life flashing before their eyes, and apparently this has been reported not by a few hundred or a few thousand, but 8 million people in the US alone! Something is astoundingly consistent, yet unexplained.
There is a possible explanation but you'd have to read the link in my post 58 in this thread.
 
It seems to me, but I might be wrong — and I probably am because I (as empirical, rational an level-headed a chump as ever pottered about this world) don’t have the least interest in, or affinity with this topic —, that the supernatural and spiritism often gain in traction after things have turned pretty grim and dire on this planet of ours. No? It’s never “I feel happy, I whistle while I work, zip-a-dee-doo-dah, let’s find out what’s happening on the other side, shall we?”, it’s always “things are bad, I feel down, I miss my departed loved ones, the future is grey and hopeless, maybe there is some comfort to be drawn from seeking contact with another dimension”, isn’t it?

As I said, I don’t know much about this, but I do know that, for example, spiritism in England saw a big rise in followers immediately after the First World War. Unable to make sense of the horrors that had occurred the previous four years, people began looking for answers elsewhere, with a fast-growing interest in paragnosis and all things supernatural as a result. And there are many other examples to be found throughout history (frequently also showing that institutionalized religion never hesitates to move in on the turf of the spiritist movement in order to win souls in times of darkness).

The climate today, during what is hopefully the aftermath of the worst that Covid has wreaked on us, is not entirely dissimilar, I believe — the majority of the people simply unable to grasp the impact, scale, suffering, cost, and biological logic of the pandemic — creating a fertile environment not only for all sorts of conspiracy madness and ideological extremism, but also for trying to lift the veil on the unknown in the hope of getting some form of knowledge or enlightenment.

_
These are the moments when people lose their faith in an omnipresent, omnipresent, omniscient and boundlessly loving god. Plenty of beliefs available, ready to fill the vacuum of "Why?".
 
I bet there are thousands of videos that have not been debunked or can hardly be explained otherwise, I could just link some random ones.
Btw, being able to "explain" something doesn't mean that explanation is right.

There are hundreds of hours of many people (not silly teenagers or youngsters, but many VERY believable sounding and sometimes sceptical adults) telling very much unexplainable stories fairly authentically on the podcast Campfire. There is no way that 100% of the unexplainable ones are fake. Only a single story has to be true for the supernatural activity to be true ;)

I also wasn't aware that everyone has cameras running, even an hour in the day. Complete bollox!
And if something odd like this happens you may well forget to film it in the moment.
This year around 1.4 trillion pictures will be taken. That's trillion, not billion.
Here in UK we have 5.2 million CCTV cameras. That's 1 for every 13 people. Once you've walked a mile something like 10 CCTV cameras has recorded you already. Add this to the 12.000 hours of YouTube vidoe's I mentioned before. If that's not 'everyone has there camera running 24/7' I don't know what is.

Anecdotes are not evidence. 1000s of people are claiming to have been abducted by aliens every year, yet we have no concrete proof of such a thing ever happening.
Ghosts can be explained as well, and even if an odd case has not been explained, doesn't mean that it's a ghost. If ghosts were real, there'd be overwhelming evidence to support their existence.
I forget his name, but one of the worlds leading Paranormal investigators has looked into 5000 ghost stories over 30 years, and have not been convinced of any of the cases.

Here's a few supernatural events that some people believe:
We used to think people with epilepsy was being possessed by demons - some countries still do.
As someone with epilepsy myself, this worries me.

Ouija boards are caused by the ideomotor effect - unconscious, involuntary physical movement.
I mention this, cause 2 people in this thread believe they are real.

150 women are killed each year in India, as they are believed to be witches.

Voodoo is still believed to be real in several African countries, it's even the official religion in Benin.

'This can't be a coincidence'.... with almost 8 billion people in the world, extremely unlikely things happens all the time.
 
Ouija boards are caused by the ideomotor effect - unconscious, involuntary physical movement.
I mention this, cause 2 people in this thread believe they are real.
Chevreul pendulum, dowsing rod etc. are conceivably ideomotor phenomena, i.e. microscopic movements amplified by mechanical devices. But from those to ouija is a huge, huge leap and to ascribe it to ideomotor effect strains reason. It could be that it's a case of life imitating art, similar to 'stage hypnosis', but the scientific angle seems tenuous to me.
 
I'm all for spirituality but my incredulity is at a new cosmic high having read some posts in this thread. Still, each to their own, whatever gets you through life.
 
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I truly believe that I have received a sign (at a crucial, formative time in my life) that God exists, but I won't mention it in this secular, anti-Christian forum. But I will mention that after my mother died a couple of years ago, I started seeing the number combinations of 11:11, a hell of a lot more!
 
I have not and I do not 'believe' in anything that is not scientifically observable. There are many, many things that have been proven to be real that I have little to no knowledge of and I do not need the billions upon billions of 'unprovable possibilities' diluting reality any further.

Give me proof and I'll adjust my world view accordingly, as I must. Such is the fate of one who subscribes to science.

If you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out.

EDIT: I say this having been raised catholic and having spent most of my teen years 'studying' demonology and myriad religions, as an edgy teen goth is supposed to. Even tried my hand at Wiccanism for a year of so. I truly believed for a while but eventually the lack of observable truth just killed it. That, and the cases of borderline insanity such beliefs wreaked on some of my acqaintances made me realize blind faith is dangerous as hell.
The inability to "believe" something, or decision to not believe, doesnt make it untrue. Neither does believing make something true. However, it is a lie that science is the measure of reality. What is reality? What is Truth? Science is a weapon of deception.

You chose to dig your heels in on a worldview that no longer allows for the supernatural, because you didn't want to give up your perceived level of control.

Choosing to believe empirical evidence (or science) is a myopic worldview, and in itself is a belief system (religion). As long as you close your mind to the possibility of anything other than "science", then you will never see anything other than what science can see. God could be standing right in front of you and you wouldnt see him. Been there, done that.

Human arrogance is a funny thing. We get stuff scientifically wrong all the time. Yet it is a false religion for blinding one from the Truth.

Humility is the first step to understanding our place in the universe, and how insignificant we are in a universe without a creator. It's not that most humans dont believe in God, we just dont want to submit to him. Humans want to BE God. We like to think we are Gods. That we matter. We try to lord over other races, nations, beliefs, as if we are supreme beings. We don't want to submit to a "real" God. If we "believe" in God, then we cant be God. We would have to serve him and not our own desires.

Again, just because you "choose" not to believe doesn't make something untrue. We all choose. Throughout life we choose poorly or wisely. Truth isn't relative or limited to ones own experiences. This one science can measure; every choice has consequences...good and/or bad.

Yes, I am a Christian and I don't just believe God is real, I know God is real. I know demons are real. I have seen both in ways that would make your skin crawl, and your heart melt.

Frankly, I have experienced way too may things to expect anyone to believe me. I don't care who believes me. What I know to be true is outside the narrow realm of science. I have seen things and experienced things that even I wouldn't believe if it hadn't happened to me personally. But...it did. I believed and then I saw things. Not I saw things, and then I believed.

So, my point is simple. I never saw Jesus, or had a two way conversation with God, or been face to face with a demon, etc, until I opened my mind and heart to the possibility of something greater than what I currently believed to be true. The moment i truly believed, He was revealed.

Until you have seen someone healed by prayer, right before your eyes, you wont believe it is possible. You will grab every other explanation you can find, except the one that it actually is. Been there, done that, too.

I studied Philosophy and many religions in college. My undergrad degree is actually in Philosophy. Back then, I was searching for the truth as my mother was dying from cancer. It took another 20+ years and facing the doom of my own life ending at Mayo Clinic before I truly got down on my knees and opened my heart. That was the beginning of a whole new life for me. I was transformed, healed, and made new. Incidentally, struggle and pain is when most of us will finally be humbled and look up to something greater than ourselves...as if we always knew it was there...waiting.

My story is utterly amazing to me (and to many others), but it is my story, for my life and my witness. Yours is still being written as we speak. Since you are not dead yet, you have no idea what lies ahead. Perhaps when you are waiting on a death sentence in a medical exam room for yourself, or someone you love, you will look up. Your desire for hope will be greater than your desire for being "right" about what you dont believe in. In those moments, you may be humble and the truth will actually set you free. It doesnt mean it will change the situation, but it may change your life.

Science isnt going to rescue you and give you any hope for anything meaningful or spiritual.

I heard a Psychologist explain why he believed the Bible story to be true. He said, if Jesus was not real, the apostles would have capitulated and scattered after he was crucified. Instead, they all testified until their dying breath that it was true. As a clinical psychologist, he knew that few would die for something they knew to be false. All of them died for what they believed. The only one to die of natural causes was John, after he was exiled to the island of Patmos. So, there is a scientific basis for faith of one man. 11 men died violently defending what they believed to be true. That was all he needed to take his leap of faith.

A life without Jesus may be a good life, but a life following Jesus is the absolute best life. Not a life without struggle, pain, or loss, but one with hope, love, and meaning. I chose that. I chose to believe, and then so much was revealed to me.

Anyway, we all have free will. We all have a choice. From what you have shared, perhaps you might look deeper before landing on the religion of science and welding your docking clamps.
 
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