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27th April 2014, 06:54 AM | #81 |
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It can be very uplifting or it can be quite disturbing. I first felt it as a disconcerting feeling like fire flowing through my chakras, I went to spiritualist churches for healing and they told me my etheric body was loose. After years the healing fixed the problem. But I could still feel atmospheres, and if I went into old churches I felt a kind of psychic warmth around me.
But it did not happen in new church buildings. That is because the centuries of prayer have impregnated the walls of old churches with positive power. Eventually I did not need healing because all I had to do to get upliftment was to go to the spiritualist associations chapel and sit there for a few minutes, and I could feel the energy lift my spirit. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 06:55 AM | #82 |
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How do the spirits know something is scientific? Do they predict someone will go back and look at a particular event and try to test if, alongside other data, the event had any special cause beyond random noise? Sounds like an iron tight wall for a believer against having to change their mind, more than a sensible conjecture, to me.
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27th April 2014, 07:05 AM | #83 |
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Believe it or not the spirit world say that there are another species of beings we call angels that never incarnate and some of them are angels of karma.
They have the final say in our evolution, and decide what experiences we need for our soul to progress. They are not concerned if that experience is harsh as they know it will all be for the ultimate good. There is also a great brotherhood of enlightened souls guiding the evolution of the human family, I do not know if they use computers. I heard a lecture by Ursula Roberts in which she said cases of possession by spirits were usually the result of two spirits being incarnated in the same body. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 07:09 AM | #84 |
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"They want to make their molehills equal to the mountains by cutting the mountains down." -turingtest "The universe did not come from nothing, it came from 'We don't know'." -Dancing David "Cry, booga, booga, booga! and let slip the Hamsters of Silly!" -JFDHintze |
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27th April 2014, 07:10 AM | #85 |
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"They want to make their molehills equal to the mountains by cutting the mountains down." -turingtest "The universe did not come from nothing, it came from 'We don't know'." -Dancing David "Cry, booga, booga, booga! and let slip the Hamsters of Silly!" -JFDHintze |
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27th April 2014, 07:13 AM | #86 |
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Yes they are - completely incompatible. See what Sean Carroll says that quantum field theory (now including the Higgs boson) tells us: The Fundamental Nature of Reality (I cut to the chase on that video; if you want the full explanation, watch it all).
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 07:35 AM | #88 |
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27th April 2014, 07:42 AM | #89 |
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Yup; if you want to maintain that anything paranormal, psychic, supernatural, etc., is real or relevant at human scales, you have to abandon as wrong the best theory we've ever had, which has matched every experiment we've done to test it as precisely as we are able to measure. But we know it's not wrong because of those very experiments, so the choice is an absolute one, between reality and fantasy - and, as you said earlier, you can't have both.
There's nothing wrong with dreaming, wishful thinking, fantasy, etc., as long as you don't confuse it with reality. |
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 07:50 AM | #90 |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 07:56 AM | #91 |
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As I understand it, chakras are supposed junction points physically located in correspondence with certain neural or venous/arterial plexi... so are you saying you felt an intense burning pain at certain points on or in your body? if so, I can see how that would be disconcerting - it sounds like a neurological problem. If not, I'd appreciate a clarification - I don't see how feeling you're on fire or burning could be 'very uplifting'...
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 08:03 AM | #92 |
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So, on the one hand we have the most accurate, best tested theory of all time (that underlies the very technology you used to post your message) - and on the other, your unsupported perception that it is bunk...
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 08:14 AM | #93 |
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We know that your personal experience is false. If Quantum Field Theory were incorrect, the computer you are using would not work.
Since clearly it does work - or we would not be having this conversation - your beliefs in the supernatural are demonstrably false.
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27th April 2014, 08:21 AM | #94 |
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I had feelings like fire flowing through my brow and through my heart, and most of the other seven major chakras. I saw a chart of the chakras in a book called alternative London and recognized them as the places where I had felt the fire flowing. So I started going to spiritualist churches for help.
After a long search I was told it was because my chakras were out of alignment due to my etheric body being loose, and you are right it was not a pleasant sensation. I also felt like there were cobwebs floating over my skin. The etheric body is an energy shell that links the higher bodies like the astral and mental body to the physical. and consciousness is channeled down through the chakras into the brain. If you suffer a lot of stress, as I did your etheric body can become loose and not align properly with the physical body. Spiritual healing is free, but you can leave some money on the collection plate to keep the church running. I had a lot of healing and I could often feel it as a power or force flowing into me. It is perceivably different, and I could feel cold on a summers day and warm if I went into an old church. My nervous system was like a psychic barometer. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 08:22 AM | #95 |
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So you perceived some problem, and the people in contact with you interpreted that problem as something they made up. Shockingly, those people had the cure for the problem they invented: YEARS of spending more time and money with them!
It sounds to me like your chakras (whatever those are) and your etheric body (whatever that is) are just fine. Between your ears, however, lies a pathological gullibility. The reason you can't be reasoned out of these silly beliefs is that you don't want to own up to the fact that you've been a rube and a regular paying customer of charlatans for many years. It's never pleasant to admit we've made foolish and costly mistakes in our lives, and I'm genuinely sorry that you've been victimized by this silliness for so long. Make no mistake though, it is silliness and you are a victim. You're here at the JREF and exposed to a wealth of information to help you break the cycle of fantasy in which you're entrapped. I hope you use the resources here to do just that. |
27th April 2014, 08:33 AM | #96 |
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27th April 2014, 08:39 AM | #97 |
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27th April 2014, 08:47 AM | #99 |
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No it would be schizophrenia, but the difference between a hallucination and a real spirit voice is that the real voice tells you facts .
I was told by a female voice that I would win the lottery one hour before I did win five numbers. I have done the lottery since it started and I still do it and the only time I heard a voice say I had won was when I did win. The odds against a five number win are 55000 to 1 and the odds against hearing a voice tell you you are going to win the only time you did win must be astronomical. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 09:00 AM | #100 |
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27th April 2014, 09:05 AM | #101 |
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I purchased the ticket two days before the draw after spending about ten minutes vibing out the numbers. It was only on the saturday night one hour before the draw that I heard the voice.
I am confident my memory is correct, and I have never heard the voice before or since I won. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 09:11 AM | #102 |
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Wouldn't you have checked the numbers anyway? If so, of what use was the voice?
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27th April 2014, 09:12 AM | #103 |
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That may well have been a tube map or bus timetable...
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 09:16 AM | #104 |
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If the spirit that spoke to you through your chakras or whatever is someone's soul, how exactly does the spirit know what's going to happen in the future? Unless spirits are omniscient in past present and future, how does the spirit of someone from the past pick lottery numbers? What, exactly, does God get to do if Joe Schmoe's spirit from whenever has this kind of power?
Also, why would it be worth it for the spirit world to help you buy a computer (good lord that's laughably silly) but not to help equally wholesome people recover from terminal illness, pay for college, find a lost child, etc? |
27th April 2014, 09:17 AM | #105 |
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Not necessarily (in either direction).
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1. We have no reason to believe that this happened as you described. Even if we assume you are being entirely truthful with us (which is what we normally do assume here, unless there is substantial contrary evidence), there is still no reason to believe that this happened as you describe. Here are two rather lengthy lists of the problems with human memory and reasoning, and why we simply do not trust them with anything but the most mundane of tasks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_memory_biases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases 2. The spirit world, were it to exist, could not possibly interact with us in the way you suggest. 3. Winning a middling prize on the lottery is hardly unusual or indicative of anything else unusual. My parents were in an office pool that won first prize in a lottery a couple of years before I was born. There are lots of lotteries, and lots of people win them. Lots of people think they are going to win the lottery. Some of the people who think they are going to win the lottery are the same people as those who do win the lottery. This is known as a coincidence. Literally, because it's where the two sets of people coincide.
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So, this is where all this leaves us: We accept that you won a prize in the lottery. We accept that you are being truthful and that you remember a voice telling you that you were going to win, that one time out of all the times you entered the lottery. And this is completely worthless as evidence for your belief in a spirit world, which we know to be false. |
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27th April 2014, 09:19 AM | #106 |
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How Much of Your Memory is True?
Memory Distortion & Invention False Autobiographical Memories Seven Sins of Memory The Memory Doctor Don't remember where I found all those... |
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 09:26 AM | #107 |
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Did you know that every time we remember something we in effect remove the memory from storage, change it a bit and then re-store the changed version?
Our memories are not reliable. Our perceptions are not reliable. This knowledge is hard won, the fruit of centuries of investigation and (often bitter) experience. You can choose to ignore it, but only if your emotional investment in your beliefs is so great that you would rather not examine them critically than risk finding that they are incorrect. Your beliefs are lovely, I find them very attractive myself. But the more I want to believe something, the more careful I am to ensure that my desire for them to be true is not biasing my reasoning ability. You do not seem to be willing to consider the possibility that you might be mistaken at all, even though it is reasonably easy to test. |
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"If you trust in yourself ... and believe in your dreams ... and follow your star ... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things" - Terry Pratchett |
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27th April 2014, 09:50 AM | #108 |
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I see. It's good to know it's so organized. Do these angels not evolve too? And the brotherhood, are they all done, or on their way? Who directs these groups?
The sheer volume of souls - going back in time it must number in the hundreds of billions - makes me mention computers. Just to keep track of the pedigree of each one, the identity, the current level and so on. Who do you suppose would run this massive operation, some spiritual NSA? For example, are there any repeat possessor spirits; those who routinely break the rules and jump into bodies already owned? How would they be identified and discouraged? If there are any rule breakers at all - does it not suggest that there's some element of will involved? If so, there could be all manner of misdeed happening in both worlds. What would stop powerful spirits from staging a take-over and ruling the other world for themselves? |
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"If I hadn't believed it with my own mind, I would never have seen it." - thanks sackett "If you stand on a piece of paper, you are indeed closer to the moon." - MRC_Hans "I was a believer. Until I saw it." - Magrat |
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27th April 2014, 10:04 AM | #109 |
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 10:08 AM | #110 |
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Well, you never know ..
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"If I hadn't believed it with my own mind, I would never have seen it." - thanks sackett "If you stand on a piece of paper, you are indeed closer to the moon." - MRC_Hans "I was a believer. Until I saw it." - Magrat |
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27th April 2014, 10:14 AM | #111 |
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The inhabitants of the spirit world ultimately answer to God, and they say it is obvious there is one because energy streams down from above, and higher beings visit the lower planes to teach.
I only know what I have heard in various trance lectures, and one of the things they have said is the spirit world is graduated into a number of planes, or realms. These realms accend in higher and higher vibrations and a spirit cannot go to a realm higher than their state of spiritual evolution allows. There are evidently dark realms where evil spirits are condemned to live until they repent and strive to improve themselves . There is no question of these beings invading higher realms and taking them over because they cannot bear the light, and they are forced back to their level. |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 10:20 AM | #112 |
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Aha! Something that can be tested! Have you ever tried being blindfolded, led into a building, and seeing if you can tell whether it is an old or new church, just by feeling psychic energy? I once had a friend who claimed to be able to do something similar, but once they no longer knew what environment they were in, their guesses fell back into what was expected from pure chance. |
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27th April 2014, 10:27 AM | #113 |
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Nonsense. It isn't obvious at all.
All these rules these "experts" are stating - about levels and vibrations and planes - they're peppering their ideas with words that sound very science-y and official, but actually don't mean anything when examined closely. Or, at the very least, are baseless in context. Don't you see that it's very easy to invent a state of being and then make up rules for it? The rules may sound quite sensible and may be set up in a very systematic order within the system created, but at the end of the day, it's still an imaginary system, and therefore baseless. It's a lot like the "technobabble" imbibed throughout the show Star Trek. It made for a better story to have such complex and official rules governing the made-up science in the plot, but from a REAL-WORLD standpoint, the bottom line was still essentially magic. Since the show was fiction, that's all fine. But when people start trying to claim the real world operates in a similar way, you have to start breaking it down and examining what may actually be pure verbose conjecture. Look, when I was a teenager and met some New Age folks who seemed wise and interesting and "in touch" with nature or whatever, all this stuff started to suck me down the rabbit hole too. But before I got too far, a few inconsistencies caused me to stop and start looking at the minutia. However good it may have sounded, it wasn't solid and it wasn't real. Some of the people who'd insisted it was were just misguided, same as me. Others were liars and deliberate con-people, weedling money out of sad, confused, or uncertain folks. It's not easy to allow yourself to see that. It's almost like quitting a drug or a tumultuous relationship. But it improves your life in the end. You feel more in-control when you can question "higher" things and see through people who misuse these ideas for myriad reasons. |
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27th April 2014, 10:28 AM | #114 |
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It is just something I noticed over the years. I once went into a franciscan monestary in Italy and the power was overwhelming. The strongest I had ever felt. I also felt upliftment from some spiritualist healers, and I would feel it for days after the healing, but it gradually wore off.
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 11:15 AM | #115 |
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I lost my mind many years ago and it hasn't affected me a bit...a bit..a bit..a bit. |
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27th April 2014, 12:00 PM | #116 |
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You mean to say that spirits are uniformly good and show none of the ethical variety they did as humans? Hijinks, mistakes and even crime can't all be evil spirits.
Anyway, it sounds like this god must be doing a lot of work handling such a vast array of characters and coordinating it all. It must be a tiring job. Is the end result worth the whole gruelling enterprise? Why doesn't this god start at the end, with the perfect creatures it always wanted as company? The potential to do work that streams from above and assured the denizens of the various levels that there must be a god at the helm sounds like faith. Is this faith enough, to you, or do you count your experiences with spirits as more important towards your beliefs? If your experiences are important, and they are your evidence, then why do you not seek more evidence about this god? Just because you are convinced there are spirits does not mean that there is a god. They could be tricking you, or something like it. |
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27th April 2014, 12:40 PM | #117 |
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There are said to be a number of planes separated by an energy barrier leading all the way up to God who remains untouched by it all. As far as I know God is a huge formless mind that provides all energy and does not interfere in our affairs directly, that is left to the angels and to highly evolved beings who have already reached enlightenment.
We go to the plane our evolution is most suited for and the darker realms are where the most unevolved go to, they can be called evil or ignorant. But it is up to them to wish to change before they can escape the lower realms. The spirit world say there is a God and they are in a better position to know than we are. They could be lying but why would they. The bottom line is that we are all God within God, and we are part of him, but we are on the long journey of self development and free will. We will ultimately rejoin God as enlightened beings at the end of our cycle of incarnations. It has been said that the point of it all is the journey itself. After all, what would we be if we all sat around in heaven as untried and untested beings? |
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You see many stars in the sky at night, but not when the sun rises. Can you therefore say there are no stars in the heavens during the day? O man because you cannot find God in the days of your ignorance, say not that there is no God. Sri Ramakrishna Even in the valley of the shadow of death two and two do not make six. Leo Tolstoy |
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27th April 2014, 12:40 PM | #118 |
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When I went into the Blue Mosque in Istambul I had a powerful, almost overwhelming sense of peace and tranquility - as you'd expect in an oasis of cool and quiet among the heat and noise of the city summer; also, my religious upbringing has conditioned me to respond emotionally to such things - you shouldn't underestimate such influences; conscious awareness is a very limited and distorted window on the self and the world. It's all normal human response.
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27th April 2014, 12:43 PM | #119 |
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Simple probability tells us that we should expect coincidences, and simple psychology tells us that we'll remember the ones we notice... |
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27th April 2014, 12:54 PM | #120 |
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