6. Belief in psychics/paranormal/supernatural claims - NYE Party ghosts and psychics oh my!
Offline This actually started back at Halloween ironically enough.
So, my former roommate and his husband and their cousin who lives with them came over to our house.
My wife was getting something in the other room and the cousin asks me what room I lived in when I lived with my
friend.
I told her it's the small spare room and she's like, "Oh that's the one with the ghost in it."
I kinda just gave her a level look and didn't say anything. I was honestly a bit shocked.
So, she says, "You believe me don't you?"
I said, "I believe you believe it but no, I don't believe in ghosts. Specifically, not in ghosts in that room since I spent a few years in the room and saw nothing and my wife (then my girlfriend) was over many nights of the week and never saw anything."
When my wife came back to the room I asked her if she had ever seen anything unusual and she said she had never seen anything like that or 'felt any presence' (other than the dogs).
So, fast forward to New Year's Eve party and the subject comes up again.
And now there's a bunch of other 'believers' in the supernatural who start coming up with all kinds of non-specific examples of hauntings and coming out in favor of the alleged haunting in the room where I lived and denied any kind of sightings.
I stood my ground in the end but eventually just let it die though I did sorta lay into someone who foisted Jon Edwards up as a sample of a true psychic.
I was really more than annoyed because there was a licensed psychologist and a psychatrist in the room (friends) who really didn't say that much and kinda just played peacemaker without offering a definite opinion.
What's the best way to handle that kind of situation? I mean I'm not going to agree with those kinda statements but
how does one deal with an unverifiable personal experience? How do you deal with being the minority with a hostile crowd potentially?
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
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I would gather as much testimony to the psychic anomalies as I could, from as many different people as possible, then use that as an excuse to double the property value; before addressing a market of goths, musicians, movie stars, and shit like that... people who like to own things that are special.
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
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well you could say that their temporal lobe might need some checking up on
honestly i dont know what to say
First of all, I've spoken to way more people who have experienced something strange of a ghostly type than could EVER be insane or prone to hallucinations. Some of them are otherwise quite rational people, and one good friend of mine has had an experience like that, and he doesn't even believe in ghosts.
Secondly, I know this forum is about squelching all things supernatural, but it can definitely go too far. Ghost stories are fun, who cares if they're true or not? I don't think there's anything wrong with suspending your disbelief for a little while to enjoy a ghost story, any more than it is to enjoy a good horror movie.
It recently happened to my folks as well. We had some friends over, who we haven't seen for years.
It's a fact, that some people are sensitive to whatever the ghosts are made of, and some not. Me personally and my folks definitely refuse to be bothered by ghosts. There is nothing cool about them, nothing useful, they're just pests. Normal, healthy people are not responsive to ghost realm at all, so it should be.
But not the couple we had at our house. They are quite a curious couple. Both are highly astral... I mean, emotionally oriented, therefore quite otherworldly and crazy, hippies par excellence. They have to keep very, very harsh, hard-working life style that is like in medieval ages, so this hard work keeps them in their senses, their material senses, I mean.
And so these friends told us, that we have a ghost in a guest room, which caused them to wake up, and feel weird, and whatever. They asked stuff about him, if we haven't had any dead relative, and so on. We responded, that this is a very old house, there is a cemetery a kilometer away, this room is heavily used for occultism, and furthermore, they could bring that ghost by themselves, it's not necessarily our ghost. So they promised to take care of the ghost. So it should be. People should clean up after themselves.
Please, if any of you die and find yourselves in ghost form, please get away from this world as soon as possible. Get to some higher astral realms where there are gathering facilities for ghosts, built by your fellow ghosts. Don't bother innocent living people with the awesome fact, that you can suddenly go through walls. Get a life. (literally, reincarnate)
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Wow.... just, wow
Haven't seen you around in a while Luminon, glad to see you're still plugging away!
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
I'm curious about this statement and the use of the word fact.
Is there any sort of study to lend some creedence to the use of that word beyond personal experiences.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
Thanks for the advice. I really would not want to blow my whole afterlife hanging around in your spare room.
=
But my little bro used to race motorbikes and one afternoon about 2pm while at my inlaws, I just flat out knew there was something wrong with Tom. I left about 10 messages on his machine and so on. I was in a real state and everyone looked at me as if I was mad. An hour or so later we found out that he'd crashed his bike on the first corner of a race that started at 2pm and he was in hospital. I don't believe in spirits or any of those things. Nor do I believe there's a connection between minds as Lum does. Nevertheless I can't explain the event in any other way than that in my subconscious I knew he was racing that day and I had a coincidental panic attack. We are pretty close so it's possible I could blow a fear out of proportion and start to panic. But memory informs me that at the time I knew with complete certainty he was hurt to the point of walking around pulling at my hair and with my face in my hands.
The message I left on his machine at 2.01pm was along the lines of "what the fuck happened to you, ring me right now" and "I know something's wrong, call me now", etc.
Such a thing has never happened again and I would not believe this story if some one else told me it had happened to them. Nor do I believe other people's stories about this sort of thing. Frankly, I think it's all a bunch of bullshit and relates to the human brain's ability to slide into an alternative reality or something.
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
I'll be passing through the walls of Jessica Alba's bedroom before I go off blithely getting myself reincarnated...
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
This, my friend, is a dangerous road to walk down with Luminon. 2 pages after the conversation starts he'll be telling you about the secret masters of the world
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
See, this is something I will never understand. And no offense, but from my viewpoint, it seems entirely irrational. That is, how a person could have an immediate, firsthand experience like this and actually disbelieve him or herSELF. Furthermore, how you could have something like that happen to you and not suspect, at least a little bit, that there might be something going on that science has not been able (or more likely willing to attempt) to explain is completely beyond me. For all the endless pages of text this forum spews in support of the "evidence," well, there it is, there's your evidence. To brush it off as a(n utterly improbable) "coincidence" just because it doesn't fit into your preconceived beliefs makes no logical sense to me.
[EDIT: As I've said before, I don't believe these things are supernatural, personally. But I know most people on here would condemn them as such.]
haha i find it easier to say.... thats awesome, but i personally havent seen anything. im not bothered by stuff like this. and then i get far away from them and find some normal people to talk to. its not my job to get people to see the truth and 100% of the time they will resent you for trying.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.
If it happened all the time I'd be wondering but a one off - nah. I think it was a coincidence or I subconsciously knew he was racing and just had a moment. It was an unusual coincidence, I agree. Funnily, my fundamentalist family are quite happy to believe there was some spirit thing going on. Lol. Probably brown spirits....
"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck
But there are studies of personal experiences
Spiritual worlds? If that would be true, scientists would already know about them. Duh. They know. This is exactly what their String theory says. Convinced? Not. You see.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
"Selfishness as a Virtue" would one such secret master.
I can tell you many masters of the world which are secret to most people.... usually they come from the BIGGEST secret master of all:the self. Selfishness is a CRITICALLY selective virtue... that can be used to achieve many Individualized Wonders (thus we have some idea about where the "VIPS" of history come from...). We also learn
edit: selfishness also promotes healing, as it is a POWERFUL psychological stimulator and Survival Mechanism of ANY imaginable magnitude. It's only been in Nature's R&D lab for about 3.5-3.8 bya. (billion years ago, which is Incoherent, but than, so ARE MY THOUGHTS!)
“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)
The thing about String theory is that it has yet to yield a testable hypothesis or predictions.
It seems to fit the math and so forth but until we get some way of validating it string theory remains an untested hypothesis at best or philosophy at worst.
The problem is that thus far no one has said what we can expect.
) and molding the theory to fit the results.
If it's a valid hypothesis or group of hypotheses then they should predict what will happen in experiments and the results of the Cern experiments before they happen instead of taking the Cern results (if it ever comes fully online
String theory may be validated one day and I agree it has some math behind it but it is by no means even close to proven.
Scientists can't even decide on whether they're very small dimensions which are compacted into something tiny like a Calabi-Yau space or whether they're extremely large such as multi-dimensional branes of which our 4-d brane sits.
All of that is interesting but goes back to the original point that there need to be testable hypotheses before concluding anything about extra dimensions.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
Are you really surprised they don't happen, since you've decided that...they don't happen?
Ah, dear Luminon. How I've missed you.
I am open-minded. It's why I got into science. I'm sure you've had personal experiences. Unfortunately for you, you've never given a definitive answer on how to repeat these experiences nor have you shown that other 'mundane' explanations can't be used.
And don't start me on the masters of the world revealing themselves to the media. I thought it was the media that was keeping them away by focusing on stuff that makes the baby jesus, sorry, Benjamin Creme, cry?
Forget Jesus, the stars died so that you could be here
- Lawrence Krauss
Excuse me, you are hardly open-minded, and even less if you're a scientist. Scientists have much higher demands on reality of something, than other people. We are open-minded, but just within certain narrow limits, it's more like closed, than open. Conditioning is the opposite of open-mindedness, and we are conditioned since our birth by all our experiences and all people we know. It is almost impossible to stay open-minded. Furthermore, your closed-mindedness is well demonstrated by the fact, that you are not willing to devote any effort and responsibility on finding the answer. Would you start attending local Transmission Meditation group once or twice per week, to find out the truth about spiritual energies?
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I listened to a Creme interview and I'm wondering when I will see the 'luminary' or 'star'.
He made the claim that it would be visible day and night and would be seen worldwide.
I am awaiting the proof.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
1) watch the sky often
2) wish to see a 'Star' (it has some thought detectors)
3) have a reasonably clear sky (obviously, a thick cloud cover won't help that)
4) be patient.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Ok, I will keep a look out since I honestly would like to see such a phoenomena.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
I don't think you need to get fancy...it is just selection bias. My wife's mom used to get 'feelings' that meant something dire was about to happen. When nothing happened after a feeling, she forgot about it. When something happened to reinforce her feeling she remembered it. In your case something truely traumatic happened and so it really sticks out.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
Or for example, just recently, I had my last exam for winter semester on marketing. I visualized, that I will get some easy questions from the beginning of the list, the lower number the better. And guess what. We had a 20-sided dice. I tossed it (with my lucky hand + mental focus), the first time it was question #1, the second time #2.
But those, who are afraid of certain questions, actually strengthten them with their mental energy and are more likely to pick them. You surely know how people complain, "I didn't learn that one question and I had it on the exams!"
Of course, that might work only for those with strongly focused mind - either because they're trained, or they're very afraid of the possibility. For most of time with most of people, the result is a coincidence.
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
I was at a party once and a woman there wanted me to look at her nude feet, as she was a foot model. I know that some people enjoy looking at feet and I don't judge you, other than to say that you are disgusting perverts who should seek immediate psychiatric evaluation. I didn't really want to do it, but it was a party. Everyone was enjoying themselves, drinking absinthe, smoking hashish and opium, you know, your typical standard fare. I wondered at that time if it was the appropriate venue to disclose to everyone how stupid they were for not knowing as I did how revolting feet are. As I deliberated on my actions I remember wishing that she had been a face model, but one must play the cards they are dealt in life and I reasoned that I'd start with the foot models and work my way up, so to speak. I opted to remain silent on the matter which in retrospect I still consider to have been the best option.
As an aside, later that evening she put moisturizer on her feet and I had sex with them, the mechanics of which I shall leave to your imaginations.
In conclusion, dear reader if you could come away from this story with anything other than nausea; if that is possible, I think it should be that you don't always have to tell people that they are stupid.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Indeed, not always, but I also shouldn't feel the need to back down in my own fucking living room.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
Back down to what, an interesting conversation at a social gathering? You must be a real party animal.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Interesting. No.
Annoying. Yes.
You can play patty cakes and foot oil massages by backing down to irrational beliefs all you want at a social gathering or anywhere else but I don't think I should back down from saying it is bullshit my own house.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
Well, obviously you didn't find it interesting, but it seems like other people did. I suppose it depends on how important the subject is to you. If I was having a good time I wouldn't bother debating with someone unless they offended my gravely. Clearly you take great offense to psychics, and you must stay true to your convictions. Your parties may suffer for it though.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
When you do that you adjust your expectations. Unless you are a vegatable *something* 'bad' happens to you every day. You get a bad feeling today and your dad dies, so you think it was a sign. You get a bad feeling and you almost get hit by someone who runs a stop sign, and it was a sign. You have a bad feeling and you inhale some juice and cough, it was a sign. You have a bad feeling and your dog chases your cat, and it was a sign.
I'm not super interested in having this converstation though, since I know the excuses you use already. This is all the same old fallicy of Heron's Beard.
Everything makes more sense now that I've stopped believing.
No, they pretty much found it annoying too just on the other side of the fence.
Good for you!
I take offense to all manner of bullshit but especially psychics like Jon Edwards who use bullshit to make money.
Haven't so far! In fact people were telling us the whole next week what a great time they had!!!
Any more sage advice oh wise one?
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
They probably said they had a good time because they were trying to avoid another argument.
You asked for advice. I didn't offer you unsolicited advice. Take it or leave it.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
A note on string theory:
Other dimensions do NOT equal alternative realities. Different dimensions, as far as string theory is concerned, is the distinction between a line, a square, a cube, and a cube changing shape over a period of time. Those are our four dimensions. With string theory there are lower dimensions bundled up into the line dimension. The theory also brings about the possibility of higher dimensions, but those inherently include the ones we are already in, and our natural laws have to be some aspect of the higher dimensions.
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Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.
Aww did I make Gauche sad because I didn't agree with him?
Poor baby
Maybe you like cowering in a corner but I'm not going to do that in my own house which I believe I mentioned in the first post.
Next time why don't you try posting an actual answer to the question posed instead of being a pretentious dick.
"Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls sports, such as hot oil wrestling and foxy boxing and such."
Homer Simpson
I can tell that you've composed yourself a little because you ended your liberal use of exclamation points. It could be that your problem isn't psychics or ghosts. Maybe it's your bellicose nature you should be concerned about. People come to your house for a party but instead they get an argument about something trivial, then you ask for advice and when you get it you become combative. Why don't you take care of that problem first, then worry about debunking paranormal phenomena?
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Heh...
This story cracked me up. Let's just say I have been to similar parties with similar results.
(Oh, and BTW, is that Van Damme in your avatar?)
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
http://www.kinkspace.com
Thanks, I'm glad someone appreciates it. It's not Van Damme in my avatar. It's William Shatner, when he was younger.
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Whoever it is, I have watched the same show that he's watching with the same dirty thoughts.
"The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind." (Alphonse Donatien De Sade)
http://www.kinkspace.com
What, you mean Lazytown?
There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine
H.P. Lovecraft
Oh yeah, go papa bear !!!
That show was just disturbing, man. And I believe intentionally so.