Do you believe in the paranormal?

[New Devilry]

Quote Originally Posted by matt cardin

I think you're wrong about that. As I say this, I'm also thinking in terms of the paranormal / supernatural in its broadest possible meaning, encompassing things like religious experience, so please bear in mind that this is involved in my response to your claim.

Fair enough, but I think that a religious experience is only religious to the extent that the experiencer interprets it as such within whatever particular context.

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What would you accept as evidence of, say, the survival of personality or entity (or whatever you want to call it) beyond the physical body?

I won't pretend to have the smarts to create the right kind of test for this, but it would definitely depend on the specific claims have been made.

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What about evidence of, say, a spiritual enlightenment or an angelic (or otherwise supernatural) visitation that arrives in someone's life as an apparent irruption "from beyond" and imparts a supernatural wisdom or vision or message?

I guess you'd have to prove that such a revelation couldn't have possibly been arrived at by a human being.

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This gets tricky. The edges of the interpretive playing field grow hazy, especially when one considers that A) purported events and encounters of this very type have driven the development of human cultures and civilizations since prehistory... ...C) it's impossible to say the question of the reality status of such events and encounters is trivial or unimportant, because of point A above.

For me, this is a matter of studying beliefs and motivations. They're crucial to understanding people and the societies we live in, and the same goes for those who came before us. Whatever supernatural or paranormal claims lay behind those beliefs and motivations seem very unlikely to be true, and it is that sense that I would call them trivial. In other words, investigating those claims is not likely to improve our understanding of anything.

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B) such events and realities, if they're real in some sense beyond the boundaries of individual human subjectivity, might well elude, intrinsically and categorically, the possibility of observation, investigation, and confirmation or disconfirmation by scientific or other empirical means ... You haven't claimed this, but just in case: If a person wants to dispute point B on the grounds that nothing is real that cannot be investigated empirically, this simply opens another wing of the conversation, beginning with the question: Why do you assume that? What philosophical presuppositions stand behind such an assertion?

What you're describing here is ultimately unknowable in any meaningful way. You're right to imply that this doesn't necessarily mean something isn't real, but it becomes impossible to distinguish between which experience is real and which isn't.

Lack of evidence isn't evidence of absence, but it is still a lack of evidence. Lacking evidence, I withhold my acceptance of the claims.

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What if there's something involved in the question of the paranormal that cuts directly and immediately to the heart of the human condition? Then it would categorically be worth knowing about, regardless of the fraud and exploitation and sensationalism that have long been associated with the whole thing.

I think that's a big "What if?"

No doubt humankind's belief in the paranormal, supernatural, etc. says something important about our condition, and I absolutely think that's worth exploring.

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Then of course there's the Fortean-type spin on that final point, which insists that the fraud and sensationalism may not be extraneous but intrinsic. According to this line of thought, since anomalous experiences have happened to humans throughout history and continue to happen today with pretty much the same frequency and distribution across human populations, it might not be unreasonable to attribute a kind of mythic trickster-ish quality to the essence of reality itself. Human chicanery and hoaxing in association with paranormal matters would then be interpretable as just one deranged aspect of a deranged universal game. And now I think I've unexpectedly talked my way into an oblique invocation of something akin to the Ligottian cosmology and ontology of Great Chymists and Clown Puppets.

Well now you're talking way above my edumacation.

[teguififthzeal]

Reality is too complex to dismiss the paranormal or the possibility of it.

You often hear people engaging in these discussions when someone is dying, or when someone has suffered a severe health event. One guy I saw in hospice replied very violently to me when I said, offhandedly, "anything's possible".

"That doesn't mean anything", he said. "People say that all the time and it doesn't mean anything."

I personally am dedicated to not succumbing entirely to the conclusions of skepticism or a barebones materialism, though there are times when my spiritual life dwindles to almost nothing.

There is a path that is divergent from what we usually take in our conscious lives, and it runs very deep. Indeed, if one pursues it to any serious degree, one can become unglued from daily reality entirely. It consists of dreams, deeper perceptions of things appearing up close and farther--it is not illusory.

[teguififthzeal]

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension - Official Trailer - YouTube

[Karnos]

There are things that can be known and remain unknown for any given reason, and then there are things that probably are unknowable.

I have had plenty of premonitory dreams, and experienced instances of telepathy with loved ones. I call it natural telepathy, and based on what other people have told me, many more have experienced it like that. It seems like an element of intimacy is required. In any case, I think this is more a case of an unknown within the frame of nature and humanity, rather than something outside of the natural order.

I have know plenty of people who have experienced bizarre encounters with, for a lack of better term, paranormal entities, and I have no reason to doubt they saw something. My girlfriend told me a couple of years ago that a few days after her grandfather's death, she saw her grandmother, who had died long before my girlfriend had been born. She knew her from pictures only, and what stroke me was that she described her grandmother as a scaled miniature, considerably smaller than what she, reputably, had been. Around that time I was reading Sebald's Austerlitz and a day or two after she told me that story, I read in the book another story, this time told by Austerlitz, about a man (I think his uncle) who sees a group of ghosts walking by the street at night in a town. The ghosts are described also as miniatures of the original people, and Austerlitz, or better said, Sebald, then goes on to talk about how other witnesses around the world have also told stories about ghosts as miniature reproduction of their former living selves.

I found that very curious.

In any case, someone here mentioned the problem with ghosts showing themselves up fully clothed, and I think many of us have asked ourselves the same question. Playing devil's advocate, though, I don't think this is an issue. Perhaps ghosts are some kind of residual space-time memory. Or perhaps, borrowing a little from Patrick Harpur's ideas, they are the witness's mental projection, compiled from skewed memories of clothing, hairstyles, etc, and invisible to the others. (There are known cases where only one person in a group of people sees something that the others don't). Or maybe spirits can only be manifested by compiling the memories of the observer or the ideas he or she has about them. Who knows.

Almost every culture has a rich tradition around the liminal that goes back for thousands of years, and it doesn't seem honest to just toss it aside as primitive woo woo just because we have iphones now. I think it is more sincere to accept that people have been experiencing bizarre things that we can't explain yet, than just chalk it up to illusions and simple inventions. Proper research in the paranormal may eventually tell us more about ourselves than about the world.

I concur with James some pages before, but I'm more ardent in my materialism.
If by some chance any of these supernatural non-manifestations are quantified and explained scientifically, they will repeat the fate of the rainbow and the pathogen and be regarded as just another detail in This Cold Portrait. Not that I have any serious interest in the supernatural outside of fantastic fiction.

Quote Originally Posted by Justin Isis

To everyone here taking a hard line "no" stance, I'm interested to hear what your estimated reaction would be if you directly experienced a paranormal event?

I had an episode of sleep paralysis once, it produced a black pulsating blob hovering abobe my head for a spit second then dissppeared. It freaked me out at first but then I immediately questioned whether or not I was hallucinating -- which of course I was -- and I was bothered by the vision no more. I hope that answered your question sufficiently.

[Stu]

I always forget how much my mum believes in the paranormal. I always think she's down to earth about that sort of thing but then when it crops up in conversation I'm reminded that she's a covert believer. The other day I was telling her about a book I was reading and got a bit embarrassed about the fact that the author believed in telepathy. My mum looked a bit disappointed with me as she replied, "Actually, I think there's something to telepathy ..."

For a while as a kid my mum kept finding feathers in the house and was convinced this was evidence of a guardian angel. This lent an aura of equivocal strangeness and eerie mystery to my home that helped fuel my early imagination when it came to the ghostly.

The fact the feathers precisely matched those coming from a leaking cushion in the lounge did little to deter her belief.

[Stu]

The cushion was obviously the guardian angel's sleeping bag.

[miguel1984]

My mother once told me that she saw the ghost of an old man sitting in the passenger seat of her car while traveling long distances several times. She added that it was not a scary experience; instead, it made her feel safe and knew everything was going to be alright.