Do you Believe in Ghosts or Afterlife?
- Thread starter justpassnthru
- Start date
Croissant
Member
ghosts are merely the parts of people that have been negated typically negative affect into a kind of land of the undead. The parts that have not been allowed to be symbolized and is typically attached to an image that has endured within the symbolic that acts as a kind of crypt.
i'm mostly skeptical, but like interesting stories
this one comes from a Scientific American author, gives a little more credibility
The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany. She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather's binoculars. His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings. Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.
At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.
Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.
What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.
The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.
this one comes from a Scientific American author, gives a little more credibility
The event took place on June 25, 2014. On that day I married Jennifer Graf, from Köln, Germany. She had been raised by her mom; her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged and several precious heirlooms lost, including her grandfather's binoculars. His 1978 Philips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set out to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried “percussive maintenance,” said to work on such devices—smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom.
Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home, and in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings. Being 9,000 kilometers from family, friends and home, Jennifer was feeling amiss and lonely. She wished her grandfather were there to give her away. She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if the neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering—absurdly—if this combined printer/scanner/fax machine also included a radio. Nope.
At that moment Jennifer shot me a look I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller The Exorcist startled audiences. “That can't be what I think it is, can it?” she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio, out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes. “My grandfather is here with us,” Jennifer said, tearfully. “I'm not alone.”
Shortly thereafter we returned to our guests with the radio playing as I recounted the backstory. My daughter, Devin, who came out of her bedroom just before the ceremony began, added, “I heard the music coming from your room just as you were about to start.” The odd thing is that we were there getting ready just minutes before that time, sans music.
Later that night we fell asleep to the sound of classical music emanating from Walter's radio. Fittingly, it stopped working the next day and has remained silent ever since.
What does this mean? Had it happened to someone else I might suggest a chance electrical anomaly and the law of large numbers as an explanation—with billions of people having billions of experiences every day, there's bound to be a handful of extremely unlikely events that stand out in their timing and meaning. In any case, such anecdotes do not constitute scientific evidence that the dead survive or that they can communicate with us via electronic equipment.
Jennifer is as skeptical as I am when it comes to paranormal and supernatural phenomena. Yet the eerie conjunction of these deeply evocative events gave her the distinct feeling that her grandfather was there and that the music was his gift of approval. I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.
The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.
I see people who once lived all the time, so I have to believe it, or I am crazy, lol! You know I believe all of us are born with the ability to see the unseen, but then most people lose the ability to see and sense those things because of many different factors. Sometimes it's simply because a peer or peers tell us that we shouldn't have an imaginary friend. Yep, that kind of peer pressure can and most times does make us lose those abilities. As for myself I was very fortunate, I had a grandmother that couldn't see or sense those things but she always listened to me when I told her about the things I saw or heard. Yeah I believe without her encouragement I would have lost that ability. Believe me when I tell you, when I was young it was difficult, because I would get hit and punished if I tried to tell my mom or dad about it. They even sent me to a psychiatrist, and a therapist. Anyway... you know most spirits are wonderful, many simply hang around to watch over those that they loved during their lifetime. But there also evil spirits, that are always very powerful, they can hurt people living in the living world, some can even kill people living in the living world. What makes them even more scary is that you know that never lived in the living world. Yes, they are truly pure evil. I am telling you, you would be suprised at how many of those creeps walk among us. They seem like they are always trying their best to hurt as many kind and innocent people that they can living in our living world. Imagine, sitting on a subway, or on your couch at home, and have one of those evil dark shadowy spirits, whispering in your ear, telling you to kill yourself over, and over again, yuck! Yeah, I have seen and heard those kinds of things way too many times!
mayorofthdesert
Active member
I don't believe in the spirit world, but it occasionally believes in me, or something like that. I've had more than a handful of experiences that I am unwilling to discount/explain away for the simple reason that they've been incredibly meaningful to me. But I'm very hesitant to extend that to what's commonly referred to as belief. For me it's more an act of the will. I fully expect nothingness/total annihilation of consciousness when it's my time, and a good deal of the time I'm not even sure I'd prefer otherwise, but something in me just wants to defy that.
I'm paraphrasing, and I'm not sure exactly where I heard the quote, but I suspect Sarte, possibly Camus : "It is our duty to apply meaning to the world, for the obvious reason that it is meaningless." Now, I'm not suggesting that one cannot live with, or give, meaning to existence without belief in afterlife, other dimensions, the divine or anything like that (neither Sartre nor Camus did) but it's the way I do it, to the extent I am able.
I'm paraphrasing, and I'm not sure exactly where I heard the quote, but I suspect Sarte, possibly Camus : "It is our duty to apply meaning to the world, for the obvious reason that it is meaningless." Now, I'm not suggesting that one cannot live with, or give, meaning to existence without belief in afterlife, other dimensions, the divine or anything like that (neither Sartre nor Camus did) but it's the way I do it, to the extent I am able.
