My twin and I have all the stereotypical twin psychic connection stuff going on. A dramatic example of it is when I had my miscarriage. I called her house, told her husband, he called her at work and told her and she went into the bathroom to discover she had gotten her period, which she hadn’t had in several months for some reason.
Less dramatic is the time we both IM’d the Virginia Slims song to each other at the same time.
I have had stuff happen to me that I couldn’t explain. But after I was 22 or so I stopped feeling like it was something mystical and marvelous outside of me. There is so much stuff in the human brain that I firmly believe we could see “visions” and feel it were true…I mean, ask 5 eyewitnesses to report on a crime scene and see what they say. I don’t think our vision or any of our senses in fact are too trustworthy. So I don’t believe in much extraordinary.
Count me in with the people who say “science just hasn’t explained it yet”.
[QUOTE=Strinka]
And even if I had experienced something unexplained by science I would assume that science merely hasn’t explained it yet.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, plus there’s precious little that cannot be explained today by simple coincidence or the faulty senses and memories of people.
When I was a kid I had a dream about two dragons being buried in the earth where people were trying to build a structure. I was very surprised many years later to find in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain that Merlin, as a boy, stopped his own execution (as a sacrifice to allow them to build something) by telling them that dragons battling under the earth were upsetting the structure, and that they should release the dragons. This would solve their problems. It did. And it did in my dream, as well.
As a kid, I’d never heard of this bit of Arthuriana, and I’m not familiar with it being in any adaptation of the King Arthur stories. There’s no way I could think of that I’ve have heard about the myth. I don’t believe in Jungian archetypes, but this is the sort of thing that tests my lack of faith. I put it down to being a weird coincidence, but I find it troubling, nonetheless.
I’ve experienced things that I cannot explain, but it doesn’t mean science, or someone better-versed in science can’t. There are also things that even science can’t explain right now. But that doesn’t mean we go making stuff up to explain these events. A simple “I don’t know yet” will suffice.
[QUOTE=Surreal]
… something that you believe cannot be explained by our current understanding of the universe? … Why do you believe that the event was ‘supernatural’ in origin??
[/QUOTE]
Sure, I’ve seen things that cannot be explained by science. I’m a research scientist, and there’s no point in studying something that is already “explained by our current understanding of the universe.”
However, I have never seen anything that I believe to be “supernatural in origin.” That is to say, I haven’t seen anything in my life which I believe can never be explained by science.
I’ve had countless déjà vu moments and have looked them up in a dream diary I keep (yes, whenever I have an incredibly vivid dream I write it down) and confirmed that I had actually seen some of the events before. Most notable were my wife’s last miscarriage and the adoption of my daughter. When the event is happening in real life my vision becomes brighter, sort of like everything is backlit.
I don’t pretend to understand how this happens or why, I just accept that occasionally I have caught glimpses of things that might come to pass. Not every vivid dream I have comes true (I’d say way less than 1%) but it does occur.
The weirdest “paranormal” events happen to a friend of mine. She sometimes gets flashes about people and knows things she shouldn’t. She attended a seminar and, when she shook hands with the presenter whom she had never met before, got the image of a little girl on a respirator who opened her eyes. My friend asked the presenter out for lunch and, in the course of the conversation, the presenter talked about her little girl who had been in a car accident years before and was in a coma. My friend told her that she was sure the presenter’s daughter would get better. A week later the girl woke up.
Another time she called my wife up at 3 AM telling us to get out of the house. We asked her what was wrong and all she could say is that she was sure something was wrong at our house. We hadn’t talked to her in a couple weeks but we had enough experience with her “feelings” that we packed up the kids and went to a hotel.
In the morning, I went back to our house and started looking around. As I was walking through, I began to get light headed. I took a look at our carbon monoxide monitor and saw it was unplugged. When I plugged it in it started screaming!
It turned out that a bird had built a nest in the exhaust from our furnace (not at the top but actually inside the pipe) and the fumes were flowing back into the house. The furnace repairman took measurements and said that if we hadn’t left when we did that we probably never would have woken up.
I think that there are so many things that we just haven’t been able to properly explain yet scientifically (quantum coupling is a great example) that I refuse to believe that the events I have been involved with are mere coincidences. I think that there are aspects of nature that we just haven’t been able to explore well enough yet.
I’m sure I’ll get ridiculed and told that if it can’t be duplicated under lab conditions that anecdotal evidence is meaningless and I’m probably part of the tin-foil hat brigade. That’s OK. When my mental powers peak I’ll squash you all like bugs!!! Bwa-ha-ha!!
What I don’t understand is the true meaning of “supernatural.” Suppose telepathic messages really do exist. They would still abide by some set of natural laws. It’s almost impossible to imagine otherwise.
So, to me, even if all of the stories of supernatural occurrences are true, it is only because we have no theory for them yet that we describe them as so.
I had an amazing coincidence happen to me once that really shook me. I don’t really think that it “cannot be explained by science,” though. I just think that of all the experiences we have, coincidences will happen simply by chance.
Still, it was strange enough that I still remember it vividly more than 20 years later.
Anyway, I was typing up a history term paper in the middle of the night that was due the next day. This was in the Fall semester of my junior year in high school. It was stormy outside, and as I typed, the electricity went out. I was using a manual typewriter, though, so I lit a couple of candles to keep going. Everything was fine until the paper coming out of the typewriter got too close to one of the lit candles and caught fire. At that point, I gave up for the night, and took the penalty for a late paper.
Several months later, in the Spring semester of my junior year, I was again working on a history term paper in the middle of the night that was due the next day. I was now working on an electronic typewriter I had received for Christmas. I was ticked at myself for again putting off my term paper until the last minute, and recalled the problem with the electricity that had occurred a few months previously. I can remember, clear as day, consciously thinking to myself, “Well at least the weather is clear out, so I don’t have to worry about the power going out again.” At the exact instant that that thought registered in my head, the lights dimmed as the voltage dropped. :eek:
I was almost hysterical. I actually grabbed the telephone and called the power utility on the military base I lived on. Someone actually picked up and told me that something strange was going on with the generator, and that they were working on the problem. At that point, the power went out entirely. I decided that that God was screwing with me, or I was being punished for my arrogance, so I took that for a sign that I should go to bed. (I then got my Mom to call in sick for me so I could finish the paper the next day at home.)
[QUOTE=AlDiMiFingOla]
So, to me, even if all of the stories of supernatural occurrences are true, it is only because we have no theory for them yet that we describe them as so.
[/QUOTE]
Everything we know in science is testable and repeatable. Everything. Even if we can’t fully explain the mechanism behind it (gravity, for example), we can still make predictions about its behavior which agree perfectly with observation, and perform experiments on it which will be accurately reproduced given the same conditions every single time.
Nothing which has been examined scientifically concerning the supernatural has either of these properties. I feel safe, at this point in time, in saying that they do not exist.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
“Something terrible has happened. Someone has died.”
[/QUOTE]
I have aged parents.
Whenever the phone rings at an odd hour (very early or late), I get a gut feeling that the reason for the phone call is to inform me that one of my parents has died.
This has happened perhaps a dozen times in my adult life … and not once has that bad news been delivered (thank Og).
Now, someday, I suppose I *will * get that dreaded phone call, and I’ll bet that if it comes at an odd hour, it will have been preceeded by my typical “one of my parents has died” feeling.
Frylock, if that does indeed happen, should I think that something supernatural has just happened?
Or, put another way, perhaps you have a mind similar to mine in that you assume the worst whenever an odd situation occurs (or even a not-so-odd situation, such as the one in your post). Then, when your worst-case-scenario finally comes true (after many, many times when it does not), is that evidence of a supernatural event?
I’ve told the story here before so I won’t go into detail but I saw my father’s ghost once in the middle of the night. Most likely just a dream but seemed very real at the time.
One time I was playing Parcheesi with some friends and kept getting the exact dice rolls I needed. “Give me a 6!” I’d get a six, etc. It was getting freaky and we joked about how I was controlling the dice with my mind. We laughed. I jokingly pointed at the ceiling light and said “Turn off!” and it flickered on and off! That stopped us all in our tracks but we laughed it off as a weird coinicidence which of course it was but it was kinda cool.
I’ve experiences that some people would consider supernatural but that can nevertheless be adequately explained as simple coincidences that are practically guaranteed to happen to someone sooner or later. Does that count?
[QUOTE=Spiff]
I have aged parents.
Whenever the phone rings at an odd hour (very early or late), I get a gut feeling that the reason for the phone call is to inform me that one of my parents has died.
This has happened perhaps a dozen times in my adult life … and not once has that bad news been delivered (thank Og).
Now, someday, I suppose I *will * get that dreaded phone call, and I’ll bet that if it comes at an odd hour, it will have been preceeded by my typical “one of my parents has died” feeling.
Frylock, if that does indeed happen, should I think that something supernatural has just happened?
Or, put another way, perhaps you have a mind similar to mine in that you assume the worst whenever an odd situation occurs (or even a not-so-odd situation, such as the one in your post). Then, when your worst-case-scenario finally comes true (after many, many times when it does not), is that evidence of a supernatural event?
[/QUOTE]
In fact I had written further comments in my post designed to forestall considerations like the ones you adduce here, but took them out before posting. I didn’t want to bog down the description of the events. But the kind of objection you’re raising to the “psychic” interpretation of the episodes I described is an important one, so I’ll say something about it.
In my experience, the kinds of thoughts that were involved in the two episodes I described are not kinds of thoughts which I regularly have incorrectly. Also, these two episodes involved a very unusual sort of clarity and certainty which attach to almost no thought I ever have, even well-developed ones, much less mere “impressions” like these.
Anyway, as I said, I don’t really believe in “psychic phenomena” and I just mentioned these episodes as the occasions which have given me the most direct experiential “food for thought” on that subject, not as occasions which prove “I have psychic powers.”
-Kris
[QUOTE=Q.E.D.]
Everything we know in science is testable and repeatable. Everything. Even if we can’t fully explain the mechanism behind it (gravity, for example), we can still make predictions about its behavior which agree perfectly with observation, and perform experiments on it which will be accurately reproduced given the same conditions every single time.
Nothing which has been examined scientifically concerning the supernatural has either of these properties. I feel safe, at this point in time, in saying that they do not exist.
[/QUOTE]
This presupposes something exists only if it is testable and repeatable.
I can imagine things existing which neither I nor any group of human beings could repeat and test. Do you think I’m imagining an impossibility?
-Kris
I’ve mentioned this before on the board. My wife and I were eating dinner with my parents when my father suddenly had a flash that someone had been there, and was now gone.
An hour later, his brother called to tell him their father had died without warning at the same time my father had his vision. My father had never before, nor ever again, had that kind of vision. He couldn’t explain it, I can’t explain it and don’t even try.
I’ve had a couple of “insights” in my life that turned out to be true, but I attribute them only to my imagination and the fact that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in awhile.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
I can imagine things existing which neither I nor any group of human beings could repeat and test. Do you think I’m imagining an impossibility?
[/QUOTE]
Perhaps. What, specifically, did you have in mind?
I think it’s funny that someone named Surreal started this thread.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
This presupposes something exists only if it is testable and repeatable.
I can imagine things existing which neither I nor any group of human beings could repeat and test. Do you think I’m imagining an impossibility?
-Kris
[/QUOTE]
The image in your head is not the reality. Sometimes those images can exist in reality; sometimes they can’t. You can definitely imagine things that are impossible outside the inner workings of the mind.
I grew up out in the country, and we burned our household trash in a big metal barrel way out behind the house. I was standing next to the barrel one day, burning trash, idly staring at the flames, when out of the blue my left knee totally buckled and I fell to the ground, ending up on my belly facing away from the barrel. At the moment I hit the ground, something in the barrel exploded and blew flaming trash and ashes all over, and sent the barrel spinning off its base. There was burning stuff all around me, but I didn’t have a scratch on me. Was I subconsciously aware that there was an aerosol can or something in the fire, about to burst? Maybe, but it still feels eerie 25 years later.