Spirituality
 

Do you believe in ghosts? Spirits? Demons? Angels? The "Astral Plain", as some call it?

I'm sort of in between. Definitely skeptical to say the least. I mean, there's a lot of intriguing evidence in the world in favor of some "other realm"'s existence, but at the same time a lot of it could just be attributed to psychotic / schizophrenic problems in people. But that's what's so goddamn interesting, even if it is the byproduct of mental illness or something it just goes to show the extent of our imaginations.

I've been reading about Ouija boards a lot the past couple days. Interesting phenomena. I dunno if it's all psychological or if there actually is some mystical element to it (probably the former but hey who knows) but it's definitely a curiosity I want to explore a bit more. So I just made one out of cardboard and am about to find somewhere quiet in town to take it for a spin. I hope Zozo doesn't eat my soul.

Have you guys ever had any demonic, ghostly or other worldly experiences that you couldn't explain through science and logic? I don't think I have, but know many people who make claims of witnessing bizarre paranormal activity.

Spirituality is stupid. Fuck spirituality.

No. I may have once, but my mind has become too logical to believe in anything like that.

Heard a few claims from friends of mine. I tend to be torn between believing them as friends and disbelieving them because it sounds so unlikely.

Myself, I've had a few odd moments that feel slightly spiritual. Usually I pin it down as coincidence or something. It's frequently stuff like predicting something in dreams or just in thoughts, or having Deja Vu at random sights.

Unless you can say something will happen, before it happens, it's not clairvoyance. Having prophetic dreams that you realize after something has already happened is just fake memories.

Apparently the town I grew up in has loads of "paranormal" activities, ranging from dead firemen, orphan mill slaves, and one I found particularly fascinating, Ida Moore: the ghost of a 20 year old girl filled with sorrow due to unlived dreams of becoming a music teacher. So sad.

Yeah I'm not totally behind the existence of any forms of tangible spirituality, but I'm definitely open to the idea. I mostly think it's cool from a psychological standpoint, but can't help but wonder sometimes. Especially when certain parallels are drawn (such as continuous "paranormal" activity (bulbs shattering, weird footsteps, static, radios switching on and off, etc) between actual historic events and weird shit happening in that place. I dunno. Maybe I'm an idiot but I find this stuff fascinating.

I used to be a Catholic (lel) but some time around 2011-2012 I ended up an agnostic and from there it wasn't long before I 'became' an atheist. Subsequently, I don't believe in any sort of apparition, nor any afterlife or limbo. I do believe that there are probably immensely intelligent alien life forms out there somewhere that, upon contact, we might consider gods. I also believe however, that they are in no way involved with Earth.

Ectoplasm hoax photos are fucking awesomely cool though.

WHY DO YOU HATE GOD STM
from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2528814/

I don't know what I believe anymore but I will say that governing religion is stupid and outdated in this day and age.

Oh and yeah obviously aliens exist. Only a complete moron would argue otherwise. But that's not really what this topic is about.

God's bead Baby, God's dead.

@Bungle - I agree, organised religion is a dangerous fucking thing.

God isn't dead, but I'll get that bastard some day.

Ooh I like what we're doing here.

Every kind of religion is dangerous. Blindly believing something which is improbable is dangerous. If any of these things were proven to be at least close to being truth, it wouldn't be a religion, it would be science.

It's all population control maaaaan!

well for the most part at least, I mean look at Christianity. I think many of the prime religious disciples are slowly accepting that the roots of their beliefs are bullshit though. they just like the themes and philosophy of it all.

I won't believe christian people are changing as long as this exists.

I didn't want this to be a Religion thread ;(

Nah, ghosts don't exist.

Well *I* didn't want to be saved by some guy who died on a cross for my sins despite me not existing, and knowing him at the time. And what?

Also, how is this even fair?

*de-lurks*

I've "seen" a couple of "ghosts" during separate events (and had people around me who saw the same things), but even I'm too cynical to believe they exist despite the fact that I can't explain what I saw. You've gotta be pretty naive to believe that.

Actually it sorta reminds me of this. People love to jump to conclusions when they can't explain stuff.

Replace each "Aliens" with "God"

Cynics and Scientists blame it on the aliens. Optimists and hippies blame it on spirits & ghosts.

Like I said, I'm somewhere in the between. I guess I just find the whole concept fun...

I think we've got five or six different definitions of the word "spirituality" running in tandem here in this thread.

Which brings me to my point: I've never heard the word "spirituality" used to describe the same thing by two different people. As words go it is utterly useless because it cannot be used to communicate the idea you have in your head to anyone else's with anything approaching reliability. We are travelling in a dark place. This is where language comes to die.


My views on religion and woo are well documented around here, I think. For the record: if ever I experience something that I cannot explain, I can put that down to either supernatural phenomena that I suddenly claim to be sufficiently qualified to recognise (presumably because not knowing what I'm looking at is considered to be a respected mark of expertise), or I can put it down to having insufficient data. I take the option that lets me use the word "data" in a sentence. That never gets old.

Can you give some examples?

A more appropriate title for the thread would've been "Do you believe in ghosts?", I suppose. Failed to remember that spirituality to some people is just the act of religious worship.

So... Do you believe in ghosts? Spirits? Demons? Angels? The "Astral Plain", as some call it? [2]

It's not enough to invent ghosts. You then have to offer explanations for their rather more unusual features. And then substantiate those explanations, which will be difficult when the same cannot even be done for the original claims of their existence.

What unusual features? They reveal themselves as soon as you start to consider their nature and origins. How do they work? What are they? Where do they come from? So often they resemble human beings, we are told that they are the spirits of the dead. Okay. So how come there are spirits at all? Why do we not all leave ghosts like them? And why, why, why are we not inundated with trillions of them? There's nothing special about human beings. But we only ever see ghost humans. Some people claim to witness ghost animals, but they are always domestic animals. Nothing older than modern recorded history. No cavemen, for example. What's up with that? No lizards, either. No mammoths. No anomalocarids. No plankton. The oceans should surely be a veritable ectoplasmic soup of the things. And we know that spirits cannot be confined just humans (and there's no reason why they should even look like humans, there's nothing special about the meat of an arm that should be ethereally preserved), because ghosts are also always wearing clothes. Ghost clothes. The ghosts of the clothes they were wearing, which in some cases may still exist and be perfectly functional. How did these clothes leave spiritual essences? If I found and wore them, might my ghost be wearing the very same clothes as another ghost? Can we duplicate ghost clothes like this? And do ghosts always look like the way they did when they died, or other periods? If inanimate objects can have multiple ghosts, can people too? I'm not the same entity I was as a child, my atoms are all different, my mind is massively changed, I don't even look the same. Could my earlier self have left a ghost already? Are we all walking around leaving ghosts of those moments, every single living thing that ever existed? Again, why are we not buried under ghosts? How many infectious diseases impotently haunt the site of their defeat like soldiers at their last battlefield?

The fact is, the only types of ghosts people ever claim to see are the types from our stories. Our culture is rife with very strong narratives we tell each other, and they are so strong that they affect our very experience of the world. The ghosts we see are as we expect them to be, right down to their period clothing. Never anything unusual or unique that we expect from real people. UFOs are the same: the modern narrative is alien space ships (as opposed to the gods and demons of our culture's past). Each our unlikely for many reasons, some of them the same reasons, and some of them at opposite ends of the scale. Alien ships are unlikely because of the size of the universe and the distance they would have had to come. Ghosts are unlikely because they are so provincial and arbitrary. Again, narrative. No one ever talks about witnessing dinosaur ghosts, and even if they did, they would have only looked the way they thought dinosaurs looked, not the way they really did, and we are still learning. Similarly, unidentified lights in the sky are always alien ships or angelic beings, never phantom pterodactyls still haunting a very different and much older world.

So really: what gives? Because even if they are real, the universe as we now understand it is just so much bigger than us, yet these ghost phenomena, which if real would be scientifically revolutionary, seem to be targeted in design and nature to be the sorts of things that ordinary people care about, which is utterly unlike everything real that we have ever discovered. This is very suspicious. It's exactly as you'd expect if they were pure human fabrications.

That just looks like people puking...

BM really really doesn't understand this belief thing.

I understand it. I don't appreciate it. Phantom phytoplankton would be interesting, but no one's beliefs are interesting enough to accommodate it. People are just boring that way.

I grew up in a haunted ass house and idgaf if it's ghosts or shit from another dimension was leaking in and affecting the house or what was going on but that and the fucked up dreams related to that house is enough to make me think "supernatural" shit exists.

However, I also think like all things there's got to be some kind of science behind it so it's not complete bullshit unexplainable occurrences but I have absolutely no desire to ever figure it out because fuck that noise

Things like angels and demons though are definitely creatures someone shit out of their brain once that got really popular. Like Klingons, except insanely OP.

There are a bunch of possible explanations. My personal favourite is infra-sound. Have a read of the paper mentioned in that article; it's fascinating.

You think the house is haunted. You have bad dreams about the house. These two things are related.

I don't believe in this shit by the way.

This bears repeating.



Also, this famous study which showed how quickly our memories of events fade and are replaced with complete fabrications, and how we are more confident about the false memories than the true ones.

Edit: BM whyyy

@Phylum
Nah son you don't understand. The dreams weren't fucked up in the ooo scary bad dream sense. The part that gets me is the fact that the house always appears in a state that I've never seen it in, that's never been described to me, and when I told my parents about it in a passing moment (I mentioned things like the kitchen being full of jarred vegetables and some of the rooms just not existing and thought it was weird) and they'd be like wtf your grandma used to jar shit with her friends all the time years before you were born and she became old and senile on 50 different meds at all times. It just weirds me out, because these are things I never knew were things until I just rambled about dreams I've had and someone was like "um x qs me"

The only "scary" that ever happens is this room that gives everyone and their mothers bad vibes if you go anywhere near the damn door, god forbid you actually enter it. It's almost as bad as that feeling you get when entering a cathedral. "Man this is cool but why does it feel like someone just set my stomach on fire". But anyways, the room always appears pitch black past the door fram for some reason and that's way too spooky for dream me.

Thinking it was haunted wasn't pre established. It was a conclusion I came to after roughly 18 years of actually living in the house, then visiting the house, then finally only ever passing by it. And I only call it that now because I'm not the only one who experienced weird crap in the house, nor am I the only one that got the bad feelings around certain parts of the house. Even my dad, the most skeptical god damn person in the universe, has experienced shit in that house and he refuses to talk about it because he has such strong disbelief in whatever the fuck it could possibly be.

Also, hilariously, ever since I moved away from that street the house was on I haven't had a single dream about it. Probably just coincidence, though. Dreams are funny things.

When it gets down to it, it doesn't matter whether you believe something like this or not. You really just have to experience something first hand to be able to make a proper judgement of whatever it is.

Edit edit: I know it's entirely possible people have just been fucking with me my entire life but oh well, it's not like I'm 100% dead set on IT WAS GHOSTS THE WHOLE TIME. It makes for fun story times.

Edit edit edit:

That makes enough sense for me to accept vibrations as the reason for any and all weird fucked up shit I experienced that may have been GHOASTS

An interesting theory about aliens and why there aren't any flying around out there is because; a planet's sentient civilisation will only ever get one real chance to figure out a way to move past it's need to use finite resources as an energy source, and to use it's finite resources as a means to enter outer space.

If they can't then eventually as the finite resources are consumed, machines break down, industrial manufacture stops, and the civilisation is forced to revert back to a less technologically advanced time. Even if a new sentient civilisation were to rise on the planet, the planet wouldn't have enough resources for them to try again.

TL;DR You got one shot do not miss you're chance to go(colonise another planet), This opportunity comes once in a planet's lifetime, yo!

Also growing up there was this haunted house, that we always called "The Haunted Barn" that we'd visit often, and heard rumours that if you heard scraping on the wood or a banging on the bars inside the house then you'd have to leave. The entrance was boarded up so you could only ever really explore the outsides of the house. We'd go infrequently but we'd always hear the noises after sometime between half an hour to two hours - obviously being kids we'd always leave, but one time I went alone; forced one of the boards away and went inside. There were indeed scratches and claw marks at the wood, and the only metal bars I saw were those attatched to the staircase, I immediatly heard the noises again and cheesed it.
2Spooky4Mi

My friends and I used to slip through a gap in the chain link fence of an abandoned factory when we were younger and scope the place it out. It was really fucking cool in the day, perfect example of urban decay and I bet we filled our lungs with plenty of asbestos. We were all considering going there in the middle of the night just for shits and gigs but that never happened. We all one by one kinda decided it'd be just best not to. That place would've made me pish me self.

Who's to say anything out there is sentient, though? Who's to say what could be out there would even fall under our definitions of life?

Everyone's ideas of alien civilisations are so humanised. Even if there was anything out there we could call alive it would be a totally different ball game. You base everything you know off of things you've seen, so the more you think about alien life the more wrong you'll be.

I'm not opposed to the idea of there being other life in the universe somewhere, but the odds of encountering it in the lifetime of humanity is bleak. Because we'll never know anything about it you might as well not waste your time thinking about it because everything you think will be totally wrong.

They knocked the "haunted" building down about a year or two after that and built some housing in it's place. It was strange because it was just this huge, looming building in the middle of a suburban area that people just seemed to ignore. Unfortunately looking on Google maps only turns up the place post-demolishment.

I saw a couple of ghosts as a kid. But then, I also saw faces in the curtains.

There's a derelict farmhouse up a hill near where I live, and some kind of stable complex. They're both pretty creepy, especially the latter. It feels like an abbatoir, even though it never was one.

I'm so happy I know about this page now.