I don't know that I have ever experienced anything that I can say is paranormal.

[George-ananda]

I do not think you were unclear. I think I misunderstood what you were saying.

Many things that were formerly considered as paranormal or associated with the paranormal have been shown to have natural reasons for their occurrence. For instance, we understand lightning much better than our ancient ancestors and all the evidence indicates it is a natural process. Disease is another phenomenon now recognized as being derived from natural causes.

I do not know what to think of ghosts. They are commonly reported. I have never seen one to my knowledge. I am more interested to know how one knows something is a ghost and not something else. What is the process that eliminates other possibilities or do people tend to go straight to ghost without consideration of anything else?

Witchcraft being more a practice of ethnobotany than of casting spells that take control of people.

There may be some things that defy explanation by science for the fact that they are difficult to observe or to set up experiments to study.

I was making the point that perhaps spirit bodies are made of matter outside of our three-dimensions. Would that make them paranormal or normal? If it’s real I consider them in the domain of science still just science not yet discovered.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Ultimately, how you map things onto the territory is up to how you want to draw the map.

Something I've observed is that "paranormal" as a concept tends to crop up where the prevailing religion in a culture is blinded in some way to certain types of religious experiences or practices. Because these experiences and practices aren't part of the usual framework - but they still nonetheless happen or are practiced - they get shunted under some other labeling system like "paranormal" or "occult."

I probably take this perspective because many phenomena quaintly referenced as "paranormal" are already incorporated into the foundations of my religious practices and not viewed as "paranormal." It's just part of my religion. But as these things are part of a religion, they are not understood in a secularized or Christianized context which means "speaking with the dead" in Paganism probably doesn't look like the seance you might be imagining.

As a Christian, there are things that I believe, but I do this knowing that I cannot demonstrate to others those things that I do believe.

I exist in the irony of believing in something, while at the same time questioning that belief and how others come to believe as they do. I don't believe in Thor and Odin, but someone else can use the same reasoning I use to reject Thor and Odin to reject what I believe. I accept that I and others believe in things that cannot be demonstrated leaving me more interested in claims that something does exist as a fact.

Are you saying that the dominant religions tend to reject or dismiss claims of experiences that fall outside of the scope of their beliefs and these are given the fringe label of paranormal? I'm being facetious, but my doubts often fall outside the scope of my own beliefs and in that broader sense of what you are saying, could be considered paranormal.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I was making the point that perhaps spirit bodies are made of matter outside of our three-dimensions. Would that make them paranormal or normal? If it’s real I consider them in the domain of science still just science not yet discovered.

That fits with some of my thoughts. How is a ghost known to be a ghost and not something else that can be explained by valid understanding. Why does someone go immediately to the conclusion of ghost and not interstellar traveling using technology we don't understand? How do I know a ghost isn't someone from the future examining the past using technology that makes them look like ghosts to us.

If something acts in the world, it has to exist in this state and be part of the world too. If it exists to our perception then we should be able to find the means to study it. If not now, then as technology progresses. We study molecules that were unknown 200 hundred years ago, because we slowly developed the technical means to study them.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

All my weird experiences have been something happening that was unexplainable with the information I had/have. There's no evidence for me to consider at all. That's why I've never been able to attribute them to the work of something paranormal. I have no more evidence to believe a ghost yanked the door out of my hand then I do that the handle on the other side got caught on something that wasn't apparent when I checked, for whatever reason. I still wonder what caused the couple incidents I've had, though.

I have seen three UFO's. They were objects in the air that I could not identify. I think one was a meteor, since it had many of the features described for meteors. The more interesting one is one I have described on here and remains a UFO to me. A UFO as in unidentified. I have no evidence to claim it was a spaceship from some other world crewed by alien life forms. I suppose it could have been, but I don't have any evidence of that.

The ghost story associated to me is in the secondhand accounts of about 5 unrelated people that were in my parents home after the death my father. All I can do is relate the claims that there was a man seen whose descriptions fits that of my father while he was alive. What that means is unknown to me. I would like to think it was my father and that this is some evidence for life beyond this one, but I can't say anything like that, since I haven't got any evidence to support that view.

Another strange event is the fact I have noted that I seem to have the uncanny ability to think about something or someone and either the event will occur shortly following my thoughts or I soon see the people I was thinking about. Am I precognitive or am I cherry picking? Do I think about these things and people all the time and only remember when the thoughts coincided with the events giving me the illusion that I am precognitive?

I never knew my mother's parents. Those grandparents were gone before I existed. My grandparents lived near a well-travelled road when my mother was growing up. She related a story about how one night my grandmother woke the whole house to a major accident on that road at a nearby busy intersection. Upon investigation, there was no accident. When everyone had returned to sleep, she woke them all again, because of this accident. Again, no accident. On the last occasion, when she woke everyone, there was indeed a very terrible car accident at that exact intersection that my grandparents were able to help with. Apparently, when this was all done, my grandfather told my grandmother to please not tell him things like that anymore, it freaked him out. This seemed to me like some indication that it was not the first time grandmother had done something like this. But another secondhand story that may have grown in its intensity with the years and the telling. Or not. I have no evidence. There are things that people can sense that are physical and real that don't have anything to do with claimed paranormal phenomena that might have resulted in a similar outcome for all I know.

Maybe grandma had the right mechanical receptors that continued to operate while she slept and subconsciously detected an increased volume of traffic on a road and intersection with a known history of auto accidents. A recent study in Current Biology lead by Daniel Cameron finds that we can detect low frequency sounds that we cannot actually hear and that these elicit responses in the people subjected to them. We tend to dance more. There are many things that happen for reasons entirely unrelated to the reasons we want for them. I think precognition would be cool and an interesting and useful ability to possess, but I have no way to determine that it exists based on what I have learned so far. Maybe I am missing something and wrong, but I am curious to know how others concluded differently than I do.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

When you look at a plane that is flying away from you it seems to hover (while moving fast).

Thanks for mentioning that. It is one possible explanation. Though given the angle, the apparent height in the atmosphere and the time, it potentially means that a plane I was watching flew straight away and out of the atmosphere.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I think you are mixing up categories here. There are the things that defy explanation (like ghosts) and things that are looking for an explanation (like ESP). Academic work is done to describe the phenomenology of ESP and first attempts at explanatory hypothesis have been published. (Morph(ogenet)ic fields, Sheldrake.)
I'm not so sure on which side of the fringe border those people reside. Very rare events have a tendency to be called non existent, like ball lightning, which was denied to exist by the science community until the anecdotes kept piling up and eventually reproduced in the lab.

I'm not sure that the things I mentioned are beyond researching, but none have any explanation in fact known to me. I don't think that ESP has been explained and established as a recognized ability with known mechanisms.

I think you have identified that what I mention as paranormal is a conglomeration of different, even unrelated, claims of phenomena that have variously been the subject of a range of examination levels.

Very rare events are to be the most difficult to study. If you want to observe an alien encounter, how do you set that experiment up not knowing when and where such events are going to occur?

 

[Dan From Smithville]

The closest to this I can recall was once witnessing ball lightning after a lightning strike, in a tank farm at an oil refinery where I worked. I think since that time ball lightning has become scientifically accepted, though still not understood.

Ball lightning is a phenomenon I have only learned about in the last 10 years and never seen it. It seems to fall into that category of recognized things that are so rare and unpredictable, the study of them is practically impossible. Since learning about it, I would love to see it, but I don't know what would increase the likelihood of that happening. If I did, I am sure it would make me popular to scientists that study such things.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Speaking for myself as a paranormal investigator, I wouldn't immediately classify the kind of event you described as paranormal. Even if I sense the presence of a spirit, I don't always assume that it is paranormal. As a medium, though, I have the benefit of being able to see and hear spirits, so if I witness a spirit causing a paranormal event, I am aware of it. I will, however, make an effort to debunk the incident and document it using my equipment in order to establish that it was indeed paranormal. If there are other investigators and observers, especially skeptics, then I'll also make an effort to debunk and document the incident in order to prove that it's authentic.

Frankly, I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for a serious paranormal investigator to make absolutely certain that their evidence of the paranormal is authentic and cannot be legitimately debunked by skeptics. In my opinion, a serious and seasoned paranormal investigator will never leave their potential paranormal evidence (recorded videos and pictures of spirits, EVP recordings) wide open for skeptics to harshly rip it all apart. I don't think it's a wise or productive strategy for any serious paranormal investigator. To be honest, I'm my own worst critic when it comes to the potential evidence of the paranormal that I collect, because my objective when analyzing the evidence is to try and debunk it so that I may authenticate it. I'm very serious about authenticating my evidence.

I also allow other seasoned investigators and even skeptics that I know and trust to thoroughly analyze the potential evidence of the paranormal that I collect during an investigation. I never take any pictures I take or videos I record at face value, despite my abilities relating to the paranormal. If I'm conducting an EVP session, then I make sure that the people around me hear what I hear via the Spirit Box. I've asked the other people around me, "What did you hear?" rather than repeating what I heard myself. I could tell them that I audibly heard the spirits speaking directly to me because of my abilities, but that isn't sufficient evidence for the skeptics in the crowd. If I show other people the pictures I've taken at a haunted location, I don't tell them what I see but rather ask them what they see. I don't try to influence how other people interpret my evidence. In addition, before I enter into a location that is believed to be haunted, I'll ask the people I'm with to not tell me anything about the place and any experiences they have had there. I don't want to be influenced. I prefer to go into a location with a clear mind so that I can be certain that what I sense there as a medium is real.

I fully support the investigation of the unexplained, unusual, paranormal and the rare. I don't operate in the same frame of reference that you do, but I don't discount the experiences. I just don't know that what I have experienced fits with those claims or how one determines whether they do or not. I wonder about many things that people are certain about. Perhaps I am just blind to some things. Perhaps there is nothing to see. Perhaps some things are there to see if you have the right tools and others never were there. It is determining the latter that interests me.

 

[exchemist]

Ball lightning is a phenomenon I have only learned about in the last 10 years and never seen it. It seems to fall into that category of recognized things that are so rare and unpredictable, the study of them is practically impossible. Since learning about it, I would love to see it, but I don't know what would increase the likelihood of that happening. If I did, I am sure it would make me popular to scientists that study such things.

I think of it as an example of a phenomenon that is reported only anecdotally and thus not by reproducible observation, which is thus hard to treat as as being a genuine scientific object of study. In this respect it resembles some of the alleged phenomena reported by believers in paranormal phenomena. But I've seen it, much to my surprise.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

I fully support the investigation of the unexplained, unusual, paranormal and the rare. I don't operate in the same frame of reference that you do, but I don't discount the experiences. I just don't know that what I have experienced fits with those claims or how one determines whether they do or not. I wonder about many things that people are certain about. Perhaps I am just blind to some things. Perhaps there is nothing to see. Perhaps some things are there to see if you have the right tools and others never were there. It is determining the latter that interests me.

I think that your curiosity is a good thing, and I would encourage you to keep pursuing answers. Have you ever considered taking part in a real-time paranormal investigation at a suspected or well-known haunted location in your area? If you're interested in learning more, you can reply in my thread on the subject here or you can send me a private message and we'll talk about it further. I wanted to suggest my thread or a private message because I don't want to derail your thread. My inbox is always open if you have questions.

 

[Quintessence]

Are you saying that the dominant religions tend to reject or dismiss claims of experiences that fall outside of the scope of their beliefs and these are given the fringe label of paranormal? I'm being facetious, but my doubts often fall outside the scope of my own beliefs and in that broader sense of what you are saying, could be considered paranormal.

Whenever we have an experience, we categorize it based on the mental maps we create of the territory. We learn these maps from a wide variety of sources and often we aren't all that cognizant of our our mental map impacts how we categorize and label our experiences.

To use a simple example, if I say "tree" to you, odds are good you have a mental standard of what that means and what something should look like to be called a tree. If you experience something new that matches your mental map of tree characteristics, you are likely to conclude this new thing is a tree. This same process happens with religious experiences. Your religious upbringing has trained your mental map in certain ways, so you'll associate certain experiences as falling within your religion and use religion-specific terminology to reference it.

All maps of the territory have limitations, though, and eventually we run into things that don't fit on the maps we've been taught. Put another way, we will experience and encounter things that contradict our way of seeing and challenge it. From there people have one of several distinct responses: (1) ignore and dismiss the experience entirely, (2) reinterpret the experience to somehow fit into your existing mental maps anyway, (3) create a new mental map that can account for the experience.

Shunting things into a category "paranormal" might look like the third of these for most folks in Western culture. Our cultural traditions are thoroughly shaped by Christian or Abrahamic mental maps, and there are lots of mystical experiences that just don't map well onto those frameworks. They've gotta go somewhere (though I suppose you could do option #1 and deny everything, and some absolutely do this) so then a concept map of "paranormal" stuff becomes the home.

Does this kind of make sense?

 

[Heyo]

Does this kind of make sense?

Yes, it does. It also explains why a single event doesn't change a well maintained map and why the older the map is, the less likely it is to change.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

I was making the point that perhaps spirit bodies are made of matter outside of our three-dimensions. Would that make them paranormal or normal? If it’s real I consider them in the domain of science still just science not yet discovered.

That is another possibility, but I am not so much interested in what they are, but how people know that they are something.

I agree that anything that acts in the material world can be seen as part of the material world (real) and not something imaginary, magical or outside of it.

What I notice is that instances of what is often considered paranormal experience, people go to that conclusion immediately or to some specific type of the paranormal. And there is often no indication of how they came to that conclusion and eliminated other possibilities. I see it as going from A to Z without stopping at the letters in between. I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but asking how they know.

If a conclusion is made about a disease by a professional, one can check that professionals credentials to see if they are an expert in diseases and diagnosis of disease. A person can check references about the disease and educate themselves on disease. Diseases are known in our experience. There is a body of literature on diseases to draw upon. There is physical evidence that can be examined by anyone including other experts. There is a verifiable body of knowledge regarding disease in people and in other organisms.

My thoughts and questions are on the process that leads to conclusions. The methodology of determination.

 

[wellwisher]

When I was much younger, I was interested in the Occult and Mysticism. I hoping to gain some first hand experiences of the paranormal. During my search for experiences, I eventually dabbled in a type of yoga called Kundalini Yoga.

The premise of this style of yoga, was we have seven psychic centers; tailbone, spleen, navel, heart, throat, mind's eye (between the eyes), top of the head. The idea was to use breathing exercises and visualize these seven centers, one at time, absorbing energy as we breath in and and the moving that energy up the spine, then out of the top of the head as we breath out. You do seven deep breath for each center starting at the bottom; tail bone at the tip of the spine, then upward; seven times seven.

I used to use this system to learn things from others, without words. I would move my hand along another person's spine, without touching and based on the centers I would feel with my hand. I could know their place in their life journey.

To make a long story short, I had reached a point where some unique experiences began to occur. This may be a technique for others to gain some kool data. I had to stop because it was getting scary. The last experience, made me feel like the energy centers were not just vibrating, but they were expanding and merging. This may be feel like I had ballooned up, and I was was starting to leave my body, floating above it.

This had been one of the goals of the yoga, but once is was happening, I was afraid, since I was not sure if I could get back into my body if I floated too far away. I stopped all the occult stuff; over night, and decided to study psychology, to see if there was a science; psychological or neural explanation, for these unique experiences. Thinking it was due to the brain was less scary than thinking it was spirits outside me.

The brain appears to have some extra features we have yet to develop and/or which humans have repressed. These cannot be easily investigated with the scientific method, as currently written, since you need to go into your own brain via your consciousness and manipulate the neural gird; you have to become the scientist and the neural experiment. This cannot easily reproduced by others, since there are no tools for this purpose besides our own unique consciousness. However, from the inside one can still act like a scientist and try to observe and record the data.

One of the pitfalls is maintaining objectivity at all times. As an analogy, say you were doing a study on the pain of a toothache. To become the scientist and experiment you will need to have you tooth drilled so you can live inside the pain and not just observe it outside yourself. The pain will be a distraction that takes concentration to keep in check so you can stay objective. Science made this the last frontier since objectivity is hard enough never mind while under constant fire. Religions dare to go there. The fact is, you will need both science and religion; objectivity and a way to deal with the unknowns that can swallow objectivity, to such neutral software experiments.

 

[George-ananda]

That is another possibility, but I am not so much interested in what they are, but how people know that they are something.

I agree that anything that acts in the material world can be seen as part of the material world (real) and not something imaginary, magical or outside of it.

What I notice is that instances of what is often considered paranormal experience, people go to that conclusion immediately or to some specific type of the paranormal. And there is often no indication of how they came to that conclusion and eliminated other possibilities. I see it as going from A to Z without stopping at the letters in between. I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but asking how they know.

If a conclusion is made about a disease by a professional, one can check that professionals credentials to see if they are an expert in diseases and diagnosis of disease. A person can check references about the disease and educate themselves on disease. Diseases are known in our experience. There is a body of literature on diseases to draw upon. There is physical evidence that can be examined by anyone including other experts. There is a verifiable body of knowledge regarding disease in people and in other organisms.

My thoughts and questions are on the process that leads to conclusions. The methodology of determination.

For example, if someone says I saw a ghost of their deceased neighbor that does not necessarily mean they know what a ghost 'is'. It just means they perceived an apparition that disappeared and looked like their old neighbor in their yard.

As far as theories about what ghost 'are', that would have to be a separate discussion. The observing person perhaps has no idea or theory even, but they believe the event happened anyway. 'Ghost' is just the colloquial English language term we all use.

It seems like you are thinking 'ghost' has a more specific definition than apparition of a dead person in this case. It's really just a term for a mystery appearance with cause unknown.

 

[Sgt. Pepper]

What I notice is that instances of what is often considered paranormal experience, people go to that conclusion immediately or to some specific type of the paranormal. And there is often no indication of how they came to that conclusion and eliminated other possibilities. I see it as going from A to Z without stopping at the letters in between. I'm not saying they are right or wrong, but asking how they know.

A professional paranormal investigator and researcher won't immediately assume that an unexplained and unusual occurrence is paranormal. An expert paranormal investigator will first make an effort to disprove the phenomenon, and if that fails, he or she will ask the spirits to repeat the incident so that it may be accurately recorded using specialized ghost-hunting equipment. An expert paranormal investigator will conduct an extensive comprehensive investigation with their equipment to either prove or disprove the phenomenon, and they will seek the assistance of other seasoned investigators to verify their evidence. A professional paranormal investigator may also seek the assistance of a trusted psychic medium or a sensitive while investigating a haunted location. I've been investigating and researching the paranormal for the past 15 years, and I'm also a psychic medium and a sensitive. And as I said in an earlier post (read here), I don't always assume that an unusual occurrence, such as lights flickering or a loud bang, is paranormal.

 

[Dan From Smithville]

Whenever we have an experience, we categorize it based on the mental maps we create of the territory. We learn these maps from a wide variety of sources and often we aren't all that cognizant of our our mental map impacts how we categorize and label our experiences.

To use a simple example, if I say "tree" to you, odds are good you have a mental standard of what that means and what something should look like to be called a tree. If you experience something new that matches your mental map of tree characteristics, you are likely to conclude this new thing is a tree. This same process happens with religious experiences. Your religious upbringing has trained your mental map in certain ways, so you'll associate certain experiences as falling within your religion and use religion-specific terminology to reference it.

All maps of the territory have limitations, though, and eventually we run into things that don't fit on the maps we've been taught. Put another way, we will experience and encounter things that contradict our way of seeing and challenge it. From there people have one of several distinct responses: (1) ignore and dismiss the experience entirely, (2) reinterpret the experience to somehow fit into your existing mental maps anyway, (3) create a new mental map that can account for the experience.

Shunting things into a category "paranormal" might look like the third of these for most folks in Western culture. Our cultural traditions are thoroughly shaped by Christian or Abrahamic mental maps, and there are lots of mystical experiences that just don't map well onto those frameworks. They've gotta go somewhere (though I suppose you could do option #1 and deny everything, and some absolutely do this) so then a concept map of "paranormal" stuff becomes the home.

Does this kind of make sense?

Yes.

These maps describe the difference between creationists (1) and scientists or science literate (3) in arguments about evolution and creation. I suppose, I would be an amalgam of (2 and 3) in retaining my theological views as well as accepting the science.

I'm not all that interested in categorizing "paranormal" phenomena or events so much as understanding how others determine them to be so. Even if they are part of the theological basis of non-Abrahamic religions, my interest still holds true.

How do I know I have had an experience with something that appears beyond the material world? That's basically my point.

 

[Quintessence]

I'm not all that interested in categorizing "paranormal" phenomena or events so much as understanding how others determine them to be so. Even if they are part of the theological basis of non-Abrahamic religions, my interest still holds true.

How do I know I have had an experience with something that appears beyond the material world? That's basically my point.

This is perhaps a bigger question than you know. One of the reasons dealing with mystical experiences (or call them spiritual experiences, religious experiences, paranormal experiences, whatever) is hard is because discerning what they mean is an unrelenting challenge. Some abdicate this challenge by dismissing these experiences as worthy of consideration or contemplation. Or they pass on the responsibility of interpreting what it means to some external authority. Some do hard work of sorting out what it all means, with all the stops and stumbles along the way.

In any of these cases, one never really knows. I'm not sure what the fascination is with certainty when it comes to dealing with reality and life's big questions. I mean, you'd think we'd all intuitively get that reality and our experience of it is complicated and it logically follows our answers to life's big questions are going to get equally complicated and never be resolved definitively. We're all just animals making it up as we go along. So to me the question is - what story do you want to tell? Who do you want to be, who are you a part of, what do you do?

In a nutshell with this particular issue - do you want to believe? If no, let it go. If yes, move from there and see where it leads. You can change your answer to this question at any time you want.

Speaking from a more personal standpoint, some of the experiences I've had one could classify as "religious" or "paranormal" or whatever... you just know. You know yourself, you know what you experienced, and you trust yourself to be discerning about what that all means for you. At the same time, you accept that others need not believe your way of understanding the experience and are not threatened by those differences.