I agree with this. But, being an incurable optimist :), I still believe and hope that when we here, on Earth, stop investing most of our intelligence into fighting and distruction, the day will come to reveal the mysteries of life that interest us.Quote:
Originally Posted by Emil Miller
That's interesting stuff Pompey. I like your attitude in that you don't overblow it but are willing to share.
I've had a few experiences - nothing very startling - where it just defies explanation, and I think an open sensible mind is the right approach. One of the difficulties with strange experiences is the fact of them being unrepeatable. In that sense science can't comment on it, but should be open minded too. Ghosts in all likelihood do not exist in the way they are traditionally presented otherwise we would see more of them. The x factor in such recounts is the human mind and it's potential.
I was a profound sceptic on all things that come under the paranormal banner my attitude was show me some positive evidence then I’ll consider it. Then, a few years ago I was shown positive evidence.
My wife and I had recently moved to the Romney Marsh in the county of Kent. The Romney and the Walland Marsh’s are flat wetlands reclaimed over the centuries from the sea. You can easily acquire more info from the web.
The roads across the marsh twist and turn dramatically, bends are very near the left and right turns. They are unlit at night, very narrow and many have irrigation ditches either side. None have paths or pavements. To sum up they can be very dangerous to drive on at night.
We had made our Christmas Eve rounds to our London relatives and friends and had left it late to drive home so it was two o’clock on Christmas morning when I was driving across the Marsh. It was a cold crystal clear night with a heavy frost on the road I could see ice forming in the headlights. I was approaching a very sharp bend, so sharp that it was impossible to see round the other side.
Halfway round the bend a figure was standing by the side of the road. My wife screamed as I swerved to avoid hitting him, the car skidded across towards a steep ditch. I don’t know how but I regained control and braked to a stop.
My wife was in a state of shock, I was absolutely livid; the idiot had almost killed the both of us. I opened the car door,
“John don’t, it never had a face”
“That’s not all he’ll be missing if I get hold of him”
I ran around the corner, there was no one there. He couldn’t have gone anywhere, there was a bright moon and in the flat empty fields, there was simply no where to hide.
My recollection of the figure is only based on a second or two but it was tall wearing an ankle long garment, it held its hands high to its face as if it was reading a book.
It could have only been no more than a foot from my wife on the nearside passenger seat but still to today she never discusses it and hates it when I tell friends of the experience.
Personally I don’t care if anyone believes this tale of not, I know its true and that’s all that matters. Have I any explanation? Well no, but if you twist my arm I have come round to the theory that we experienced a Time Slip. We were witnessing an episode from the past. The figure itself had no substance; it never belonged to our time. It wouldn’t have mattered if I had driven straight through it, though that option wasn’t available at the time.
The occurrence of Time Slips is not as rare as I once thought and they fit more comfortably with an explanation of ghostly experiences than many others.
I think that one will need more than optimism. The digital revolution has enabled science to make some headway in answering the question, 'how'? but until it can answer 'why'?, it will have failed to solve the fundamental problem that besets the human race.Quote:
Originally Posted by free
I think I can explain this phenomenon. It was also in the early hours of the morning when I was a passenger in a car being driven along a deserted country road in Somerset. The driver and his wife were seated in the front and, as we turned a bend, I saw a strange figure standing at the side of the road ahead. My friends told me that on one occasion they had seen what looked exactly like a man standing by the road at a similar hour and only later did they discover that, for some reason, pockets of fog form shapes momentarily before disappearing into the atmosphere. I must say that the object I saw certainly looked solid enough but their explanation put my mind at ease.Quote:
Originally Posted by Carousel
Bravo. I once saw a science book for children called The Big Book of Why. Wrong!--I remember thinking--Science is The Big Book of How. Why can be quite another matter.Quote:
Originally Posted by Emil Miller
I take your point and its true that the Marsh can be misty but not on that night. It was a crystal clear night with a three quarter moon and any mist would have been reflected back because the car headlights were at full beam.
I spoke to my wife who said that if her side window had been open she could have put her hand out and touched the figure, she was that close to it, so there was no way it could have been a mist.
About 15 miles from where I live is Dover Castle which stands high on the white cliffs above the port and town of Dover. The largest castle in Britain; it was originally built a thousand years ago and was added to over the centuries to defend the shortest gateway to the realm.
If you are looking for Walt Disney palaces and pretty turrets from where Rapunzel dangled down her golden locks, walk on by, Dover castle wasn’t built for fairy tales, it was built for business.
Underneath this fortress are maze of tunnels the latest of which where dug just before WW2. Deep down remains a command post, a hospital, canteens sleeping quarters and a telephone switchboard all now open to the public on guided tours. From time to time visitors experience strange events in these tunnels. The most disturbing to date was a Dutch lady in a group of tourists who later said she moved to one side to let a man in uniform walk round her when he walked straight through her. She was taken to hospital in a traumatic fit.
Thanks Paul. Not believing in ghosts doesn't make one closed-minded any more than it does credulous. And apparently (based on my experience), it doesn't even stop them from messing with you. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
That is something you often hear religious apologists say about miracles: that they are one-time events or that they are inherently outside of natural science. I know what they mean, I suppose, but as an argument, I don't find it very convincing. In fact, it's a tautology: it's just saying that the supernatural is supernatural or the miraculous is miraculous. It doesn't advance the argument that either the supernatural or the miraculous actually exist. So science can comment inasmuch as it can say No, I'm sorry, that won't quite cut the mustard. But of course science remains open to new data.Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
Well let me put it this way: I'm glad that Pendragon and Carousel are thinking of their ghosts (a Confederate soldier and a mysterious robed figure, respectively) as time anomalies, because otherwise we would need to address the troubling issue of whether they were wearing the ghosts of their respective uniform and robe. At a certain point, it's time for string theory. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Paulclem
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
No I am not talking of ghosts in the literal sense of the word those who experience a time slip are witnessing a real event of the past much like a replayed scene for an old movie as an intruder. Doing a bit of research in the subject I’ve found that the time slip for the majority is very short no more than a few minutes while a few are longer.
The one who is in a time slip can see and some can hear but is in the roll of an invisible observer. What they see is nearly always mundane, people and traffic pass by, workers in fields, just folks going about their normal lives.
A more interesting account concerned a young apprentice plumber by the name of Harry Martindale. I haven’t the time to spend in writing the account myself but here is one I downloaded.
It was 1953, and the Treasurer’s House was having modern central heating installed. Harry was tasked with checking over the joints of pipes installed by his more experienced colleagues, which was why he went down into the cellar - alone.
Harry was intent on his work when the incident began. He was up a short ladder so that he could check piping that was running along just below the cellar ceiling. He heard a muffled trumpet blast, but took no notice. He thought perhaps a band was nearby practising. The trumpet came again, nearer this time. Again Harry ignored it. Then a horse stepped out of the solid wall right in front of Harry’s eyes. Thunderstruck and terrified in equal measure, Harry fell off his ladder and tumbled to the floor. As he scrambled to get away from the figure of the horse, Harry could not tear his eyes from the apparition.
The horse continued to emerge from the wall into the cellar. On its back was a man in a long cloak and a helmet with a feather crest on it. Behind the horseman came a dozen or more men on foot. As Harry gradually recovered from his shock, he was deeply relieved to see that the ghosts paid him not the slightest bit of attention but marched on as if he were not there. The men on foot carried large, round shields with long spears slung over their shoulders and short swords hanging from their belts. They had what looked like kilts, dyed a dark green colour, and mail shirts. One of them carried a trumpet that was long, straight and battered as if from long years of hard use.
As the men marched across the cellar, Harry realised that he could not see them from the knees downward. Then the horsemen came to a spot where a hole had been dug into the floor. Harry could now see the horse’s legs almost down to the hooves. They carried shaggy hair around the fetlocks, similar to those on a modern shire horse. As the men on foot passed the hole, Harry could see their legs down to the ankles. They were wearing leather sandals attached by straps that ran criss-cross fashion up to the knees. The men marched on, giving out an aura of dejection and despondency, until they vanished into the wall opposite.
Excavations have shown that a Roman road runs underneath the Treasurer’s House leading from what had been a gate in the fortress walls to the east toward the headquarters building that stood where the Minster nave is now. The ghosts follow the route of this former road precisely. Even more interestingly, the surface of the road is about 18 inches below the cellar floor, and some three inches lower than the bottom of the hole that was there in Harry’s day. The ghosts are, of course, seen only from the knees up so it would seem that they are marching along the surface of the old road that existed when they were alive.
My point exactly. You're going to do better with that sort of thing than trying to explain how dead souls are wearing the ghosts of their clothes (especially if Grannie's nighty is still in the closet). Time slips get mixed reviews these days--apparently the original claim of two 20th century English academics that at least one of them had chanced upon Marie Antoinette near Versailles during a trip to France turns out to have been considerably embellished after their own research into "things they couldn't possibly have known at the time."
From the Museum of Hoaxes website:
The most damaging analysis of their claims appeared in 1950, written by W.H. Salter. Salter concluded, based upon a close review of Jourdain and Moberly's correspondence with the Society for Psychical Research, that many details included in the accounts they had (supposedly) written in 1901 had actually been added at a much later date, in 1906, after the women had conducted extensive historical research. This discovery cast serious doubt upon their claims, because their entire case had rested upon the impossibility of the two of them, in 1901, being able to give an accurate description of 1789 Versailles.
And as far as Harry Martindale goes, anecdotal evidence about seeing ancient Romans--not even reported until 20 years after the alleged event--only gets you so far. But time travel, parallel universes, the multiverse--there may not be a shred non-theoretical evidence for any of them, but they're all way better than ghosts. And the multiverse may even be real. :)
It depends on what you want to believe. I am pretty sure there is a "multiverse" because our universe had a beginning and I assume that beginning was not a unique event. I don't see why those other universes would be much different from our own. That means I want to believe that events aren't too unique. I like the metaphor of the cosmic egg that hatched into our universe. It is organic rather than mechanical.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
However, I think that a "many worlds" multiverse depends on wanting to believe in complete determinism in spite of quantum mechanics insisting that is false. It is too mechanistic for me, so I don't want to believe in mechanistic metaphors. Also time travel depends on time being real and not just changes in position. It implies there is a sort of "block universe" which also implies determinism which doesn't seem organic enough for my taste. So I don't want to believe in it.
I don't mind believing in ghosts. I want to believe that consciousness is primary and even more important than matter, if matter has any substance at all to it after quantum physics got through with it.
I agree with you to the extent that making meaning of our lives is a matter of choosing the things we believe. Personally I don't make those choices based on what I want to believe, but on a number of criteria, including reason, common sense, experience, and various types of knowledge; nor do I imagine that my belief in something in itself makes it so. Like everyone else, I can only do up to my best to understand--and I seldom do that! :)Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I have to confess to being well out of my depth with theoretical physics. After I wrote my response to Carousel, I remembered that according to the mathematical theory of the multiverse (at least as it was spoon fed to me on public television), there can be no intercourse between universes--so that wouldn't account for the sort of time anomaly he is proposing. But you probably know more about it than me.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Metaphors on the other hand are free. :) But cosmic eggs suggest cosmic chickens, and that puts me in fear of cosmic chicken sh*t. I choose the handsome monkey king's war with Heaven as a metaphor for the human condition, although I don't really get that story's cosmology (stone monkey eggs are just weird).Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
As I said before, I have no faith in the silly things. But your mention of the primacy of consciousness over matter is interesting. There's a book I've been meaning to read called Biocentricity (by the physician who pioneered stem cell science) that sounds remotely similar. I know very little about the subject. Are you familiar with it?Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
I guess I fall under the "not in the usual sense" category in that I think there are some phenomena that science cannot (yet) explain.
A few things have happned to me that were unusual, but one stands out far in front of the rest. I lived in Nepal for about two years and among the many friends I made was a man named Musafi. He was a big strong guy, with a prominent mustache, probably in his mid-thirties, and sold meat in a local market. He wasn't among my closest friends, but he was a friend nevertheless. Although I don't remember, at some point I must have given him my home mailing address in the United States.
Some six or seven months after returning to my home in the United States, I had an extremely vivid dream about Musafi. It was like I was looking down at him from the ceiling. He was sitting on a wooden chair in a small jail cell lit by sunlight streaming in from a single barred window near to where I was looking down from. He was writing a letter, and I could read the letter. Although I don't remember every word now (this happened many years ago), the gist was that he was writing a letter to me telling me that he had been arrested for murder and that he was innocent and asking if I could do anything to help him. One of the mnost vivid parts of the dream was the sensation I had that he was writing out of desperation and terror. Then I woke up.
This was in the early 1980s before e-mail and cellphones. It would normally take 10 days to two weeks to send or receive a letter between Nepal and the United States. About two weeks after my dream, I received a letter from Musafi. In it, he told me he had been arrested and was in jail (it said nothing about a murder) and asking if there was anything I could do to help. And there was a definite sense of desperation in the tone of the letter (written in somewhat broken English). Of course, I couldn't do anything to help, and I never answered the letter. But to this day, I am convinced that (given the 12 hour time difference and the fact that I received the letter two weeks later) I actually saw Musafi writing the letter from his jail cell.
I'll relate one more incident, not experienced by me, but by a neighbor of my late aunt. This elderly aunt of mine, who had been sick for many months and who had not been outside of her house in weeks, died in the afternoon in her home. At the funeral home a couple of days later, her neighbor told me that he saw her the evening that she died walking down the road past his house (he didn't know at the time that she had died a couple of hours earlier). He saw her from the window and he remarked to his wife that he was surprised to see Marie walking outside since she had been sick so long. His wife corroborated the story, but it was clear she didn't want him to be talking about it at the funeral home.
I'm actually writing a short story based on this incident and hope to post it on the Forum soon.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pompey Bum
The whole time slip thing is as speculative as claiming a traditional ghostly prescence don't you think? I feel that given the dominance of the scientific worldview, the idea of a time slip seems to be a more acceptable explanation, whereas there is no more actual evidence for it being the explanation than for a dead person. I put that down to a kind of conditioning - it is deeply - unfashionable is the wrong word- unfashionable to refer to hauntings and ghosts whereas reference to physics, time and scientific sounding theories is ok.
Culturally, that is interesting - I'm not trying to be critical of you here by the way. How could I be - there's no evidence either way for the truth of the matter? I do feel that science - with good reason - has become the default setting. Email's comment about the fog forming shapes is a clear attempt to rationalise a situation for which he couldn't possibly know anything about - especially given that the clearness of the night had already been stated.
The problem it throws up is not that it contradicts earlier beliefs in ghosts for example, but that it might blind or obscure the actual facts of the matter which could be something equally radical and new.
It is a fascinating topic as much for the reactions to it as the possibilities it might present.
My niece's young daughter, about 7 or 8 years old, saw my father, her great-grandfather, walk across the backyard of the house they lived in together shortly after he died. She thought her daughter was delusional.Quote:
Originally Posted by 108 fountains
I told her about how I saw my aunt and had a brief mental conversation with her around the time she died. Her boyfriend said he experienced something similar with a grandparent of his.
My niece was at least consistent in receiving all this evidence. She had no problem thinking all three of us were delusional.