My Issue: The Supernatural

I have tried to theorize it. I have tried to experience it. I have tried to believe it. Once I accepted who I am and what I really think, I know that I wholeheartedly reject the supernatural. I just CANNOT find any evidence of it that convinces me whatsoever. And believe me, I've tried.

As an illusionist and mentalist, I have both practiced trickery and exposed it. I cannot just accept that "unexplained" equals "supernatural" due to the many, many, many times that such past mysteries that have now been explained have been explained naturally and never proved the existence of the supernatural.

I cannot make the leap of "faith" to believe in the supernatural. I'll be honest, there is nothing I'd love more than to find out that reincarnation or ghosts actually exist, but I've seen no evidence that I could not dismiss--that I had NO alternative but to believe it because the reason or evidence to believe was more powerful than the evidence against it. And I've seen some pretty powerful stuff before...just not quite convincing. Not exactly the "ah ha!" ...

So, I sit here and realize that as much as I love debating Christians (because I wouldn't even want Christianity to be true anyhow, because I would hope that if God existed, he or she wouldn't be that big of an asshole), I have to accept that I don't frown on other beliefs such as Hinduism or Buddhism as much as I do the Monotheistic Barbarianism of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

But, I just can't accept such theories of even those Eastern religions due to my lack of connection with any belief in the supernatural.

 

Go to Ottawa, Canada. Spend a night in the youth hostel downtown.

Tell them you want to spend the night in the haunted section. Noone has ever spent a full night there.

The Youth Hostel is the old jail. The haunted section is the death row/execution area, which is disturbedly haunted. NOBODY has ever spent the full night there.

Our camera crew from Concordia tried to record what was going on. We saw it, but the film didn't.

 

I'll love to attempt to do that. I would have a few conditions to be met, however. First, as a practitioner of trickery myself, I would have to secure a few loose ends to make sure that what I was experiencing was not--in any form--trickery. Secondly, I'd have to record any and all phenomena I experienced and would gather myself after the experience to determine if these were natural phenomena through various methods of experimentation.

After that, if I could dismiss both, I'd now know that I had experienced something unexplained--however, it would have to be extremely convincing before I would say, "Ok, there is obviously some degree of the supernatural."

I'm such a stickler when it comes to this stuff.

 

Go to it.

You'll find the Youth Hostel has neither the time, energy or resources to pull any trickery.

They simply accept that there's a part of the building NOBODY will venture into after dark.

 

It's a difficult thing really, the whole idea of the supernatural. It's very difficult to point to anything that can fully validate a belief in it. But there are various considerations I think.
One is that so called super-natural occurences have an explanation which is simply as yet not understood by science. There is no 'super-nature' only nature - but the range of natural phenomena may extend beyond the range of our current understanding. There are many un-explained things that fall into this category.
The mind is something which science has yet to fully understand. Consciousness also is very little understood. Things like telepathy, distant vision, and so on, might just turn out to be powers of the mind and brain, with no super-natural element.
On the other hand, there are many who claim to have experienced higher levels of consciousness - through some magical or yoga type route, or through psychedelics. Some take these experiences in a kind of 'super-natural' way. Once again, there are usually alternative lines of explanation.
Myself, I think there are many things we don't understand - a certain mentality will always want to label all that stuff as super-natural. I remain open minded - I'm certain that there is a lot more to existence than meets the eye.

 

This is, indeed, my current philosophy when it comes to the unexplained. I find it unnecessary to add a foreign concept into the mix...to unnecessarily multiply entities, if you will.

For example, when people use "God" to explain the existence of the universe, I find that they have just presumed this entity as an explanation when there is no evidence of such an entity. To say the existence of the universe is the evidence is a fallacy. They have just used "God" to explain the universe and the universe to explain their "God" -- i.e. circular logic.

I find it very difficult to accept that some thing that is currently unexplained should be used as "evidence" of the supernatural--that a natural mystery is evidence is not exactly convincing nor logically sound.

 

damn, i'm gonna have to check that hostel out some day. I bet I could do it.

anyways, libertine, one must wonder what it would take for you to be convinced. Is there really any possible way, or have you set your parameters such that there's really no way for you to see it that way? What I'm talking about is "rationalization."

Because, according to my understanding, the belief in the supernatural is more about a mindset than it is about specific events that one can point to and say "ok, this was natural, but THAT was supernatural."

It's like how people say the greatest miracles happen every day, with flowers and butterflies, trees in the wind, and just the fact that they are alive. They mean miracle in the "holy" sort of sense (not just as a metaphorical word that sounds nice).

 

have you ever seen the movie 'what the bleep do we know' if not I'll explain..its not really a movie but a collection of scientists from across the country explaining reality in a sense of metaphysics and quantum physics. they basically conclude that what we have considered to be real isn't real and that our mind is just making it real for us.

after reading 'autobiography of a yogi' I was really interested in what the movie had to say because paramahamsa yogananda explained a lot of the movie in 1940, except he said that this was what he understood from meditation and yoga and that science was on the verge of discovering it, and then in 2002 the movie came out explaining it.

in a current issue of yogananda's self realisation magazine I found an article with the following:
"Parahamsa elucidated that ancient vedic wisdom which has taught that duality and relativity are the hidden fabric of the universe. today quantum physics knows that the solid aspect of matter is the consequense of the quantum effect conneced with the dual 'wave-particle' property of matter. quanta are fundamental aspects of nature: light and every other form of electromagnetic radiation can appear at the same time both as wave and as a particle......'

'modern physics has stripped matter layer after layer has learned about cells, molecule, atoms, subatomic particles, various forms of energy, and lately, with the 'string theory' may have glimpsed pranic energies. 'strings' are subtle patterns or energy so called because they vibrate like the tonal vibrations from a violin. in a television show presenting the string theory, called 'the elegane universe' the commentator remarked that the string theory evokes the image of a universe similar to a cosmic symphony."

"Nobel prize laureate Sir John Eccles won the prize in neurophysiology beleiving that there is a nonmaterial mind, a mental world which acts upon and interacts with the material brain. with the help from fredrick beck they show the mind brain linkage can be viewed as a flow of information at the subatomic level of brain structures by means of quantum energy patterns called psychons. physicist Nick Herbert postulates the mathematical possibility of mental 'quanta' which he calls cogitons. Psychons and cogitons express a scientific conviction that matter is fundamentally mind stuff."

"Modern physics explains the apparent soliditiy of matter is the consequence of electrons revolving around an atomic nucleus at a velocity near the speed of light. just as apropeller revolving at high speeds gives the illusion of a solid disk. Sensors in the body pick up energy patterns and encode them ina language that the brain can understand: different energy patterns are transduced into specific sensations of light, soudn, touch, taste, and smell. sensations are percieved by the brain and cognized into categories of logical reasoning which transforms the sensations into objects and colors them iwth like and dislike emotion. in the eyes of modern science 'objects' are nothing but ephemeral creations of the human mind from patterns of energy"

the video goes to say that since we are essentially a cloud of electrons like all other matter that if we believe wit 100 percent of our being that we are the water then we would have no problem walking on water, its only our viewpoint that we are not water that prohibits us.

 

Yeah.

Just as I expected. What's even worse is that nowhere does it state unambiguously what the whole thesis is purported to be. Let's compare it to authoring a research article for a scientific journal. Such an article would begin with the 'abstract', a brief paragraph saying, in distilled form, what the whole article will assert to demonstrate in more robust detail: the thesis. Then it would present the body of research, consisting of evidence & methodology designed to converge necessarily on the conclusion. Additionally there would be citations of others' works in the event that they were employed in supporting the assertions at hand.

'What The Bleep' does NONE of this. It says nowhere what its whole point is asserted to be. And of course, with no stated goal to guide it, the story wanders seemingly aimlessly, just thrashing about. It is thoroughly unscientific, in that it's sloppy, to say the least, and utterly ANTI-scientific in that it offers no self critical counter evidence & arguments; there's no quality control. It's an asylum being administered by the inmates.

Yes, yes, of course, Bleep does really have an implicit agenda, namely that people have unresolved emotional problems, which can be cured by way of de-victimizing one's self, by being a proactive, coequal participant in life, rather than a footstool. Sure, but what has the so-called 'physics' to do with all that?

The movie got a lot of the quantum theory and neurology right, but then it proceeds to make a lot of wild tangential claims that are loosely based on the theory and pass it off as the absolute truth.

The main problem I have with this movie, however, is the way these people use quantum theory as a way of providing a scientific basis for mysticism and spiritualism.

I saw the movie as new age religion passed as scientific fact.

 

RE: have you ever seen the movie 'what the bleep do we know' if not I'll explain..its not really a movie but a collection of scientists from across the country

This film is a recruiting tool for the Ramtha cult.

 

I watched about a half hour of "what the bleep..." and I turned it off, I couldn't stand it. I thought they were trying too hard to mix new-age concepts with science. I couldn't get through it.

Libertine, I completely understand what you are going through. I write fiction, mostly, and I would LOVE (LOVE, LOVE, LOVE!) to see some real evidence of the supernatural. My prose is almost always on that topic. For years I was obsessed with it. Growing up I made up ghost-stories a-plenty, kids would have to leave my sleepovers early because they were so scared. I even scared myself a few times! Unfortunatly, I am not a believer in the supernatural either, especially as I have grown older and settled more into reality. It kinda makes me sad sometimes, I miss the days when I thought I was talking to a spirit on the ouija board =(

I would definitely love to spend a night at that youth hostile. And you bet your ass I'd be there ALL damn night. I love to be scared! I plan to make a career off of it =P

 

I had to get out of the Christian Forums. I tried and tried, but I could not get over the fact that so many people will just ignore reason and logic.

The "prophecies" and "interpretation" horseshit was bad enough, but the constant usage of logical fallacies as arguments and the presupposition crowd took me to the brink of insanity.

I have come to the conclusion that debating with most Christians is like talking to an undisciplined four-year old. They do what they want to, live in their own world and have no clue what the hell you are talking about--or they just act that way spitefully.

Anyhow... *sigh*

 

i know what you mean...at this point in my life, i dont think i could truely believe in christianity even if i wanted to or tried

 

Libertine,

Just so you know: I am just as frustrated with fundamentalist Christians as you are.
---> I don't spend much time on the Christianity forums trying to prove that God exists. I can't prove that God scientifically exists. I just try to talk to people and show them that one can have faith, yet still hold reason and logic. I mean: I am a rational human being just like you...except I get strength from God, and think that the promises of God are real and beneficial.


---Colours: I wouldn't try to "believe in Christianity" either. I believe in God....and I ended up choosing the Christian lense for that as a teenager.

What I'm most interested in is what you're doing about the earth: if you think that government policies on the environment need to be changed: do something. If you think that there is suffering on earth and that Christians aren't responding properly: do something about it. If you think that there are Christians spouting incorrect conclusions from the Bible, (which is how I got started in all this: trying to read the Bible to show other Christians how much they had it wrong,) then do that.
I'd rather work to see real change rather than be on these boards all the time debating matters that, ultimately, one decides for themselves. No one can tell someone else what to believe.


peace! .namaste!! assam alaikum!

 

wow, IG, i've never heard of that particular hostel. would you mind telling us what your camera crew saw there? i'm curious....




love,

 

You may have somthing there with the free will thread thing.I must dealve deeper into my parents's libary of Bible stuff for this answer.I have to compare all options and explanations.

Your sig rocks

 

If you spent less time making up stories and more time observing...

 

Logically you cannot know of God's existence unless God reveals it to you.

Illogically you kept asking people to reveal God's existence to you, even after being told that God controls all things, even your knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of God. Of course, even your acceptance of this fact is controlled by God.

Anyway, it seems that you have the problem with logic. People cannot prove God's existence, only God can.

 

khar no one takes your explanations seriously seeing as you dont have any sources or even a reason for believing the things you do.

 

Trouble is with trying to interact with christians - or a lot of them - is that they're just fixed in that one little pigeon-hole - they aren't really interested in being open minded, or even giving real consideration to any criticism.
Generally, they either try to act as 'defenders of the faith' or try to convert you to their own view.

Some of the 'prophecies' come from beyond the brink of insanity!

All 'christian logic' is based on pre-supposition.