What do you believe a ghost is?

im not sure if ghosts exist or not (i would love to see one just to know), but if they do i think they absolutly mean no harm and have only the best intentions. if your were given the gift/curse of worldly after life why would u spend ur days tormenting people. i really think that there just lonely and when they do things like turning on faucets and closing doors are just ways of playing games with you, and if you see a ghost in the stereotypical "phantom" form they are probably just trying to iniate some type of concact with you, probably like a conversation or something. it probably gets boring being a ghost

 

I really like your description of what a "ghost" is..

 

Ghosts are misfirings of our evolved perceptual mechanisms for agency/threat detection, intuitive concepts about personhood and intentionality, intuitive pattern recognition and our inability to intuitively comprehend coincidence and contingency. Figments of our psychology

 

"Just a dissipation of energies"
Xenon, I really like that... I've never been able to put those feelings into words...

"residual energy can be left behind in spots, and just repeat events, rather than be an active 'ghost'"
Zimmy, good description...

Although I have not known for a fact whether or not it truely happened with a human spirit or not... Possibly when I was younger...
You may think I'm nuts, but I believe I have an adequate psychic perception to the paranormal... but anyways...

A while back, actually in like August, my kitty was diagnosed with a very rare disease. She was only 3 years old, and we had thought she just had a viral infection which my parents didn't keep up on the meds very well, and I think it might've deveolped into it, but she was diagnosted with Cryptococcus which went neurological and she had went through months of pain. I had noticed her having a seizure one day and immediately rushed to the Emergency Vet where she stayed overnight for a few days in ECU and almost overnight diagnosed with it. The blood test took a few days...
But I held her paw when they called me and said she couldn't hold on any longer, and gave her the injection...
It was hard. My mother and a really good friend who had gone through something similar were present. My friend later told me she had once had to put her dog down but couldn't be present, she said I was very strong, although I cried like a little bitch..
The vets told me they had a service that I could receive an urn, with her ashes in it, an imprint of her paw and some hair cuttings... She now basks in the sun in my window at all times... :'-|

A few days after her passing I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom(I have to walk to whole length of my house to the b/r) and while I was shuffling in the dark I could've sworn I saw her white chubby self stretch out from under my sleeping parents' bed and lead me to the kitchen. She was too fat to hop to the table, but could hop to the chair. I rubbed my eyes, entered the kitchen, as she curled up on the chair. I fumbled on the light, leaned over to double check the seat and nothing. I have two other cats but they're gray and they climb all over the highest window sills...

It hurt... She was my baby... I raised her runty ass from when she could curl up and I could hold her and wrap one hand of my small fingers around her... She was 1/3 of her litters' size at '6 wks'...

 

Actually, ghosts are just shadows of people in the 4th dimension - or "after life" if you will.

Just like we in the 3rd dimension cast a 2d shadow, they in the 4th cast a 3d shadow.

 

stickmen have it bad

 

i've had firsthand experience with ghosts. so i know they're not all in someone's head. how exactly do physical objects move by themselves? unless you yourself have had firsthand experience with something. how can you say for sure if it's real or not?

 

Believe me, you have a soul.

 

time is the 4th dimension so einstein says

 

Well yes, you could say time is the 4th dimension, BUT, time doesn't really exist.

 

I think there is more than one correct answer to the original question.

 

yes, theres alot of answers to the question

 

if time doesn't really exist. why do clocks and sundials seem to work so darned well?

 

Quote:
"i think that during our lives we leave footprints in this reality and they can filter through into a living persons reality which is how we see apparant ghosts."

- like attaching an image to a thought form? If thoughts and deeds are repeated in a place perhaps the energy (thought form) just stays if it has nowhere to go ... just lingering there.
I think it's fair to say that what people don't 'know' they fill in with their imagination, and if a thought form has no physical form of it's own then we just give it one from our imagination according to it's energy or our own interpretation or expectation of that energy?

Some events seem to be where people have had the experience of 'being in the past' and experiencing themselves in the same place, just a different time.

I've read a few stories of people or places being 'haunted by the living', ie, someone who is living but whose astral form is seen by other living people and considered a ghost.

I myself do go with the idea that NOW is an eternal moment containing and encompassing all time, and even perhaps alternate realities/possibilities and parallel worlds too. And for me this is my explaination of most ghostly apparitions ... just cracks in that illusory web of time where we, as if through a window we can see, hear, smell, taste and feel, another time, being, or thought form.

 

don't know if it's been said, but you might wanna read up on edgar cayce. he seemed to know/have a lot to say on the subject.

 

to elijah: do inches exist?

 

...my stories weird.

When I was 14-15 (?) I was going up to visit my boyfriend in Oregon. We stopped by this red lighthouse, and my parents wanted to go look but it was cold and I really didn't want to. So I just sat in the car. But I saw this woman maybe in her twenties, with long brown beautiful hair, and a gown, and she looked back at me, and she just stared.

I was confused cause I didn't know why she was scaring me. I just knew she was dressed weird. Then she spread her arms and looked back at the ocean and just purposely let herself fall off the cliff, and into the water.

I was scared at first but then I realized nobody else was looking or saw what I did. I think it's possible that an entity will stick around a place for a while. But I also think it's possible that these spirits 70% of the time, are nothing but a demon seen within yourself, through the physical eyes. In my case, maybe a demon of sucide.

I know what xexon is talking about though too, I control my dreams a lot of the time when I sleep, that's usually how I have an OBE or when I go on a vision quest... but I can't control everything only what I sometimes want to know. Unless I'm not supposed to then I have absolutely no control..

 

take it or leave it, but i have seen, in my own experience, that if i clean my body of all intoxicants and as many psychological addictions as possible, i have much more power in those dream states. caffeine, thc and ependiture of sexual energy (probably more for guys on that last one) seem to drain us of that dream awareness. good luck in your travels.

 

I agree to an extent yyyesiam2, ... when i stop smoking pot for a few days i start dreaming, or at least remembering my dreams.
I do think that a higher 'awareness' in a person can override these factors though, but in essence ... yes.

 

If ghosts exist, then there is no reason other types of animal ghosts shouldn't exist either.