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Do you believe in ghosts?
hermitwin
Veteran
Do you believe in ghosts?
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I suppose you could call our consciousness a ghost.
My sister was very prepared for her death as she had suffered with breast cancer for ten years. She planned her own service down to designing the dress in which she would be cremated. There were four hundred people at the event and much live poetry , words and music were performed. There was also one, only one, piece of recorded music . The words were printed and distributed to the crowd. It was a song I had never heard called "Orange Sky," by Alexi Murdoch. Here are the first six lines:
"Well I had a dream I
Stood beneath an orange sky
Yes I had a dream I
Stood beneath an orange sky
With my brother standing by
with my brother standing by"
In the past I had trouble ( nay , I would have no truck) with ghost stories; now I am having trouble with coincidences.
I'm sure phenomena exist but I don't want to go along with how humans generally account for those phenomena.
IOW, To label "ghosts" as gods or spirits of ancestors is just as plausible as this: I can imagine a bunch of rowdy college kids in any of the infinite number of universes out there beer-ing it up and playing tricks on us because they've somehow tapped into the ability to mess around like that.
See? Yes, strange stuff occurs but we have extremely dubious "explanations" of those phenomena. So? I have decided to marvel at them, and try very hard to avoid getting sucked into fearing them, they are extremely unlikely to have anything to do with what we imagine them to be.
IOW, Because we exist in the human realm, and outside of this realm is HUUUGE, is obscenely easy for humans to be wrong about what motivates these strange events.
Given that situation, and the basically primitive structure of the flight-or-fight survivalist human brain-organ, we're pre-wired for getting into emotional-imagination trouble!
People who go to retreats will often experience hallucinations that are more real than real life.
The content of the hallucination depend on the content of your mind.
(religious people may see their prophet, christian people may see dead relatives, anxious people may see terrifying things etc...)
The thing is when you stop that little chatting box in your head which take all of your mental activities, and stop poking yourself with distraction all the time (tv, entertainment etc...) the rest of your brain get some of that energy and begin to work for the first time, which leads to raptures including hallucinations.
Even completely untrained people who have no idea whatsoever about what they are doing will unleash the power of their brain to some extend, given suitable conditions.
watch this documentary where they isolate some people, removing all entertainment and distractions of normal life (which keep our mind numb and busy).
Even with no training and no idea whatsoever, some quickly begin to have incredible hallucinations and other experiences...
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/alone/
http://www.samadhitank.com/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isolation_tank
If someone has mastered human knowledge to the point where they are free and can control chi that effectively and easily, these people are probably enlighten or close to be, and have spent a great deal of time and efforts in meditation and their spiritual practice.
The problem for someone who would like to gain powers for his own evil egoistic desires is that this very idea, this "feeling" will block him from progressing.
or put another way, in order to progress, he will have to eventually release that feeling and be at peace with the world.
So the likeliness of a evil extremely powerful chi master is extremely small in my understanding. (not impossible, but not common, very rare)
I can see many people who can develop some kind of powers and use them to hurt others but those will likely be pretty weak.
Rules for attaining Siddhis
(112) Do not call those fierce ghosts together and utilize them to hurt others.
Thus should we not help ghosts to reflect on their lifetime and why they became ghosts by falling into sin and into the ghost realm?
The Bible says,"Naked they come and naked they go."But they actually take all the sins they have committed with them because all have been recorded by Yama.
Also: the coincidence that all the kids felt the same thing doesn't prove much except something marvelous happened which we can't explain. It certainly is not proof that the mother (or an aspect of her?) was the cause; maybe she was maybe she wasn't. Neither conclusion is more substantial than the other.
Again, it could just as well be caused by what I suggested above: the funny example of some beer-y college kids in another one of the infinite parallel universes (?!) somewhere who got access to some "channel" and just started messing with your friend and his siblings. Maybe even the Infinite Universe version of "Girls-Gone-Wild" because they think your friend's cute!
I'm not sure what to label myself. I could use some help. I'm not a skeptic. I'm not a [insert something "spiritual" here].
I'm just assuming we can only know things in human terms in this human realm while we're here as humans.
PLUS: There's poetry on one side of the brain and science on the other, if you will. Nothing in between! HAHA!
But I've had a lot of sound things. Distortions of sound extreme so songs don't have the same emotional program or themes, but also voices I can hear in my head. They tell me usually yes or no or I hate or something, but I have to listen to them with respect and consideration, yet not autopilot them and let them put too much pressure without a release. So yeah sometimes patience.
FWIW, I'm 20% serious. I mean we messed with animals in the zoo when we were kids. Try to test them, make them wonder. Nothing cruel, just for fun. Why can't "ghosts" be doing the same thing to us? They might not even know we see them as ghosts! They might even wonder if we feel "creeped out." I know a chimpanzee feels fear but would they feel "creepiness?" No biggie. Oh! compassionate_warrior: I know you weren't intending to..., I dunno..., something like "take a stand" and prove something; I know we're just talking.
As far as I know, he doesnt use drugs and seems perfectly normal.
They're energy and thus energy can affect many things. So it is never a "hallucination" when I encounter a spirit. It is not even close to a guessing game, it is that obvious. I am a no nonsense practical type, but I am not at all a bigot. I think to say someone is just hallucinating encounters with spirits is a form of bigotry.
When you encounter a cat outside in the middle of the night, is that a hallucination? To me, the way I have encountered spirits is as physical as that. In my adult life I have encountered them in a way that left no doubt in my mind that they were genuine. It wasn't a matter of false identification or hallucination it was just a ridiculous encounter of something from another plane.
I have these encounters almost once a year or more. Whenever I have these experiences I remember them in vivid detail just due to how bizarre they tend to be. When you see a tiger in the wild you would remember it forever, it is like that.
There are a few of my accounts and a very recent one on this thread.
http://newbuddhist.com/discussion/9688/would-you-be-superstitious-if-this-happened-to-yous#Item_42
But I have all sorts of stories of my time dealing with genuine spirits. I call them spirits over ghosts, because I don't always believe that they're dead humans. But rather sometimes I believe they're their own entities.
I'm the same way with other realms, gods, and literal rebirth. No clinging to things I don't actually "know" for myself.
but a friend saw many ghosts that may be considered pretas. she haven't seen them recently.
honestly, despite these experiences, i still don't really know if i believe in ghosts. according to ghost hunters, a lot of electronic devices around you can have funny influences on your brain. they can make you feel physical sensations, like being itchy. they can make you hallucinate too. there was definitely a lot of electronics surrounding me in that warehouse.
i guess, i don't want to be that person that says, "i don't believe in ghosts because they don't fit in with my understanding of the world!" but.. that's kinda true. combined with the fact that it doesn't really effect me either way. my best friend claims to be somewhat clairvoyant, just last night he was telling me all about the spirits he feels inhabit his work. but to me, everything he says just seems to be based on his thoughts and perception, which is INCREDIBLY unreliable. that's not a dig against him, btw, i just mean that the mind and feelings in general are not very reliable.