What do you think is the TRUTH?

[Tueuse de Vampires]

Exactly. How can time/space just have started. If there was nothing before that, well, how impossible is that!!!

That's human thinking. For us, there always have to be action and reaction, because that's what we've witnessed for thousands of years. And that's why we can't understand things like this, because we're too damn stuck in this pattern.

 

[Old Master 3.0]

I believe in ghosts/spirits wholeheartedly. Also to a small degree, magic and mysticism.
Being Puerto Rican, it was something that wasn't uncommon to encounter back when I was a child.

My mom used to be a medium (a practitioner of Espiritismo. More on that later) when I was just a kid...and she could see them sometimes.
It was a power she couldn't understand when she was younger. She thought she was hallucinating when spirits would come to her, and thought she was going insane...so she was in therapy for about two years. But long story short, she met up with people who helped her understand she had a gift, and not mentally ill.

When I was 7 years old, I experienced my first phenomenon. Now to clarify, I myself have never actually SEEN the spirits themselves....just things that would happen while the spirit was there.

My mom and I were in our living room one winter, when she says to me in Spanish "someone's here for light", and she pointed towards her bedroom down the hall. As she did that, the bedroom door forcibly FLEW open, not slowly creaked open , but flew open. We were the only two in the apartment, and no wind could have caused it because as I said it was winter and all the windows were tightly shut.
To explain what my mom meant by "someone's here for light" was that infrequently a spirit would come to my mom for guidance, and she would light a blessed candle for it and say a prayer, and the spirit would leave.

Anyhoo, my mom explained to me a few things after that little event, to help me understand what the hell was going on, as well as understand any subsequent things I may witness down the road.

I saw quite a few things (and on one occasion, heard something) as I grew up. The thing that I heard was at age 13. It started when I was alone one night in the apartment (mom was visiting an upstairs neighbor) and taking a bath with the door shut. A lay there in the tub and began to doze, when I heard this long, continuous scratching sound going down the length of the outside of the bathroom door, like fingernails.
I thought it was mom come back home and playing a joke, so I didn't think much of it. It got annoying when it happened three more times, though. I got out out of the tub, wrapped myself in a towel and it happened yet again. I opened the door mere seconds afterwards and looked outside.

Nothing. Nobody was there. Mom had never come home. I think the term "warp speed" is slightly understating it in regards to how fast I got dressed and went upstairs.
Whatever it was, it didn't happen again. A day later mom called someone from her circle of practitioners and it was taken care of. No idea what was done, though.

The last time EVER I was privy to any phenomena was when my cousin committed suicide when I was 18, and the lights shut off in my bedroom and adjacent hallway two nights later (not burned out....shut off).
My mom told me he was sitting on my bed, and he wanted my forgiveness so he could go in peace (a whole other story I won't go into here).
After that, I haven't encountered anything else for some reason.

My mom had to give up being a medium when I was 13, because she suffered a small heart attack while she was channeling a spirit during one of her seance/meetings....called "misas" in Spanish (my mom met with a group of them every Saturday night in a "templo" (makeshift temple)....yet ANOTHER story I won't go into).

But even after she stopped, she still saw spirits, and still helped them off with a little light and a prayer.
My race (Puerto Ricans), as with other Hispanic races, used to breed a lot of mediums way back in the day, but it's been an ability that has been lost through subsequent generations.

Anyhoo, yep, let me tell ya, spirits are real, and they aren't necessarily evil....at least not in my overall experience.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Here's an explanation of what the aformentioned practice of Espiritismo is (book excerpt)........


Espiritismo (Spanish for "Spiritism") is the Latin American and Caribbean belief that good and evil spirits can affect health, luck and other elements of human life.

It shares many fundamental concepts with Spiritualism as popularized in 19th century and early 20th century United States. During this period, several books on mediumship and spiritual practices became available in the Caribbean and Latin America. As many Native Americans and people of African descent had long standing traditions of ancestor worship and trance possession, Spiritualism was readily absorbed into and adapted to these pre-existing belief systems.

Many Espiritistas (Espiritismo practitioners) communicate with spirits in a gathering of like-minded believers. These sessions, called "misas", are somewhat akin to the séances of American-style Spiritualism. Many Espiritistas' practices, however, have elements of magic ritual which are alien to Spiritualism.

A tenet of Espiritismo is the a belief in a supreme God who is the omnipotent creator of the universe (THE God, in the case of the Puerto Rican belief system). There is also a belief in a spirit world inhabited by discarnate spiritual beings who gradually evolve intellectually and morally. Espiritistas believe these beings can influence the corporeal world in various ways and that they can influence the actions these spirits choose to take.

Espiritismo has never had a single leader nor epicenter of practice, and as such its practice varies greatly between individuals and groups. In all cases, Espiritismo has absorbed various practices from other religious and spiritual practices endemic to Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Roman Catholicism, curanderismo, Santeria, and Vodou.

An example of this syncretism is a magical spell that involves asking Saint Marta (or Martha) to exert one's will over that of another person by burning a specially prepared lamp, saying certain prayers, and wearing an amulet tied with a red ribbon around one's waist.
In other cases, the goals and methods of the Espiritista are less obviously in the realm of magic and might be considered a form of folk medicine of alternative medicine. Whatever the desired effect, the equipment and materials used for Espiritismo may often be purchased at a botà¡nica within the practitioners' community.

 

[randiann]

Time is a mankind-made concept to measure between two points ie from the big bang to now. Or the length of a day, hour, minute, week, month etc:
You can measure the ' time ' from before the big bang if you want to. But why?
So, a watch is the same as the trip meter on a speedometer, a watch measures time and a trip gauge measures distance, both are just mankinds creations to measure something.

That is the European concept of time; a linear set of moments placed sequentially one after another. Many Native American cultures see time as a spiral or a circle, with cycles and seasons repeating themselves rather than a line going from point "A" to point "B". Just wanted to show a different perspective on how to look at things.

 

[T.I.P]

i think its like the matrix

 

[palabravampiress]

With regard to what OMIII says:

I will say this much: when someone close to you commits suicide, you know. You know it before you get the call. It doesn't make getting that phone call any easier, but it does make it less of a surprise. I don't know if I think it has anything to do with spirits or anything as specific as that person needing your forgiveness so they can go in peace, but there's a definite vibe. Maybe it's weird, but I get vibes like that when people die or are in danger. Call it intuition, a sixth sense, whatever... but when major stuff goes down, some part of you senses it. The suicide vibe is really really creepy.

But yeah. I tend to know when people are in trouble. I don't even always necessarily know who is in trouble and I don't usually know enough to stop it, but I have some major intuition going on when it comes to that stuff. Mostly, I try to ignore it or rationalize it away. I'm almost always quiet about it because, well, it sounds crazy. Sometimes, I slip up, though. Last time a friend was in trouble, it was attempted suicide. When a mutual friend called to tell me, I made the mistake of saying I wasn't surprised. My friend was very taken aback and kind of miffed. If you tell people you have a bad feeling about something beforehand, they act like you're nuts. If you tell them afterward, they act like you're insensitive. It's just better not to get involved.

But yeah... the suicide/violence/foul play vibe, that's a bad vibe and a hard one to mistake. It's even harder to describe, of course. It feels sort of like being watched and threatened at the same time. When my grandpa committed suicide, I was home alone. I was actually about to call him, but the feeling was so strong that it stopped me from doing so. I actually got a knife and walked around the house checking for intruders, making sure the alarm was on, etc. Satisfied that I was alone, I tried to calm down with a bath. Didn't work. Then, when I picked up the phone, I realized I had missed three calls. I really didn't want to get those messages, but when I did... they were all messages saying we needed to call right away, all from sort of peripheral relatives like cousins and uncles by marriage and all sounded very upset and strained. By this time, I had no doubt that someone was dead. When I finally picked up the phone and called back... I was right.

That's just one example. Sometimes I dream things, too. Sometimes that feeling wakes me up in the middle of the night. Once, when my uncle had an aneurism, I was on another continent and I still woke up terrified that someone was hurt. Another time, I dreamed that my sister drowned. The next day, she had to be rescued from the swimming pool. It happens with other things, too. It's like... someone will say something totally innocuous in a weird tone (like, "it's all right") and I'll think, "So-and-so is going to cheat on so-and-so and end up with so-and-so." And lo and behold... it will happen. It makes me really uncomfortable. I don't like it and, like I said, I mostly try to ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. I mean, I don't really want to believe in all of that psychic hocus pocus, and yet... I seem to be highly intuitive.

9/11 was really bad, too. I got that feeling while I was in class. I ignored it. It followed me from class to the library and then back to my dorm room – where I found my entire hall in my room glued to my teeny tiny TV set. By now, everyone knows what I saw on the TV. Who knows what tips you off to that kind of thing? It could have been that, somewhere in the back of my mind, I noticed that planes stopped flying by overhead. While I was focusing on the lesson, I could have picked up snatches of conversation through the open window without realizing it. Any number of background noises or activities or changes could have tipped me off.

There's got to be a completely sane and rational explanation for that, right? There must be some subconscious brain activity that is busy putting together clues and analyzing information even when you’re not consciously aware and then reporting those observations and conclusions via the chemical messages that induce those feelings that I mentioned. If not, the alternative is too creepifying to really contemplate.

 

[Joyce Summers]

Elaborating on what you said Palabra, my Mom has very similar experience to the ones you listed there. She has a sort of sixth sense when bad things are going to happen and she often has dreams of events that occur the following day- an example she's forever reminding us of is the time she had a semi-nightmare that my Dad picked us up in a huge blue van and in the dream she was going 'Where the hell is your car?!' and lo and behold the next day he turned up in a huge blue van saying his car had broke down last night.. Freaky. Course my Mom goes around bragging she's psychic. Then again my Mother is decidedly hippy-like and sings to plants and so obviously doesn't know the meaning of the word discretion.

I think everyone at some point in their life has one of these 'experiences'. I myself had one when my Grandmother died. I just knew and then a minute later my Aunt called saying we needed to get to the hospital and that she had passed away.

Another time, when I was living in New York I was getting really homesick which was strange since I'd been living there a good long while and I just really wanted to talk to my Mom, just to hear her voice but everytime I called I just kept getting her voicemail. A day or so later my aunt called (Again. Seriously that woman is the bearer of bad news) saying my Mom was in 'a bad way' and she was staying in at the hospital. Needless to say, I was back in California within two days.

And as I had a sickening, bad feeling when my Grandmother was sick after my Mom was seen to by the doctor's and had her treatement, I felt okay, relieved even and I knew it was going to work out and she was going to be just fine. At the time I just thought it was mixture of positive thought and denial, but since I didn't have that uplifting feeling at all with my Grandmother (Who, erm, consequently died) maybe it was another example of this sixth sense.

There are many stories across the globe where people have had similar things happen to them. A mother in Texas woke up in the middle of the night, knowing her daughter was in danger. Tragically, the following day she found out her daughter had died in a car crash. Another man after a bad feeling called his wife and told her not to get the train that night, to wait for one tomorrow and stay out of town one more day. That night the train she would have got on had he not stopped her, crashed and several people died.

And let's not forget deja vu which all experience. Something that literally means 'Already seen'. It may be mild and brief, but this could still be considered psychic phenomena- feeling we've seen something or experienced something that couldn't have possibly happened before.

The movie Practical Magic, I don't know who of you here have seen it, goes into this concept quite a lot; of having an intuition that just let's you know someone you love is in danger. For example Sandra Bullocks' character, Sally Owens, is worried about her sister when the phone starts ringing. She runs to the phone shouting 'It's Gilly! It's Gilly!'. And indeed it is her sister calling for help.
One of the neighbors said she could feel her young child's fear and pain thousands of miles away. She just knew it in her gut.

As Diane Wiest's character as one of the Aunt's in the films said 'Yes. There's a little witch in all of us'. And why the hell not? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy is one of my favorite quotes, and don't we all technically come from Pagan and Wiccan roots? Maybe in such a built-up, technological, mundane world such natural instincts and intuition have been repressed but occasionally in extreme and/or random circumstances it briefly comes to the fore again