Rather than spirituality being strictly irrational and science rational, perhaps they occupy different, but equally legit domains, with little overlap between them, at least at present, since our culture has divorced them.
Just because phenomena can’t be reproduced in a lab, doesn’t mean it’s unempirical, people are witnessing and making some sense of this stuff.
They could be magic flying space elephants.
You don’t know. I thought you had psychic abilities? If you had then you should know by now that they’re magic flying space elephants.
Perhaps you could address his point instead of being pleased by a not so cleverness that isn’t related to that point.
@Wrong
They don’t look like flying space elephants, in some cases they look like aircraft many times more advanced than known aircraft.
UFOs come in many shapes and sizes, we may be dealing with many different sorts of things rather than just one, from extraterrestrial and interdimensional aircraft, to clandestine government craft, from weather phenomena not known to science, to life forms somehow surviving in our upper atmosphere, spirits and things we perhaps don’t even have words for, or can imagine.
If I received messages from extraterrestrials seemingly from outside my skull, of course I might be hallucinating, but then existence itself might be hallucinatory, so what does that prove?
I would be at least open to the possibility they were legit, especially if they weren’t internally and externally contradictory, and their messages were deeper, more profound and wilder than I have the ability to imagine.
And if I could somehow verify something the extraterrestrials told me, something I couldn’t’ve otherwise possibly known, or my psychic abilities in general had a history of being correct, I’d be inclined to believe in them.
I’m addressing the point directly.
UFOs are in fact flying magic space elephants. And they do look like UFOs. If you were psychic then you would know this. You would feel the truth.
You’re playing devil’s advocate, but I’ll play along.
I don’t have any evidence you’re psychic, nor do you feel psychic to me, and many people who claim to be psychics also claim they’re aircraft piloted by extraterrestrial humanoids.
If that’s how they feel to you, so be it, but they don’t feel like anything to me, most of them look like unknown aircraft.
Just to balance the scales a bit …
Has anyone here doubted their psychic abilities at all? Questioned them?
Perhaps wonder if these abilities might just be as a result of something else not having to do with psychic phenomenon – something more natural like simply paying attention, observing ~~ the unconscious seeing and remembering and making connections with all of those things and thoughts which the conscious mind does not?
…
What makes a river so restful to people is that it doesn’t have any doubt - it is sure to get where it is going, and it doesn’t want to go anywhere else.
Hal Boyle
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
Rene Descartes
We know accurately only when we know little, with knowledge doubt increases.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
Voltaire
Doubt in my tradition is something that is very helpful. Because of doubt, you can thirst more and you will get a higher kind of proof.
Nhat Hanh
Sure, of course. I grew up in an environment, perhaps like many of us where on the one side there were monotheisms present, where any ‘powers’ or things slightly magical could be seen as witchcraft or of the devil - these judgments carry over into even secular enrivonments, and then also in the presence of very secular people with their judgments of anything they considered to be not scientific - regardless of their own understand of science. So guilt and fear on one side and them being shamed on the other. So, for me anyway, I generally tried to dismiss any anomolous experience of any kind. I noticed that my mind did this very quickly almost unconsciously. A very quick dismissive explanation would arise in my mind and my focus would often go elsewhere. It took a lot of experiences to finally see if the dismissals made sense and also to deal with the fears that made me not even want to notice things that did not fit with the dominant paradigms around me. (and note: I am not claiming some kind of ability like as in something I can control, I would be more comfortable saying I have psychic experiences and other kinds of not yet verified by science related phenomena)
Arc
Of course, I’m sure everyone who’s claimed to have psychic abilities has questioned them at one time or another at least a little, and some came to the conclusion they weren’t psychic at all, that they were misinterpreting the relationship between their thoughts, feelings and events, and some came to the opposing conclusion.
Sometimes people who were skeptics, or believers in the official narrative became believers after witnessing something extraordinary themselves or examining the data.
Yes, rather than sensing what’s going to happen in the future directly, perhaps our subconscious is just thousands of times more intelligent and intuitive than our conscious mind often gives it credit for, and it’s simultaneously processing millions of bits of info and drawing disparate connections between things holistically, inferring them, while our conscious mind is linearly and narrowly processing a few bits at a time.
Maybe psychics are just people who’re using their whole brain or intelligence, rather than having a sixth sense, or magically being able to see the future/past.
On the other hand, according to pantheism or panpsychism, reality itself is God or consciousness, and if that’s the case, everything that’s happening may be accessible to us in the right state of mind, as we ourselves are a manifestation of this collective consciousness, and interconnected.
Thanks for admitting there is no rational verification for psychic claims nor experience.
Belief in psych-ism is equivalent to believing in Santa Clause.
I think the ‘this goes against physical laws’ claim is often a hubristic act of communication. An anomalous phenomenon may not seem to fit but actually does because of certain conditions or is not contradicted by laws that describe the physical reactions of what we currently can measure. An anomolous phenomenon may show the need for new models, if later verified and repeatable. The new models may contradict previous laws, in the sense that Einstein’s sense of space and time differ from Newton’s, though I wouldn’t say that the observations that confirmed his ideas violated Newton’s laws, they showed their limitations and scope and use. To speak of something not being supported by current models is a valid and useful criticism. To say that it must violate current laws indicates a kind of intuitive genius and certainty I think is generally unfounded. Rogue waves were dismissed in this way. That they were just the emotion exaggerations of sailors and other seafarers. They did not fit with current science. Later video cameras then satellite images confirmed they existed and scientists then worked backwards from the knowledge that their existed and figured out how. No problem that scientists were not convinced by the experiencers, given current knowledge, but when they decided they must not be the case because they violated current models, they were being unscientific.
Just because I have no evidence, and/or feelings, because I’m open to evidence and feelings or intuitions, that you’re psychic, doesn’t mean I don’t have evidence and/or feelings I am psychic or others are psychic, and the more evidence and feelings I have for something, the more I go with it.
If you want to verify whether an amateur psychic is genuine or not, hang out with them, when they exercise their powers, the more true they turn out to be more than guessing would allow, the more psychic they probably are. If you want to verify whether a professional psychic is genuine, get a reading, and the more professional psychics you can verify as being genuine from that community, the more likely that community as a whole and psychics in general are genuine.