To former 'staunch' non-believers...what changed your mind?

a reply to: lostgirl

Adding this until Elementalist responds.

Elementalist made a thread on Flame Meditation
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Another thread I had about Out of body
www.abovetopsecret.com...

A couple of videos that at least triggers the vibrating energy body in me even if I do not leave the body. . If the sound annoy your hearing choose another video. It is supposed to be easy/comfortable.

a reply to: lostgirl

I believe it was my internal destiny, and that very night was my introduction to broader realities within our being.

After this initial expeeience, which happened during my last exam period, which is when a student decides to go into the established world on their own...

Before I went out on my own, Spirit wanted to open my doors and mind to the "other side" of things.

I believe this for very good reason. Go read my introduction thread to extend on my previous post here.

After graduation ( I got 99% on my bio exam btw), I moved to a the country side. The first time I was isolated from inner city, friends, distractions etc..

At this point, the things I would experience after moving, would spiral into very .. fantastical experiences, I would never of guessed could be given my stance of the world I lived in (before the initial Astral experience).

Things that make Astral travel look like a rookies experience.. and so it was.

Now my view and understanding and truth is we are internal beings perceiving and experincing a reality outside of ourselves.
We must master thought/mind, emotion/spirit, and action/body.

Anyways, thanks for giving me a space to share

I love reading these threads as personal experiences are good yarns... so thanks. I usually just end up listing my own as I'm sick of them and there are so many... but here, as short as possible while still being as accurate as memory allows...

I was (and am... or try to be) a rationalist who thought religion and the paranormal the domain of stupid... I now only think one of those stupid... or the dogmatic versions, anyway. But most of my early years were paranormal free... except for some esp, that is.

My mother and I had whole silent conversations when I was very little (pre 6 ) and I had some very detailed, recurring dreams about living as an adult (and something like a sentient seal in an ocean and water park environment) before in various scenarios. I ascribed the dreams to imagination... and my esp with Mom as just knowing her very well... once I grew up enough (was programmed enough) to hear esp was bunk, that is.

Then, in my late teens, my accountant, executive, non-drinking, non-woo father took me to the pool one afternoon and proved to me he could effect clouds with his will. After the fourth doughnut shaped cloud I was shaken to my core and knew it wasn't some oddly out of character joke or insanity.
He told me he discovered the ability in WWII when he was the lead bombardier over France and the cloud cover was hiding the target and his friends were getting killed... and found out he was an atheist sorta Rosicrucian/Hermetic/rationalist, heh. It took his energy, though, and I had to almost carry him home. He made me swear to keep it quiet as he didn't want any attention, ridicule or dissection (he's now dead, so I'm off the hook).

Then, I was at a local historical park at night with someone and we had stones shower us ... with one arcing into my chest and a clear view that it had originated three feet away and nobody visible was there. Then hundreds pelted us and we ran to shelter. Later I learned the park was infamous for a stone throwing ghost.

Then things started to get weirder more often.

I had a diamond shaped, mini-van sized, black framed with orange lit panels, wingless craft buzz around my house in the wee hours, seen by myself and an aunt. I saw lights in the sky, after that, often, doing things no aircraft or natural phenomena should do.

I had an out-of-body dream where I saw a frisbee on our roof I didn't know was there and when I got a ladder and checked, it was right where I had "seen" it. I also had a dream after an experimental ingestion of certain fungus where I entered my room, saw my sleeping body, saw my eyes open and had a scary moment where I was sure there was something else in the me on the bed and then I was actually in bed with my eyes open... disorienting, but that might've just been a dream... or by-product of the experimentation.

I lived in two very haunted rental houses that had the gamut of paranormal events on a daily basis... and three more with lighter odd events. I tried hard to debunk them... but after the night I found myself with agnostic friends shouting the Lord's Prayer to attempt to stop the crashing and growling sounds coming from the back room, I had to admit defeat. I also saw a couple solid looking apparitions and a column of shifting lights in those houses... and the dreams, weird vivid dreams in a symbolic language I still remember... and found out one of the houses had had a suicide by an addict and I had developed a taste for the same certain substance I was too smart to touch, before then, and oddly, when I moved out I just forgot I liked it and never touched it again... which is supposedly physically impossible.

And then I saw red, glowing eyes in a local canyon on a night we made a two hour hike in twenty minutes and saw a mountain side morph into an old Indian man's face... that moved and was seen by all twelve of us.

My dog growled at a Ouija board I was going to use to try to figure out some of the haunting events, mentioned before, and she crawled onto it and wouldn't let us touch it... totally out of character for her. She also saw things in those houses, but in the quieter houses, she didn't. Actually, when puppy in one of those haunted places, the ghost played fetch with her daily... throwing a ball into the house from outside that she'd tear after.

So many wild synchronicity events that I lost count years ago. Usually expressed as passing conversations I hear that echo an internal dialogue or a name of someone.

Crunching footsteps in the woods and city where I could see there was nobody really there... and many 'psycho' kinetic events where things broke, moved or were thrown when no visible means was near. Once my friend was mad and a couch on a porch we were passing (yeah-trashy!) jumped about a foot into the air and split in two with the wood splinters showering feet away from it.

Random PK events.. that still happen every few months (blinds crashing around with no open window or door- pennies appearing from nothing, etc).

One really weird night I watched an electrical storm as I had never seen... ball lightening and St Elmo's fire racing across mountains, continuous lightning , some of the balls of electricity seemed to be playing with each other... it was magical. I went home and was stung by a scorpion in my room when lifting wet swim wear from the floor, and it tagged me in the groin (ouch). I dropped the wet suit and lost it on the cluttered floor.
I then had tremors and went to another room, had vivid dreams where I was a little being scuttling around a surreal desert, woke and just knew where the stinging offender was in the messy room with hundreds of places to hide and a house to roam in, but I knew the scorpion was under a particular pile and calmly captured it.

I then saw, in '97, with several strangers, a white, cigarette looking cylinder in broad daylight hanging over my city against an incoming T-storm... from the distance haze I'd guess it was larger than a commercial jet and it was immobile relative to a phone pole for 10 minutes in 30 mph+ winds. I lost sight of it to get a camera and when I got back, the strangers told me it had vanished... and there were more UFOs, but not as spectacular and usually at night... though the two lights meeting, stopping and whipping around each other before whizzing over the horizon in seconds in another stumper... as are the white blobs that flit in clouds I've seen.

I have had good, sane friends and family report some weird things: like playing jump rope and having the rope go through an eyelet of a shoe when both ends were held... one changed his eye color from brown to grey by will over a couple weeks when he was 18, and I can attest to it... UFOs galore including a huge saucer hovering over a grade school in mid city, witnessed by everyone there and talked about for years after and a cousin who was buzzed by an egg shaped flying thing with a stereotypical grey at the controls... spontaneous abduction memories... vanishing people... voices from nowhere... missing time... lights... magik working... premonitions... creatures... haunting... walking into a church on a lark with friends and having the whole, boisterous congregation go silent, turn to them and point with the minister shouting "Begone spawn of satan, begone children of evil!" and they weren't dressed oddly, they just quietly, respectfully entered an old church they were passing ... it made them uneasy and self questioning, though!

Enough!

a reply to: Baddogma

Whoa nellie!! Thank you for sharing all that!

I had hoped the thread would generate more posts from such 'former' total non-believers, because I thought it would be interesting to try and correlate a bit to see if Vallee's Control System (aka KPB's trickster) might have any tendency to 'pick on' dis-believers...

...If you come across people like that on ATS, would you mind encouraging them to share their experiences here?

a reply to: lostgirl

Yeah, I have others... almost as long a list just from those weird two houses... and the ritual result I just posted on the other thread and some other things the memories triggered (slow work day for me!)... like a toilet bowel full of exotic, large ants, a tree hung with 43 coat hangars in the seconds it took to go through a door and bring out a chair from the kitchen to the patio, hearing footsteps on the roof with a roomful of people while someone filmed the empty roof with a cell phone, etc., etc., but those are boring and run-of-the-mill compared to some poor souls on this site who've been through some weirdness... and that's the thing... once you know this stuff actually happens, where do you draw a line as far as what to believe and why?

I respect truth, and it does sting when someone swings by with a "neat story, bro... keep smokin!" or something like that... but, hey, I know it sounds insane at best... but at least I now know something's up and don't have to guess... except for the whys of it, anyway.

Will do as far as referring stories, LostGirl... regards.

eta and this alleged control system picking on skeptics... maybe,dunno... most staunch unbelievers I know are that way DESPITE this sorta stuff happening to them on occasion... there is also some very odd behavior most people exhibit that seems like denial, but is more convoluted and weird... I've often joked about a 'forget it ray' that seems to beam people after they experience this stuff... odd as it gets.

It's hard to be a non-believer when you more or less grew up in a haunted house although I'll admit that I didn't exactly know I was a believer until I lived someplace other than that house.

When I was about 5 my parents moved us to a modest, older two-story in a medium sized Kansas town. I lived there until I moved out for college. There was something really wrong in that house, but because I didn't really think about it being haunted in any way I could think of, and because every time something would happen, I immediately mostly told myself it was just me having an over-active and especially vivid imagination, I never realize what a bad place that house was until I lived in other places and never reacted the same way to them.

For starters that house had feelings of dread around the staircase which was the most obvious thing wrong. This was one thing you always felt. It was worse at night, but there was always an uneasy feeling. I never really felt comfortable in the main room of the upper level or on the stairs even at daytime. And at night, going through the house in the dark, it often felt like something was actually chasing you and it was a frantic type of terror like you couldn't turn to see it because it was that horrible. No matter how hot or cold it got, I almost always kept my bedroom door closed during the day and only had it open at night in the summers so the AC could cool the room, and then it felt like something would come to the door and watch me. In winter, I simply would pile heaps of blankets on my bed and sleep in layers.

Our pets would also sense it, there would be times when they would stop whatever they were doing or even wake out of a sound sleep and stare at the stairs and raise hackles and then run from them.

Other things in that house that I experience - a couple of shadow people and occasional footsteps.

But the sense of something there was the main thing and because it was so psychological, I always just thought it was me. And then I moved out and realized that no other building I have ever been in since has quite terrorized me like that one did. In fact, I have very seldom even felt uncomfortable in another building to even anywhere near the degree that house provoked terror on a regular basis. And oddly enough, it seems it wasn't just me, but my sister had a lot of the same feelings and experiences ... and we never talked about it until years later after we were all out of that house.

I even asked my husband who was only in that house a few times after we married, and he mentioned that the place made him uncomfortable but he didn't know why.

Been a believer all my life and it's interesting to read these stories!

Many things have confirmed my faith. Try having a manor house if your family that had it's oldest parts of the house dating back to the 1200s. Monks used to live there (the priest hole was now a safe... haha) and things would happen. Doors would open if you closed them properly (apparently they didn't like that) We'd go running in a room after a bang to find things thrown/moved across the room. But it felt SO warm and inviting. Never once did it feel evil. The nights, when I stayed there, were creepy though (It was my aunts house) House was sold - such a shame a lovely piece of history.

I lost my father 11 years ago at age 12. My neighbours were in my driveway after we had gone to the hospital where he was rushed and they all said our garage door was banging really loud. For no reason. It's a metal door, so it was apparently very loud. Was it him? There was nothing in the garage apart from the car and old junk.. Also, the night we came back to the house it wouldn't settle. Alarm wouldn't set. Alarm would go off. There was just a strange feeling as if, he hand't moved on yet.... Later down the line things have happened e.g. a card my mother received from a friend was on the dining table where she had placed it to display for a little while. I sat there and watched the card turn all the way around by itself. Me and my brother just sat in awe. No draft, no movement from anyone. It just turned around - still standing up.

And to top it all off my cousins friend who sadly passed was on her death bed, and as she passed away she said "there's a beautiful door - I'm going through it" and that was it.

There's something - Just have no idea what it is.

a reply to: lostgirl

9/11 inside job changed my mind

Looking up collapse of building 7 made it for me

I have Jewish and Christian grandmothers (one grandfather was dead and the other a drunk) and tried both faiths a little but became an anti-religious person in college (Math & Physics major). In pilot training, I was about to crash when a voice calmly told me what to do to recover; that convinced me there was something supernatural. About five years later, I fell off a roof and a gentle breeze put me back on the middle of the roof. I knew that was a miracle so I got on my knees and thanked (the Jewish) God. I became an Agnostic sinner. About 3 years later, I awoke and saw about a 4 ft green "creature" at the foot of my bed and thought it was a joke by my wife; I blinked and it disappeared. I think I saw a demon watching me and decided to get right some day but I continued my life of sin until my wife divorced me. I went to the bottom of the barrel and decided to get right and began reading Matthew; decided Jesus was real and my sins were the cause of the problems; my broken heart was killing me so I begged Jesus for help. I immediately felt a viscus liquid pour onto my head and drip onto my shoulders. The next thing I remember was awaking and feeling great; like I dad slept 10 hours. I regularly began to read the Bible, pray and go to church. A friend invited me to her church to hear an evangelist from South Africa. He gave me a reading from Jesus: "You have a heavy load. It was I who came and put my arm around you." I remarried and in about a month a voice spoke to me from a tree or roof: "If you can't get her on the right path, I'll find someone who can." I told her and we became very regular at her Baptist church and she was Baptized. Later, I had a very vivid dream: The Virgin showed me a map of a flooded South Florida except for some islands and told me to warn the people; I asked how rain could possible do that and a man's voice said that water will also rise from springs and rivers; then everything disappeared. I looked at a map and realized the flooded areas I saw were low and the islands high ground; I couldn't care less about South Florida and had never considered that before or am smart enough to have imagined it. I called the state emergency management office and told a guy my dream and that all north-south highways would be blocked by water. He said we know that; when will it happen? I said I don't know. He said let us know if you find out. I wrote a letter to every denomination's Hqs in Florida I could find and to a half dozen state offices to pressure the legislature to publish a Topo map in phone directories with escape routes to the nearest ground 35 ft or more ASL. Only one church responded and all agencies that responded said it was not their responsibility. Maybe a year later, I spoke up at a meeting of Republicans about an upcoming election and advised candidates to dance around Choice because most voters supported it. Two nights later at about 3AM, I was awakened by about an 8 ft angel at the foot of my bed dressed like a Roman soldier who loudly said: "I am Michael. You have prided yourself on never having killed anyone but I have just come from the Throne of God to tell you that you murdered your own daughter!" He looked to his right and a teenaged girl who looked sort of like my son walked to his side and said: "I love you daddy" and both disappeared. I then remembered my wife's cries from the bathroom about 12 years earlier from an IUD abortion. I am a heretic Christian because I don't believe everything in the Bible but otherwise I am finally trying to walk The Narrow Right Path.

a reply to: lostgirl

Seeing the reaction they give when the heart starts to thump upon seeing them in full visual.
They're really freaked out like us...
I'm a believer and so should you!

a reply to: lostgirl

I wanted to clarify a couple things as that novel I posted was churned out in a rush and I missed the context of my own post... I was a total reductionist who loved science (still do, too) until my father showed me that ...er, trick of the mind.

Then, once the door was open, the events just poured in.

The 'sheep and goats' idea might be true, in that we fix our own reality and it then mirrors our expectations. Think it's all hooey and insanity? Then it IS. Think the universe is a vast, magical puzzle chock full o' mystery (or misery) and it IS.

That's were I was going until I went into "remember that weird thing?" mode!

I pretty much raised myself, so I didn't end up with a lot of external biases influencing my life. I was very.. "Come what may".

Anyway, I hadn't really given the occult or such things much thought. It was not something I was involved in until I started experiencing OOBE's and prophetic dreams.. Highly accurate. A few of the dreams were disturbing, a future Earth which was not desirable in the slightest.

I found that when I had dejavuii, if I just paused and cleared my head, I could see into the situation more and get a better feel for what was happening and usually visualise more. I was starting to realise there was much more to the world than I knew about.. and I wanted to know more.

I studied over the years, psionics, oracles, OOBE's, remote viewing... I was a bit cavalier. I knew it was possible, but didn't see too much of it.

Then some years later, I was in my 20's and, had met some interesting "spiritual types". I learned much more and did some fair intensive study, the dreams, encounters and random things continued. I bought some FUTHARK runes, I found I was very good at using them. Once again, highly accurate. I could predict precise events over multiple readings for people I did not know.

I purchased a servitor. Within 2 days, everybody in my shared household individually told me that they had a dream, a certain entity was "scrambling wildly" to get to me. They described her and all of the descriptions matched. Then my ex that I had not spoken to for over 6 months contacted me and said the same. I told nobody I purchased her.

Then I really kicked things up a notch, I started practicing Chaos Magic, I involved Egyptian, Esoteric Shinto, Alchemy, concepts and practices from Liber ____.. you name it.

I remember another specific event from when I was a child (I am 35 now). I didn't grow up with my sister and didn't live her. One night, I astrally projected and knew I was at her school, I picked up a pencil for some reason, and I threw it. The window broke. I looked around, I remember there was a cat.. anyway.. Upon waking I asked my sister about her classroom. The description matched perfectly, besides the cat. The window had been broken the night before too.

I had an experience when I go ghost hunting in school. Me and my friends were exploring and came to this toilet. The toilet had a slit at the bottom of the door and it is located at a corner at the old 2 storey building.
The toilet is sensor activated meaning that unless it detect a person then the lights and fan will be activated. You can see if the light is on very clearly from the big slit below the door.
As I walked closer to the door, I was just outside the door when I heard something in the toilet drop like a toilet roll very clearly. Then I looked down the lights were not on, obviously there was no one inside, the fan thus could not be turning. Then I just ran, only I heard it though cuz my friends did not dare to go near it

What changed me from a non-believer to a believer?

Having me and my older brother, clearly hear the downstairs backdoor opening and hearing footsteps shuffle on the carpet, me running down the stairs to see who it was and seeing no one and the backdoor still closed and locked, and knowng no one was in this house.

Being alone in a garage one night, then having a angry disembodied voice whisper in my right ear, as if someone was right next to me. Me turning around and seeing no one, then having the entire room feel like icy cold when it was in the middle of summer. Then having a strange feeling like someone was staring at you from the corner of the room, but you can't see who or whatever it is.

Both of these incidents happen in two different locations, in two different houses.

I'm enjoying reading through these replies so far - as someone else said, when you experience something from beyond the veil, where do you draw the line? I mean, life itself is weird and terrifying enough - just look at the organised paedophilia in the entertainment and establishment circles of the UK..!! Frightening that such things occur just beneath the surface veneer of society, for decades, before anyone seriously knuckles down to investigate. And even then, we know we won't get the full story, it will just be a handful of big names, and some lower rank individuals at the fringes who get thrown to the wolves.,,

a reply to: FlyInTheOintment

As for me, my personal experiences have been too numerous to record fully in the time I'm able to commit at this particular moment, though I hope to come back & give a proper breakdown of some of the stranger stuff. I still have a team of spooks involved in 'handling' certain aspects of my life, and have verified this a number of times - though it's quite hard to prove, even when other members of my family & friends have witnessed the goings-on. I mean, they're spooks when all is said & done, so they're pretty much fulfilling their job description when they don't get caught.

I suppose the really weird stuff started when I had a hypnampompic experience aged 17 - I was toyed with by an attractive, sensual female from another phase of reality, who materialised on top of me in bed. She kissed me, & as she did, a strange gel-ball, like a marble wrapped in jello, transferred from her mouth to mine. Then the damn thing literally propelled itself down my paralysed mouth/throat/gullet. The woman dematerialised, and I slowly came round to full awareness of the room around me. I could feel something wriggling around in my stomach, I wondered if it was my imagination - I checked the door, it was still locked from the inside (living in a hostel at the time). I lay back down again, feeling the weird discomfort that something 'alien' was inside my stomach, wriggling around. I tried to pass it off as indigestion and a bad case of night terrors (though she was the most pleasant apparition ever experienced..!)

A short while later, I felt a sudden and intense pain in the upper left side of where I know my stomach to be located. It was like a searing needle-fine blade determinedly, and slowly, carving through the stomach lining from the inside out. The thing pressed in towards the area which had apparently been cut, then went dormant for a while, Later, the same thing, same pattern - incision, pain, movement into the cut, then dormancy. This literally went on for two days, with occasional pulses of regular, defined 'wriggling' accompanying the pain. After two days the thing stopped wriggling, and apparently went dormant. Someone in the hostel, who was clearly psychotic and had issues with allowing dark entities to share spaces within his being, began to have moments of extreme malicious laughter and mockery, referring in no uncertain terms to something not only alien, but actually demonic in nature, having been implanted in me.

For years afterwards I would have episodes where I had sudden and intense abdominal pain, accompanied by the wriggling movements of the 'thing', which had apparently spent the first few days working its way slowly, painfully, into my abdominal cavity. It would move from one side to the other in between episodes, and it actually showed up on an x-ray, the only one I was allowed to see (despite having up to ten x-rays, including at least five on the chest/abdomen taken in recent years) The NHS are supposed to provide you with all scan images if you pay a fee and fill out a form. I was only given one, being told that the others had been 'lost'. In the single chest/abdo image I was given, you can make out the 'thing', hiding behind my left lung, with a tail like that of a manta ray hanging down into the abdominal cavity,

Even after seventeen years, I still get woken by its weird pulsating cycles of movement, wriggling & stabbing pain, which last from a few minutes to an hour each time. When it first was 'implanted', the weird guy I mentioned before sat down next to me the next day, deliberate invasion of personal space to a ridiculous degree - eyes gleaming with malice & demonic mirth, he stated in a matter-of-fact way, with a glint in his eyes: "It's Be-e-je-bub" - which I instinctively knew to be the name of a demon (albeit one that isn't catalogued in the grimoires of the old-time demonologists, following several internet searches in years following.)

I recall St Paul's "..thorn in the side, a messenger of Satan."

It wasn't until two years later that the first of the Matrix films came out. When I saw the scenes where Neo is implanted with a pseudo-organic, bio-mechanical critter, I literally had a brain freeze of panic. I knew that scene, because I had watched the damnable thing pushing outwards from inside me, visibly moving the flesh & skin of my abdomen, for minutes at a time, so often that I'd long ago lost count. It is just the same as when a baby pushes hands & feet out from its mother's womb. It looks exactly the same when it happens.

A group of senior consultants/ GPs in my local NHS region, seemingly have 'need to know', in accordance with the lead of the spooks, who are aware of the weird experiences I have. The above is literally one amongst a thousand. I was subjected to hypnosis aged 14, and no explanation was given concerning the outcome of the session. MK..?

Nowadays these guys are so honest with me about what's going on, it's almost frightening in itself - I laid everything out for a psychiatrist, to see whether he would diagnose me with some form of schizophrenia. He read the letter I had composed describing a selection of my experiences, and I asked him whether he wanted to make a diagnosis. His response?

"You've had twenty-five years of these things going on, so I guess you're pretty much used to it now..? I suppose you must have learned how to cope with it all?"

I answered in the affirmative, adding that despite my general modest ability to resist the negative influencing which occurs daily in an organised fashion, these matters cause me anxiety, hyper-vigilance & various other issues which crop up & depart in a seasonal way. As examples, my letter included descriptions of a number of woo topics like OOBEs, time distortion, dream-walking, precognition, dreams of high technology in very specific detail from the ancient past, living multiple other lives (as an ancient human, as a non-terrestrial human, as a totally different form of life, as a man who lived on Maars before its atmosphere was ripped away - due a war between advanced cultures previously existing in our solar system... In the same context, I recall being despatched as a military commander to prevent an uprising connected to control of game-changer tech on Phobos, in 10,983 BC). I explained an awareness of living as a multi-dimensional 'meta-being', with a soul that could split & exist in different spheres of reality, different universes essentially, my spirit-frame based upon the structure of the Tree of Life. I explained brief experiences with remote viewing, an ability to discern various spiritual powers in the atmosphere of a place, or affecting another person, and so forth..

Next, he said:

"These things do happen - the main thing is not to be a slave to them".

I'm officially sane, despite all that lot..!!

a reply to: FlyInTheOintment

Hi there friend

If this implant is still present and causing you trouble, I really and sincerely encourage you to find a Christian ministry that believes in the full gospel of Christ and deliverance of demonic entities. I would be happy to look for places you could contact and enquire in your area.

originally posted by: lostgirl

...If you come across people like that on ATS, would you mind encouraging them to share their experiences here?

Hardcore skeptics are caught in a kind of catch-22. It's rare for them to find their way out of it. It takes many lifetimes.

It has to do with the nature of the paranormal. It is tied to consciousness, and through consciousness it is tied to our paradigm of thought. This is illustrated by the sheep-goat effect.

"Gertrude made one of the most important discoveries ever in parapsychology, one with strong spiritual implications and one which I think none of the spiritual traditions knows about, for while it’s something that can happen in everyday life, it’s pretty much unobservable except under laboratory conditions. She gave many classes of students ESP tests, guessing at concealed cards, but, before giving or scoring the tests, she had students fill out questionnaires that asked, among other things, whether they believed in ESP.

When she analyzed the results separately for the believers – the “sheep” – and the non-believers – the “goats” – she found a small, but significant difference. The sheep got more right than you would expect by chance guessing, they were occasionally using ESP. The goats, on the other hand, got significantly fewer right than you would expect by chance.

Think of it this way. If you were asked to guess red or black with ordinary playing cards, no feedback until you’d done the whole deck, you would average about 50% correct by chance. If you got 100% correct, you don’t need statistics to know that would be astounding. But if you got 0%? Just as astounding!

The sheep thought they could do it, they got “good” scores, they were happy. The goats knew there was no ESP, nothing to get, they got poor scores, they were happy, that “proved” their belief. These were not people who were sophisticated enough about statistics to know that scoring below chance could be significant….

Many other experimenters replicated this effect over the years.

The only way I’ve ever been able to understand it is to think that the goats occasionally used ESP, but on an unconscious level, to know what the next card was and then their unconscious, acting in the service of their conscious belief system, influenced them to call anything but the correct one. The goats used a “miracle” to support their belief that there were no such things as miracles….

Talk about living in samsara, in a state of illusion!" -Charles Tart
blog.paradigm-sys.com...

It's not that skeptics never experience the paranormal. It's that their own unconscious psychic faculties serve their backward belief system, which keeps them oblivious and going round and round in circles. The only way out is a leap of faith. We all know how skeptics feel about that kind of thing.

👣

I remain a "non-believer" but I'd like to join the discussion if I may.

It seems that a lot of you are relating personal experiences that don't conform to standard "consensus reality."

I'm here to submit that those experiences are not, per se, a function of whether you "believe" in the paranormal or not.

We all experience them, we just "file" them differently, so to speak.

Using my own self as an example (anecdotal evidence only) I can tell you that I have come to depend on my higher than average intuition fairly strongly. Some would refer to this intuition as "clairvoyance or precognition." To me, it is the corresponding mental action to direct processing of perceptions/observations.

Intuition can draw on small usually unnoticed details to process an understanding of the world that SEEMS not to be based on a direct chain of causal events.

There are also levels of perception itself that have yet to be fully integrated into our modern scientific worldview. That paradigm, by its very nature, is objective and analytic ... i.e. it views the world as separate and atomic. There is another kind of perception, also linked I would argue, to what I call intuition, that is more subjective and holistic.

We do not yet understand the set of observable connections between humans that has been referred to as the collective unconscious. It seems obvious to me that we are composed of the end-results of four-billion years or so of evolution, and there is far more data available to the human consciousness than we are aware of at any given time.

Understanding that humans have qualities that science has not yet fully examined does not, however, provide carte blanche to assign whatever belief-based explanations seem to fit. Well, amending that, anyone can believe whatever they wish, but those beliefs are not necessarily rational or logical or based on observable fact.

TL;DR - There are many human characteristics that are not yet fully understood. Some of these lead to paranormal and /or supernatural experiences within the realm of the subjective and/or personal realm.