Why so many people–including scientists–suddenly believe in an afterlife

AfterInfinity
reply to post by WarminIndy

 

I would love to read the full story sometime. These things fascinate me!

I have attempted many times to sit down and write it, but something always happens.

What is strange is that my youngest sister is so sensitive, that even when I mention it to someone else and she doesn't know, she is affected by it. After this, I will have to call her to see if she is ok. She lives in Chesapeake, Virginia, but this is how I know the influence is real. If I say it out loud, she knows. Something then happens at her home.

There were nine of us, and each of us have some level of sensitivity to the paranormal, I seem to be like a magnet, people have taken pictures of me and a lot of orbs surround me, but I never can take a picture of it myself.

My mom thinks it is like this, houses that people have lived in, an imprint is left in the memory of the house and replays sounds and voices. If the supernatural is just energy, then it makes sense that the energy has not been transferred into something else, it just stays in audio form.

But when you get pushed by an intelligent something, then it's not just energy anymore. Some kids decided one time to go there and have a seance. None of our family was living there any more. But these kids left so quickly, all of their stuff was still there when I went to check on it. We still had the house, but my grandmother had moved out and I was married and living elsewhere, my mom and dad had moved with my two youngest sisters to North Carolina, but my brothers tried to live there at different times, before deciding they could not stay there. So it was up to me to check on it at times.

Whatever these kids had brought up, was something they could not be around. And I know they didn't bring it up, it was already there.

My grandmother used to write in automatic writing. I didn't know what that was when I read her journals. I could see that while writing, it would change in the middle and looked like a whole different person wrote it. The handwriting had changed so much mid-sentence. But it was what she was writing that really said a lot. She wrote about having visions of a man with a mule in her kitchen. This is the same woman who said nothing was going on, but then seeing a man with a mule in her kitchen, at 3 AM?

One would think this would be just her mental state, maybe she was hallucinating, but then my brother came home from school one day and said one of his classmates who rode the bus asked him why my grandfather was out in the field with a mule. My grandfather had been dead since 1981, and this happened in 1987. That kid did not know my grandfather. Many people around the area had been talking about seeing the same man in various places, but for a kid who was simply riding the bus, would see a man with a mule in the field? He never read my grandmother's journal.

And people always described him the same way, and one time when I had seen the only picture of my great-grandfather who had died in 1932, he was dressed the same as they described.

There is something real about the afterlife, sometimes it is good, and sometimes not so good. We got the not so good in our experience.

SasquatchHunter
reply to post by WarminIndy

 

My problem isn't that I think other people are dishonest or all people who have these encounters have mental health issues or anything like that, the issue I have is why I can't see these things.

I would just say this, how do you know you haven't? We can't say that every person we see walking on the street are just people, unless we talk to them. And even then, who knows?

When my grandfather saw Satan appear, he had a heart attack and spent the rest of his life in ill health. But he started doing strange things, he had a red lightbulb in his bedroom. That wasn't normal for people. It was really unnerving as a child to see this red light on at night, even then when I was young, I recognized it was not normal for an older man in the cornfields of rural Ohio in the 1970s. Maybe in the city it was normal, but not a farmhouse.

I don't even know how to pull this off as a hoax, but people would say it is. I don't have all the witnesses now to interview, most have died now, those who were older. But the things about my siblings is that we had shared dreams at different years. But we never talked about it when we dreamed it, only when we were older and talked about a different experience. My youngest sister and I have the most shared dreams. We have always done that.

But the dreams we shared were always about the house, things were happening in it and we would dream about each other. But this is one example to show that I did not make it up, I drove a friend who had lived in Cincinnati when I was there, and had lived her whole life before that in Washington Courthouse, Ohio. That was over four hours away from my town. I did not tell her why we were going, or even where we were going. The one thing not to do is talk about it before, so it is not suggested to someone.

When we got to the town, it was about 1 AM, and she began to feel nervous. It was not until we had gotten over the hill of where you would have seen the house (it had been burned down by this time), she began to be so nervous, she began to tell me things that only I knew. When we got right in front of the house, she looked at me and said that a man was watching her. I had said nothing about this to her. We then drove past it and then she told me about horses and mules she could see. Then I drove on another road, then another to drive behind the property, she was not aware of the geography and if you are from Ohio, you know about the grid patterns for the road system. It was on the other road, of where you could have seen the house from the property, it was actually two fields away, but in this part of Ohio, it was flat. At that moment she felt something hit her, just as we passed where the house should have been.

But people will say I make this up and attempt to tell me it is all a hoax, but everyone is like that and people can be skeptical if they want. But with the number of witnesses ranging a such wide span of time, I can't make it up. There's too much that happened.

reply to post by WarminIndy

When I was very young 4 this house my mother ran a daycare out of supposedly there was a little girl ghost there my mom claims to who have seen her and many others adults and children however it was a large house with 3 floors and I explored alone all the time and saw nothing and spent more time their than anyone else.

One of my best friends growing up an to this day his father owned a large house in the woods. Him and others claimed that house was haunted. I saw nothing. When the stories are told around me and I'm forced into it usually say I was drinking too much or too young toremember because I care about these people regardless of the fact I didn't see anything at all.

reply to post by WarminIndy


Are you sure it wasn't Set? Would he have known the difference? I have heard of Set appearing and laughing at people trying to summon Satan.

AfterInfinity
reply to post by WarminIndy

 

Are you sure it wasn't Set? Would he have known the difference? I have heard of Set appearing and laughing at people trying to summon Satan.

Sorry about the thread drift. so in answer to the OP, maybe it's because of the multiple experiences and performing experiments that make scientists now believe?

Now as for the answer to this question, he would not have known the difference. He was a rural farm kid born in 1903 on the farm in Ohio. No, I had never even heard of Set until a few years ago.

SasquatchHunter
reply to post by WarminIndy

 

When I was very young 4 this house my mother ran a daycare out of supposedly there was a little girl ghost there my mom claims to who have seen her and many others adults and children however it was a large house with 3 floors and I explored alone all the time and saw nothing and spent more time their than anyone else.

One of my best friends growing up an to this day his father owned a large house in the woods. Him and others claimed that house was haunted. I saw nothing. When the stories are told around me and I'm forced into it usually say I was drinking too much or too young toremember because I care about these people regardless of the fact I didn't see anything at all.

edit on 22pm22q000000pm302013-11-01T21:34:22-05:000909 by SasquatchHunter because: (no reason given)

I don't know why you have never seen anything. Sometimes people do, and sometimes they don't. I just can't answer that one.

Sometimes though it isn't seeing, it's hearing and feeling. We know things like that happen all the time. Two people can witness the same thing, like a person doing something, and oftentimes they don't even say the clothing color the same.

wildtimes

A wrathful, angry, jealous God is incompatible with what we know about compassion, love, honesty, and the virtues that we, as humans, are born with.

Only if that God were unidimensional, a one-trick pony. There is no particular reason to assume that ALL of those qualities and more can't be found in a deity.

I, as a mere human, can get double-super-extra wrathful and angry. That does not mean that's all there is to me. OB has never seen that in me, and never will unless some radical threat presents itself. At that point, she will see a man she will not recognize, until that threat is neutralized - or I am.

If I as a human can display varying qualities, how much more so could a deity?

Part of the problem in understanding the concept as it relates to God is the modern Christian concept that "God is love". How cute. God is NOT love. Love is an emotion, not an entity. One feels love, one expresses love, but one cannot BE love. Another factor is the quaint notion that "God loves everybody". No It doesn't. They haven't read their Bibles closely enough if they believe that. It says plainly that "God loved Jacob, but hated Esau". If God loved everyone, that would be an impossibility.

In my human example, and keeping in mind my limited faculties, I love my wife, but any threat to her better give it's soul to God, for it's ass is mine, and wrath will be forthcoming post-haste. Therefore the two emotions are NOT incompatible on a human level.

How much more so in a God, who can see farther and hasn't the human faculty limitations?

Bassago
reply to post by wildtimes

 

This is probably the most difficult topic on ATS. Personally I don't believe there is any more after death than there was before birth but since humans have such a narrow range of experience and knowledge I try to keep an open mind.

That is absolutely correct - but it sounds like your assumption is that there was only nothingness before birth. Perhaps there was something else...

In your present state, you exist; all you have known since coming into existence is simply that, your constant existence. You have never experienced non-existence, therefor cannot fathom non-existence.

NDE's are a load of s***; a certain substance which must not be named is the culprit behind them, but I'm sure you know that since you've been reading up on them. You can simulate an experience very similar to that of an NDE through use of said substance.

There cannot be life, as we know it, after death. Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost. Why is this so hard for people to accept? What is so bad about oblivion? What makes you think you're so important that you are entitled to unending existence?

You are here. Eventually, you will be here no longer. The Earth will still spin on its axis and the Sun will still burn.

FlyersFan

I hope OpinionatedB comes on and shares her NDE.
What she experienced is much what I would expect 'on the other side'.

She woke up a little while ago and I told her you said that - she said she'll drop in in the morning or whenever the first chance she gets occurs to post it.

wulff

I have studied this for years and have read a lot on the subject. There are MANY doctors out there that were at one time in their lives believers in a final death, then ceasing to exist.. yet there are now many doctors that has talked to so many resuscitated people with almost identical stories they feel the proof is overwhelming.
One book I read (I will have to research to find the name) was by a heart doctor and he said one thing he found with everyone that he 'brought back' was that they were no longer afraid of death where before they feared it.

An ATS member whom I worked with during the investigations that resulted in my book on a hoax also had an NDE. His ATS handle was dcmb1409. He posted in a thread that he had an NDE, so I got hold of him and asked him about it. He described what he saw to me in some detail, but the one thing that stood out to me was when he said "wherever it was, whatever it was, I'm not afraid to die any more".

Just a few months after that conversation, he died for the last time. It does my heart good to know that when he did go, he didn't go out in fear, but like a weary traveler returning to the comfort of home.

WarminIndy

I don't know why you have never seen anything. Sometimes people do, and sometimes they don't. I just can't answer that one.

Sometimes though it isn't seeing, it's hearing and feeling. We know things like that happen all the time. Two people can witness the same thing, like a person doing something, and oftentimes they don't even say the clothing color the same.

I personally believe it's just a matter of what you are, for lack of a better word, "tuned" to. I used to do a lot of tracking. I can see tracks where other folks only see rock, dirt, grass, brush, etc, because they are not tuned in to what is there to be seen. I found that I could "fine tune" that to pick out certain kinds of tracks, whatever I was looking for, and entirely tune out the rest that were present.

In this case, however, the target is a bit more invisible. Think radio waves. We can't see them, but we can tune a radio and hear them, or tune a TV and watch them. When we turn that device off or re-tune it, the radio waves don't just go away. They're still there, but we can't detect them because we are not tuned in. It's ungodly the number of radio waves, TV signals, cell phone signals, etc. that are passing through our walls, our bodies, our eyeballs, our brains, even our toenails all the time, 24/7 If we are not tuned to them, they just keep on going undetected, but they are still there, all the time, passing right through us. We can take one radio, tune it in to one station, and another to another station, all in the same room. One radio picks up one, the other another, and maybe a third one is sitting there turned off, and detects nothing - but EVERYTHING, ALL of the signals, are still there, most of them undetected and one radio detecting nothing at all.

I believe it's just a matter of tuning. But then again I'm just a hillbilly, and we're known to have odd notions.

reply to post by SasquatchHunter


I kinda have the same view as SasquatchHunter.

My view: As SasquatchHunter said, NDE's are WAY interesting phenomenons', and a WAY fascinating subject.

SasquatchHunter hits the nail with the hammer on this IMO:

Who can say 100% there is an afterlife? I don't think anyone can, because the only way to find out absolutely involves a one way trip.

Now to make the afterlife more interesting, lets take it a step further!? Anyone ever heard of Marian Prophacies? One known prophacy states (from the apparition of Virgin Mary) that once peace comes on Earth, the grounds of the Earth transform the dead back to life. And no.....I'm not making this up. I think the source comes from this website: Virgin Mary Prophacies Rex Research

Or if I am wrong about the above comment; then the source I read this from comes from this: Veronica Lueken - Virgin Mary Prophacies

Lastly, anyone who doesn't think of the *possibility* that a spirit of the Virgin Mary does not exist, needs to check this out (google terms to present day apparitions):


Our Lady of Anguera Brazil, Our lady of Medjugorje, Marian apparitions, etc.

So, how does my above information even relate to NDE's and the afterlife. Lets make a conclusion with the above information: If there exists a Marian spirit, then spirits do exists (souls); and if souls exists (withholding the concept of reincarnation), there's an afterlife! Of course, I had to add extra information about the "prophacy" to make the (off the) topic scenario more interesting.

I don't even know what to say besides that I have also been doing research into this subject for at least five years and have come to the same conclusion beyond a shadow of a doubt. I have been able to meditate and successfully have an O.B.E. on one occasion (although it scared me too much to do it again), my mom has had a N.D.E., and that's just the beginning -

I spent a long time investigating a Quantum Theory of Mind in order to come to the conclusion that our souls might be quantum particles or quantum fields. I have learned that although neural psychology can pinpoint what parts of our brains light up, we choose which parts do, as evidenced by studies with Buddhist monks. It is not a reaction (although it can be), but an action by our free will and choice.

The list goes on, I don't even know what to say, I have had luck with paranormal investigation for some reason, I'm not sure why. I've talked with intelligence agents about remote viewing protocols and they have offered me help controlling my psychic and physiological overload.

I've been studying demons and Grey aliens, for starters, both of which appear to exist from the investigating I've been doing. I have a few very good friends that have a rare (and nonexistent condition, according to the DSM) of having the ability to see entities that are from other dimensions and communicate with them.

I'm looking into why demons need or want a human soul to do their bidding, and I am pretty sure that it is only a temporary arrangement.

I guess my point is the afterlife is complicated, but it exists, I like to think of it as kind of a reincarnation thing, that makes the most sense.

As human beings, we are still not a very advanced race, even after the latest technological revolution and the information age - although it did bring us closer.

We don't know anything about the afterlife, and are just starting to learn how to communicate with plants and animals as equals - we are just starting to learn that their culture is different than ours, but diplomacy is possible. A lot of the answers probably lie with the Shamans, especially ones still over in South and Central America.

VirginMaryISGod
Or if I am wrong about the above comment; then the source I read this from comes from this: Veronica Lueken - Virgin Mary Prophacies

1 - Mary is not God. I hope your screen name isn't trying to promote that. She's a created human.
2 - Veronica Lueken of Bayside ... FRAUD.

ATS Quick Guide to False Apparitions

Church Statement on Veronica Lueken of Bayside by +Bishop Francis Mugavero, Bishop of Brooklyn

I, the undersigned Diocesan Bishop of Brooklyn, in my role as the
legitimate shepherd of this particular Church, wish to confirm the
constant position of the Diocese of Brooklyn that a thorough investigation
revealed that the alleged "visions of Bayside" completely lacked
authenticity.

Moreover, in view of the confusion created by published reports of
messages and other literature by this "Movement," I consider it my
obligation to offer Christ's faithful pastoral guidance, lest their faith
be endangered by "messages" and "teachings" relayed by "visionaries,"
which are contrary to the Faith of our Catholic Church.

Therefore, in consultation with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the
Faith, I hereby declare that:

1. No credibility can be given to the so-called "apparitions" reported by
Veronica Lueken and her followers.

edit on 11/2/2013 by FlyersFan because: (no reason given)

reply to post by wildtimes


here is one that has been posted on ATS before that my husband was talking to me about last night. It was a neurosurgeon who was in a coma with no brain activity (shut down at the cortex I believe) for 7 days and what he experienced and said concerning such.

au.news.yahoo.com...

^^ Yahoo Article

www.gobookee.org...

^^^ Free Ebook Download


Also, I do not know if it has been posted yet, but I found a free download for the "Tibetan Book of the Living and Dying" for you. Link below, but you do seem to have to sign up to join the site before you can read the book...

www.holybooks.com...

and for purchase:

www.amazon.com...

and a penny plus shipping isn't bad for a used book:

www.amazon.com...=tmm_hrd_used_olp_0?ie=UTF8&condition=used&sr=&qid=

reply to post by DestroyDestroyDestroy


I had an NDE due to blood loss when I gave birth to my daughter. I never drank alcohol or used drugs. I did not have any anesthetic during this or even before with the birth of my son because I did natural childbirth and with my daughter I didn't have a choice.... So no, that isn't the "cause" of an NDE.

Up to that point in my life the only "drug" I had ever taken was antibiotics. So unless you mean to say that antibiotics used as a child could cause an NDE when you are, at some point, clinically dead then I must say I beg to differ.

reply to post by LewisStulePhD

| meant the book, book. With the paper and ALL that jazz..

Oh, trust me, I MUCH prefer to read paper and cover books. I just meant like an amazon link or summary page or something. I'll look for it.

reply to post by SasquatchHunter


I haven't "seen" any, either, but I have "heard" and "felt" them...footsteps approaching and then the sofa I was lying on being "bumped" as if someone had purposely banged their knees into the foundation...

I thought it was my husband (who was in the other room down the hall), so I turned to look (having had my back to the room), and there was NO ONE THERE. I asked my husband out it the next morning, and he said he'd seen a silhouette-type figure, back-lit, come into the room where he was sleeping...at the same time that I heard/felt this entity.

I firmly believe it was his late grandfather, who had built that house with his own hands...and he didn't like that we were quarreling about some stupid thing....

I've also "felt" embraces, and comforting "touches" on my shoulders. But haven't "seen" anything. So, I get your frustration. On the other hand, I'm used to "not seeing" them, and it would no doubt be quite unnerving to suddenly do so. I HAVE, however, "seen" and "visited" with the deceased in my dream-state.

I think dreams and sleep are somehow VERY closely related to death and the 'afterlife' - that other dimensions DO exist. Some even propose that we have several lives going on at the same time in different dimensions.

Cool stuff.

reply to post by EnochWasRight

Have you seen the movie What Dreams May Come?

I have not. Thanks for the suggestion. You seem to be, from what I read of your posts, very tuned in to "suffering". I have suffered, make no mistake - and I do believe we "suffer" in order to learn, but I don't think that's the "whole purpose" of life. It's part and parcel of this life, yes...but I think "BALANCE" is what we're meant to 'find.'