by free2beme 24 Replies latest jw friends
What determines what kind of spirit you get, a good one or a bad one? Does your spirit have some effect on your life? Can your physical part control the spirit or does the spirit part control your physical side? When there is a near death experience how does the physical body remember what the spirit did out of the body?
I think it's all a fairy tale. Of course I can't explain why life exist, so what do I know for sure?
Ken P.
Do animals have some spirit too? They seem to work just like humans.
Ken.....ya big ol' knucklehead! You ain't never heard of a ghost story with a dog beside a ghost now have ya? When someone sees their dead uncle earnie.....he's never got a dog beside him or any buddies........he just appears for a second then leaves ya with poop in your shorts.
Gumby
Undecided
I will explain how it seems to me. Some is based on my own meditations, some on things i have read, which seem to make sense.
What determines what kind of spirit you get, a good one or a bad one?
You don't get a bad one, just less developed ones. I see it the other way around, though, the spirit is the real you. The body and some of the mind gets sluffed off, but the spirit remains and can recycle. Not so the body. Much of the mind seems to go w the spirit.
Does your spirit have some effect on your life?
Yes, but it's subtle. The effect is based on how developed the spirit is. It's not a matter of knowledge, but of the developed/evolved nature. An undeveloped spirit will just ride along merrily w whatever the body and mind want to do. Picture party bimbos (not that there is anything wrong w them).
Can your physical part control the spirit or does the spirit part control your physical side?
It's dynamic, but generally, as people get older, they get more control of the physical through the use of the mind. The mind is not the spirit. A big obstacle is the ego, which is a construct of the mind and body. I think the spirit gets to do more input as the mind and body become more quiet. Also, ones focus determines what is more dominant.
When there is a near death experience how does the physical body remember what the spirit did out of the body?
While i haven't had one of these, i understand it in the way that the experience must be downloaded into the conscious mind brain. Most nde's are forgotten quickly, like dreams are soon forgotten. 'Course this does mean that the spirit has faculties like cogitation, memory, vision which can work separately from the meat brain and eyes.
S, reporting from the fantasy world
I'm of the "just dirt" class myself, although I do believe that "strange things" can happen to us (or actually that we can THINK "strange things" can happen to us), but I for the life of me (obtuse pun there) can't understand how people make this imaginative leap and decide they know all sorts of things about what they experienced that by definition they just cannot know. Why is it so hard to say, "Something odd happened to me once and I have no idea what it was."
At the root, I think it is because unknown, un-named things are more frightening than things we've stuck a label on, even if the label says "brain-eating ghoul."
James Thomas, I like your "theory" of the "one" with seemingly separate experiences. That could be another source for experiences and rememberances of other lives and reincarnation, which I have come to belive in due to my own experiences.
I also believe in ghosts. Or leftover energies. I've seen animal ghosts. A cat that inhabited a 23rd floor hotel room in a new hotel downtown San Fran. I lived in a house that had chicken ghosts. The house was built over an old chicken pen. I've entered a room that felt like a party was in full swing, but the only "living" person in the room was the bartender. Sat night I stayed in one of the "top 10 haunted hotels" in the US, in a room that wasn't supposed to be very "active". It was active enough! It also happened to be the former county poor farm, and later an old folks home. Seemed like a fitting place to have an apostfest!
This earthwalk isn't all that there is. This realm, this personal universe that we all experience isn't the sum total of our "existance". IMHO. But I belive that the reality is far beyond anything we can totally explain. It's not in our tiny human minds to be able to fully comprehend what "it" is.
The human mind is very suggestible. I have noticed that in all cases of so-called "sightings" they are all eyewitness accounts only. There is never any hard evidence such as a picture or video taken under scientifically controlled circumstances. There has never been any physical evidence left behind. Nor, despite the supposed "great powers" of Demons have any verified predictions of important human events ever been recorded from so-called "spirit mediums". This all provides evidence that what you have both seen are merely creations in your own minds. Please don't be offended, because I used to be enslaved by "fear of demons" etc.and I know how easy it is to maybe think I saw someything "not right". Indeed, many completely rational people including yourself can under the correct circumstances and suggested thoughts, see things that didn't happen. I pride myself now as being a free-thinker so I don't want to be dogmatic on the issue one way or another but I have decided that in leiu of the total lack of factual evidence for these creatures (ghosts,etc) that they do not exist.
Perhaps try adopting this approach yourself, and , like me, you may eventually notice that you simply don't see stuff like that anymore. Thanks for the post!
Toby, it was "seeing" and "experienceing" stuff like that, without any physical or human explanation that has helped form my belief in "them".
That's why Saturday night at the haunted hotel, when our room got "active" I searched around to make sure there were no physical reasons that I could find to explain the occurances. (This in spite of the activity in the room next door - before they even came in!)
Not everyhting is explainable, nor is it testable even with today's science. And even my explanations and conclusion may be way off from the "reality" of "them". But.... non-existance or "the brain play tricks" is not an accurate definition of these experiences. To reference science: At one point observations of the heavens told scientists that the heavens and heavenly bodies as the sun, moon, planets, starts, and outter heaven, revolved around the earth. There was pleanty of empiric evidence and astronomical science at the time to support that. The astronomer (can't remember which one) was persecuted when he announced that the Earth revolved around the Sun!
Brenda: Thanks for your reply. You mentioned that you have percieved these things and that they never leave behind any factual evidence (no physical or human explanation) so I would submit that what you were seeing was a mental construct. And I do not deny how real it must have appeared. I do submit however that by placing yourself in that "haunted hotel" you very powerfully self-implanted a predisposition to see something stange. And perhaps a certain emotional atmoshere of fright, adrenaline, etc. may have helped to precipitate the vision/experience you have had. However you must not deny the plain truth that there is no factual evidence that what you saw existed anywhere in external reality. I personally choose to acknowledge as true only those things which can pe proved or disproved with factual evidence, because I do not trust my human perception. The scientific method can help us to know what is really there, based on reason and evidence, and this in conjunction with our own perceptions can help us to know how the world really is. For me the world I see is clean and without devils, demons, satan, ghosts or evil charms.
I think there are too many strange things that happen to people for there not to be something else. 
But just what that is I don't know.
Toby, actually, I have no fear of ghosts or spooks or aliens. So the hauted hotel was a fun experience. And maybe it was a psychological "setup". I don't care. It was cool. However, I challenge you to stay in that hotel in room 215 (or is it 214?) for at least one night.
The ghost snapshot I saw at the old beach house where our family gathered for Kevs parents 50th wedding anniversary came outta the blue. The room changed colour, the funishings were different, and I "caught" her with her leg on a stool rolling up her stocking. I dug down, and the room colour I saw in my mental snapshot, was 5 or 6 layers of paint down! (No, I did not see any pictures of that room, the house, or the person the ghost represented in the house! I looked after the fact and found none.)
The cat the kept following me around the 23rd story hotel room. I saw it several times. When I spoke to it or made a friendly move, it would run to the shadows and disappear. Totally out of the blue.
The bar at the Captain Whidbey Inn on Penn Cove Whidbey Island built in 1910 as a destination resort for Seattle. I've been there several times and have never been able to sit in a certain booth. I've always had to get up and move if possible. Once when not possible, I moved to a chair at the end of the booth. My last time there, I walked into the bar with my bf, and it felt like I was walking into a roaring party. However, the only living person in the room was the bartender! The party was going on. I got a mental flash of Arthur Stayton or Slayton (whom I had never heard of until that moment) and his two "girls" in THAT booth. I later did some research on that name. He was a well known and well connected whisky runner from Seattle to the Capt Whidbey Inn. Now, I swear I never, ever encountered that name nor his story before. It was only after I got a mental picture of him in his booth with his ladies (I can tell you exactly what they were wearing) and caught his name that I did research. etc., etc., etc.
I've had other experiences. Many of them. During none of these experiences was I under any drug or alcohol influence (clean and sober years on each experience!).
I know there is nothing I can say to anyone that would ever change their mind. I'm not trying to. Each person comes to their beliefs through their own exploration and experience, including religious, or agnostic, or athiest! My experiences have been my own. Two of the above have been confirmed or co-experienced by at least one other person, historic writing, and my own searching for any history to back up the experience. I just know that it happened.
