Posted by justoneman (here)
One of my very best personal friends is a professional medium. She does not do what she does for "the money" as she does not need money as she is quite wealthy. The clients she takes on are all and only recommended to her by her former clients (thus all and only through word of mouth).Posted by TraineeHuman (here)
Do you believe that only the physical exists – that spirit is just an epiphenomenon of the body? ...
And how would you explain all my experiences of communicating with dead people and beings, some of whom I have never known? Your comments would seem to imply that there is no such thing as an afterlife. So, according to you is it all hallucination? What about experiences I have which are far more vivid than anything I experience in the physical world?
And what about, e.g., my memories of being conceived, for instance? Not the physical act, but the business that went on in a higher plane. Is that fantasy, according to you?
She takes on a client because she cares to help folks who are dealing with the loss of a loved one.
The primary reason she has such great respect and appreciation from her clients is because she is always able to prove to the clients she is indeed in communication with the target Spirit being by telling her clients one or more things the Spirit being knows the client will know that is otherwise an unknown fact to the public much less something that might be known to my friend.
Now I have had hundreds of psi experiences with my friend that were not of the medium variety and so I know her abilities first hand. But this one specific talent proves unequivocally to me that there's far more to life than than the simple passing down of "genetic memories."
I have also developed my own psi abilities where I know this as well.
I recall when I was younger and had the view as shared by FrankoL. ... I suggest one considers "who" or "what" might benefit that "we" share that type of narrow view?
... my intuition smells a rat.
Quite right, Chester. The position FrankoL espouses forces him to believe that, e.g., all mediumship phenomena, even the really accurate professional mediums and clairvoyants, is pure fantasy.
FrankoL, I don’t agree that I believe anything, when it comes to what’s most important. I don't believe. I take pains to find out how much I don't know, and how much I know. I chose to be born to parents both of whom were atheists, and whose programming of me was all directed at trying to make me materialistic and to be a rich person in my adulthood, and to avoid and devalue anything spiritual or psychic.
FrankoL, let me try to describe the sort of reason why I take it you believe that the whole idea of “spirit” is just an illusion. In the late 1950s Gilbert Ryle, the Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, completed a small, easy-to-read book called The concept of mind. In that book he very concisely and simply summarized all the possible explanations anyone could come up with of what “mind” is.
He went through each possible explanation and very simply explained why each explanation has absurd implications – or else it implies that what he called “pantheism” must be true. There were at least about five explanations which led to “pantheism” or else they fell over.
His conclusion was that while we suppose that there is something we call “mind’, that whole notion is illusory. That in effect, we are seeing a complex machine and using the concept of mind because we want to explain its workings by saying there must be a ghost in the machine running it all.
His conclusion depended on the assumption that “pantheism” – or, rather, the existence of one Great Spirit in us all -- is untrue. However, a majority of the members of this Forum subscribe to the notion of that Great Spirit, or something similar.
In my case, I experienced the Great Spirit directly and in a fairly full way at the age of fifteen. So, I don’t believe anything. I either know, or I don’t know. And in this case I know.
I do appreciate, though, that some spiritual people get to a point where they deeply realise that at a deep level reality is profoundly unified. And that a sharp split between “matter” and “spirit” cannot be the deeper truth. Through insight or analysis such as along the lines of Gilbert Ryle’s, they opt to say that everything that’s real must be matter, and the rest must be illusion. This is in contrast to the majority view on this Forum, that everything that’s real is spirit, and that matter is just a denser form of spirit.
If I was addressing professional philosophers I could point to many huge inadequacies in punting in favor of matter, despite all the conditioning of recent centuries to favor such a choice. Instead, though, let me give you all a very quick (and very partial) critique of the whole notion of “matter” just as it has been explored by physicists. (Believe me, a philosophical critique would leave the notion of “matter” in even greater tatters.)
The history of physics has been to attempt to analyse what “matter” is. Since the early twentieth century, however, it has been discovered that where “matter” was assumed to exist there is only forms and space. Absolutely nothing else. Even subatomic “particles”, on analysis, have been proved to reduce to nothing but form and space. (I understand this inspired movements like abstract expressionism to emerge.)
Moreover, it has been proved that supposedly inert space is always “curved”. Here, if physicists were intellectually honest, they wouldn’t call it “curved” but “intelligent”, or “active”. But physicists have assumed in advance that the only thing that is real is matter. Hence, since “empty” space contains no matter, they dare not even hint to the public that non-matter could also be at work in the universe.
Similarly, it has more recently been proved beyond all doubt that at least 80% of the physical universe contains something which is not matter and not energy. What do the physicists do here? They certainly don’t call it “mind” – which they should morally do if they were truly “objective” in the debate regarding “mind” versus “matter”. Instead, even though they have totally proved that it cannot be matter nor energy, they insist on calling it “dark matter and dark energy”. (they should either call it "dark space", or else admit that something completely unlike matter lies "above" and has considerable impact on or control over matter.) Talk about conditioning. Talk about clinging to a belief system in the face of some of the most undeniable facts in the whole history of modern science.
And in the societies and academies of sciences, none dare call it conspiracy.