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The Weird Events Thread: supernatural stuff


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Not really. He was an agnostic who did not believe a personal God as the bible would have you believe.

Hmmm, I swear I recall him talking about some kind of God, but maybe he did mean cosmic consciousness or something like that. No biggie, since he apparently believed in a psychic:

Albert Einstein Endorsed a Popular Psychic in 1932. This Is the Controversy that Ensued

Even Upton Sinclair got involved, since he apparently wrote a whole book on telepathy...man I love Weird History...

Those stories all sound like urban legends. I'd be much more interested if someone experienced stuff that was not as "predictable" as sightings of Grandpa or warnings from deceased strangers.

True. But this thread is ultimately about entertainment...

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There are probably book-length treatments of Einstein's religiosity. Apparently he did not follow an organized religion and whatever he called God was closer to Spinozas God = Nature = Substance (deus sive substantia sive natura) which for Spinoza is, in a sense, the only being there is. (Everything else that appears to us as ordinary things are states or modifications of this One). This was reviled as atheism by many of Spinoza's contemporaries, but of course it is rather different from modern (Marxian, Nietzschean or Dawkinsian) Atheism. So when Einstein said, he did not believe God played dice, referring to uncertainty and stochastic elements in quantum mechanics he probably expressed that his idea of rationalist universal harmony was not compatible with fundamental stochasticity, not anything about a theistic Jewish/Christian Creator.



The spiritism vogue in the late 19th/early 20th century is also a very interesting phenomenon. The most baffling case may be AC Doyle who became famous by the ultra-rationalist, "scientific" Holmes with his "method of deduction", but fell for faked fairy photos and whatnot. One of his later "Professor Challenger" stories is about spiritism. I do not remember if I read this one. The most remarkable ones for me are not the "Lost world" with the dinosaurs in some remote jungle, but one about a deadly cosmic "field" the earth passes through and another one where they discover that the earth is in fact a sentient being like a giant sea urchin/echinoderm (The Day the Earth screamed).


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This is rather funny:



"The situation raises the much debated question about the worth of the scientific method as a mental discipline. We have seen our scientists, no matter how eminent, reveal themselves time and again utterly “hopeless” once they step outside their narrow specialties. The physicists, particularly, have been guilty of all sorts of strange and weird conduct. We need not concentrate our fire on Dr. Einstein. We can cite the vagaries of Drs. Eddington, Jeans and Whitehead. And then there is Dr. Einstein’s colleague in California, the famous Dr. Robert A. Millikan. But even Millikan hasn’t endorsed any vaudeville actors yet."



http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119292/controversy-einsteins-endorsement-psychic-upton-sinclair-defends


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Lately, and this is starting to really bother me badly. But, I'm having the most vivid real life dreams I've ever had. Like in my dreams I wake up to someone in my house, or a fire in my home or just me so random normal shit. Then when I wake up for real it is the scariest feeling because I can't separate reality from my dreams. Its really getting to me lately.

Have you tried gaining control of the dreams via lucid dreaming?

=-=-=

The Mysterious Powers of Body and Mind: An Interview with Michael Murphy

London: What kind of potentials?

Murphy: There are physical potentials. For instance, a book called Biomarkers came out recently that rounded up all the evidence that strength-training in people aged 84-96 increases their strength 50 percent in 3 months and their health radically. There was also a big article in The American Psychologist in August 1994 entitled "Expert Performance" which reviewed dozens of studies about abilities that were thought to be genetically determined, such as perfect pitch or the ability to remember strings of numbers on a single hearing or various athletic skills. These studies have shown that everybody who is trained can learn perfect pitch, can learn to extend their short-term memory, and can extend their athletic abilities. It was a landmark study, one of those great historic roundups of the evidence. Those are just physical abilities. There are also emotional capacities, cognitive skills, and spiritual abilities. Every single human attribute gives rise to the extraordinary — among men and women, young and old, in all cultures.

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  • 1 month later...

One Last Goodbye: The Strange Case of Terminal Lucidity

I’m as sworn to radical rationalism as the next neo-Darwinian materialist. That said, over the years I’ve had to “quarantine,” for lack of a better word, a few anomalous personal experiences that have stubbornly defied my own logical understanding of them.

Once, for instance, I was staying at a hotel in Fort Lauderdale when I had a vivid dream in which there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find my mother’s good friend, Sally, trembling and distraught. “It’s Blaze,” she said to me, weeping inconsolably about her golden retriever. “I can’t find him. He’s not here.” It was such an odd dream that I even shared it with my father the next morning over breakfast. “Weird,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Later that day at my mom’s house, the phone rang. It was Sally. “It’s Blaze,” she said immediately, sobbing into the phone. “We put him to sleep this morning. I keep expecting him to be in the house but he’s not here, Jesse.”

I can live with the uncertainty surrounding these very few incidents without getting all … unscientific. “Think of all the dreams you’ve had that haven’t come true,” I can tell myself. “So you get one that seems like a premonition. Big deal.” In any event, none of these events have been particularly meaningful to me, just minor hiccups in a naturally ordered universe.

Except for one. Possibly. When my mother died in early 2000, we had a final farewell that some researchers might consider paranormal....
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  • 2 months later...

Someone shared this occurrence with me, made me think of this thread after a long while. Obviously paraphrased:

"First weird dream I had was after my grandmother passed away. We lived over 4000 miles apart and as a dumb insensitive teenager it didn't really impact my life. But, shortly after I ended up having a very intense dream. There was a phone ringing and there was already a strong sense I knew who was calling though not sure exactly who but when I answered the phone it was my deceased grandma. Wasn't profound, which made it feel more real - she was just checking in on me and wanted to make sure I was okay and was saying goodbye before she moved on.

Obviously I can't claim it was real contact with my grandmother's ghost. I talked about the dream with my family and they told me how she was always thinking of me because I was the only cousin that was so far away. Also given her personality they said if anybody could have reached from the other side to make a quick call it would be her."

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