Force theory

Senan wrote: We can see how faith and science can get pretty mucked up when we try to apply it to real life.

ah! yes! this is true. We get so mixed up in these sorts of debates that we forget to move the discussion to the things we agree on! I am as guilty of this as anyone. I have a lust for knowledge and truth in reality (as close as we can get to it anyway). In that I see so many people that try to apply science in improper ways and come to all sorts of erroneous conclusions. That is my real goal in these discussions. to try and introduce a bit of critical thinking. I think this is so important and one of my missions at this place, to introduce this into the training in some fashion eventually.

There is a show called the Carbonaro Effect. If your not familiar look it up on you tube. Its a magician that puts himself in real life places and then convinces people that impossible things happen right in front of them. I find this so fascinating that people just so readily will believe a person in a perceived position of authority even when the see something that defies all logic.

I believe the force is not some supernatural energy field, I believe it is the human condition itself and that can never be explained by science. Oh sure we can talk about the brain and the nervous system but no one really knows how it works, where emotions or consciousness comes from. Why we have it. Where we are going with it or what the end result of this universe will be or what will happen in between then and now. That's what fascinates me, to me that is The Force.

kyrin, i don't feel any insult to what you said so it's all good there. i can understand you pov here and do appreciate the scientific method for determining fact.

What if I am not trying to prove, or even discover anything, and this phenomenon occurs 2x for me. The first time I basically did write this off as my imagination but the second time made it a real occurrence that I could not explain. Scientific method almost defined here where an event occurred in the same environment and variables with the same outcome 2x. I wasn't trying to experience the event but it happened.

I mean I was watch Star Trek not a ghost story that would excite my mind into false perceptions. Random event at a random time repeated the same way twice.

I'm not trying to convince you one way or the other just revealing my experiences. I honestly don't know what that experience is telling me. I personally find it a fascinating experience that I wish I could allow others to experience in the same manner.

Yea I've had experiences which fall outside both reasonable coincidence or imagination and scientific explanation - and while they might have appeared in forms associated with imagination, dreaming or hallucination, what makes them stand out is the specificity in content, with accuracy in detail and timeliness. I do not 'have to' explain it, but the effort to do so tends to benefit from the tools and techniques attributed to things defined as metaphysical or spiritual but also perhaps more saliently - philosophy and science. I don't have a need to assert truth to questionable stuff to use it generally speaking and when I do its usually conditionally applied - but rather do it to further my experience which is then what I use to shape the use of belief to further refine or explore the experience..... and through this process I'd love to develop some objective results or reliable toolkit. One thing is for sure though, I cannot let my interest in finding metaphysical reasons for something cloud my judgement on the variety of reasons of things which might be outside my knowledge but still well within the realm of science - there is enough complexity and variety out there to shape all sorts of bizarre circumstance BUT certainly some of it sometimes seems to defy possibility.

I see a lot has been discussed since I was last online haha.

It is true indeed that scientific method does have limitations when it comes to this kind of debate. I've mentioned previously the difficulty in using such a method to explain something that is deeply unique and personal to each individual.

Personally, I think there may be a way of scientifically explaining matters of this kind. Einstein was on to something when he spoke about his theory on the Ether (in my opinion). However, even if we were to in some way use scientific method to explain A) the existence of the spiritual and how it interacts with the physical or how the human condition interacts with matter. I don't know if it will ever be possible to use the scientific method to explain said personal experiences.

The point is, we all believe in something greater, and this presents itself to us in many different ways. Despite the various ways it presents itself we are connected by this fact.

ནའдհдཀ༑ནკ wrote: kyrin, i don't feel any insult to what you said so it's all good there. i can understand you pov here and do appreciate the scientific method for determining fact.

What if I am not trying to prove, or even discover anything, and this phenomenon occurs 2x for me. The first time I basically did write this off as my imagination but the second time made it a real occurrence that I could not explain. Scientific method almost defined here where an event occurred in the same environment and variables with the same outcome 2x. I wasn't trying to experience the event but it happened.

I mean I was watch Star Trek not a ghost story that would excite my mind into false perceptions. Random event at a random time repeated the same way twice.

I'm not trying to convince you one way or the other just revealing my experiences. I honestly don't know what that experience is telling me. I personally find it a fascinating experience that I wish I could allow others to experience in the same manner.

I understand your position and that is the nature of subjective experience. It’s one in which each of us have to decide for ourselves what we feel about it and what we believe about it.

I have had many strange experiences in my life as well. I’ve seen those same type of shadow figures. One walked down my hallway one night, one walked behind me in the living room. I’ve seen a shirt rise up and float from my laundry room across my kitchen one night. I have heard people screaming they were on fire when no one was there (picture visions of hell at a time I was searching for God). I was in Alaska one time and I was supposed to go with my friends to a movie but as we were walking into the theater for some reason (I could not tell you why to this day) I stopped and instead went next door to a pub. Inside that pub I encountered a celestial being that explained the universe and God to me so clearly I could not deny his existence. It changed my outlook on the world at the time.

All these things that have happened to me in my life I could take and make conclusions about them that they were all caused by supernatural events. Many times I even wanted this to be true, but the nature of my personality does not allow things to be that simple for me. LOL.. I experienced these things with my own senses and yet I still could not just believe them. So I studied these events in my life, really spent time looking at them and examining them and the circumstances that led up to them and potential corporeal causes behind them. In every case what I found was my own perceptions had fooled me.

What I did was try to become actively aware of my environment and when I found myself in similar situations I studied them acutely instead of just being a passive participant. I found that the shadow figure in my living room was actually a car passing through my neighborhood and causing strange shadows to move in weird ways as the car lights shined into my living room window through my bamboo blinds. The one in my hall was much rarer and yet still something I had experienced. But in that case I found it was my back neighbor leaving his house late at night and his car lights shining through my back fence into my window and causing weird hall shadows to move.

The shirt was an open window in the laundry room that blew it off a hanger and across the kitchen. At the time I was working 12 hours shifts and was exhausted and half asleep and just perceived something that was not as dramatic as I thought it was.

The screaming I realized was just Hypnagogia at a time that I was truly worried about going to hell. By becoming aware of my environment and truly studying the phenomena from a rational point of view I was able to find an explanation that did not involve the supernatural. I experience these from time to time to this day and I can now recognize them for what they are.

The celestial being I encountered was the result of my intense desire to reconcile my doubt in a God with my attempt to be a good Christian. I had surrounded myself with people that told me to just have faith and my doubt would go away but it never would. I thought something was wrong with me. Then I spoke to this “being” and he used a version of the Kalam cosmological argument in combination with Pascal’s wager and a bit of intelligent design to dispel my doubts at the time. I had never heard any of these before and I was susceptible to them and my immediate conclusion to all this was he was sent by God to tell me these things. That was the reason I had walked into the pub instead of going with my friends. It made sense at the time. However, also being who I am I did not just take his words at face value and I studied them from all angles and from many different contexts. Over time (it was actually years) I began to see the holes and inconsistencies in them and the doubt returned - causing me to study even deeper. And that resulted in me rejecting any belief in God altogether because I ended up completely debunking the truth I thought I knew. At that point I just could not bring myself to believe in something with no evidence to support that belief.

Of course, as I said before, this does not mean that I believe the supernatural and God cannot exist, just that I have never seen any consistent and reliable evidence to support the belief that they do. If something undeniable were presented I would be forced to believe it, but for me it has just never been presented.

So I could also conclude that my shadow figures where lights shining through my window in a way that caused my shadow to be cast that way, however I lived in a very remote area so for this to occur while not impossible would be very hard to come by. Though if I had seen a light come through my window that caused a similar reoccurrence of this event I could be influenced that that is what actually occurred. it is actually very practical to think this is what may have actually occurred, but I don't have evidence either way.

As to the duckling, and literally hundreds of other times where my gut has told me to go somewhere, do something, or whatever, I don't have any practical scientific explanation to attribute that to.

Another"shadow person" type occurrence happened shortly after I had gotten my license to drive. I was young and dumb, feeling invincible, driving down a canal road, doing at least 50-60 mph in a 25, when suddenly I see blue and red lights in my rearview. No one else was on this road, I was having fun speeding through the curves and must have just missed this cops great hiding spot.

Obviously he was after me and I pulled my car over. Once I stopped I reached for the identifying information I was going to need to present to the Officer. When I returned to an upright position and looked into my rearview mirror, there was nothing there. I looked around and did not see any lights in any direction around me. After a minute of trying to figure out what had occurred, I started to drive away again, this time obeying the speed limit and wouldn't you know it that around the next bend was a hairpin that I surely would have lost control on and ended up in the canal without any means to get help. Cell phones didn't exist at that time. I suppose I could assume this to be my imagination playing on the fact that I should have known I was speeding, but that would have been completely subconscious. And I assume that might be as easy a dismissal practice as any assumption that the event was a manifestation otherwise. However one thing that I have always believed is that there must be something after this life. I cannot accept that we live this short existence and that is all there ever will be.

I don't see it as an irrational thought to consider this a spiritual warning that I have more to accomplish in this life and therefore needed the warning. I can further assume this based on my many close encounters with death that I have been virtually unscathed in. Unscathed by the likes of accidents in vehicles, mortar attacks, mines, grenade attacks, a roadside bomb, falling from a great height, an avalanche, fireworks show that misfired directly into the crowd where I was. I'm sure I'm missing at least another incident. But somehow I have no real obvious signs that I've encountered any of this. I have no scientific proof as to why the results are as they were, I can interpolate reasonable information to comprehend in a scientific manner for some but not all. I believe that if you don't accept that there may in fact be some supernatural or spiritual reasons behind these events, you will likely never have a spiritual awakening. If you can prove something scientifically that doesn't rule out that the science is an evolution of something else. Can you totally rule out that science trumps spiritual? We can agree that spiritual can be trumped by science so why not the other way around?

Alethea Thompson wrote: For the record: I happen to believe the spiritual realm exists. Of course, I don't believe it's necessary to believe it exists to get the benefits of using it.

Picking up on this. I do not believe accept supernatural accounts of events, but that's almost beside the point. If there was a supernatural account of this event, what does that tell us about how to live? Similarly if there was a rational explanation for the same event, what does that tell us about how to live? What do we learn and how do we apply what we learn to leading a good life?

ནའдհдཀ༑ནკ wrote: If I may present a couple arguments here, how do we know that 2+2=4? What is 2, what is 4? X and Y and Z are points of reference to solidify something. We only know the 2 and 4 exist because we learned that in school, by someone who also learned it from another, and on and on until someone made a hypothesis and a theory to develop a conclusion.

Why do we believe that the sky and water are blue? Are they both not black the deeper you go? Do we suggest that the atmosphere is a reflection of the water making it appear blue, or is the water a reflection of the sky which makes it appear blue?

There's a good TED Talk about perception and reality.