Have you ever had a real experience you consider to be supernatural?

[Umbran]

I have.

Normally I'm a rational skeptic, scientifically inclined person. I'm agnostic in that I believe that the actual origin to existence is almost certainly beyond human comprehension as we are now, so I believe that things we cannot explain likely do exist.

Yes, well, in Archimedes' time lightning could not be explained - it seemed supernatural.

Science doesn't bother classifying things as "supernatural" - there is merely the natural that we have explained, and haven't yet explained. And if some phenomenon defies your notion of what is possible in the universe, the appropriate scientific action is to expand those notions, rather than to classify the phenomenon as beyond nature.

 

[Older Beholder]

Have you ever had an experience you believe to be supernatural? I'm kind of curious if other people who generally use analytical thought, which gamers often do, have experiences they can't rationally analyze.

During high school my friends really got into having seances, (small country town with not much else to do) and I have to admit I saw some pretty weird stuff.

The best/worst example was when we were talking to one of the spirits and a friend of mine started to challenge it, demanding it knock paintings off the wall, mocking it that it couldn't. The glass we were using on the Ouija board became agitated before it flew across the room.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Before we had our modern versions of scientific theories, we thought anything we couldn't explain was magical. The loud wind of winter was often thought to be the souls of angry spirits shepherded by Odin or some other pagan deity. Lightning was thought to be the wrath of God/gods. The seasons were believed to be caused by the daughter of a nature goddess going to the Underworld for 4 months, causing the nature goddess to be depressed, making the planet almost die until her daughter came back. Before we understood mental illnesses, we believed that they were caused by demonic possession or curses. Before we understood birth defects, we thought that fairies kidnapped infants and replaced them with changelings.

All throughout history, as we have learned more and more about the universe and created greater scientific theories, we have debunked a lot of outdated superstitions. The "supernatural" is regularly debunked by science and reason in the modern day.

I have had feelings and experiences that I don't know the explanation for. I thought that they were supernatural at the time. But after gaining a better understanding of history, science, and the various things we thought were magical/supernatural throughout history, I've learned to believe there are logical, scientific justifications for these things. I don't think magic or "the supernatural" exist in the real world, and am fine keeping those ideas in fictional worlds.

 

[R_J_K75]

I don’t know. I go back and forth a bit and generally don’t think reports of paranormal activity are fact based. I won’t litigate religion or other culturally sanctioned beliefs in this forum. Suffice it to say I am in a field that has other explanations for unusual experiences. Nevertheless…

I've lived in my house what will be 35 years on October 31st. It's been so long I don't even think about it let alone let it bother me anymore, but generally speaking I've always got weird vibes living here. My father and brothers all have said the same. After a year or two of living here we were all having dinner and the conversation drifted towards the topic and we realized that we were all having the same strange experiences. I look at it in 1 of 3 ways. 1 - this is odd but I can find a logical reason behind it if I think about it enough. 2 - This is odd and I cant come up with a logical explanation but I'm sure there's one even if I don't know what it is. Then there's 3 - Some things are just eerie, unexplainable and out of the realm of conventional wisdom and fly in the face of tradition and physics. On a side note, I do believe in miracles...the Bills beat the Chiefs!

 

[Umbran]

OK, I'm saying a supernatural experience as a term of convenience. Maybe I should say an experience that cannot be explained by any rational means except coincidences so unlikely as to be harder to accept than any other explanation.

I'm like Morrus on this - I generally replace "cannot be explained" with "has not yet been explained".

Given how poor human intuition on probability is, and how weird the human brain can get, the alternatives to "supernatural" seem a pretty good bet.

 

[wicked cool]

It is an interesting topic. I think we will all have to be pretty careful if we want the thread to stay open as it is potentially going to get into contentious territory.

My background is a I was raised extremely religious, went through a period of agnosticism and a brief period of atheism in my very early 20s. But ultimately I returned to belief in God (for me it was a long process of reading philosophical arguments for and against, and having different experiences). Just my personal belief, not something I am interested in pushing on anyone else. I also found, despite moving towards agnosticism and atheism I still tended to do things like recite the Lords Prayer or the Rosary during things like heavy turbulence on a plane. Generally I am fairly skeptical of anything (not just supernatural claims but any, without evidence to support them), but I am always interested in other peoples experience and hearing what they believe about the world.

I have had a few experiences I can say felt supernatural to me. Whether they truly were or not, I can't say with any degree of certainty (I can definitely find plausible wordy explanations for them). At the same time, I am persuaded that two were at least genuine. The first experience was one I am quite convinced was a product of lack of sleep and medications I was given following a surgery. I saw the classic little green men dancing on my chest at night. Even as it was happening I was convinced it was a hallucination (though it came during a time where I did feel the walls between the afterlife were seeping into real life: after coming home from the hospital I had this dread that I had died and was in purgatory).

I've had two experiences though I feel were real and I would describe as religious experiences. And since those two events, I've continued to feel a presence at times. I don't think I can get into them without getting too deep into religious territory. For me, the experiences were profound and life altering.

Another experience isn't my own, but when my grandfather was dying he began talking to deceased relatives as though they were there. This was in maybe the last few weeks before he passed where it you could tell he was leaving. I honestly didn't know what to make of it. Part of me said it's just his mind being affected by the dying process and memories surfacing (he was also hallucinating bears at the time) but I also found the conversations very compelling and had a nagging 'maybe he really is talking the them' feeling.

It’s funny that often when people are dying they see parents or loved ones that have passed or in some cases angels. Regardless they seem to find peace in it before they die.

 

[Mercurius]

Perhaps a better term would be paranormal. Merriam Webster's first definition of supernatural is "Of or relating to existence outside the natural world." The first definition of paranormal is "Beyond the range of normal experience or scientific explanation."

Meaning, supernatural is implied to be fictional and impossible, and thus more of a fictional concept (as in supernatural fiction). Paranormal is possible, but simply not (yet) understood.

There are lots of unexplained, not-yet-understood phenomena. Ghosts could exist and be paranormal, but not need to be supernatural. And of course the opposite is true: just because we don't understand something, or it doesn't exist within our current (scientific) paradigm, doesn't mean it doesn't exist or isn't possible.

 

[Sanguinarious]

Speaking of ghosts, there's one thing most ghost stories have in common that just makes my scientific side do the NDT "Hmmmmmmmm..."

Most ghost stories seem to involve a sense of coldness. Cold feelings, cold air, cold breezes seem to be very common in ghost stories. Now why is that?


Just for a moment assume there is something to ghost stories, that there is a thing that exists which is the basis of ghost stories. Call it an entity for the moment.

This entity might be almost completely outside what we call reality. Almost but not completely. It might hagr to follow at least a few of our known laws of physics, like thermodynamics.

Not a major part of thermodynamics is it takes energy to do anything. Suppose an entity that is the basis for ghost stories has to follow this, abd in some way we can't understand now employs ambient heat as a form of ebergy, is soaks up heat abd uses it to become visible, make sounds, move stuff. Yes our current laws of physics say this isn't possible, for us.

But maybe not for something partially or mostly outside our currently known reality. Maybe something can take in heat abd channel it into ''manifestations''.

It would explain why ''coldness'' is so associated with ghost stories from around the world and all sorts of separate cultures. I'm not saying I believe in ghosts, just putting out a possibility.

 

[TheAlkaizer]

Not myself (that I can remember) but I got two stories to share. A short one and a long one. Neither happened to me.

Grandmother's story

I learned some years ago that my grandmother had a gift. My mom said "Your grandmother could arrêter le feu. (stop the fire" What she meant by that is that she could prevent the pain from burns through touching and voice. She said that many years ago, my mom burned herself with hot milk when I was a baby, and my grandmother started mumbling and touching her arm and said something like "It's done. The fire's gone. No burn for you," and my mom was fine. I took it as a funny story.

But I met some other members of my family years later when I visited my father's natal village and several people came to me saying "Oh, you're the grandson of Jeanne," and very quickly in the conversation they'd tell me how they'd always go see her when there was burn and how she could mumble something and instantly the burns wouldn't hurt anymore. Some even said that they could just call her and she'd talk them through it and the burns would stop hurting.

I always wanted to talk to my grandmother about it, but unfortunately she passed away the next year.

Uncle's story

The story has three characters: my mother, my uncle and the man.

My uncle is a painter. He lives on the street in Quebec City and paints for tourists. He's done it for years. He doesn't earn a ton of money but he's always been very happy.

A few years ago, let's say four, he had an accident while carrying his equipment and he hurt the index finger on his right hand. The part of the finger from the tip to the first phalanx became crooked. The rest of his finger could move normally and be straight, but the first phalanx was always bent. He sent pictures to my mother (whose a nurse) and she said that he should see a doctor; most likely he had a fracture and the bone was stuck or something (I don't remember).

So my uncle is not one that really goes to the doctor. So he waited for months. But eventually he goes. He writes back to my mother saying that she was right in her diagnostic but also that he went too late and that the bones fused together (or something) and that his doctor said it was not really possible to fix it now. That was bad news because it made it hard for my uncle to paint.

Comes Christmas and I see my uncle. I see his crooked finger, we talk about it. I witness it. It's impossible to straighten the tip of his finger.

Next year, he goes to a doctor in Ontario but he gets the same diagnostic. "We can't do much, it's too late." So at this point, my uncle just accepts that this is the way things are.

Later in the summer, he leaves a lot of his possessions behind and moves to spain to paint for tourist and visit a different country. He settles in Granada and spends the summer painting to earn enough money to eat and supply his painting and he sleeps in the nearby networks of caves (google it, it's really interesting).

At one point in the summer, it's sunset and my uncle is sitting next to the beach sipping a coffee reading a book. An older man sits next to him. They sit in silence for a few minutes. The man starts chatting. "Who are you?", "Where do you come from?" Very quickly, it turns an interesting conversation where two strangers share their life. The old man says that he's an healer. The conversation keeps going.

Eventually, the old man notices my uncle's finger and asks him what's up with it. My uncle explains all of it to him. The old man moves one seat closer to my uncle and says "Let me see." He takes my uncle's finger and asks him more question. My uncle starts blabbering, eyes locked on the sunset while the old man inspects his finger and eventually wraps his own fingers around it and starts massaging it gently. Lost in his discourse, my uncle doesn't pay much attention to it and he just blabbers for a minute or two.

When he's done, the old man lets go and says he has to go. But he thanks my uncle for the nice conversation, they wave and he goes. It takes several minutes before my uncle takes out some stuff to paint and then notices something. His finger is straight again. He sends a picture of his finger against the sunset to my mother, but she doesn't understand. "What's up with that picture?" and he's like "Don't you see?" It takes a few minutes for my mother to notice that his finger is straight. She video calls him and they talk about it and my uncle says that the old man healed him. He shows how his finger is mobile and works just like it did before.

My mother has no idea how it's physically possible. She saw the X-rays at the hospital, it's not possible.

 

[Sanguinarious]

There is a term for when a cancer just stops growing or even seems to die. It's called 'spontaneous remission' and medical science uses that term when it can't explain why it happens.