Bereavement apparitions..

In fact, it would very likely depend on what the "most people" knew about New Mexico highways. If it often rains on New Mexico highways, and this is known by "most people", then "most people" would not be surprised to hear somebody report seeing a puddle of water on the highway. On the other hand, if it seldom rains on New Mexico highways, but mirages are a well-known phenomenon, then "most people" who know anything about New Mexico highways might very well suspect that it is more likely that a mirage was seen, rather than an actual puddle of water.

Notice that none of what I just wrote relates to the degree to which people have a priori trust in other people's reports of their personal experiences. That's because "most people" don't decide whether claims about the world are true based solely on the degree of trust they have for the person who is making the claim. In fact, it is only especially gullible people who will take everything they hear entirely on trust. It's just the way the world works.

Of course, expectation and suspicion don't get us anywhere if we want to actually know whether there are puddles on New Mexico highways. That question is not something that can be settled merely by deciding you're going to trust one person rather than another. What is really needed is some objective evidence.

Never questioning what people tell us makes for very deluded existence. It also, unfortunately, makes you extraordinarily susceptible to frauds and scams.

Have you found that, in your own experience, Magical Realist? How many times have you been successfully scammed? (Actually, how would you even go about determining that you were scammed, if you just believe everything anybody tells you?)

 

By which you mean that you're not interested. (You don't speak for everyone, Magical Realist. There's a bit of that delusion that's going around lately with some of the people here, for some reason.)

Also, you were interested enough to read my post - or at least to skim it for long enough to find something to take offence at.

If you took a more positive attitude, there's a lot you could learn from me about critical thinking, for example.

I suppose you feel insulted because I pointed out, again, why you're very gullible. A better response to that would be to make some effort not to be so gullible, rather than shooting the messenger. And, like I said, a good start down that road would be to start reading my posts with the intent of trying to understand the content, rather than merely with your usual intention of trying to find ways to take offence. But hey, it's you. You've already had years to make a positive change, but instead you just keep doubling down on the wrong and the stupid.

See, if you had any actual response, these insults wouldn't be necessary. You only get this upset because you know I'm right.

 

Is he gullible? About some things, yes, but I put it more down to a desire for wanting more to exist out there, a want for the intangible. But perhaps we should refrain from dismissing a very strong and personal experience that he has had after suffering a major loss in his life. An experience that brought him comfort and peace in his knowledge and belief that his mother has moved on.

I am an atheist and exceptionally sceptical and am in no way spiritual, I do not believe in an afterlife, but I have also had similar experiences just before and after my father passed away. I was not the only one. My husband also saw my father a couple of days after he passed away. My husband was in our kitchen and he heard a sound like my father coughing in the extension we had built for my parents. He told me later, while looking quite pale and somewhat shaken, he immediately went through to their place, thinking maybe it was the kids, and walked in and saw my father standing where he always stood in front of a big window that was next to the glass door that looked out to the backyard, his hand on his hip, where he would always stand in the morning while debating what he wanted to do in the garden that day. My father then turned around, look at him and smiled, then turned and walked into his bedroom. My husband, by this point, feeling quite shaken, followed and my father was no longer there. If I am sceptical, my husband is even more sceptical. He's agnostic bordering on atheist. He is not spiritual or religious at all and is in fact, quite anti religion. He doesn't scare easily, his worst fear is running out of coffee. He's a logical man. But this left him shaken. When I woke up, he came into our bedroom, still clutching the coffee that he'd forgotten to drink, his hands had a tremor to them, his eyes were wide open and he looked genuinely shocked. It took a while for him to tell me what he'd experienced. He thought he'd lost his mind.

A couple of days before my father passed away, I was sitting by his bedside, alone in the palliative care ward. My husband had just left to go and check on the kids at home. It was around 11:30am on the Sunday (he died on Tuesday morning). He hadn't regained consciousness since Thursday evening. On the Friday afternoon, his whole body went stiff, his jaw clenched and then he just flopped on the bed, we thought he'd died, but he hadn't - his heart was still beating. All muscle tone was gone, the twitching movements he'd been making in his drug induced sleep before that had stopped and even his feet, pointed downwards (he had been lying on his back and his feet had been pointing upwards, and then they weren't, it was bizarre). His eyes were half open but weren't focusing and not responding to any stimuli. And his breathing changed to what sounded like mechanical breathing. 6 short breaths, then one slightly deeper one, a pause for around 15 seconds, then the cycle would begin again. He wasn't on a ventilator. But he lingered. And I remember sitting by his bed on that Sunday morning. I was alone in his room and I was crying, begging him to let go and that it was alright to let go and that we would be alright. I was holding his hand pressed against my eyes and I was crying. And I felt this arm go around me my upper back and I was pulled slightly to the right as I felt his fingers press into my upper arm I was being comforted as he comforted me when I was upset and crying - he would always come and sit or stand next to me and place one arm across my upper back and pull me into his side and and he'd always press his fingers into my upper arm. I smelled what my father used to smell like before he had come into hospital - the soap he used when he showered - Pears soap - it was how he always smelled. I sort of jumped, dropped his hand and opened my eyes thinking my husband had come back, or maybe a nurse had come into the room, but I was alone in that room. And I freaked out a bit. I thought I was losing my mind. And I thought I was clearly imagining things. But I know what I felt and I know what I smelled. That scent lingered and the nurse also smelled it when she came into the room a few minutes later, because she asked me if I'd sprayed something in the room. I was in tears and I tried to explain it to her and she immediately understood and told me that these things happened often in that ward and she stayed with me until my cousins arrived 30 or so minutes later, so I wouldn't be alone in that room any more.

The other weird experiences occurred after he passed away. Immediately after my father had passed away, I couldn't stay in that room. His body was still there, he'd just passed away about 20 minutes before. They had closed the doors and shut the blinds in his room to give us privacy during those last moments and immediately afterwards. The palliative care ward had a courtyard and most of the rooms had french doors that led to that courtyard and there were comfortable chairs and tables set out under a veranda in front of each room. I was so distressed, I couldn't stay in that room with his body and the nurses took me and my husband out onto the veranda outside his room and shut the door. I never went back into that room and I never saw his body again after that. I just couldn't look at him, knowing he was gone and I was starting to feel like I couldn't breathe. The nurses and his doctor, as well as the social worker would normally have go through the paperwork, instructions about moving his body, his personal items, what funeral arrangements we wanted to have, any religious requirements, etc. So this happened on the veranda outside his room. When that was done, I didn't want to go back into that room and my husband then went in to collect my father's bag and my bag (I kind of ran out of that room like a bat out of hell to be honest) and we then walked through the courtyard to another side door on the other side. I turned around and saw my father sitting there smiling at me, where I'd just been sitting. I froze, spun around and turned back and he was gone. I put it down to my emotions and it probably was. The second time I saw him was a few weeks later, in my house, in the hallway. I had come out of my bedroom, and I saw him in the doorway to his room (that he'd moved into when he got sicker), I started crying and I said "Papa", he turned to me, he said something to me that I couldn't hear, smiled at me and walked down towards the living area at the back of the house, turned right as though he was going towards their apartment. I ran down that hallway and I could smell him, I could smell that Pears soap scent he always smelled like, but I didn't see him again. I lost him when he turned right in the living room. There was no Pears soap in my house. The day after my father passed away, I packed up most of his clothes and belongings, I threw out all the Pears soaps in his bathroom and in their apartment. What could be given to charity, was donated. The rest was thrown out. I kept some personal effects and had placed them in big vacuum bags for storage - like the suit he wore when he married my mother, his favourite hat and his favourite shirts, I kept and stored in those bags. It was like a purge, because so much of what he had, had become so connected to his cancer that I wanted it out of the house. It was my way of dealing with everything that had happened. So there was no way for that scent to be in my house or for me to smell it.

Were those occurrences a part of our imagination and a sign of our grief, and particularly my trauma? Perhaps.

Do I believe in the afterlife after that? No. Were my experiences real? Yes, they were to me and it was to my husband as well. Just as the nurse who came into that hospital room could smell something in his room and thought I'd sprayed something in there.

It's hard to explain, it's hard to justify or explain scientifically. But they were real.

What MR experienced is real to him, just as my experiences are real to me. So perhaps we shouldn't call people who experience this "gullible" because they cannot produce evidence. There is no evidence to this. Until you experience it, it's actually hard to explain. Is it our imagination and grief? Is it our brain's way of helping us deal with the trauma or losing a loved one? Probably yes. But it's still a very real and vivid experience. Calling him gullible for it, is cruel, particularly given the subject matter. He experienced something that many others have experienced, myself included. He's not gullible for having experienced it and believed it, nor is he gullible for believing what others have experienced with this. What he experienced brought him comfort and helped him through the process of grieving his mother. Do I believe others who experienced it? Yes. Does not make me gullible for believing them. Just makes me understand that they experienced something that was very real to them and respect their grief.

 

Bells:

Note that the conversation moved on, following MR's initial comments about his mother. MR reverted to running his usual generic line about how eyewitness reports should always be taken at face value because, essentially, "you had to be there" and if you weren't you have no right to question anything and no need to look for any further evidence.

MR regularly runs that argument in discussions about UFO sightings and his other woo hobby topics (e.g. Bigfoot sightings, ghost sightings).

The idea that whatever an eyewitness has to say must reflect the reality of the situation they are reporting on is naive, and MR is well aware of that. Nevertheless, he trots out this argument on a regular basis.

If he really believes that eyewitnesses are infallible - which is essentially the position he insists upon - then he is gullible in the extreme. But I don't think he really believes that at all, these days. A few years ago, when he was younger and even more naive, he might have had an excuse. These days, I think he just does it to be a troll, because nobody (at least, nobody with MR's ability to write a coherent paragraph of text) could be so stupid as to have something carefully explained to them many times in some detail and yet never absorb the salient points.

I did not dismiss it. I was very clear in post #2.

Sure, MR had a strong personal experience that brought him comfort. But that was a sort of side-point in his opening post . In the opening post, MR was trying to argue (from the existence of numerous anecdotes) that life after death happens and that ghosts or spirits or what have you are real things in the world.

I don't want to deny your personal experiences any more than I wanted to deny MR's personal experience. I certainly do not want to deny that either of you had the experiences you had. It will come as no surprise to you, however, that I am not convinced that your experiences necessarily involved any person, being or entity separate from yourself. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks regarding the sort of evidence that I'd need to start believing in ghosts or spirits of any kind. Also, you will have a hard time convincing me that a person who has just lost a loved one is in any kind of "normal" mental state. The human mind, in states of high emotional arousal, can do all kinds of strange things.

None of this is intended to subtract any meaning or comfort that you both took away from your experiences. You, Bells, say you do not believe in an afterlife, which I assume means that you do not believe in actual spirits or ghosts. I'm sure you have your own explanations for what you experienced. They are, in all likelihood, the same as my explanations.

In terms of what MR was trying to do with this thread, that really says it all. What MR wants is for all of us to believe in the afterlife, like he (says he) does.

Yes, but "real" is a word that leaves a lot of room for interpretation in this context. Did you and your husband really have personal experiences of seeing your father after he had died? Undoubtedly. Was what you saw really a ghostly apparition? I doubt it, and I think you do too.

For me, it's not that hard to come up with a plausible scientific explanation. I'm not saying I can prove anything, of course.

With personal experiences, gullibility doesn't enter the equation. People experience what they experience. Gullibility becomes relevant when we consider whether we should just take somebody else's account of their experience (or, often, of some third party's alleged experience) as conclusive evidence of facts about the physical world, especially in situations where the alleged facts are not well supported by more objective forms of evidence. And, as usual, we ought to keep the maxim in mind that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.

Absolutely.

That's not primarily what he's asserting here, though. He is asserting the existence of an actual spirit world. He's not actually interested in exploring why people have certain experiences. For him, there is only one explanation - or, at least, only one that he repeatedly pushes on this forum.

I don't accept that we shouldn't be able to discuss whether a ghost was real, just because the person who reported seeing the ghost was grieving a loved one.

Context is all important. You shared a personal story here, but your aim was not to offer it as evidence of an afterlife or the existence of ghosts. MR, on the other hand, apparently offered his story because he thought that two anecdotes would be better than one in making a case for an afterlife. The majority of his opening post, you will see, concentrated on a hearsay anecdote, as most of what MR posts tends to do. And then, not long after posting that, MR only really wanted to talk about the alleged generic reliability of eyewitness testimony, as he so often does.

 

That really depends on what you mean when you say you "believe in" your own experiences.

Your experiences are your experiences that you've had. They aren't things that somebody else told you, so it's not a matter of blindly trusting somebody else. But then, what's to "believe in" about your own experiences? How could you not "believe in" your own experiences?

I suppose we could separate the idea of believing that you had an experience at all from the idea of believing that your experience is good evidence for some other belief or assertion that you or somebody else has about the external world (i.e. the world outside your head).

When it comes to believing that you had an experience, as opposed to not believing that, it's not up for debate, as far as you're concerned. Either you experienced something or you didn't. There's no "believing in" required.

On the other hand, when it comes to believing that an experience you had ought to convince other people of some fact about the world - say, for instance, that ghosts are real - then you might well be gullible for "believing in" that. For instance, you could well have had other people tell you that anecdotal evidence is really solid, scientific-grade evidence of real stuff in the world. You could, hypothetically, "believe in" that. If you did, that would make you gullible, because you would be believing in something that has been shown time and again to be false.

You need to read post #28 again. I was quite clear. I'm happy to answer questions if you still don't understand. Please quote the bits of that post that you're struggling with and tell me what you don't understand.

Read post #28. Work it out.

Effectively, that is what you insist on, regularly.

You're still not sure, after years spent here, having these basics explained to you carefully on numerous occasions. Are you thick, or just a troll?

What leads you to trust people so much that your brains fall out? (But this, also, is just you trolling again, isn't it?)

 

What did you not understand in post #28? What did you not understand in post #31?

Switch your brain on. Engage. Don't just react.

You mean you believe that Bells and her husband both saw an actual honest-to-goodness ghost.

That belief you have was a pre-existing one, however. Your belief in that ghost is no different from your belief in any other ghost. It is not a belief based on you trusting Bells, or anything like that. It's a belief based on your desire to accept every ghost story as support for your existing beliefs in the supernatural, without taking even a moment to think it through rationally.

In any case, you can, of course, believe whatever you like about whatever you like, and I'm sure you will continue to do so, regardless of any attempts by anybody to prod you to critically examine anything you believe.

What you need to realise is that you're doing nothing to convince any rational person that they ought to believe what you believe about ghosts and aliens and the rest. You're just making statements of faith, in effect.

Your reasoning is illogical. Can't you see that?

Perhaps. Do you think, then, that it might be worth taking a little time to investigate things in more depth, seeing as your interpretation of what they experienced is fundamentally different from their interpretation?

Don't you think it is rude to just make assumptions - to try to shoe horn Bell's experience into your box of woo?

What did you not understand in post #28?

What did you not understand in post #31?

There has never been any convincing evidence that ghosts exist, in reality.

Have you learned nothing in the years you have been on this forum? Or is this just trolling?

 

Magical Realist:

Here's what I wrote to Bells, again:

I don't want to deny your personal experiences any more than I wanted to deny MR's personal experience. I certainly do not want to deny that either of you had the experiences you had. It will come as no surprise to you, however, that I am not convinced that your experiences necessarily involved any person, being or entity separate from yourself. I'm sure you can fill in the blanks regarding the sort of evidence that I'd need to start believing in ghosts or spirits of any kind. Also, you will have a hard time convincing me that a person who has just lost a loved one is in any kind of "normal" mental state. The human mind, in states of high emotional arousal, can do all kinds of strange things.​

I think it is extraordinarily poor form for you to use Bell's account of her experience as your focus here, rather than referring to your account of your personal experience. I think you're a troll who is hoping to provoke an argument between myself and Bells. I don't think you give a damn about her feelings or her experience. What you want is to use whatever you can to attack me.

I should not have to be explicit about the possibility of hallucination (or just strong memory). Bells is an intelligent woman. She is already well aware of that possibility, I'm sure. Moreover, the possibility is clearly implied in what I wrote.

Since you insist on brutal bluntness, I will be blunt with you. I am not convinced that you saw a physically real ghost of your dead mother. I am aware of no good evidence that any real ghosts exist, so I do not currently believe in them. It is possible that you hallucinated.

Are you happy, now? Is this what you wanted?

In future, don't be a coward and try to use somebody else's grief as a vehicle to prosecute a personal grudge you have against a third party. If you think it's at all appropriate to leverage somebody's grief to score some points in a penis waving competition, use your own grief.

You have no sense of tact or respect. No empathy. It's a real shame. You've turned into a rather nasty human being, Magical Realist. Are you proud of yourself?

You wouldn't know strong evidence if it came up and bit you. But that's almost beside the point, now.

 

I have never claimed that all experiences should be questioned. Stop trolling.

Do you think I haven't noticed that you have not apologised, or even acknowledged, the poor behaviour I pointed out on your part? More importantly, do you think nobody else will notice, either?

Here you are, still trying to troll me. That speaks volumes about you. You're not a very nice person, these days.

How does it make me feel to be sensibly skeptical of extraordinary claims? It makes me feel comfortable in myself. I'd feel uncomfortable and worry about being a hypocrite if I gave an undue credulity to an extraordinary claim.

Is it smart to be skeptical? Yes, it is.

Do I feel smarter than everyone else? No. Just smarter than you.

Am I proud of myself? Well, it makes me feel good that I'm consistently honest and open with people here, unlike yourself, for example. You can call that pride, if you like.

What an incorrigible troll you are.

You're a little worried, though. There's that tell-tale nervous tic. You're right to be worried. I hope you're calculating how much further you can push this current trolling escapade of yours. Let's hope you don't miscalculate, or it'll be holiday time again.

 

I did not say "many people". I did not say "psychosis". I did not even say "hallucinations", until you brought it up. These are all your words, not mine.

Stop pretending. You haven't checked to see if there's any scientific evidence.

Okay. So what?

How do you know?