Are Spirits/Demons real?

[Cacc]

I've never encountered anything considered supernatural before on my life. But I tried this thing called The Portal, which used frequencies for spirits to communicate with you...

There was a constant switching of what seemed to be radio frequencies.

So, I said, is anybody there? I said it for a couple of minutes to no avail. Then there it was, the noise stopped and I heard a unrecognisable whisper from a male.

I asked if anyone was there and the noise stopped and I heard the whisper again. I said, "Can you tell me my name", after a couple tries I heard it say, "why?".

I said can you tell my my grandmas name. It fucking said it.. Twice. Then, it started saying my sisters name without me asking.

It even told me my cats name when I asked. What the hell...

It was a really strange, and creepy whisper that kept giving me goosebumps.

I said, where are you? "In your room". It was hard to hear, but I heard it. It "seemed" evil.

I asked later where he was again, and he said he was in me. Can't say for sure if I heard 100% right, but it scared the crap out of me. and I remember my eyes getting groggy and cold flashes. He kept telling me to save him. And he said he was on his way.

I turned that crap off. I hope this doesn't mean he's stuck in my house now?

 

[Cacc]

Forget I said anything XD

 

[Byron]

Yup, you're fucked, he's coming for you!

 

[Cacc]

Sent him over to you... Sorry not sorry.

 

[Ree]

I've never encountered anything considered supernatural before on my life. But I tried this thing called The Portal, which used frequencies for spirits to communicate with you...

There was a constant switching of what seemed to be radio frequencies.

So, I said, is anybody there? I said it for a couple of minutes to no avail. Then there it was, the noise stopped and I heard a unrecognisable whisper from a male.

I asked if anyone was there and the noise stopped and I heard the whisper again. I said, "Can you tell me my name", after a couple tries I heard it say, "why?".

I said can you tell my my grandmas name. It fucking said it.. Twice. Then, it started saying my sisters name without me asking.

It even told me my cats name when I asked. What the hell...

It was a really strange, and creepy whisper that kept giving me goosebumps.

I said, where are you? "In your room". It was hard to hear, but I heard it. It "seemed" evil.

I asked later where he was again, and he said he was in me. Can't say for sure if I heard 100% right, but it scared the crap out of me. and I remember my eyes getting groggy and cold flashes. He kept telling me to save him. And he said he was on his way.

I turned that crap off. I hope this doesn't mean he's stuck in my house now?

lol
what the fuck?

 

[Hector Papi Castillo]

Yes.

But as even the Buddha said, it's not something you really talk to people with materialistic views of the universe about (funnily, the Buddhist Scriptures, the Pali canon, is absolutely *riddled* with references to other planes of existence and gods, demons, heavens, hells, etc. Also miracles. The abundance of paranormal and supernatural occurrences in the Buddha's time are absolutely staggering. If anyone gets all weird about miraculous shit happening in the Bible or in the news, go check out the Pali Canon. And no, they're not metaphors).

It's just really impossible to discuss it with someone who is convinced than any supramundane experience is a hallucination (which begs the question of what a hallucination is...and usually, however you define it, you can argue that "real life" is a hallucination, unless of course you define a hallucination as opposed to waking life...which is a pretty circular definition).

Oh well...life is really more interesting when you open up to stuff like this (not an argument for its existence, just saying).

Hector

 

[CaptainHenley]

Yes.

But as even the Buddha said, it's not something you really talk to people with materialistic views of the universe about (funnily, the Buddhist Scriptures, the Pali canon, is absolutely *riddled* with references to other planes of existence and gods, demons, heavens, hells, etc. Also miracles. The abundance of paranormal and supernatural occurrences in the Buddha's time are absolutely staggering. If anyone gets all weird about miraculous shit happening in the Bible or in the news, go check out the Pali Canon. And no, they're not metaphors).

It's just really impossible to discuss it with someone who is convinced than any supramundane experience is a hallucination (which begs the question of what a hallucination is...and usually, however you define it, you can argue that "real life" is a hallucination, unless of course you define a hallucination as opposed to waking life...which is a pretty circular definition).

Oh well...life is really more interesting when you open up to stuff like this (not an argument for its existence, just saying).

Hector

But what would be a way to prove this, if they exist?


I mean just because there are references about it doesn't mean much, Greeks thought Zeus caused storms with his anger.

So I am actually quite interested on what you have to say about it

 

[Cacc]

When I was a little kid I had a school friend who spoke about the devil and demons who chased him. Overtime I became so scared that when I was alone I would go in my bed and put my blanket over me and not move a muscle until someone came home. I was in constant panic and everything little thing scared the crap out of me.

Even now, If I read into those things it makes it hard for me to sleep for the next few days, so I choose to be ignorant.

Although, i've never actually encountered anything concrete that I could really say it was paranormal rather than just straight hallucinations from being scared shitless, except for what I described in this post.

 

[Hector Papi Castillo]

Henley,

I can't prove it to you, that's for sure. Even logic can't be proved outside of itself If we were to see something...strange together, you would have to accept it as real; you could always dismiss it with some argument.

The best way you can investigate this phenomena is to act AS IF it is real. Say to yourself, "what if it IS real? What if gods, demons, angels, spirits, other dimensions - what if they *are* as real as the air I breathe?" Then try to argue for it and live your life believing they are real.

My best argument would be that there is no way to distinguish between the waking life and dreaming, only in that one seems unreal when the other begins. They are equally impermanent. In fact, if something is not permanent and ever present, then it is surely fake. How could something that is Truth be anything but always there? So if everything is bullshit, then everything is equally real in that it is bullshit. Does that make sense? I hope so.

Saying that storms are caused by Zeus and saying that storms are caused by wind and water fucking each other are not mutually exclusive. They can both be true. That we demonstrate storms being caused by whatever meteorologists and physicists says causes them is simply us observing patterns and saying that certain patterns result in certain effects, but it does not mean that these things alone cause the storm - science doesn't work that way (if you've ever heard the saying "it's not even wrong," then you know what I'm talking about; science can't disprove anything or prove anything - it just tests scenarios endlessly until we accept it because there's no other theory to accept at the moment...until another one comes along and destroys that theory).

So, the fun begins when you ask yourself, "What if it IS Zeus? What then?"

It really doesn't change much actually. The Buddha and his students regarded the gods and demons with as much casualness as they would another person. They're there, but they're not anything special..just different.

Hector

 

[Inbocca]

About three years ago, my brother, his friend, and I were burning a couple down in an empty lot and then started driving off. Suddenly the friend yells out "OH MY GOD WAS THAT A BODY" and my brother goes "THAT WAS A FUCKING BODY" and the dude floors it out of there back to our place. I was in the back seat and didn't see anything. On the way back, my brother says "Maybe I was just trippin but it looked like someone cut off his legs" and the guy said he saw the same thing. At this point, I was pretty sure they were trying to punk me. But I've also known my brother for years and he looked super scared. When we get back, the dude goes home and my brother, who's way too curious for his own good, wants to bring me back out to prove it was real, and grabs a couple guns just in case. We get back out to the spot and look around for about 10 minutes. No body, no drag marks or limbs or anything. To this day, he insists he knows what he saw.

The way I see it, it doesn't matter. Maybe there was a body and some cartel goon got it tf out of there before we came back, maybe it was a ghost, or maybe they were just super high. I think what scares people about the notion of the supernatural the most is that there's stuff out there that we don't know. But that's out there anyway. And most of the time, your knowledge or ignorance of its existence is irrelevant. So why bother?

 

[CaptainHenley]

Yup, that's pretty much the answer I would give/ expected Hector.

And as Inobocca said, well even if they are real, if they don't change our reality then why does it matter?

And if they do, and we obviously cant change it, why does it matter again?

That is my stance to god as well.

Maybe nothing is real, maybe its a dream? Can we prove it? No, as you said, its a circle. We can't escape this reality. So why bother?

With the same logic our hormones/neurons/urges etc. could also be interpenetrated as "demons" who control our will. It makes you wonder what is free ill and if it even exists.

So why bother doing anything other than eating, shitting, fucking and peeing? Well as it has been said here many times, men make things to ensure the "fucking" part. But also I think because we can't accept our death.

We would like to leave something behind, to be quoted , to achieve some form of immortality.

 

[Hector Papi Castillo]

Ah, there is only one exception to what you've said (all else I agree with). Well, two actually.

There is one change that accepting these things does, and that's rebirth. If you accept these planes exist, then there must exist a process by which they're migrated to, some form of cause/effect (call it karma or whatever). If so, then your actions will decide which plane you're born into next. The cosmology of the Buddhist system is pretty complex but he laid pretty much everything out (the coolest ones for me are the "Gods who manage the creations of other gods" and of course the Maha-Brahmas, the highest gods in the pantheon, oh and Mara, the one who perpetuates the cycle of rebirth from the tempter-side of things.) Question is, where do you want to go next?

Or, if you want to get out, well, that's literally the entirety of Buddhism. My second exception.

"Both formerly and now, I teach stress and its cessation" - The Buddha

He was only concerned with escaping the cycle, hence "Nibbana" (lit: to extinguish or to release).

But if that's not your schtick, you have an infinity to play around in this infinite playground. Isn't that cool? I think so. Makes you take it all a little bit less seriously.

 

[Drck]

We all asume that we are real. Modern science proves it. Or does it...?

Currently there are two branches of science (resp. Physics). One is the classical one, large moving objects such as rocks or planets, space, time, gravity and so forth. Most of us are familiar with this science as it is rather intuitive - you grab a rock and feel it's weight. You throw it, you feel its resistance, and perhaps you can somehow predict its trajectory because you know intuitively that it will eventually fall to the ground. You know you can measure time, space and speed... You know that when you drop a piece of rock on your foot you feel pain. This is science of Kepler, Newton, Einstein,... Einstein advanced this science much further into Theory of Relativity...

The other branch is called Quantum Mechanics, its associated with famous names such as Plank, Heisenberg, Schrodinger,... This is science of small particles, atoms, electrons, protons,...

Here is where the fun starts, because this world of tiny particles is like an alien planet to us. Particles exist and they don't - at the same time. Particles can be at two places at the same time. Particles can be so called entangled, they are somehow interconnected and always interact with each other instantenuously regardless of distance - whether the distance is one meter or another corner of the universe, it makes no difference, they are simply 'connected' and nobody has a clue how... Particles can move through solid wall sometimes, and other times not... In this miniature world, electrons can behave as both particles and waves, depending whether they are observed or not. They literally behave differently depending whether somebody is looking, or not...

The world on atomic level is so weird and strange that even today the brightest brains have no clue what is happening. Einstein himself couldn't admit that such things are happening, yet they have been proven 100% true with countless experiment...

Here, on the atomic level, the expression "real" becomes rather questionable. What is "real"? The everyday logic we are used to is totally useless on this level, laws of classical physics don't apply. Some interpretation of Quantum Mechanics say that the moon is not there if we are not looking. You open your eyes, and moon is there. You close your eyes - and the moon disappears. It's so weird that Einstein couldn't accept it, yet again - numerous experiments prove that Quantum Mechanics is a valid science...

So what do we really know about The World we live in? What do we know about what is "real"? Very little. Even the smartest humans have no clue...

I really like the note about Buddhism above. There could be different spheres, different planets, different levels of what we call "life", or perhaps different quality of being, or if you want different "quality of experiencing life" (such as real hell and heaven). We could be only imagining this material world (remember, on atomic level it is 99.99% just an empty space, and modern physics says that material world exist only when we look)... by changing our thoughts, feelings, behavior and believes we could literally leave this planet after death of material body and 'awaken' as a different life form or different being in another sphere, not necessary physical - all according to laws of karma, because remember, karma in essence is simply what physics describes as law of action and reaction...

So are Spirits and Demons "real"? And why not? It could be just different beings, different forms of "life" - just simply living in another dimensions of what we call universe...

Does it sound too unreal? Well, what is "real" then?

 

[Chase]

Spirits / paranormal / afterlife is a fascinating question. One fascinating bit to me personally is how people decide what they believe.

You have most religious folks. These folks believe what they believe because they grew up believing it. The alternative viewpoint is something they more or less haven't seriously entertained, except perhaps in a few crises of faith.

You have most Western atheist folks. These folks mostly grew up believing religion, then at some point renounced it. Now dislike the very idea of it and consider it superstitious hokum.

Former Communist atheists (Russian, Chinese, etc.) have an entirely different take on it from Western atheists. They're closer to Western religious folks. They've just grown up knowing the world is a certain way and the alternative viewpoint simply isn't something they realistically consider.

You can find evidence and arguments to support whatever position you want to support. The most fun area in this study in my opinion are near-death experiences of atheists. There's a good collection of these and analysis of them as they compare to non-atheist NDEs here:

http://www.near-death.com/religion/atheism.html

Near-death experiences are quite a rabbit hole to go down. They occur in every notable civilization. At least some of the time they occur, it is during total monitored brain death of the experiencers. They feature numerous recurring elements, shared across civilizations. And they recur throughout history, as well. Gregory Shushan has a wonderful scholarly analysis of NDE representation in ancient afterlife beliefs in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and Mesoamerica in his book, Conceptions of the Afterlife in Early Civilizations. Interestingly, despite each of these civilizations being, effectively, founding civilizations, their afterlife beliefs contain numerous cross-culturally recurring elements, universal to all the belief sets, that are also shared with NDEs. Shushan's position is the likeliest explanation is that religious afterlife beliefs are embellished accounts of NDE reports.

Of course, once you get into it, if NDEs are essentially the foundation of afterlife beliefs, then the question becomes, "What are NDEs?" Are they legitimate phenomena? Are they products of a dying brain? If so, how do non-functioning brains produce such detailed experiences? Why are they all so similar, versus, say, acid trips, which are far more variable? How can the brain produce such experiences during brain death, when on the other hand acid trips, perhaps the closest brain phenomenon to NDEs, produce and demand greatly increased brain activity over normal?

One interesting note is that NDEs may be produced with ketamine (bonus is you don't actually have to die in this instance to experience them). 50-100 mg of ketamine injected into the bloodstream produces an NDE within about 10 minutes. I, for one, would love to see a study done with a large sample set of subjects. Put them in a room, place objects around the ceiling that can only be seen from the ceiling. Instruct them what they're about to experience. Tell them to look for objects around the ceiling. Then induce the NDE. Many participants will be so absorbed in the experience they won't bother to look for the objects. But some will. Will they see what is actually there (in which case, the experience is empirically real)? Or do their minds fill in the blanks with made-up objects that do not match what are actually around the room?

The result of a study like this - you might need a sample size of 50 to 200 participants - would go a long way toward showing whether an NDE is an artifact of a dying brain, or is in fact a legitimate phenomenon.

Until then, put me in the Fox Mulder camp:

Chase

 

[Byron]

Chase-
In the UK, Ketamine is a very common party drug. I haven't tried it, but many of my friends have. Are you saying the high it produces (people snort it) is the same as a NDE?
B

 

[Yhaceed]

I once heard of a student that did well in physics or mathematics maybe (I can't remember the exact details). Anyway she wanted to know why the different equations worked. Why did one thing lead to another. So she asked her teacher and he said something but it didn't satisfy her curiosity. Finally he understood what she was saying and he said "science explains the how. If you want to understand why you'll have to talk to Christians or go to another religion". In other words you can get reproducible results from experiments and explain it mathematically but it doesn't tell you why that happens. Hence as was mentioned before it can't be proven at least using science.

~Yhaceed

 

[Hue]

How can the brain produce such experiences during brain death, when on the other hand acid trips, perhaps the closest brain phenomenon to NDEs, produce and demand greatly increased brain activity over normal?

In the UK, Ketamine is a very common party drug. I haven't tried it, but many of my friends have. Are you saying the high it produces (people snort it) is the same as a NDE?

Something I used to read about obsessively when I was in my psychedelic phase was a drug called DMT. Basically the big kahuna of all psychedelics.

If anyone's heard about it, similarly to NDE, it's a complete rabbit hole. A movie called "The Spirit Molecule" on Netflix covers some of the basics, but to really get an understanding there's forums and other shit about it all over the internet (similar to FR's here they have fucking crazy "trip reports").

I've never tried it.



Basically it applies to the Spirits/Demons idea because, while every trip is unique, and there's still tons of diversity from trip to trip, person to person... people of different race, culture, and religion have spotted reporting of the SAME DAMN THING at the most intense part of the trip.

In addition to a "fourth dimensional super reality" beyond the comprehension of human language and time perception, people have repeatedly talked about entities and specifically "elves" they encounter and interact once having "broken through". That they sometimes speak some wumbo jumbo language, sometimes telepathically, but mostly communicate without need of language

The whole thing is pretty fucking cray.


That said, it's always puzzled me how people from very different environments / views of how life describe seemingly the same shit from DMT.

With both NDE and DMT, people have reported:

out of body experience
a warm, loving ecstasy
lack of accurate articulation
eternity
lack of biology
ego death
becoming one with the universe
crazy ass geometrics
time not existing
entities

At first I thought that everything people experienced was just random synthesis of shit in the mind, like part of how I see dreams.
Or that the entities were just shapes that the brain attempts to make sense of into humanoid figures.
Or that DMT / NDE makes you believe you're dead (or about to be) and your brain, by defense mechanism, starts to ease consciousness into death.

But after reading thoroughly, it becomes very apparent that language literally can not describe the shit.
And, that neuroscience fails to really rationalize it, even when in support of the experiences' legitimacy.

Then there's some dude on Youtube (and yes, I know it's just some dude on Youtube and thus loses all credibility), that has apparently experienced both and says that while similar it's just not the same shit. He, like a good amount of people that want speak / write about DMT, attempts to explain some of it with quantum physics.

With all drug-related shit you gotta be careful, in this case because people often identify with their experience above other presentations of logic.

Got a little off topic, but worth noting.


As far as just NDE's, there's a book about an atheist neurosurgeon's account who had no use of the part of his brain required for his profound experience, "Proof of Heaven".
Disclaimer: it's not based in Christianity at all, I think Heaven was possibly used for marketing purposes.

I tried it out, interesting, inspiring, overall worth the read.


What's shitty is getting hard science on psychedelic and near death experiences is usually out of reach because the research doesn't get backed by much or it doesn't appear to be reliable and valid.


Fun to speculate, huh?


Hueman

 

[Chase]

@ Byron-

In the UK, Ketamine is a very common party drug. I haven't tried it, but many of my friends have. Are you saying the high it produces (people snort it) is the same as a NDE?

50-100 mg of ketamine administered intravenously is supposed to induce a complete near-death experience, with all the bells and whistles. Some interesting discussion of that here:

How to Have a Near-Death Experience

It's part of a general phenomenon of bodily dissociation called the "K-hole" that occurs at higher doses of ketamine:

Wikipedia article on the K-hole

Looks like it's generally a safe drug when administered in professional settings. However, a number of young kids have been irresponsible with it in the U.K. and ended up drowned, poisoned, or in car wrecks. Not legal there anymore:

Recreational Use of Ketamine


@ Hueman-

In addition to a "fourth dimensional super reality" beyond the comprehension of human language and time perception, people have repeatedly talked about entities and specifically "elves" they encounter and interact once having "broken through". That they sometimes speak some wumbo jumbo language, sometimes telepathically, but mostly communicate without need of language

The whole thing is pretty fucking cray.

Totally bizarre.

I had a (non-Indian) friend who reported encountering Ganesh and Kali while on acid on Northern Thailand. He told me another friend had the same thing happen to him; neither of them had discussed it beforehand. Nor were either aware of the Hindu influence in that part of the world.

Steve Jobs once commented that Bill Gates would never be able to match the kind of output Jobs would at Apple because Gates never took acid.

There's definitely an entire other world out there with some of these substances. Whether it is totally brain-based or includes aspects beyond that, it's fascinating either way.

Chase

 

[Cacc]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

The universe is filled with millions of galaxies and within those galaxies billions and trillions of planets and so much unknown how can anyone be as naive as to say we are alone in the universe.

You know what I think? I think that when we die we will find the answers to the hardest questions. When we die we moght get to see what's truly going on, and it will be overwhelming.

There can't just be bone and skin and a brain that defines us. I refuse to believe we just die and that's it. There's too much we don't know in the universe to answer any of those questions now.


With that in mind,

What do you guys think about supernatural creatures? Is there anything out there about it?

 

[Drck]

Should we look at the universe from point of view of science, we know very little about it... the estimates are that we see about only some 4-5% of the observable universe (all planets and galaxies)... How much do we really know about all the planets and galaxies there that comprise these 4%? There is for example dark energy and dark matter which nobody has a clue what it is. Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe and dark energy about 68% (according to NASA).
https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/f ... ark-energy

IMO it is a mistake to assume that life can be only in physical form (meaning material as we known, e.g. Planets, water, oxygen, organisms...). Life could could exist in another form, which leads me to question - what is actually life? If we forget the tentative explanation from biology lectures suggesting that only organisms and plants have the capacity to grow, function and reproduce, we must come to conclusion that life is also somehow connected to awareness, consciousness... Animals have some form of Awareness of the surrounding, so do plants. We know we are conscious, especially when we are awake...

The interesting thing is, that except superficial definitions of what consciousness and Awareness is, nobody actually has a clue... We don't even know how consciousness is created on material level (in the brain), because all we can see is only some electrochemical exchanges between billions of neurons...

Here is where come the eastern philosophies, Buddhism, mysticism, yoga, Hinduism,... They do deal with the question of what is Awareness... We all know the concept of "I" - "I am hungry", "I am happy", "I am awake"... We all can say that and we know what is that mean, we know that we are alive... But what is actually the "I"...?? When you say "I am" - what does it actually mean??

Eastern philosophies teach us that the "I" doesn't exist. It is a delusion. What exist is Awareness, the thing that see and perceives material World through senses, the Seer that sees (or perceives) material World. The "I" is only a false perception because the Awareness is limited to one physical body. The Awareness limited to one physical body is called Atman, but there is also another' higher level of this Awareness - it is called Brahman. This is sort of universal awareness. According to eastern philosophies, this universal Awareness created the material World... My personal believe is that this universal Awareness (Brahman) is also what other people call God...

See, you as a person is simply a little part of this Awareness. You have a body, you perceive material World through senses - you can see, hear, taste, feel,... We can say that you can experience life. However, the claim is that after we die, all these senses will simply disappear (as they are part of material/organic world). The physical body will perish. The Awareness however persists to "live", meaning to keep experience material (or other) world through re-birth in another body (or on another level of "living") - or it can join the main much larger Awareness (Brahman)...

I believe that joining the Brahman is what is called Nirvana in Buddhism, and what is called Heaven or eternal life in Christianity... those are simply different words describing the same... I also believe that Heavenly Father (or God) in Christianity is what buddhists call Brahman... After all, there is really not much difference between different religions and Buddhism or yoga, they are IMO describing the same in different words...

The re-birth can however happen on another levels, it doesn't necessary have to be on some physical planet in some form of physical body that has eyes, ears, nose,... The other levels could be what you call spirits, demons, angels,.. They could live in another non-physical worlds, such as what people call heavens, hells, somewhere in between.... . These could be beings (entities that exeprience life) without having physical body. They can exist, but you cannot perceive them with senses because they are not composed of material. Remember, the universe we live in is very strange, we can observe through senses only about 4% of this universe, and out of these 4% we don't really know how much we even understand... in other words, we just have no clue what else is out there...

The word supernatural is misleading. It just implies that there are some beings that have much more power than we humans. And true they could exist, there could be much more powerful beings out there. But why supernatural? We humans have much more power than say fish, dogs, birds, bacteria or plants. Are we supernatural to them? I don't believe so, we are just different life form, different beings...