to ask if anyone has had a psychic reading that was extremely accurate?

[opheliaria]

One that could not be down to cold reading. For example, giving out very specific details such as exact dates, unusual names, basically precise facts that cannot be fished for or guessed and are not vague?

There's is no such thing as a spirit or a soul. Nothing to hang around in the afterlife to send banal messages about Aunty Dot or Grandpa Pete. People are a bag of bones and blood and electricity, and that in itself is wondrous. And we should celebrate that we are unique, created by our genes and our faces and our experiences. How can there be something separate to that?

I've seen people horribly altered by Alzheimer's or brain dead or in a persistent vegetative state. They are no longer themselves. Their essence has gone. There are no spirits to report back. This is all we have and we should make the most of it.

What a horribly depressing thought, Heebie. Why be unique if there is nothing after? If we go to nothing then did we come from nothing? Why are we different and have unique experiences? What is it all for?

It's not depressing, it's glorious. If we are who we are then why teach our children manners and consideration? We are uniquely shaped by our environment and have one shot at leading a good life in this big wide world.

One shot? What for? There isn't anything to gain from all that we've experienced? That is a deeply depressing thought. I like to think my life has amounted to something for it to carry on after.

As for teaching our children, I'm somewhat of a fraud on here. I joined when pregnant and have now lost 4 should-have-been children (I'm not fishing for sympathy) but I can't pass anything on so where's the value in anything I've learned?

I'm struggling to find anything glorious or even liberating in a non believing sense of the pointlessness your beliefs portray (IMO). I'm not criticising, I just know that'd be a harrowing way for me to live.

I don't believe in them but I have had a weird thing happen. I've had my palm read a number of times at parties etc. Different psychics have repeatedly told me that I have one more kid than I actually do. Bizarre.

I'm very sorry for your losses, Fackinell. For me, Heebiejeebie is right - there's nothing 'depressing' or 'pointless' about the fact that we are all there is, that there is no deity rewarding or punishing us with an after.life of heaven or hell, that we are mammals who have somehow grown the ability to write Hamlet and Beethoven's symphonies and cure disease and go into space etc etc. And who need to develop a grown-up, secular ethics that means we try to live well, and try to be good, without the hope or fear of supernatural reward or punishment. We don't need to have children or an afterlife in order for our lives to be 'worth' something, though I assume Heebiejeebie is talking in purely evolutionary terms, that as animals, if we pass on our genes, we've performed our biological task. The dead live on only in our memories and the legacy of their actions.

"Our story is the story of the Universe. Every piece of everyone and everything you love, of everything you hate, of everything you hold precious was assembled in the first few minutes of the life of the Universe, and transformed in the hearts of stars, or created in their fiery deaths. When you die, those pieces will be returned to the Universe in the endless cycle of death and rebirth. What a wonderful thing to be part of that Universe. And what a story. What a majestic story!"

You never see a fortune teller winning the lottery or a faith healer working in a hospital

just sayin

Self confessed- do they say you have two when you actually have one?

Fackinell, I just don't get this "there must be something more" attitude.
Being alive, on this fabulous planet, here are now, is just amazing, The chances of any one of us actually existing at all are trillions to one. The billions of sperm your dad produced and the hundreds of eggs your mum produced and it was just you and maybe a few siblings resulted.
Even if your mum and dad just made love once, just think about it. 100m sperm and you were the quickest! Not to mention your grandparents, and thousands of generations before, chance meetings, narrow escapes from death. If that arrow had landed just an inch to the left in that battle 1000 yrs ago and killed that young soldier instead of wounding him, you might not be here today!

It's like winning the lotto, but much more unlikely. And you're not happy with that. You want something more???

Imagine meeting someone who had won the lotto euromillions rollover. You go up to them and say "congratulations, what are you going to do with the money?" And they replied "I haven't got time to think about that, I'm too busy worrying about my next euromillions lotto rollover win. After all, there just can't be one lotto win, I mean, what's the point of that?"

I suspect you'd think they were utterly bonkers, and a bit greedy. Be happy with life in the here and now. This is it, one shot. Forget about future lives, heaven, the hereafter and all that rubbish. There isn't one.

Personally, I'm more than happy with my 70/80 years (hopefully). I feel very privileged to have it. And I wouldn't dream of wasting one precious moment of it worrying about the hereafter, or asking some sky pixie for a place in some mythical heaven.

I'm not hanging on for what comes after, although many Christians, Hindus and Muslims live their life with a framework that will see them right in the afterlife. I'm not a religious person and while I believe you should be a good, kind and charitable person, it shouldn't be for future rewards. I live every day as if it's my last because one day I'll be right. I just believe that this life is not the end. That's no more ridiculous than your beliefs that we are temporary and organic.

Well I've had many x-rays in my life, and I've never seen a soul or a spirit yet.

I think it's possible to believe in some kind of afterlife without it being necessarily religious.

In a different vein, I am sure that living in a comfortable western country feels like hitting the evolutionary jackpot (thank you, my ancestors) and could be regarded as enough in its own right, but I am not sure that a beggar in the developing world or some innocent on the way to torture and death at the hands of [name your tyrant] would necessarily feel that a life of suffering was enough. Hence the popularity of the Lazarus and Dives parable.

"just believe that this life is not the end. That's no more ridiculous than your beliefs that we are temporary and organic."

Life is not the end. We are eternal organic creatures. Our physical beings go to make more physical beings- out thoughts and ideas and what went to make us individuals lives on in our children if we have them, and in the minds of everyone whose lives we touched.

It goes back to evidence again. There is no evidence at all that Sophocles or my mum or my best friend's toddler daughter are living on in some altered state somewhere. But my dd was in a production of Antigone recently, and we wept at words written over 2000 years ago. I recently posted something my mum had said and another Mumsnetter found it helpful, even though she's been dead for 5 years. And we laugh and cry often as we remember and talk about little Kate. So loads of "afterlife". We live on as long as we are remembered. And the cells that make up our bodies go on for ever! isn't that amazing and wonderful?

Heebie that is your opinion, other people believe different.

What science has proven is that energy does not cease to exist, it just changes form. You can say this of our bodies after death so what do you think happens to our core, our thoughts, feelings and memories?you say they live on through others and yet will cease to exist in us. That's not viable of the science you all bleat about. That part of us can't just 'die.'

Fackinell, I hope this my help explain the scientific position:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy is created in the universe and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, ever vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid the energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point, you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off you like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue in the heat of our own lives.
And you'll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across and and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they'll be comforted to know your energy is still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone. You're just less orderly

I went to a friends house when I was 18 and her mum said a psychic was coming over to do a session for her. I dont believe in it but was interested so she gave me and the friend a reading too.

I was very shocked. She just kept firing facts at me. I wrote everything down even stuff I didn't understand.

On sitting down - she said - isnt 'Dave' doing your head in. Dont worry you'll get your place in uni to do 'abc course' in 'x town' and he relationship will just fizzle out rather than you having to end it.

'Dave' was a long term childhood boyfriend who I just could seem to finish with even though I really wanted to. I did get the uni course in that town too. And the relationship did just fizzle out.

She told me about relatives who had died. Businesses I have had, my husbands name and occupation (didnt marry until I mid thirties). I had facts about my children.

Very woooo. My last business I did - I knew I would do well and sell well (as she had told me about it - 20 years previously! )

TTWK, you didn't quite bamboozle me with enough scientific words for me to think you'd answered my question.

What form do my thoughts, feelings and memories take after I die?
In me, not in those around me.

BTW to all the people like Bellybuttonfairy, I'm really enjoying hearing your experiences. Thank you for sharing them, especially since they're bound to be picked apart by non believers.

Fackinell,

There is no "you" after you die. As Heebiejeebee said, you are a collection of blood and bones and electrical signals. Feelings, thoughts and memories would be the result of electrical firings in your brain. If buried, your brain will turn to mush, and leak thru the coffin into the soil, and maybe sucked up by tree roots and the atoms therein will be transformed from Facknells brain, memories, thoughts and feelings, into sap, bark, leaves and twigs. Or perhaps fruit that will be eaten. And used to build feathers and wings or antennae.

Isn't that wonderful!

You're talking about matter and tissue.

If our thoughts memories and feelings are all just electrical impulses then why do we get upset or laugh or get angry? We are not machines. Are we here just to procreate? What for? To provide more little machines to feed the bugs and trees?

Have you ever talked about someone being spirited? Do your children believe in Father Christmas, the Easter bunny, the tooth fairy? What about God or Allah or Ganesh? You are placing other's spiritual beliefs in these categories. That's rather rude don't you think? And if you have ever promoted a belief in any of the above, it's rather hypocritical too.

Are you really telling me that all that matters in your world are things that you have tangible proof for?

The debate as old as time is interesting and, frustratingly, seems unlikely to be resolved. On the subject of life/death, psychics etc I'm a live and let live. Neither can be proved one way or the other.

It's fascinating to watch people of opposite views state their thoughts though.

Fack- did you see my post of 10.10?

I would describe myself usually as a non believer - Im an atheist and believe that when you are dead you are just nothing. I have never seen a 'fortune teller' since.

However, the constant narrative of facts and specifics was very unnerving. Throughout my life so far Ive often had occassions when I've thought "the fortune teller told me about this".