Something really strange just happened

[InSwamTiddler]

I’ve NC for this as I’m not sure what to make of it and I’m really confused.
Back story - I was raised Catholic, but I’m atheist now. I work in a science based field and for as long as I can remember I have believed in the factual, empirically provable reality of things. I don’t believe in God or the afterlife, or ghosts / paranormal stuff.

Nearly 9 years ago my dad died. He died very suddenly and unexpectedly at a young age in my childhood family home.

Due to some circumstantial things, I’m currently living back in my family home.
My mum has mentioned a few times over the years that she’s felt my dad’s presence here and I’ve always been openly kind to her about it, but thinking “nope. Your imagination is going crazy because you’re grieving”. She’s mentioned she’s felt pressure on the bed as if someone has sat down on it next to her for example.

Anyway, this morning DP has left for work and I was still in bed. I was listening to him brushing his teeth, then popping the kettle on so I was definitely awake, but a little drowsy.

I felt him get back into bed with me and thought “what’s he doing?”... it’s not unusual for him to pop back into the bedroom and give me a hug or kiss before leaving the house.

I felt the heaviness of him pressed against my back and his arms wrapped around me. There was a heat between my shoulder blades I have never felt before but I wasn’t scared but I knew it wasn’t DP then. I heard the front door open so DP was leaving the house. Then my whole back went tingly a bit like pins and needles but not in an unpleasant way.

When it was happened I felt calm and warm but I’m freaking out now and can’t stop crying. Sounds silly but I feel like it may have been my dad.

I was 100% awake, not dreaming. I leant over and flicked the lamp on straight after.

Does anyone believe in this stuff? I never have but now I’m questioning everything.

Do all the people on here saying that there half remembered, half asleep experiences are evidence of the existence of God etc. also believe that stage magicians do genuine magic?

If not...then why not? I mean apparently there is 'so much more to the world than we understand' when it comes to people making up stuff about dead relatives for money (mediums) so why not go for it and assert the same regarding Penn and Teller?

I suppose the fact they outright explain how the tricks are done is a bit a of a buzz kill, but how do we know they aren't doing that to smoke screen their real actual access to magic?

pam290358 I am incredibly glad that your brain provided you with the release you needed in a moment of dire need. Brains are amazing things that can do so very much without direction or conscious knowledge.

Science already has perfectly rational and evidenced explanations for your experience, but that honestly shouldn't detract in any way from the fact that you got what you needed when you needed it.

The natural world is more than miraculous enough.

I've not had an experience like this but I do know after my dog died both me and my husband at the exact time sat up in bed. Woke from sleep as it felt like he had jumped on and we both heard his little " talking noise" he used to make.
As clear as day.
I was still sad but I took comfort from it as that day I had cried to dh about him being alone at the pet crematorium and that I wanted him home.
We can't both have been having the same dream.

This has deepened my belief that something so perfect, like the human body, had to be created by something/ someone of a higher being.

There are various things that puzzle me about these kinds of statements. For a start, the human body is a long way from perfect. It's remarkable and it's amazing, but it's not perfect. it fails after around 80-90 years, often a lot sooner. It's entirely dependent on getting oxygen into it pretty much all the time. It breaks fairly easily in different ways. It's subject to attack from micro-organisms and it has vestigial bits and pieces which, if you were designing it, you would probably avoid putting in.

And I've never understood where this higher being comes from. You can't believe humans just are, therefore they must be created. But who creates the creator? Who is presumably even more perfect, or how did s/he come up with humans? "Oh something else made us" just for me raises far more questions than it answers.

Hi there - lots of work being done now in QP (Quantum Physics) and possibility of multi-verses... it sounds like crazy sci-fi ideas but go with your gut feeling. I am also an atheist by the way... and I have now started learning more about things that are 'fringe-ish' like shamans, healing powers (listen to or watch Derren Brown the British mentalist/hypnotist and the show he did about faith healing...he's also an atheist). It may have been your own consciousness or something else but you had a real experience :)

agree... :) I am at a place where I don't believe in a single organised religion anymore... but I have not found answers...and not found what to believe in... and probably will have to live with this uncertainty (which is very taxing for the frontal cortex of our brains :))

pam290358 I am incredibly glad that your brain provided you with the release you needed in a moment of dire need. Brains are amazing things that can do so very much without direction or conscious knowledge

That's really not nice

Why not nice?

I think its bloody fantastic that the brain can do these magical things for us.

If someone had a horrible infection and their immune system cleared it up, would it be 'not nice' to say 'isn't awesome how the immune system works to fix your body?'

If they were thanking mystical intervention for fighting the infection, wouldn't you want to point out that while recovery was awesome, it was due to natural miracles not supernatural?

Isn't it slightly odd for that matter, that people very rarely thank their deceased relatives for curing physical ailments, while mental aliment like grief is apparently fair game?

Body and mind heal themselves...

m3lon it isn't nice because you are doing the opposite of validating someone else's thoughts and feelings. It might even be gaslighting, actually, I am not sure.

To answer your other question, I think the magicians you are talking about will be able to work on a subliminal level and with intuition in a fairly sophisticated way, but minus the spiritualism. The difference from the experiences of many posters on here (who have indicated they do not want to be questioned or analysed so not sure why you continue to do so...) is that they are talking about experiences which combine intuition with spiritual beliefs, that is the difference, I think.

I referred to "instincts" up thread but meant "intuition". I guess "instincts" is common parlance but more correctly it should be referred to as "intuition".

The only "permitted" position on the paranormal on Mumsnet is absolute unquestioning acceptance of other people's experience. It's very strange.

To those that say everything can be explained scientifically.....no it just can’t. Many scientists are concluding that the laws of chemistry andy physics cannot explain our experience of consciousness.

Our consciencness is described as our introspection, sensations, thoughts, emotions etc, that make us alive and aware.
“You can’t get something from nothing”. If the universe began with dead matter having no conscience, how then, do you get something totally different...conscious, living, thinking, feeling creatures....from materials that don’t have that..

No scientist can answer that.

Just appreciate this, don’t try to analyse it or find a logical explanation.
I’m atheist, I don’t believe in ghosts, afterlife, hell etc but....that doesn’t mean I’m right.
We don’t know everything, just appreciate a cuddle from you dad x

Sounds like your faith is calling you back OP. But you don't believe so tricky this one. Maybe reopen that chapter in your life and explore?

Sorry I pressed before time. You can't use explanations of this world to explain spiritual things, it's illogical. Spiritual/ out of body experiences are just that, spiritual. Take this as a chance to reconnect with your belief. It'll help you make more sense of these non-earthly experiences

If the universe began with dead matter having no conscience, how then, do you get something totally different...conscious, living, thinking, feeling creatures....from materials that don’t have that.

No scientist can answer that.

Well the answer that some higher being put a spiritual consciousness or essence into us isn't very satisfactory and IMO is a bit of a cop out. I'm not saying that science can ultimately explain it, because science is our invention and we're just primates. I'm not sure we're evolved enough to understand all this, but I do think that a more evolved species would be able to explain in material terms only, without recourse to "god did it".

As it is, scientists are close to giving material explanations for consciousness. This article from the Scientific American is useful on this www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/

In the end though, I think this: if our bodies are deprived of oxygen, and we can no longer respire, we die. We are no longer conscious and our bodies eventually decay. Now you can argue that somehow there is some spirit essence of us that lives on but that it's gone somewhere else. But the fact is, the body and the consciousness you knew is gone. The idea of a spirit essence is comforting, and maybe we need that comfort to handle existence, and the lack of it. But that doesn't make it true that there is a spiritual existence - it just means it's comforting to believe there is.

I visited a medium recently after losing my DF earlier in the year.

When I walked in, I felt a warmth pass through my shoulder and I felt bizarrely calm. My DF would often put his hand on my shoulder.

Could be nothing, could be something. Who knows!

Each to their own, people believe what they want to xx

heartsofgold the universe started with dead matter, and absolutely nothing has changed.

I think science is pretty clear on that.

Every single time someone has held up a phenomenon that they believe proves that 'living' things are somehow different from 'unliving' things, it has been found that they aren't. There is no evidence for vitalism.

If you synthetically create all the components of a cell, and then put them together...you have a cell. There is no missing magic.

If you built a computer program based on the same rules that the human brain is built on (ie. fuzzy chemical messaging, electrical impulses, hormone signalling) with the same complexity and extent as the human brain, it would be every bit as alive as anyone reading this.

Its already been a decade since someone managed to accidentally evolve computer code that had the power of self preservation. The system was such that it would run and allow little code packets to interact and replicate...and then the system would delete all the surviving code packets and start over on a new run. The experiment was compare the successful code packets between different runs. After a while doing this, the scientists noticed they started getting the same outcome each time they ran the program...instead of the mixture of 'winning' packets that had been retrieving before. Sure enough they discovered that the code packet now winning ever single time, was able to avoid the deletion and reset part of the process. It found a way to hide from the system when deletion was occurring.

the universe started with dead matter, and absolutely nothing has changed

speak for yourself, love!

M3lon but if scientists are baffled?

if our bodies are deprived of oxygen, and we can no longer respire, we die. We are no longer conscious and our bodies eventually decay.

agreed

Now you can argue that somehow there is some spirit essence of us that lives on but that it's gone somewhere else. But the fact is, the body and the consciousness you knew is gone. The idea of a spirit essence is comforting, and maybe we need that comfort to handle existence, and the lack of it. But that doesn't make it true that there is a spiritual existence - it just means it's comforting to believe there is.

Philosophers have debated this point since the ancient Greeks - afaik comfort doesn't come into their debates though. The debates are exactly as you say - to what extent are "we" our bodes and to what extent are "we" our thoughts and feelings, or both, and so on. Most religions believe that the soul lives on, and many major religions believe that souls are re-born to Earth - and I think over a quarter of religious followers in the world believe this, in terms of numbers (christianity and islam taking up the majority of the rest) - not so much to do with comfort more to do with encouraging people to strive to live well, good overcoming evil and so on, so that people can reach a point.

I am not sure the idea of all souls living on is terribly comforting, thinking about some of things humans can do to each other on earth.

Given what we know about relativity it is possible within science that there is a dimension or dimensions with souls... do you agree?
Ie we just don't know.

And if there is, then the more intuitive folk on earth could feasible communicate with them. Though no single religion teaches that that happens I don't think.

M3lon going back to your other post in some religions people do pray to ancestors to get help with medical things, I think...

your beloved husband is at peace and you will one day be together again

heartsofgold How can you state they will be together again as if it were a fact when you don’t actually know, how is that better than people giving other explanations.

I would love to believe people could contact us. I lost my Mum a few years ago. It was a week before Christmas and just a few weeks before my DC1 was born. We were very close and I just know if it was at all possible for her to, she would have contacted me somehow. So as much as I would like to believe, I just can’t.

M3lon but if scientists are baffled?

Well they used to be baffled by the arrangement of the solar system but they worked that out. Ditto gravity. Evolution took a long time to figure out. Cloning higher mammals has been tricky, to say the least, but it is now possible. The fact that scientists may be puzzled by something still doesn't mean it's right to hold up your hands and say "it must be supernatural".

The thing is, the material world is amazing. Matter is mindblowing. Trying to understand it is complex and difficult and takes years of training.

Given what we know about relativity it is possible within science that there is a dimension or dimensions with souls... do you agree?

I don't think we have a soul or consciousness separate from our bodily selves. If we have them and if there are parallel universes then it's not impossible, in the same way that it's possible there are alternate universes populated by goblins. There could be all manner of things out there but I don't see the point in speculating on them when we're more likely to find the answers by investigating the material world around us.

If we have them and if there are parallel universes then it's not impossible, in the same way that it's possible there are alternate universes populated by goblins. There could be all manner of things out there but I don't see the point in speculating on them when we're more likely to find the answers by investigating the material world around us

I understand your point of view, other than the bit about goblins (not sure goblins have quite the same relevance to us all in terms of furthering our understanding...), but the existence of a soul and how it might interact with the brain is considered as a question by serious science.

The general consensus at the moment is that the idea of a physical soul is incompatible with quantum field theory apparently (consciousness not being physical?) though quantum indeterminacy has been used by some theorists to explore possibilities.

Consciousness, intuition, free will etc - part of the same question - are things currently being explored in neuro science.

The idea of a spirit essence is comforting, and maybe we need that comfort to handle existence

spot on! thats when religons and belifs are for!..

Ive name changed to protect my privacy with previous posts. A few people know this story in real life
10 years ago I started to feel a rising sense of what I can only describe as strong discomfort. Life was good. 21 year old daughter settled with bf and working. 16 year old son just finished GCSE's. I told a friend that I didn't know what or why but I felt something really bad was going to happen. The night before the fateful day I had a strange dream where I was stood in my garden with police officers, one male and one female and was showing them my lavender ( new gardener and very excited!) It was one of those dreams where you feel that an odd situation is completely normal. It just left me feeling a bit non plussed but wasn't distressing or anything just odd and I forgot it quickly. Two days later at 6am the police ( a male and a female) knocked at my door and told me my son had been killed after being hit by a car. The next few hours are quite a blur with many people in the house and I was clearly in horrendous shock. During this period of time the officers took me outside to get me away from everyone in the house. I stood and discussed my lavender with these officers as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Later that day I realised that I'd actually dreamed what was going to happen two days later. The officers were stood in exactly the same place as in my dream, it was the same conversation, it was a male and a female. I'm pretty sure she will skoff at this but I know I had a premonition. I don't know what a premonition is or why they exist but it happened.