believe it or not

[kleenexwoman]

Because now I'm curious about this.

[Poll #716690]

ETA: If you feel comfortable doing so, please elaborate in comments.

Comments

[gmonkey42.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in ghosts or UFOs or anything but there's one weird thing that happened that involved me but I was too young to remember: my mom and I were at my grandparents' house. They had a laundry room upstairs that had a staircase leading down to a back door and the stairs were steep and often home to black widow spiders, so they kept the laundry room door closed to I couldn't go in there. I was upstairs and my mom was down by the front door. She suddenly got this... vision of a child's-eye-view of the laundry room and she knew it meant I'd gotten the door open and was in there. She went upstairs and I was in the laundry room.

So did she hear something that was too quiet to register consciously? Or was there some kind of... OK I hate to use the word "telepathic" here but some kind of telepathic communication going on? That I can't say for sure. My mom points out that our brains generate electromagnetic fields and radio waves, another type of electromagnetic radiation, can travel great distances. I have a hypothesis that, if that's true and we can get subconscious signals from other people, then that's what ghosts are. We think we see ghosts but it's really just information coming from other people. That would also explain out-of-body experiences, where someone can describe in detail a place where they've never been but other people have been there.

I believe that by living in cities, we numb ourselves to our senses. I saw a film, Being Caribou, a documentary by/about two people who went on foot with a solar-powered camera and a tent, following a herd of caribou for several months as they migrated from Canada to their calving grounds in Alaska. Sometimes they fell behind the herd and they talked about having vivid dreams about where they would see the herd next, and then those dreams came true. They said how the whole time, it was like living in a waking dream-state, how they felt so aware and open to the Earth around them. They said at the end of the film how being that open in civilization, a person would just be crushed under the weight of all the noise and overstimulation. It's like how the animals knew the S.E. Asia tsunami was coming after the earthquake hit and they fled to higher ground. I believe that animals, humans included, can see, hear, smell and feel a lot more than they're consciously aware of. Humans just have to turn it off as a defense against the constant stream of blaring sensory input we get from living with so much machinery and so many other humans in a small area.

The past two centuries, western humans have forged ahead with the Industrial Revolution and we're just now beginning to understand the consequences. I keep thinking about how we're at risk of driving whales to extinction with sonar. There are people working to stop the damage and find better ways of maintaining our lives in a way that still makes sense to us (telling everybody to go back to 18th century agrarianism, let alone hunting/gathering, wouldn't work. People wouldn't be able to do it and that system wouldn't support the population density that's built up as a result of the Industrial Revolution). It'll take another generation or two before we really get on track but I have hope.

...That got really philosophical. I'm going to post it in my own journal too.