Merkabah
- Thread starter Skarekrow
- Start date
Glad you enjoyed them!
Hope you are doing well?
Take care!
Thanks!
Nice avatar!!
The ribbon one is from a young children's book believe it or not...I'm sure many a child were traumatized.
I know that would have messed with my head if I had read such a thing as a kid.
Take care!
Thank you so much for sharing, Skare!
She feels so nervous up there..
I know right?
lol
She totally strikes me as INFJ...what do you think?
What did you think of her talk?
Hope you are doing well with everything?
Much love!
Impact Character
folding paper cranes ⭐
I know right?
lol
She totally strikes me as INFJ...what do you think?
What did you think of her talk?
Hope you are doing well with everything?
Much love!
This is embrassing but when I watched it I had some issues (trouble hearing/understanding English).
Basically something like "Oh, that's not her comfort zone. She is nervous and speaks too fast. Why are there no subtitles? What did she say there? Why is she talking while there are so many information on the screen, pause! Oh, she is reading. Reading is too difficult to understand in oral communication" yadda yadda *sweats* lol
I feel like I couldn't really understand enough technically to make a real and fair statement here..But intuitvely I liked it alot but I need more processing (maybe also research or try again watching it.)
Last week or so (maybe a couple of weeks ago, I don't know), I talked with my SO about vegans, and it was within this context of economy etc..
How people try to actively change how our society works by changing their life style and behavior (detox so to say), and really putting alot of ressources and mind into basically in order to change how that world works, and then the world just takes it and makes another market out of it. The bizarrness of this that is everywhere..(creative energy being sucked out as well).
I think she is definitely intuitive, and stronger on the introverted INFJ side, in that middle/"MBTI" version. The whole time I felt like turning on an ENFJ switch just for that presentation. uff.. so many people.. she has my deepest respect.
The topics she chose make alot of sense from the perspective of an observer dom, especially if it's the reflecting, pattern seeing kind. Ni and Se are in sensitive interplay: "the self" and "the space", therefore the dynamic and interaction between these that pretty much boils down to "it's important where you put your attention/energy in an attention demanding civilization for profit", and connecting it to questions about life and existence, and reconnecting (meditation
) with self/places and people/places.Definitely something the tribe can value, I hope. (at least those who are not extremely practical sensors lol)
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This is embrassing but when I watched it I had some issues (trouble hearing/understanding English).
Basically something like "Oh, that's not her comfort zone. She is nervous and speaks too fast. Why are there no subtitles? What did she say there? Why is she talking while there are so many information on the screen, pause! Oh, she is reading. Reading is too difficult to understand in oral communication" yadda yadda *sweats* lol
I feel like I couldn't really understand enough technically to make a real and fair statement here..But intuitvely I liked it alot but I need more processing (maybe also research or try again watching it.)
Last week or so (maybe a couple of weeks ago, I don't know), I talked with my SO about vegans, and it was within this context of economy etc..
How people try to actively change how our society works by changing their life style and behavior (detox so to say), and really putting alot of ressources and mind into basically in order to change how that world works, and then the world just takes it and makes another market out of it. The bizarrness of this that is everywhere..(creative energy being sucked out as well).
I think she is definitely intuitive, and stronger on the introverted INFJ side, in that middle/"MBTI" version. The whole time I felt like turning on an ENFJ switch just for that presentation. uff.. so many people.. she has my deepest respect.
The topics she chose make alot of sense from the perspective of an observer dom, especially if it's the reflecting, pattern seeing kind. Ni and Se are in sensitive interplay: "the self" and "the space", therefore the dynamic and interaction between these that pretty much boils down to "it's important where you put your attention/energy in an attention demanding civilization for profit", and connecting it to questions about life and existence, and reconnecting (meditation
Definitely something the tribe can value, I hope. (at least those who are not extremely practical sensors lol)
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
Yes, I also thought she had some good insights to share about capitalism co-opting and ruining things that were special in some way...either by overexposure or some profit-driven model.
I would have never thought you had any trouble whatsoever with English...you are really amazing with the language!
Anyhow, I'm very glad that you got something out of it!
I hope you are doing well for yourself and everything is alright?
Much love and take care!
So I bought these yesterday at the store...
@Sensiko says - Is it just me or do the cartoon mandarins look stoned AF?
LMAO
@Sensiko says - Is it just me or do the cartoon mandarins look stoned AF?
LMAO
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Time for some serious strangeness...sorry I've been slacking on the articles.
Enjoy!
Conventionally speaking, there is a single physicist named Sean Carroll at Caltech, busily puzzling over the nature of the quantum world.
In the theoretical sense, though, he may be one of a multitude, each existing in its own world.
And there’s nothing unique about him: Every person, rock, and particle in the universe participates in an endlessly branching reality, Carroll argues, splitting into alternate versions whenever an event occurs that has multiple possible outcomes.
He is well aware that this idea sounds like something from a science fiction movie (and it doesn’t help that he was an advisor on Avengers: Endgame). But these days, a growing number of his colleagues take the idea of multiple worlds seriously.
In his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll proposes that the “Many Worlds Interpretation” is not only a reasonable way to make sense of quantum mechanics, it is the most reasonable way to do so.
Prominent supporters of the Many Worlds Interpretation include physicists David Deutsch at Oxford University and Max Tegmark at MIT.
If they are right, our intuitive sense of how reality works is profoundly wrong.
Then again, some other researchers think that the Many Worlds way of looking at quantum mechanics is misguided, unproductive, or even downright absurd.
To make sense of how the Many Worlds Interpretation works, and what it means for our understanding of the universe, I had a long and mind-bending conversation with Sean Carroll.
A slightly condensed version of it appears below.
Then in my next blog post, I will share a drastically different perspective on quantum mechanics.
The stakes are high in this debate: What’s being contested here is nothing less than the nature of reality!
Let’s begin at the beginning.
What is the Many Worlds Interpretation?
Carroll: It starts with quantum mechanics, which is our best theory of elementary particles and the microscopic world.
There’s this thing in quantum mechanics that says, before you look at an object it’s not in any definite location.
It’s in a wave that you can think of as a superposition [overlap] of all the different locations it could be in.
So it might be more likely than you observe it in one place or another, but it’s not actually located at any particular place until you observe it.
It’s really weird to think that the behavior of this thing is different depending on whether you’re looking at it or not.
That’s the fundamental weirdness of quantum mechanics: that objects behave one way when you’re not looking at them, in another way when you are.
Agreed, quantum physics is weird.
How does the Many Worlds Interpretation help you make sense of it?
Many Worlds says that what actually happens when you look at the electron, it’s not that there’s some sudden transition where boom, it’s in one location that happens to be where you saw it.
Instead, it’s that the world branches into copies—one where the electron was here and you saw it here, another copy where the electron was there and you saw it there, and so forth.
This is not just wild speculation, this is exactly what is predicted by the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.
Everyone agrees that quantum systems obey the Schrödinger equations when you’re not looking at them.
Many Worlds just says that they also obey the Schrödinger equation when you are.
Every other approach to quantum mechanics has to make things more complicated by saying, no, there’s something special that happens when you look at them.
Maybe that’s possible, but if there’s no need for that–if there’s no empirical benefit to saying that, and there’s no metaphysical benefit to saying that–then why say it?
The formulation of the Many Worlds Interpretation is the simplest version of quantum mechanics that there can be.
The price you pay is that there are a lot of worlds.
But that’s like saying, there’s an infinite number of numbers in the number line.
That doesn’t stop us from using the concept of a number line.
Likewise, in quantum mechanics there’s one concept, the wave function obeying the Schrödinger equation.
You can’t get simpler than that.
Let’s say I accept that Many Worlds applies to electrons and atoms.
How does it apply to people?
Do we keep getting new copies of ourselves?
It’s all the same.
Many Worlds says, look, if an electron can be in a superposition, you can, too.
You’re made of electrons, atoms, and stuff like that, so you can be in superposition.
Does that mean that there’s an infinite variety of “you”s making an infinite variety of different decisions?
Is that a valid interpretation?
It’s almost valid, with a couple footnotes.
One is that the crucially important point that the worlds don’t branch because you made a decision.
The one thing that is great about the Many Worlds Interpretation is that it’s absolutely unambiguous about when worlds do branch, which is when a small quantum system that is in a superposition becomes entangled with the wider world.
This is, again, something that is just described by the Schrödinger equation.
You don’t have to use words like “measurement” or “observation” at some fundamental level to define it.
You can derive it.
The famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment could be an example of how the universe splits.
The living and the dead cats may both exist, but in separate realities.
I want to come back to that word “entangled.”
What exactly does it mean, and how do you know when something is or isn’t entangled with the world around it?
That’s a great question, and here’s the problem.
Mathematically, I can define it in two seconds; it’s very easy.
If you want me to define it in words, then I have to use words like “were you to observe it…”
Here’s a key point.
There’s never just a single electron.
It has a wave function, which means it’s spread out all over the place, meaning it’s in a superposition of being in different places.
The same thing is true for every electron in the universe.
There’s only one state for the whole universe.
We call it, cleverly, the “wave function of the universe.”
Hugh Everett, who invented the Many Worlds Interpretation, was one of the people who first pointed this out.
If you interpret this wave function as telling you about what the possible observational outcomes are, they can be correlated.
You might not know where one electron is, and you might not know whether the other electron is, but you know that they’re in the same place.
Then if you observe one, you know where the other one’s going to be.
That’s what entanglement is.
That’s a tough concept, at least when you put it into words.
Since there are an awful lot of particles getting entangled all the time, are there an infinite number of versions of the universe?
We don’t know whether the number of worlds is finite or infinite.
That’s not something that the state of our knowledge is good enough to answer.
I think that physicists should be kind of embarrassed that they haven’t thought about this harder.
It’s certainly a very large number of worlds, let’s put it that way.
There’s no way it’s like…five.
It’s definitely a bigger number than that.
How should we interpret all those different worlds?
Are they all equally real?
They all have equal validity, but validity is not really the right word here.
Some branches of the wave function–some worlds–count for more than others.
That’s why, when we observe a quantum system, we can say, well, there’s a two thirds probability of seeing this but only a one-third probability of seeing that.
There’s more weight attached to the one possibility than the other.
The single biggest worry about Many Worlds is that it can’t answer the question of where the probabilities come from.
But this is all perfectly well-defined mathematically.
I can’t help noticing that we experience one reality, one world only.
Why is that?
Where do all the other worlds go?
You mean, Why you find yourself in one world rather than any other?
Well, what other one would you find yourself in?
It’s like asking, given all the time that existed in the past and will exist in the future, why do we live now?
Everyone at every moment thinks they live “now.”
Everyone in every world thinks that they’re in the one and only world.
I don’t know how else it could be.
Knowing that those other realities exist naturally makes me wonder whether it’s possible to cross over and visit one of them, the way you see in science-fiction movies.
Could you do that?
You can imagine what you’d like to do it, but it’s not physically possible.
It’s like traveling faster than the speed of light: It’s not something that you can actually do.
This is exactly why the different parts of the quantum wave function count as separate worlds.
Once they come into existence, they go their own way.
They don’t interact, they don’t communicate, they don’t influence each other in any form.
How do you reconcile Many Worlds with conservation of energy?
Aren’t you constantly bringing new worlds into existence?
It looks like you’re creating extra copies of the universe, but energy is actually 100 percent conserved in Many Worlds.
You’re not really creating new universes.
It’s better to think of it as taking a big, thick universe and slicing it, differentiating it into multiple copies, each one of which is thinner than the other one.
That’s a rough, intuitive analogy, but it’s backed up by the math.
It’s like you take one world and you split it into two.
That’s literally the word that Hugh Everett used when he talked about this–he talked about “splitting” the universe.
It’s not like a Xerox machine where you now have two copies of what you once had.
It’s not like the other worlds are located somewhere.
But still, in Many Worlds, those other worlds are real alternate possibilities that contain real alternate versions of you.
Those other versions of you could have led different lives, making different decisions, right?
Yeah.
I want to emphasize that it’s not your decisions that make the universe branch.
But it’s absolutely possible that something happens in your brain that branches into two different quantum possibilities, and we interpret those differences in the macroscopic world as different decisions being made.
So it’s absolutely possible that there are multiple worlds where you made different decisions.
There is an app you can download for your iPhone that will offload your difficult decisions to a quantum measurement device.
If you have two choices to make, you can just send it to this app, cleverly called Universe Splitter, and it will tell you which branch of the wave function you’re in.
It’s fun to think about, but if you could experience other versions of yourself, they wouldn’t really be other worlds.
Enjoy!
Endless Versions of You in Endless Parallel Universes?
A Growing Number of Physicists Embrace the Idea.
A Growing Number of Physicists Embrace the Idea.
Conventionally speaking, there is a single physicist named Sean Carroll at Caltech, busily puzzling over the nature of the quantum world.
In the theoretical sense, though, he may be one of a multitude, each existing in its own world.
And there’s nothing unique about him: Every person, rock, and particle in the universe participates in an endlessly branching reality, Carroll argues, splitting into alternate versions whenever an event occurs that has multiple possible outcomes.
He is well aware that this idea sounds like something from a science fiction movie (and it doesn’t help that he was an advisor on Avengers: Endgame). But these days, a growing number of his colleagues take the idea of multiple worlds seriously.
In his new book, Something Deeply Hidden, Carroll proposes that the “Many Worlds Interpretation” is not only a reasonable way to make sense of quantum mechanics, it is the most reasonable way to do so.
Prominent supporters of the Many Worlds Interpretation include physicists David Deutsch at Oxford University and Max Tegmark at MIT.
If they are right, our intuitive sense of how reality works is profoundly wrong.
Then again, some other researchers think that the Many Worlds way of looking at quantum mechanics is misguided, unproductive, or even downright absurd.
To make sense of how the Many Worlds Interpretation works, and what it means for our understanding of the universe, I had a long and mind-bending conversation with Sean Carroll.
A slightly condensed version of it appears below.
Then in my next blog post, I will share a drastically different perspective on quantum mechanics.
The stakes are high in this debate: What’s being contested here is nothing less than the nature of reality!
Let’s begin at the beginning.
What is the Many Worlds Interpretation?
Carroll: It starts with quantum mechanics, which is our best theory of elementary particles and the microscopic world.
There’s this thing in quantum mechanics that says, before you look at an object it’s not in any definite location.
It’s in a wave that you can think of as a superposition [overlap] of all the different locations it could be in.
So it might be more likely than you observe it in one place or another, but it’s not actually located at any particular place until you observe it.
It’s really weird to think that the behavior of this thing is different depending on whether you’re looking at it or not.
That’s the fundamental weirdness of quantum mechanics: that objects behave one way when you’re not looking at them, in another way when you are.
Agreed, quantum physics is weird.
How does the Many Worlds Interpretation help you make sense of it?
Many Worlds says that what actually happens when you look at the electron, it’s not that there’s some sudden transition where boom, it’s in one location that happens to be where you saw it.
Instead, it’s that the world branches into copies—one where the electron was here and you saw it here, another copy where the electron was there and you saw it there, and so forth.
This is not just wild speculation, this is exactly what is predicted by the fundamental equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation.
Everyone agrees that quantum systems obey the Schrödinger equations when you’re not looking at them.
Many Worlds just says that they also obey the Schrödinger equation when you are.
Every other approach to quantum mechanics has to make things more complicated by saying, no, there’s something special that happens when you look at them.
Maybe that’s possible, but if there’s no need for that–if there’s no empirical benefit to saying that, and there’s no metaphysical benefit to saying that–then why say it?
The formulation of the Many Worlds Interpretation is the simplest version of quantum mechanics that there can be.
The price you pay is that there are a lot of worlds.
But that’s like saying, there’s an infinite number of numbers in the number line.
That doesn’t stop us from using the concept of a number line.
Likewise, in quantum mechanics there’s one concept, the wave function obeying the Schrödinger equation.
You can’t get simpler than that.
Let’s say I accept that Many Worlds applies to electrons and atoms.
How does it apply to people?
Do we keep getting new copies of ourselves?
It’s all the same.
Many Worlds says, look, if an electron can be in a superposition, you can, too.
You’re made of electrons, atoms, and stuff like that, so you can be in superposition.
Does that mean that there’s an infinite variety of “you”s making an infinite variety of different decisions?
Is that a valid interpretation?
It’s almost valid, with a couple footnotes.
One is that the crucially important point that the worlds don’t branch because you made a decision.
The one thing that is great about the Many Worlds Interpretation is that it’s absolutely unambiguous about when worlds do branch, which is when a small quantum system that is in a superposition becomes entangled with the wider world.
This is, again, something that is just described by the Schrödinger equation.
You don’t have to use words like “measurement” or “observation” at some fundamental level to define it.
You can derive it.
The famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment could be an example of how the universe splits.
The living and the dead cats may both exist, but in separate realities.
I want to come back to that word “entangled.”
What exactly does it mean, and how do you know when something is or isn’t entangled with the world around it?
That’s a great question, and here’s the problem.
Mathematically, I can define it in two seconds; it’s very easy.
If you want me to define it in words, then I have to use words like “were you to observe it…”
Here’s a key point.
There’s never just a single electron.
It has a wave function, which means it’s spread out all over the place, meaning it’s in a superposition of being in different places.
The same thing is true for every electron in the universe.
There’s only one state for the whole universe.
We call it, cleverly, the “wave function of the universe.”
Hugh Everett, who invented the Many Worlds Interpretation, was one of the people who first pointed this out.
If you interpret this wave function as telling you about what the possible observational outcomes are, they can be correlated.
You might not know where one electron is, and you might not know whether the other electron is, but you know that they’re in the same place.
Then if you observe one, you know where the other one’s going to be.
That’s what entanglement is.
That’s a tough concept, at least when you put it into words.
Since there are an awful lot of particles getting entangled all the time, are there an infinite number of versions of the universe?
We don’t know whether the number of worlds is finite or infinite.
That’s not something that the state of our knowledge is good enough to answer.
I think that physicists should be kind of embarrassed that they haven’t thought about this harder.
It’s certainly a very large number of worlds, let’s put it that way.
There’s no way it’s like…five.
It’s definitely a bigger number than that.
How should we interpret all those different worlds?
Are they all equally real?
They all have equal validity, but validity is not really the right word here.
Some branches of the wave function–some worlds–count for more than others.
That’s why, when we observe a quantum system, we can say, well, there’s a two thirds probability of seeing this but only a one-third probability of seeing that.
There’s more weight attached to the one possibility than the other.
The single biggest worry about Many Worlds is that it can’t answer the question of where the probabilities come from.
But this is all perfectly well-defined mathematically.
I can’t help noticing that we experience one reality, one world only.
Why is that?
Where do all the other worlds go?
You mean, Why you find yourself in one world rather than any other?
Well, what other one would you find yourself in?
It’s like asking, given all the time that existed in the past and will exist in the future, why do we live now?
Everyone at every moment thinks they live “now.”
Everyone in every world thinks that they’re in the one and only world.
I don’t know how else it could be.
Knowing that those other realities exist naturally makes me wonder whether it’s possible to cross over and visit one of them, the way you see in science-fiction movies.
Could you do that?
You can imagine what you’d like to do it, but it’s not physically possible.
It’s like traveling faster than the speed of light: It’s not something that you can actually do.
This is exactly why the different parts of the quantum wave function count as separate worlds.
Once they come into existence, they go their own way.
They don’t interact, they don’t communicate, they don’t influence each other in any form.
How do you reconcile Many Worlds with conservation of energy?
Aren’t you constantly bringing new worlds into existence?
It looks like you’re creating extra copies of the universe, but energy is actually 100 percent conserved in Many Worlds.
You’re not really creating new universes.
It’s better to think of it as taking a big, thick universe and slicing it, differentiating it into multiple copies, each one of which is thinner than the other one.
That’s a rough, intuitive analogy, but it’s backed up by the math.
It’s like you take one world and you split it into two.
That’s literally the word that Hugh Everett used when he talked about this–he talked about “splitting” the universe.
It’s not like a Xerox machine where you now have two copies of what you once had.
It’s not like the other worlds are located somewhere.
But still, in Many Worlds, those other worlds are real alternate possibilities that contain real alternate versions of you.
Those other versions of you could have led different lives, making different decisions, right?
Yeah.
I want to emphasize that it’s not your decisions that make the universe branch.
But it’s absolutely possible that something happens in your brain that branches into two different quantum possibilities, and we interpret those differences in the macroscopic world as different decisions being made.
So it’s absolutely possible that there are multiple worlds where you made different decisions.
There is an app you can download for your iPhone that will offload your difficult decisions to a quantum measurement device.
If you have two choices to make, you can just send it to this app, cleverly called Universe Splitter, and it will tell you which branch of the wave function you’re in.
It’s fun to think about, but if you could experience other versions of yourself, they wouldn’t really be other worlds.
Seems familiar...
There are many haunted places in this world, which have filled tomes and tomes worth of literature on the matter.
Places seem to indeed be hauntable, but what about actual people?
Can a person be haunted, a spirit or some other entity attached to them and following them around like a shadow?
There is indeed a phenomenon in the paranormal world which covers this, and here are some spooky accounts of people who seem to have picked up phantom hitchhikers that will not leave them alone.
The concept of what are called “spirit attachments” concerns an alleged phenomenon in which a ghost, spirit, or even demon or some other supernatural entity essentially attaches itself and even partially possesses a living person, following them around wherever they go and influencing them in a variety of ways.
In a sense, rather than a building or other location becoming haunted the person themselves become haunted, and this can be for a variety of supposed reasons.
Sometimes the ghost just wants to try and live in the physical world and relive the sensations that it knew in life, while in others might be trying to contact the living for some reason.
It also might also be a decidedly more malevolent force, like a parasite feeding off the energy of the host or even a sinister entity seeking to fully possess or otherwise harm the “host.”
Others still might have more benign purposes, such as looking out for a host they have taken a liking to like some sort of guardian angel.
It really seems to depend on just what you have managed to attract to yourself.
Depending on the type that has decided to follow the host around, these attachments can run the range from rather pleasant, to annoying, to downright terrifying, and these sorts of hauntings are said to potentially go on for anywhere from days to years and years, even full lifetimes, basically until the ghost gets bored, moves on, or is cast out somehow.
In some cases, the spirit is believed to not even know that it is attached to someone, while in others these spirits actively seek people out to attach to.
For those who don’t know anything about this phenomenon it can all be a rather harrowing experience, and can manifest in peculiar ways, such as personality changes, physical or mental ailments, picking up new habits good or bad or even obtaining new memories or skills, mood swings, potent dreams, often of places the host has never been to, conversely lucid nightmares, as well as intense poltergeist activity, shadow figures always lurking about, or other varied paranormal phenomena.
Even facial features have been known to noticeably change depending on how far along the possession is, and it can all be very frightening indeed.
In most cases the spirit seems to be constantly following the host about and often harassing them in some way.
A good example of this is an account given by Reddit user “byoung006,” who says that he picked up some sort of hitchhiking entity while working at a local pub.
He claims that the building was over 100 years old, and that while there had always been some odd unexplained phenomena at the place, it really ramped up when it was renovated, and led to something he believes attached to him.
He says:
As they started to renovate the building lots of employees started to have some strange experiences.
Often the grill would be turned off in the middle of service.
Bottles in the fridge would fall off the shelf, or be rearranged and none of the employees were involved with anything.
I started feeling like there was something with me in about the second week of renovation.
I would walk home and constantly feel like someone was walking behind me.
Then I felt like there was a constant feeling of dread and I fell into this dark depression.
I became irrationally angry, which is quite out of character for me, and many other employees had the same experience.
Eventually the owners made the decision to have a monk who deals in the spirit world do a walk through and cleansing due to the amount of people who fell into a depression and couldn’t properly do their jobs.
He said later that he encountered 28 different spirits during his walk, 7 of which were dark, or “evil” entities.
I went to him and he explained to me that I had one of these spirits attached to me.
He did a cleansing of my body and removed the entity.
When he removed it I felt the dark feeling fall away.
There was a tingling feeling move from my feet up to the top of my head, and I immediately felt lighter and the feeling of dread left me.
In this case the witness says the attachment followed him for a week, but the phenomenon can go on for much longer than that.
One Reddit user called “Asteria1998” claims that she has had a very intrusive attachment hovering about her for many years.
She says it started out small and escalated in intensity, and explains that it is sort of a symbiotic relationship in a sense.
She says of her experience the gradual increase in intensity it involved:
It started when I was younger, mostly as intrusive thoughts.
A thought would pop into my head that was extremely out of character for me and I would even question my own desires in ways I’d never thought of (things like power fantasies and sexual desires).
I started getting this feeling in my chest that’s kind of hard to describe but I’ll try my best.
It’s like this electric current that pulses out from the center of my chest to the rest of my body.
This doesn’t necessarily hurt but it isn’t exactly comfortable either (although it’s almost pleasurable). I
t started out small but as I got older it became more and more intense and frequent as did the thoughts.
I guess I should also try and explain the weird pseudo-relationship I’ve developed with him (it? This? I’m not sure how to refer to it.)
His voice started quiet and I’d usually confuse it with my own.
As I got older, it became clearer and clearer to the point where I knew I wasn’t making it up.
I decided to get evaluated because surely something had to be wrong with me but they decided it was most likely due to stress or a lack of sleep.
I don’t think calling it a possession is accurate because it’s like we’re sharing control. I
can feel what makes him excited or angry and more than anything I can feel his extreme pride.
Sometimes it feels like he takes partial control of my body and actions, almost like we’re sharing a consciousness.
She goes on to say that she almost enjoys it when this entity takes over, as she describes herself as nervous and meek, whereas it is very confident and in control, and this infuses her with a sense of power that can be intoxicating.
In a sense, although it is terrifying at times for her she doesn’t seem to really want to be rid of this spirit or whatever it is, yet she is aware that it is leading towards further intensity and that she is unsure of how this will all end up.
The witness ominously says of this:
It feels he’s trying to bring me to this tipping point but I have no idea what’ll come after that. I’m almost curious what could happen if I just let him do what he wants but am more scared of what would happen to me.
Another witness who seems to have had an attachment for many years and has a rather odd relationship with it is a witness on Your Ghost Stories, whose own attachment is described as being both frightening and comforting at the same time, depending on the situation.
She says that it began with a sort of shadow figure appearing in her room at night right around when she was in her early teens, of which she says:
I first grew aware of his presence when I began puberty.
This time period, he was the most aggressive.
I remember laying in bed and watching a black mass of a man walk around my room.
The crunch of the papers I had on the floor would crunch under his feet.
At times, I thought this was a living human that had snuck in, but with the lights on, he would disappear.
My bed would violently shake and at times, my hard to open drawers on my nightstand would fly open and slam shut.
Books would be thrown at my head some mornings and other times, I would just cover my head and shut my eyes tight and pray it will go away.
I am born and raised in California and have had my fair share of earthquakes, so I know what to look for and none of that was part of an earthquake.
He would often times appear to me the night before something bad would happen.
The first time, my mother got into a car accident with a semi-truck.
The second time, my grandma was sent to the hospital with kidney failure.
The next time, the place next to ours got broken into and ransacked.
The last time he appeared to me in an aggressive way, the hotel across the street caught on fire.
I don’t believe that this was his causing, but him warning me.
She says the menacing spirit made a habit of following her around wherever she went, often speaking into her ear to startle her.
He would also appear in her dreams, sometimes in a decidedly sexual manner, and that these dreams were extremely vivid and realistic.
This entity then seemed to have gone dormant for some years and she almost forgot about it all until she was living with her husband, and they began to experience paranormal activity such as shadow figures, moving objects, and something that would spook their dog for no reason they could detect.
It would all pick up in intensity when she got pregnant with their first child, of which she says:
Things became dormant for a while, but then I got pregnant with our daughter.
He started to make his appearance again.
But once again it had more of a loving feel to it.
I was sent to the hospital with premature labor and I squeezed my eyes during a labor pain and when I opened them, I saw him there standing by my bed, smiling affectionately at me.
I closed my eyes with another contraction and when I opened them, he was gone.
I was worried that he would latch on to my daughter, but he has been acting like she is his own.
She is 8 months now, but was born with a rare genetic disorder, so she is very small and a bit behind.
I would walk in on her squealing and playing with someone or something above her.
She would have her blankets in a ball under her and I would check and the blankets would be draped around her and tucked in.
She doesn’t have the abilities to do that and I was the only one at home.
I wish to know what he is and what he truly wants.
I’ve grown affectionate of him, but scared at the same time.
While this all seems almost benevolent in nature, although definately unsettling, there are other cases where the attachment is anything but friendly.
A creepy account was given by Reddit user “rchl_ann00,” who claims that she has had the spirit following her around for 7 years, and that it manifested itself in the form of all manner of paranormal activity wherever she would go.
While this was mostly creepy but innocuous things such as moving objects and the opening or closing doors, and indeed seemed almost playful, its demeanor would one day suddenly become decidedly more sinister.
The witness says:
After 3 months of this I BELIEVED and we settled into life with a ghost that played with the dog and walked our hallways.
But for some reason he decided (I later learned it was a he i will explain in a bit) that he didn’t like me.
It started with him opening my bedroom door while i was out and opening all the cabinets in the bathroom and spilling my pill bottles.
These bottles are the pharmacy bottle that you have to pinch the sides and twist to open, they don’t just pop open.
I had to get up very early in he mornings to get ready for work and i’m a deep sleeper and it takes me awhile to wake up.
I would stumble across the hall to the bathroom and slam my leg into open cabinets and have to sit on the floor to pick up my medications.
It happened so often but my still asleep brain would apparently forget and hit those cabinets at least 3 times a week.
The front of my lower legs were covered in bruises.
He escalated one day and I felt a full on slap on my back while i was in the shower while I was facing the water stream, I jumped out of the shower and ran out of the bathroom with just a towel.
My best friends boyfriend had just come home and when I spazzed to him about what happened he checked my back and saw a hand print.
4 days later I had a heart episode that landed me in the hospital for 3 days.
I HAVE NEVER HAD HEART ISSUES BEFORE THAT DAY.
My pulse jumped to 150 BPM and I lost consciousness my mother found me in the living room (I was feeling faint that day and asked her to pick me up and take me to my GP) and got me to a hospital where it wasn’t until the 3rd day that my pulse went back below 90.
Ever since that day I have had arrythmia and syncopal episodes, its nearly debilitating with how often it happens.
She would move out and go to live with her boyfriend, but the strange phenomena would continue and indeed get worse, as would her health condition, which still plagues her and which she is convinced is caused by the attachment.
She is rather morose and fearful when she ends her post thusly:
After 2 years of living there my ex and I broke up and I moved out of state.
I moved to Cali where my brother offered to help me get my life re-started.
By this point my medical issues had progressed and I ended up needing a service dog.
She is always by my side and at the same time I feel him near she reacts and focuses in the direction of where I can feel him.
Sometimes a far corner or behind me.
He never gets close when she’s by my side but he’s always around.
Its when I feel him that I start to have my heart episodes and Im afraid he’s been causing them, I’m afraid he’s going to escalate more.
My current BF and I have moved from Cali to Utah.
The house/land we live on has been in his family for over 100 years and there are spirits here.
They are neutral and I have no problem with them but he is here too.
He has been attached to me for 7 years now and is always close.
He’s mean.
My BF wants to smudge me with sage and I have asked, begged and demanded he leave me alone but he never leaves.
WHAT CAN I DO?
These negative spirit attachments are often described as taking their toll on the health and mental well-being of the individual being targeted and invaded, and this can be seen in a report by Reddit user “Balgoth55.”
He rather spookily claims that his attachment came about after using a Ouija board, actually sometimes said to be a wellspring of spirit attachments, and that the dark forces following him were not at all friendly, slowly draining him and wasting him away physically and psychologically.
The witness explains:
I started having vivid nightmares like a movie screen on the back on my eyelids every time I’d go to sleep.
One night I had a dream where I stumbled over a block and woke up to a high pitched ringing or like a gnat buzzing inside my ear.
As I opened my eyes I saw an expressionless pale ghost standing by my bed looking at me.
I rolled over and pulled the cover over me until morning.
I still thought that it must just be sleep deprivation or something psychological… Because science says spirits don’t exist right?
Well, the negative air followed me everywhere for years.
Eventually I talked to a few psychics who cold read that I had three dark spirits that had been following me.
Lately I’ve become more open to the reality of the spiritual and also more lucid in my dreams.
I’ve been experiencing the feeling of being pushed downstairs or hit, which usually wakes me up in a bit of a startle, and I always feel super drained the next day.
I’ve actually suffered from chronic fatigue for the past ten years, despite all healthy lifestyle changes, and I’m wondering if it’s connected.
The number three keeps appearing in them.
I actually just woke up from a minor nightmare where I saw three “spirits” though invisible, and felt one push me.
In another report we have a witness whose mother had just spent some time in a hospital, and that on the day she was scheduled to go home she was in good spirits and her health had improved considerably, but things would suddenly take a turn for the worse.
He says:
However, about an hour before she was to go home she suddenly felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach and she became nauseous and extremely weak.
Her doctor released her anyway and we took her to my sister and brother-in-law’s home to recuperate.
By the time we got her settled in all she could do is lay on the couch with her eyes closed.
After about an hour my brother-in-law and I gently lifted her up in order to take her upstairs and put her to bed.
As we got her to her feet she suddenly started to fall straight backwards almost as if someone had pushed her.
Thankfully, my brother-in-law caught her in time but as he steadied her onto her feet I saw a gray mist or smoke leave my mother’s chest area.
The best way I can describe it is if you can imagine someone smoking a pipe has just exhaled the smoke from their mouth.
The smoke drifted away from her and disappeared.
At the time I was mystified as to what I had just witnessed.
I knew I hadn’t imagined it and none of us smokes.
The next day my mother wasn’t doing much better and we were perplexed as to why there was this sudden downturn in her health.
I didn’t say anything about the smoke to my family because I suspected they would assume I had imagined it.
However, it finally dawned on me that what had occurred is that I had witnessed a spirit attachment.
I couldn’t believe it took me that long to figure it out.
Once I figured it out, I told my family about my experience.
As it turns out, my sister had seen the smoke as well but didn’t say anything assuming it was her eyes playing tricks on her.
The witness goes on to explain that he had his mother and whole house cleansed with white sage, which seems to have done the trick, his mother’s health dramatically improving after that.
He also asserts that hospitals are havens for spirits looking to attach themselves to someone, with these entities roaming the halls and taking advantage of people in their physically and mentally vulnerable states, which makes it easier for them to take hold.
He gives a stark warning about this, saying:
So please take heed of this cautionary tale.
Any time you find yourself inside a hospital for any reason assume that you’re taking home a spirit hitchhiker.
The symptoms can vary so you may not experience the same ones that my mother did.
They can be as simple as causing insomnia or forgetfulness or as serious as weakening your immune system making you susceptible to illness and disease.
Just spend a few minutes kindly talking to them telling them they cannot go home with you and that they have family, pets, and friends waiting for them in the Light and that they need to look for the Light or these loved ones who will guide them to their true home.
Spirits can remain attached for a long time so even if it’s been a while since visiting a hospital it’s never too late to release anyone who may still be around you.
By doing so you may be pleasantly surprised to have a long term problem resolve itself.
What do these attachments want?
What are they and where do they come from?
Why do they choose to follow people around to torment them so?
Are they even real at all?
There are only ideas and speculation, but one thing that is for certain is that for many people out there they seem to be very real indeed.
What can you do to stop this from happening to you?
It is recommended that you do not enter haunted areas without proper protection and that you always maintain good physical and mental health when visiting such locales.
It is also often said that one should pay attention to the warning signs of a spiritual infestation, such as sudden mood swings, personality changes, recurring paranormal phenomena wherever you go, and strange physical symptoms that cannot be readily explained.
If you do feel you are the host of a spiritual attachment, well, it is best that you purify yourself and seek help from a specialist in such things, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
Are spiritual attachments real and what do they mean?
They remain another strange oddity of that realm that eludes us.
Frightening Experiences with Spiritual Attachments
There are many haunted places in this world, which have filled tomes and tomes worth of literature on the matter.
Places seem to indeed be hauntable, but what about actual people?
Can a person be haunted, a spirit or some other entity attached to them and following them around like a shadow?
There is indeed a phenomenon in the paranormal world which covers this, and here are some spooky accounts of people who seem to have picked up phantom hitchhikers that will not leave them alone.
The concept of what are called “spirit attachments” concerns an alleged phenomenon in which a ghost, spirit, or even demon or some other supernatural entity essentially attaches itself and even partially possesses a living person, following them around wherever they go and influencing them in a variety of ways.
In a sense, rather than a building or other location becoming haunted the person themselves become haunted, and this can be for a variety of supposed reasons.
Sometimes the ghost just wants to try and live in the physical world and relive the sensations that it knew in life, while in others might be trying to contact the living for some reason.
It also might also be a decidedly more malevolent force, like a parasite feeding off the energy of the host or even a sinister entity seeking to fully possess or otherwise harm the “host.”
Others still might have more benign purposes, such as looking out for a host they have taken a liking to like some sort of guardian angel.
It really seems to depend on just what you have managed to attract to yourself.
Depending on the type that has decided to follow the host around, these attachments can run the range from rather pleasant, to annoying, to downright terrifying, and these sorts of hauntings are said to potentially go on for anywhere from days to years and years, even full lifetimes, basically until the ghost gets bored, moves on, or is cast out somehow.
In some cases, the spirit is believed to not even know that it is attached to someone, while in others these spirits actively seek people out to attach to.
For those who don’t know anything about this phenomenon it can all be a rather harrowing experience, and can manifest in peculiar ways, such as personality changes, physical or mental ailments, picking up new habits good or bad or even obtaining new memories or skills, mood swings, potent dreams, often of places the host has never been to, conversely lucid nightmares, as well as intense poltergeist activity, shadow figures always lurking about, or other varied paranormal phenomena.
Even facial features have been known to noticeably change depending on how far along the possession is, and it can all be very frightening indeed.
In most cases the spirit seems to be constantly following the host about and often harassing them in some way.
A good example of this is an account given by Reddit user “byoung006,” who says that he picked up some sort of hitchhiking entity while working at a local pub.
He claims that the building was over 100 years old, and that while there had always been some odd unexplained phenomena at the place, it really ramped up when it was renovated, and led to something he believes attached to him.
He says:
As they started to renovate the building lots of employees started to have some strange experiences.
Often the grill would be turned off in the middle of service.
Bottles in the fridge would fall off the shelf, or be rearranged and none of the employees were involved with anything.
I started feeling like there was something with me in about the second week of renovation.
I would walk home and constantly feel like someone was walking behind me.
Then I felt like there was a constant feeling of dread and I fell into this dark depression.
I became irrationally angry, which is quite out of character for me, and many other employees had the same experience.
Eventually the owners made the decision to have a monk who deals in the spirit world do a walk through and cleansing due to the amount of people who fell into a depression and couldn’t properly do their jobs.
He said later that he encountered 28 different spirits during his walk, 7 of which were dark, or “evil” entities.
I went to him and he explained to me that I had one of these spirits attached to me.
He did a cleansing of my body and removed the entity.
When he removed it I felt the dark feeling fall away.
There was a tingling feeling move from my feet up to the top of my head, and I immediately felt lighter and the feeling of dread left me.
In this case the witness says the attachment followed him for a week, but the phenomenon can go on for much longer than that.
One Reddit user called “Asteria1998” claims that she has had a very intrusive attachment hovering about her for many years.
She says it started out small and escalated in intensity, and explains that it is sort of a symbiotic relationship in a sense.
She says of her experience the gradual increase in intensity it involved:
It started when I was younger, mostly as intrusive thoughts.
A thought would pop into my head that was extremely out of character for me and I would even question my own desires in ways I’d never thought of (things like power fantasies and sexual desires).
I started getting this feeling in my chest that’s kind of hard to describe but I’ll try my best.
It’s like this electric current that pulses out from the center of my chest to the rest of my body.
This doesn’t necessarily hurt but it isn’t exactly comfortable either (although it’s almost pleasurable). I
t started out small but as I got older it became more and more intense and frequent as did the thoughts.
Now, it’s sometimes so strong that I can hardly breathe and it feels like I lose all control of my body
I guess I should also try and explain the weird pseudo-relationship I’ve developed with him (it? This? I’m not sure how to refer to it.)
His voice started quiet and I’d usually confuse it with my own.
As I got older, it became clearer and clearer to the point where I knew I wasn’t making it up.
I decided to get evaluated because surely something had to be wrong with me but they decided it was most likely due to stress or a lack of sleep.
I don’t think calling it a possession is accurate because it’s like we’re sharing control. I
can feel what makes him excited or angry and more than anything I can feel his extreme pride.
Sometimes it feels like he takes partial control of my body and actions, almost like we’re sharing a consciousness.
She goes on to say that she almost enjoys it when this entity takes over, as she describes herself as nervous and meek, whereas it is very confident and in control, and this infuses her with a sense of power that can be intoxicating.
In a sense, although it is terrifying at times for her she doesn’t seem to really want to be rid of this spirit or whatever it is, yet she is aware that it is leading towards further intensity and that she is unsure of how this will all end up.
The witness ominously says of this:
It feels he’s trying to bring me to this tipping point but I have no idea what’ll come after that. I’m almost curious what could happen if I just let him do what he wants but am more scared of what would happen to me.
Another witness who seems to have had an attachment for many years and has a rather odd relationship with it is a witness on Your Ghost Stories, whose own attachment is described as being both frightening and comforting at the same time, depending on the situation.
She says that it began with a sort of shadow figure appearing in her room at night right around when she was in her early teens, of which she says:
I first grew aware of his presence when I began puberty.
This time period, he was the most aggressive.
I remember laying in bed and watching a black mass of a man walk around my room.
The crunch of the papers I had on the floor would crunch under his feet.
At times, I thought this was a living human that had snuck in, but with the lights on, he would disappear.
My bed would violently shake and at times, my hard to open drawers on my nightstand would fly open and slam shut.
Books would be thrown at my head some mornings and other times, I would just cover my head and shut my eyes tight and pray it will go away.
I am born and raised in California and have had my fair share of earthquakes, so I know what to look for and none of that was part of an earthquake.
He would often times appear to me the night before something bad would happen.
The first time, my mother got into a car accident with a semi-truck.
The second time, my grandma was sent to the hospital with kidney failure.
The next time, the place next to ours got broken into and ransacked.
The last time he appeared to me in an aggressive way, the hotel across the street caught on fire.
I don’t believe that this was his causing, but him warning me.
She says the menacing spirit made a habit of following her around wherever she went, often speaking into her ear to startle her.
He would also appear in her dreams, sometimes in a decidedly sexual manner, and that these dreams were extremely vivid and realistic.
This entity then seemed to have gone dormant for some years and she almost forgot about it all until she was living with her husband, and they began to experience paranormal activity such as shadow figures, moving objects, and something that would spook their dog for no reason they could detect.
It would all pick up in intensity when she got pregnant with their first child, of which she says:
Things became dormant for a while, but then I got pregnant with our daughter.
He started to make his appearance again.
But once again it had more of a loving feel to it.
I was sent to the hospital with premature labor and I squeezed my eyes during a labor pain and when I opened them, I saw him there standing by my bed, smiling affectionately at me.
I closed my eyes with another contraction and when I opened them, he was gone.
I was worried that he would latch on to my daughter, but he has been acting like she is his own.
She is 8 months now, but was born with a rare genetic disorder, so she is very small and a bit behind.
I would walk in on her squealing and playing with someone or something above her.
She would have her blankets in a ball under her and I would check and the blankets would be draped around her and tucked in.
She doesn’t have the abilities to do that and I was the only one at home.
I wish to know what he is and what he truly wants.
I’ve grown affectionate of him, but scared at the same time.
While this all seems almost benevolent in nature, although definately unsettling, there are other cases where the attachment is anything but friendly.
A creepy account was given by Reddit user “rchl_ann00,” who claims that she has had the spirit following her around for 7 years, and that it manifested itself in the form of all manner of paranormal activity wherever she would go.
While this was mostly creepy but innocuous things such as moving objects and the opening or closing doors, and indeed seemed almost playful, its demeanor would one day suddenly become decidedly more sinister.
The witness says:
After 3 months of this I BELIEVED and we settled into life with a ghost that played with the dog and walked our hallways.
But for some reason he decided (I later learned it was a he i will explain in a bit) that he didn’t like me.
It started with him opening my bedroom door while i was out and opening all the cabinets in the bathroom and spilling my pill bottles.
These bottles are the pharmacy bottle that you have to pinch the sides and twist to open, they don’t just pop open.
I had to get up very early in he mornings to get ready for work and i’m a deep sleeper and it takes me awhile to wake up.
I would stumble across the hall to the bathroom and slam my leg into open cabinets and have to sit on the floor to pick up my medications.
It happened so often but my still asleep brain would apparently forget and hit those cabinets at least 3 times a week.
The front of my lower legs were covered in bruises.
He escalated one day and I felt a full on slap on my back while i was in the shower while I was facing the water stream, I jumped out of the shower and ran out of the bathroom with just a towel.
My best friends boyfriend had just come home and when I spazzed to him about what happened he checked my back and saw a hand print.
4 days later I had a heart episode that landed me in the hospital for 3 days.
I HAVE NEVER HAD HEART ISSUES BEFORE THAT DAY.
My pulse jumped to 150 BPM and I lost consciousness my mother found me in the living room (I was feeling faint that day and asked her to pick me up and take me to my GP) and got me to a hospital where it wasn’t until the 3rd day that my pulse went back below 90.
Ever since that day I have had arrythmia and syncopal episodes, its nearly debilitating with how often it happens.
She would move out and go to live with her boyfriend, but the strange phenomena would continue and indeed get worse, as would her health condition, which still plagues her and which she is convinced is caused by the attachment.
She is rather morose and fearful when she ends her post thusly:
After 2 years of living there my ex and I broke up and I moved out of state.
I moved to Cali where my brother offered to help me get my life re-started.
By this point my medical issues had progressed and I ended up needing a service dog.
She is always by my side and at the same time I feel him near she reacts and focuses in the direction of where I can feel him.
Sometimes a far corner or behind me.
He never gets close when she’s by my side but he’s always around.
Its when I feel him that I start to have my heart episodes and Im afraid he’s been causing them, I’m afraid he’s going to escalate more.
My current BF and I have moved from Cali to Utah.
The house/land we live on has been in his family for over 100 years and there are spirits here.
They are neutral and I have no problem with them but he is here too.
He has been attached to me for 7 years now and is always close.
He’s mean.
My BF wants to smudge me with sage and I have asked, begged and demanded he leave me alone but he never leaves.
WHAT CAN I DO?
These negative spirit attachments are often described as taking their toll on the health and mental well-being of the individual being targeted and invaded, and this can be seen in a report by Reddit user “Balgoth55.”
He rather spookily claims that his attachment came about after using a Ouija board, actually sometimes said to be a wellspring of spirit attachments, and that the dark forces following him were not at all friendly, slowly draining him and wasting him away physically and psychologically.
The witness explains:
I started having vivid nightmares like a movie screen on the back on my eyelids every time I’d go to sleep.
One night I had a dream where I stumbled over a block and woke up to a high pitched ringing or like a gnat buzzing inside my ear.
As I opened my eyes I saw an expressionless pale ghost standing by my bed looking at me.
I rolled over and pulled the cover over me until morning.
I still thought that it must just be sleep deprivation or something psychological… Because science says spirits don’t exist right?
Well, the negative air followed me everywhere for years.
Eventually I talked to a few psychics who cold read that I had three dark spirits that had been following me.
Lately I’ve become more open to the reality of the spiritual and also more lucid in my dreams.
I’ve been experiencing the feeling of being pushed downstairs or hit, which usually wakes me up in a bit of a startle, and I always feel super drained the next day.
I’ve actually suffered from chronic fatigue for the past ten years, despite all healthy lifestyle changes, and I’m wondering if it’s connected.
The number three keeps appearing in them.
I actually just woke up from a minor nightmare where I saw three “spirits” though invisible, and felt one push me.
In another report we have a witness whose mother had just spent some time in a hospital, and that on the day she was scheduled to go home she was in good spirits and her health had improved considerably, but things would suddenly take a turn for the worse.
He says:
However, about an hour before she was to go home she suddenly felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach and she became nauseous and extremely weak.
Her doctor released her anyway and we took her to my sister and brother-in-law’s home to recuperate.
By the time we got her settled in all she could do is lay on the couch with her eyes closed.
After about an hour my brother-in-law and I gently lifted her up in order to take her upstairs and put her to bed.
As we got her to her feet she suddenly started to fall straight backwards almost as if someone had pushed her.
Thankfully, my brother-in-law caught her in time but as he steadied her onto her feet I saw a gray mist or smoke leave my mother’s chest area.
The best way I can describe it is if you can imagine someone smoking a pipe has just exhaled the smoke from their mouth.
The smoke drifted away from her and disappeared.
At the time I was mystified as to what I had just witnessed.
I knew I hadn’t imagined it and none of us smokes.
The next day my mother wasn’t doing much better and we were perplexed as to why there was this sudden downturn in her health.
I didn’t say anything about the smoke to my family because I suspected they would assume I had imagined it.
However, it finally dawned on me that what had occurred is that I had witnessed a spirit attachment.
I couldn’t believe it took me that long to figure it out.
Once I figured it out, I told my family about my experience.
As it turns out, my sister had seen the smoke as well but didn’t say anything assuming it was her eyes playing tricks on her.
The witness goes on to explain that he had his mother and whole house cleansed with white sage, which seems to have done the trick, his mother’s health dramatically improving after that.
He also asserts that hospitals are havens for spirits looking to attach themselves to someone, with these entities roaming the halls and taking advantage of people in their physically and mentally vulnerable states, which makes it easier for them to take hold.
He gives a stark warning about this, saying:
So please take heed of this cautionary tale.
Any time you find yourself inside a hospital for any reason assume that you’re taking home a spirit hitchhiker.
The symptoms can vary so you may not experience the same ones that my mother did.
They can be as simple as causing insomnia or forgetfulness or as serious as weakening your immune system making you susceptible to illness and disease.
Just spend a few minutes kindly talking to them telling them they cannot go home with you and that they have family, pets, and friends waiting for them in the Light and that they need to look for the Light or these loved ones who will guide them to their true home.
Spirits can remain attached for a long time so even if it’s been a while since visiting a hospital it’s never too late to release anyone who may still be around you.
By doing so you may be pleasantly surprised to have a long term problem resolve itself.
What do these attachments want?
What are they and where do they come from?
Why do they choose to follow people around to torment them so?
Are they even real at all?
There are only ideas and speculation, but one thing that is for certain is that for many people out there they seem to be very real indeed.
What can you do to stop this from happening to you?
It is recommended that you do not enter haunted areas without proper protection and that you always maintain good physical and mental health when visiting such locales.
It is also often said that one should pay attention to the warning signs of a spiritual infestation, such as sudden mood swings, personality changes, recurring paranormal phenomena wherever you go, and strange physical symptoms that cannot be readily explained.
If you do feel you are the host of a spiritual attachment, well, it is best that you purify yourself and seek help from a specialist in such things, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this article.
Are spiritual attachments real and what do they mean?
They remain another strange oddity of that realm that eludes us.
Pretty cool.
Enjoy!
In December 1975, a woman named Allison awoke from a terrible nightmare in which her 4-year-old daughter Tessa was on a train track.
In the dream, Allison had been attempting to get her daughter to safety when Allison herself was struck and killed by a train XE "train."
Allison was in tears telling her husband about this terrifying nightmare.
Not more than two weeks later, Allison and her daughter were at a train station seeing off a friend.
An object fell onto the tracks, and, in an effort to be helpful, the little girl went to pick it up.
Allison saw a train coming and rushed to save her daughter, but they were both hit and killed.
Allison’s husband is the one who reported this experience to dream researcher Dr. David Ryback.
The husband was understandably devastated by these events, but he told Ryback that he did take some comfort in the warning he and Allison had had.
It “makes me feel close to Allison and Tessa,” he wrote to Ryback in a letter, “because something I don’t understand forewarned her” (Ryback 1988:2).
Stories of dreams that appear to foretell a death are abundant.
It’s very likely that you or someone you know has had one.
But might these dreams just be coincidences?
After all, who’s keeping track of all the death dreams people have that don’t come true?
As it turns out, at least one person has been keeping track.
Dr. Andrew Paquette was himself skeptical of the ability of dreams to tell us anything useful about the future, so he began keeping a detailed dream diary, with the goal of proving that his seemingly “precognitive” dreams were no more than the products of chance and selective memory.
For 25 years from 1989 to 2014, Paquette carefully recorded 11,779 of his dreams.
He wrote them down directly upon waking and before any “verification” of them could occur.
In 2015, Paquette published an analysis of his dreams that specifically focused on death.
Paquette began his investigation by combing his personal dream database for dreams that suggested the death of one of the people who were in the dream. Specifically, he was looking for dreams that had happened before he had any normal knowledge of the person’s actual death, and where he was subsequently able to verify whether the person was still alive, and if they weren't, the date of their death.
He ended up with 87 dreams featuring 50 identifiable people.
Twelve out of those 50 people were dead by the time of Paquette’s analysis—24%.
Paquette’s investigation didn’t stop there, however.
For the 12 people who were now dead, Paquette went back into his dream database and located all of the dreams he’d had about them, both those related to death and those that had nothing to do with it.
He then counted the number of days that had elapsed between each dream and the person’s date of death.
He discovered that, for 9 out of the 12 people who had died, his death-related dreams of them occurred, on average, closer to their day of death than did the non-death-related dreams.
And, when the statistics for all 12 of the people were combined, it still turned out that the death dreams were on average significantly closer to the date of death than were Paquette’s other dreams about those individuals.
On the other hand, it’s important to point out that the average length of time between one of Paquette's death dreams and the person’s actual death was a whopping 2208 days or 6 years.
While this is significantly less than the average length of time between non-death dreams and the person’s death (which was 4297 days, or 12 years), it’s clear that the mere fact that one has a death-related dream about someone can’t be relied upon to pinpoint that person’s date of death with any accuracy. (Keep in mind, too, that 76% of the people whose deaths Paquette dreamed about during those 25 years were still alive at the time of his analysis!)
At the same time, it is noteworthy that one of Paquette’s death dreams happened the very day that the person in question died, even though Paquette had not been in contact with the person or their close acquaintances anytime during the previous year.
It is also worth mentioning that, when Paquette awoke from that particular dream, he was “certain” that this person had died, and told his wife and daughter as much.
The next day, an email arrived confirming that the person had indeed died on the day of his dream.
This case suggests that there may be ways to differentiate between
(1) death-related dreams that indicate that the death has only just happened or is immediately impending and
(2) dreams that either relate to a death that is some distance in the future or that deal with death in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.
In conclusion, Paquette’s analysis indicates that further investigation of this topic could very well yield interesting results.
The challenge is going to be finding enough other people who are willing to diligently record their dreams over the span of many years and make them available for scrutiny.
References
Paquette, Andrew. (2015). Can death-related dreams predict future deaths? Evidence from a dream journal comprising nearly 12,000 dreams. Journal of Scientific Exploration 29(3): 411-23.
Ryback, David, with Sweitzer, Letitia. (1988). Dreams That Come True: Their Psychic and Transforming Powers. New York: Doubleday.
Enjoy!
Can Dreams Predict Death?
A controlled study of death-related dreams suggests they can—sort of.
Posted Dec 03, 2019
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201912/can-dreams-predict-death
A controlled study of death-related dreams suggests they can—sort of.
Posted Dec 03, 2019
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mysteries-consciousness/201912/can-dreams-predict-death
In December 1975, a woman named Allison awoke from a terrible nightmare in which her 4-year-old daughter Tessa was on a train track.
In the dream, Allison had been attempting to get her daughter to safety when Allison herself was struck and killed by a train XE "train."
Allison was in tears telling her husband about this terrifying nightmare.
Not more than two weeks later, Allison and her daughter were at a train station seeing off a friend.
An object fell onto the tracks, and, in an effort to be helpful, the little girl went to pick it up.
Allison saw a train coming and rushed to save her daughter, but they were both hit and killed.
Allison’s husband is the one who reported this experience to dream researcher Dr. David Ryback.
The husband was understandably devastated by these events, but he told Ryback that he did take some comfort in the warning he and Allison had had.
It “makes me feel close to Allison and Tessa,” he wrote to Ryback in a letter, “because something I don’t understand forewarned her” (Ryback 1988:2).
Stories of dreams that appear to foretell a death are abundant.
It’s very likely that you or someone you know has had one.
But might these dreams just be coincidences?
After all, who’s keeping track of all the death dreams people have that don’t come true?
As it turns out, at least one person has been keeping track.
Dr. Andrew Paquette was himself skeptical of the ability of dreams to tell us anything useful about the future, so he began keeping a detailed dream diary, with the goal of proving that his seemingly “precognitive” dreams were no more than the products of chance and selective memory.
For 25 years from 1989 to 2014, Paquette carefully recorded 11,779 of his dreams.
He wrote them down directly upon waking and before any “verification” of them could occur.
In 2015, Paquette published an analysis of his dreams that specifically focused on death.
Paquette began his investigation by combing his personal dream database for dreams that suggested the death of one of the people who were in the dream. Specifically, he was looking for dreams that had happened before he had any normal knowledge of the person’s actual death, and where he was subsequently able to verify whether the person was still alive, and if they weren't, the date of their death.
He ended up with 87 dreams featuring 50 identifiable people.
Twelve out of those 50 people were dead by the time of Paquette’s analysis—24%.
Paquette’s investigation didn’t stop there, however.
For the 12 people who were now dead, Paquette went back into his dream database and located all of the dreams he’d had about them, both those related to death and those that had nothing to do with it.
He then counted the number of days that had elapsed between each dream and the person’s date of death.
He discovered that, for 9 out of the 12 people who had died, his death-related dreams of them occurred, on average, closer to their day of death than did the non-death-related dreams.
And, when the statistics for all 12 of the people were combined, it still turned out that the death dreams were on average significantly closer to the date of death than were Paquette’s other dreams about those individuals.
On the other hand, it’s important to point out that the average length of time between one of Paquette's death dreams and the person’s actual death was a whopping 2208 days or 6 years.
While this is significantly less than the average length of time between non-death dreams and the person’s death (which was 4297 days, or 12 years), it’s clear that the mere fact that one has a death-related dream about someone can’t be relied upon to pinpoint that person’s date of death with any accuracy. (Keep in mind, too, that 76% of the people whose deaths Paquette dreamed about during those 25 years were still alive at the time of his analysis!)
At the same time, it is noteworthy that one of Paquette’s death dreams happened the very day that the person in question died, even though Paquette had not been in contact with the person or their close acquaintances anytime during the previous year.
It is also worth mentioning that, when Paquette awoke from that particular dream, he was “certain” that this person had died, and told his wife and daughter as much.
The next day, an email arrived confirming that the person had indeed died on the day of his dream.
This case suggests that there may be ways to differentiate between
(1) death-related dreams that indicate that the death has only just happened or is immediately impending and
(2) dreams that either relate to a death that is some distance in the future or that deal with death in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.
In conclusion, Paquette’s analysis indicates that further investigation of this topic could very well yield interesting results.
The challenge is going to be finding enough other people who are willing to diligently record their dreams over the span of many years and make them available for scrutiny.
References
Paquette, Andrew. (2015). Can death-related dreams predict future deaths? Evidence from a dream journal comprising nearly 12,000 dreams. Journal of Scientific Exploration 29(3): 411-23.
Ryback, David, with Sweitzer, Letitia. (1988). Dreams That Come True: Their Psychic and Transforming Powers. New York: Doubleday.
Impact Character
folding paper cranes ⭐
*nodds* I also enjoyed her fog metaphor. It is so very familiar.
I would have never thought you had any trouble whatsoever with English...you are really amazing with the language!
Thank you, Skare. I always thought it had to do with my ears (I had ear infections when I was a child) that I get so stressed out, but it is probably more psychological than I would like to admit it.It's okay-ish. Bit back on the rut of sleeping issues, and I haven't meditated in a while. Thank you for asking!
I hope you are doing alright as well?
Lots of love back to you.
*nodds* I also enjoyed her fog metaphor. It is so very familiar.
It's okay-ish. Bit back on the rut of sleeping issues, and I haven't meditated in a while. Thank you for asking!
I hope you are doing alright as well?
Lots of love back to you.
Thanks!
I'm doing fair to moderate, lol.
I definitely feel like I'm in less contention with my own body and pain, though it continues to worsen slowly.
So...I consider that a win.
I would have pinned you as speaking English as your first language.
Very comprehensible!
As for meditating and sleeping - I fully understand...my sleep is constantly interrupted and often that is an issue for my own meditative practice.
Luckily, they are showing now that such states of mind that things like meditation can induce are actually carried over into our sleep and dream cycle.
After this post to you, I will post up an article I found just last night speaking about it.
It's perfectly fine to fall asleep while trying to meditate.
It doesn't negate the time spent meditating before you fell asleep even if it's rather fast...it does carry over so it seems.
Have a good one....hope you have a peaceful day/night!
@Impact Character
@John K
Here is that article IC.
John, I know we have talked about meditation, falling asleep, and the possibility of lucid dreaming and meditating in that state of mind.
Thought this would be of interest to you!
There is also the state of mind to consider where you are indeed lucid at the time but upon fully waking forget you were lucid.
Lot of love everyone!
Comparison of dreams with waking consciousness has traditionally focused on claims that the dreaming mind maintains only a simple awareness of perception and emotion, but lacks the self-reflective awareness and metacognition, that is, awareness of one`s current state of consciousness, which is assumed in wake.
Lucid dreams are distinct in that the dreamer does have insight into the present state of consciousness, and is able to maintain some awareness of the fact that they are dreaming, along with a varying degree of control over their thoughts, actions, and dream qualities.
While this distinction is tied to the dream state, the truth is that even in waking we often wander around in a state of semi-consciousness, simply perceiving and experiencing emotions as they arise without affording much reflective awareness or attention to the present moment.
The practice of mindfulness is aimed at improving an individual`s capacity to maintain awareness of the present moment, with an open and non-judgemental mind, and to diminish automatic habits of mind-wandering and other auto-pilot behaviors.
Evidence shows that increased mindfulness is associated with enhanced well-being and decreased negative rumination.
Relating to dreams, mindfulness has been shown to be inversely related to dream anxiety and negative dream quality (Simor, Koteles, Sandor, Petke, & Bodizs, 2011).
Taken together, by improving attention to the present moment`s consciousness while cultivating an accepting attitude, mindfulness may similarly increase the likelihood and frequency of lucid dream experiences, a dream state characterized by both awareness and positivity.
The authors, Stumbrys, Erlacher, and Malinowski (2015), recently set out to test this relationship.
The main measure for assessing mindfulness was the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI; Walach, Buchheld, Buttenmuller, Kleinknecht, & Schmidt, 2004), which measures two interrelated factors of Acceptance and Presence, using 14 items on a 4 point scale.
Acceptance refers to the accepting and appreciative attitude towards experience, while Presence refers to sustaining full awareness of experience as it is happening.
Presence has been linked to improvements in a wide range of cognitive abilities, perhaps due to the role of cognitive control in maintaining focused attention and continuously monitoring the stream of consciousness.
While mindfulness training does not explicitly aim to enhance awareness in the dreaming state, there are many traditions which have linked cultivating awareness in wake with lucid dreaming at night; lucid dreaming itself has even been considered an ideal state for meditative awareness (particularly in Tibetan and Toaist Dream Yoga traditions).
Further, while many meditation practices do not specifically define mindfulness, they often have similar aims of promoting awareness and acceptance. Thus, the authors investigated a potential influence of prior meditation practice, even those not explicitly defined as mindfulness practices, on lucid dream frequency.
528 participants (290 men, 238 women) recruited through a German lucid dreaming website responded to an online questionnaire regarding dreaming, meditation, and mindfulness.
Both dream recall frequency and lucid dream recall frequency (defined as a dream where `one is aware that one is dreaming during the dream`) were estimated per week.
Participants were asked if they had any meditation experience, for how long they had practiced, and estimated how many hours per week they practiced. Lastly, they completed the aforementioned Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory questionnaire.
The main findings of the study showed that participants who reported having prior meditation experience also reported higher lucid dream frequency, with approximately 4.28 vs 2.55 lucid dreams per month.
Further, those having meditation experience also reported higher FMI mindfulness scores.
Specifically, years of experience and hours of practice per week were correlated with mindfulness scores.
The authors conducted more complex analyses to extricate the mediating role of meditation on the relationship between mindfulness and lucid dreaming. What they found was, only in those subjects who have prior meditation experience was there a significant correlation between FMI mindfulness score and lucid dreaming frequency.
Those subjects without meditation experience showed no relationship between FMI score and lucid dream frequency.
Thus, their hypotheses were partially confirmed; individual mindfulness is positively related to lucid dream frequency but only in those subjects who practice meditation.
Further, these individuals report higher mindfulness and lucid dreaming frequency in general than people without meditation experience.
The authors conclude that “higher awareness cultivated during daytime is also reflected in higher awareness of one`s mental states while dreaming.”
Future research may seek to delineate which types of meditation practice are most directly influential on dreaming, and perhaps in the future, the possibilities of practicing meditation even from within the lucid dream state.
References
Simor, P., Koeteles, F., Sandor, P., Petke, Z., & Bodizs, R. (2011). Mindfulness and dream quality: the inverse relationship between mindfulness and negative dream affect. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 52(4), 369-375.
Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., & Malinowski, P. (2015). Meta-Awareness During Day and Night The Relationship Between Mindfulness and Lucid Dreaming.Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 34(4), 415-433.
Walach, H., Buchheld, N., Buttenmüller, V., Kleinknecht, N., & Schmidt, S. (2006). Measuring mindfulness—the Freiburg mindfulness inventory (FMI).Personality and Individual Differences, 40(8), 1543-1555.
@John K
Here is that article IC.
John, I know we have talked about meditation, falling asleep, and the possibility of lucid dreaming and meditating in that state of mind.
Thought this would be of interest to you!
There is also the state of mind to consider where you are indeed lucid at the time but upon fully waking forget you were lucid.
Lot of love everyone!
The Link Between Mindfulness, Meditation, and Lucid Dreaming
Meditation practice improves mindfulness while awake, and while you sleep.
LINK - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...een-mindfulness-meditation-and-lucid-dreaming
Meditation practice improves mindfulness while awake, and while you sleep.
LINK - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/...een-mindfulness-meditation-and-lucid-dreaming
Comparison of dreams with waking consciousness has traditionally focused on claims that the dreaming mind maintains only a simple awareness of perception and emotion, but lacks the self-reflective awareness and metacognition, that is, awareness of one`s current state of consciousness, which is assumed in wake.
Lucid dreams are distinct in that the dreamer does have insight into the present state of consciousness, and is able to maintain some awareness of the fact that they are dreaming, along with a varying degree of control over their thoughts, actions, and dream qualities.
While this distinction is tied to the dream state, the truth is that even in waking we often wander around in a state of semi-consciousness, simply perceiving and experiencing emotions as they arise without affording much reflective awareness or attention to the present moment.
The practice of mindfulness is aimed at improving an individual`s capacity to maintain awareness of the present moment, with an open and non-judgemental mind, and to diminish automatic habits of mind-wandering and other auto-pilot behaviors.
Evidence shows that increased mindfulness is associated with enhanced well-being and decreased negative rumination.
Relating to dreams, mindfulness has been shown to be inversely related to dream anxiety and negative dream quality (Simor, Koteles, Sandor, Petke, & Bodizs, 2011).
Taken together, by improving attention to the present moment`s consciousness while cultivating an accepting attitude, mindfulness may similarly increase the likelihood and frequency of lucid dream experiences, a dream state characterized by both awareness and positivity.
The authors, Stumbrys, Erlacher, and Malinowski (2015), recently set out to test this relationship.
The main measure for assessing mindfulness was the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI; Walach, Buchheld, Buttenmuller, Kleinknecht, & Schmidt, 2004), which measures two interrelated factors of Acceptance and Presence, using 14 items on a 4 point scale.
Acceptance refers to the accepting and appreciative attitude towards experience, while Presence refers to sustaining full awareness of experience as it is happening.
Presence has been linked to improvements in a wide range of cognitive abilities, perhaps due to the role of cognitive control in maintaining focused attention and continuously monitoring the stream of consciousness.
While mindfulness training does not explicitly aim to enhance awareness in the dreaming state, there are many traditions which have linked cultivating awareness in wake with lucid dreaming at night; lucid dreaming itself has even been considered an ideal state for meditative awareness (particularly in Tibetan and Toaist Dream Yoga traditions).
Further, while many meditation practices do not specifically define mindfulness, they often have similar aims of promoting awareness and acceptance. Thus, the authors investigated a potential influence of prior meditation practice, even those not explicitly defined as mindfulness practices, on lucid dream frequency.
528 participants (290 men, 238 women) recruited through a German lucid dreaming website responded to an online questionnaire regarding dreaming, meditation, and mindfulness.
Both dream recall frequency and lucid dream recall frequency (defined as a dream where `one is aware that one is dreaming during the dream`) were estimated per week.
Participants were asked if they had any meditation experience, for how long they had practiced, and estimated how many hours per week they practiced. Lastly, they completed the aforementioned Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory questionnaire.
The main findings of the study showed that participants who reported having prior meditation experience also reported higher lucid dream frequency, with approximately 4.28 vs 2.55 lucid dreams per month.
Further, those having meditation experience also reported higher FMI mindfulness scores.
Specifically, years of experience and hours of practice per week were correlated with mindfulness scores.
The authors conducted more complex analyses to extricate the mediating role of meditation on the relationship between mindfulness and lucid dreaming. What they found was, only in those subjects who have prior meditation experience was there a significant correlation between FMI mindfulness score and lucid dreaming frequency.
Those subjects without meditation experience showed no relationship between FMI score and lucid dream frequency.
Thus, their hypotheses were partially confirmed; individual mindfulness is positively related to lucid dream frequency but only in those subjects who practice meditation.
Further, these individuals report higher mindfulness and lucid dreaming frequency in general than people without meditation experience.
The authors conclude that “higher awareness cultivated during daytime is also reflected in higher awareness of one`s mental states while dreaming.”
Future research may seek to delineate which types of meditation practice are most directly influential on dreaming, and perhaps in the future, the possibilities of practicing meditation even from within the lucid dream state.
References
Simor, P., Koeteles, F., Sandor, P., Petke, Z., & Bodizs, R. (2011). Mindfulness and dream quality: the inverse relationship between mindfulness and negative dream affect. Scandinavian journal of psychology, 52(4), 369-375.
Stumbrys, T., Erlacher, D., & Malinowski, P. (2015). Meta-Awareness During Day and Night The Relationship Between Mindfulness and Lucid Dreaming.Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 34(4), 415-433.
Walach, H., Buchheld, N., Buttenmüller, V., Kleinknecht, N., & Schmidt, S. (2006). Measuring mindfulness—the Freiburg mindfulness inventory (FMI).Personality and Individual Differences, 40(8), 1543-1555.
(Lots of violent rabbits in the middle ages!)
Good reading...
I've been thinking about suicide.
Not for myself, mind you, but because it's such an evolutionary puzzle.
After all, even though evolutionary biologists know full well that no complex human behavior is rigidly and unilaterally determined by genes alone, it remains a well established article of faith that even complex human behavior has at least some underlying genetic component.
(Is it an oxymoron, by the way, to suggest that an "article of faith" can be "well established," given that a reasonable definition of faith is belief without evidence? Oh well, that's another question, for another time!)
The suicide puzzle is simple enough to state: any genetically influenced phenotype — including behavior — that leads to elimination of the genetic factors themselves should be strongly selected against.
And yet, suicide appears to be a cross-cultural universal.
According to the World Health Organization it is the 10th leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for nearly 1.5 million annual fatalities.
Freud was convinced that the answer, essentially, was "Thanatos," which was among his most crackpot and biologically ignorant theories.
Although the word doesn't appear directly in his writings, "death drive" (Todestrieb) does, and is ostensibly opposed to "Eros," the "life drive."
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud maintained that living things possess "an urge ... to restore an earlier state of things," specifically that inorganic simplicity from which all living things emerged.
It is a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death."
This "explanation" is total BS, reminiscent of Henri Bergson's notion that life is due to an "élan vitale," which Julian Huxley caricatured as being equivalent to explaining the movement of a railroad train by its "élan locomotif."
It is plausible that natural selection could favor suicide if, by doing so, predisposing genes were benefiting identical copies of the same genes residing in other bodies — namely, in genetic relatives — and thus operating by the well-established phenomenon of kin selection, or inclusive fitness.
This process has already been demonstrated to be a powerful explanation for "altruism" in many animals, both nonhuman and human.
But what about cases where this explanation doesn't apply, namely individuals whose death benefits no one, genetic relative or not?
Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, made an important contribution in his classic book, Suicide.
In it, he identified five distinct social explanations for self-killing: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic, each worth understanding, but none providing any reconciliation with evolution by natural selection.
Some biological coherence, on the other hand, appears to derive from pathology.
Many people die of heart disease or cancer, not because doing so is adaptive, but because in various ways, our bodies are vulnerable, just like any organism.
Similarly, there are also mental pathologies, notably depression, due to biochemical malfunctions, among other things.
Powerful evidence for this — and for not being cavalier about suicide — comes from the fact that antidepressant medications and/or psychotherapy often abolish suicidality.
Beyond this, however, are cases in which suicide is not precipitated by depression per se.
And that's where my hypothesis comes in.
Start with pain, a biological warning signal that something is out of whack.
Accordingly, living things, including people, have doubtless been selected to minimize pain and to avoid it when possible.
(For example, it is pain that helps prevent us from embracing a hot stove.)
Then add two consequences of our big, smart brains: knowledge of death, and of killing.
There is much debate about the evolutionary pressures that made us so clever, but no doubt that our species has become very, very intelligent.
And furthermore, it seems likely that at least some of our mental abilities — e.g., painting, composing symphonies, programming computers, playing the violin — weren't selected for directly but arose as a by-product of a creative intellect that was favored because it conveyed other, more clear-cut benefits, such as social cooperation, complex communication, and so forth.
I suggest that as a byproduct, human beings — perhaps alone among living things — understand about death. (Shades of Ernest Becker.)
We don't simply act in most cases to avoid death; our species understands that it means the cessation of life, and thus, of all sensation — not just the end of pleasure, but also of pain.
Finally, due once again to our big brains, we have figured out how to end life: not only the lives of prey or other people, but also, by simple extrapolation, our own.
Put these three observations together:
(1) people are strongly predisposed to avoid pain,
(2) our species comprehends that death means the end of bodily sensation, and
(3) we know how to kill, including how to kill ourselves.
Couldn't the result then be that when individual Homo sapiens experience unrelenting and untreatable pain (physical or emotional) they, unique among living things, can be inclined to end that pain?
Other animals sometimes behave in a way that results in their death: Honeybees die when they sting an intruder to their hive, Pacific salmon die after spawning, and so forth.
But there is no reason to think that they are intentionally killing themselves.
We, on occasion, are different.
The above considerations are neither intended to condone suicide nor to oppose it.
Moreover, I am not proposing that my hypothetical triad explains more than a subset of suicide, which is doubtless multi-factorial and differs for different people.
In addition, this difficult and complex topic is immense, such that perhaps the three-part biologically based hypothesis presented here isn't even valid.
Or new.
But maybe it's at least worth thinking about.
David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington.
Thinking About Suicide: A Three-Part Hypothesis
An evolutionary puzzle suggests an evolutionary answer.
Posted Dec 07, 2019
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/peace-and-war/201912/thinking-about-suicide-three-part-hypothesis
An evolutionary puzzle suggests an evolutionary answer.
Posted Dec 07, 2019
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/peace-and-war/201912/thinking-about-suicide-three-part-hypothesis
I've been thinking about suicide.
Not for myself, mind you, but because it's such an evolutionary puzzle.
After all, even though evolutionary biologists know full well that no complex human behavior is rigidly and unilaterally determined by genes alone, it remains a well established article of faith that even complex human behavior has at least some underlying genetic component.
(Is it an oxymoron, by the way, to suggest that an "article of faith" can be "well established," given that a reasonable definition of faith is belief without evidence? Oh well, that's another question, for another time!)
The suicide puzzle is simple enough to state: any genetically influenced phenotype — including behavior — that leads to elimination of the genetic factors themselves should be strongly selected against.
And yet, suicide appears to be a cross-cultural universal.
According to the World Health Organization it is the 10th leading cause of death worldwide, responsible for nearly 1.5 million annual fatalities.
Freud was convinced that the answer, essentially, was "Thanatos," which was among his most crackpot and biologically ignorant theories.
Although the word doesn't appear directly in his writings, "death drive" (Todestrieb) does, and is ostensibly opposed to "Eros," the "life drive."
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud maintained that living things possess "an urge ... to restore an earlier state of things," specifically that inorganic simplicity from which all living things emerged.
It is a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death."
This "explanation" is total BS, reminiscent of Henri Bergson's notion that life is due to an "élan vitale," which Julian Huxley caricatured as being equivalent to explaining the movement of a railroad train by its "élan locomotif."
It is plausible that natural selection could favor suicide if, by doing so, predisposing genes were benefiting identical copies of the same genes residing in other bodies — namely, in genetic relatives — and thus operating by the well-established phenomenon of kin selection, or inclusive fitness.
This process has already been demonstrated to be a powerful explanation for "altruism" in many animals, both nonhuman and human.
But what about cases where this explanation doesn't apply, namely individuals whose death benefits no one, genetic relative or not?
Emile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, made an important contribution in his classic book, Suicide.
In it, he identified five distinct social explanations for self-killing: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic, each worth understanding, but none providing any reconciliation with evolution by natural selection.
Some biological coherence, on the other hand, appears to derive from pathology.
Many people die of heart disease or cancer, not because doing so is adaptive, but because in various ways, our bodies are vulnerable, just like any organism.
Similarly, there are also mental pathologies, notably depression, due to biochemical malfunctions, among other things.
Powerful evidence for this — and for not being cavalier about suicide — comes from the fact that antidepressant medications and/or psychotherapy often abolish suicidality.
Beyond this, however, are cases in which suicide is not precipitated by depression per se.
And that's where my hypothesis comes in.
Start with pain, a biological warning signal that something is out of whack.
Accordingly, living things, including people, have doubtless been selected to minimize pain and to avoid it when possible.
(For example, it is pain that helps prevent us from embracing a hot stove.)
Then add two consequences of our big, smart brains: knowledge of death, and of killing.
There is much debate about the evolutionary pressures that made us so clever, but no doubt that our species has become very, very intelligent.
And furthermore, it seems likely that at least some of our mental abilities — e.g., painting, composing symphonies, programming computers, playing the violin — weren't selected for directly but arose as a by-product of a creative intellect that was favored because it conveyed other, more clear-cut benefits, such as social cooperation, complex communication, and so forth.
I suggest that as a byproduct, human beings — perhaps alone among living things — understand about death. (Shades of Ernest Becker.)
We don't simply act in most cases to avoid death; our species understands that it means the cessation of life, and thus, of all sensation — not just the end of pleasure, but also of pain.
Finally, due once again to our big brains, we have figured out how to end life: not only the lives of prey or other people, but also, by simple extrapolation, our own.
Put these three observations together:
(1) people are strongly predisposed to avoid pain,
(2) our species comprehends that death means the end of bodily sensation, and
(3) we know how to kill, including how to kill ourselves.
Couldn't the result then be that when individual Homo sapiens experience unrelenting and untreatable pain (physical or emotional) they, unique among living things, can be inclined to end that pain?
Other animals sometimes behave in a way that results in their death: Honeybees die when they sting an intruder to their hive, Pacific salmon die after spawning, and so forth.
But there is no reason to think that they are intentionally killing themselves.
We, on occasion, are different.
The above considerations are neither intended to condone suicide nor to oppose it.
Moreover, I am not proposing that my hypothetical triad explains more than a subset of suicide, which is doubtless multi-factorial and differs for different people.
In addition, this difficult and complex topic is immense, such that perhaps the three-part biologically based hypothesis presented here isn't even valid.
Or new.
But maybe it's at least worth thinking about.
David P. Barash is professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington.
Among his recent books is Through a Glass Brightly: using science to see our species as we really are (2018, Oxford University Press)
Impact Character
folding paper cranes ⭐
Thanks!
I'm doing fair to moderate, lol.
I definitely feel like I'm in less contention with my own body and pain, though it continues to worsen slowly.
So...I consider that a win.
I would have pinned you as speaking English as your first language.
Very comprehensible!
As for meditating and sleeping - I fully understand...my sleep is constantly interrupted and often that is an issue for my own meditative practice.
Luckily, they are showing now that such states of mind that things like meditation can induce are actually carried over into our sleep and dream cycle.
After this post to you, I will post up an article I found just last night speaking about it.
It's perfectly fine to fall asleep while trying to meditate.
It doesn't negate the time spent meditating before you fell asleep even if it's rather fast...it does carry over so it seems.
Have a good one....hope you have a peaceful day/night!
It's amazing how you deal with your life, accepting and everything. That is very inspiring.
Also.. Thank you for the compliment and that article.
So, there is a link! :-o very intriguing
Great article!!!New Seems familiar...
Frightening Experiences with Spiritual Attachments
Highjackers, from my experience, are looking for help resolving something or getting a message delivered. (Thinking this is where the series The Ghost Whisper came from.) They often attach themselves to strong souls as a means to get a toe hold in the physical. Reminding them that I am in charge of this physicality usually gets them gone. Rituals to keep them in the external helps too.
Water/shower ritual really works to remove unwanted "energies" and entities. Lately I've heard the echoes of becoming a healer again, but could be want to heal myself too.
Somewhere in my blog is a story about feeling 'ichy' when I go in a docs office or visit the hospital. That energy feels like wet cotton clinging to me, like the white, cottony ich that sticks to tanked fish.
I believe spuritual attchments are different than a soul attachment. I luv it that we far too often attribute negative connotations to things we don't truly understand yet, yet, we with open minds say hmmm, yep, it is possible
!?!
How to differentiate a spirit guide from a hijacker? Anyone got some intel on the fastest most efficient way to draw energy from the universe? I can push out/burn energy faster than I am able to recharge. Id like for it to be at a balance point where I can push out and absorb at the same time without the output diminishing or stagnating
I'm telling you you gotta try VELO - Voluntary Energetic Longitudinal Oscillations.
When I was self-inducing going out of body or astral projecting...this actually put me into the vibrational stage on a few occasions.
This technique will help you balance and also amp up your energy while breaking down any internal blocks or outside attachments such as the article suggests.
Here are a few videos...this first two are very good explanations of the technique and how to begin.
The last is a very cheesy video, but it's a good visual image of how to.
I have other thoughts...let me know.
Much love!