Post by auntym on Dec 5, 2014 14:28:46 GMT -6
scroll.in/article/693137/If-you-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-the-paranormal
If you don’t believe in the paranormal, can you explain these?
Paranormal experiences feel real. But do they correspond to an equally real ‘existence’ somewhere out there?
Annie Zaidi
December 4, 2014
What we do know is that we will crumble and disappear. It is one of the most awful certainties of life – the cessation that must follow. Your breath will stop. Your body will decay. all that will be left of you is a skeleton, perhaps not even that. dust to dust, as we say. and yet, will we truly cease?
Humanity has, since the earliest time from which some evidence of human civilisation can be found in any part of the known world, struggled with mortality. Most religions, most myths, are centred on our struggle to understand the questions: where does life come from; where does death take us; is there no way of returning to the living world? even faiths that reject the notion of an all-seeing, all-controlling “God” must grapple with death and contemplate the ideas of reincarnation and souls seeking release from the mortal world.
Yet, evidence points towards cessation of human existence. Like any other living creature, we are born, we grow, given a chance we reproduce, and then we decay and halt. We cease.
We can be buried on land or at sea, or burnt, or left to the vultures. We can turn into dust and manure, or we can line the digestive tracts of some other species. Finally, we will return back into the elements, just as we were created from the elements through a series of magical – if scientifically explicable – processes of nature. We accept this, and still, the question remains. The “me” that was neither skeleton nor synapse, where does that go?
There was a time when I would have unequivocally said, “Nowhere!” The spirit is probably an electrical impulse. You may survive in the memory, or in the DNA, of the living. But no dead person has access to our living rooms, living habits, living bodies. If legs have decayed, on what does a spirit walk? If tongues and vocal chords have decayed, with what does the spirit speak? Dreams, failures, injustices, anger – all of it ceases. I was sure of this.
Then, I was no longer so sure.
CONTINUE READING: scroll.in/article/693137/If-you-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-the-paranormal
If you don’t believe in the paranormal, can you explain these?
Paranormal experiences feel real. But do they correspond to an equally real ‘existence’ somewhere out there?
Annie Zaidi
December 4, 2014
What we do know is that we will crumble and disappear. It is one of the most awful certainties of life – the cessation that must follow. Your breath will stop. Your body will decay. all that will be left of you is a skeleton, perhaps not even that. dust to dust, as we say. and yet, will we truly cease?
Humanity has, since the earliest time from which some evidence of human civilisation can be found in any part of the known world, struggled with mortality. Most religions, most myths, are centred on our struggle to understand the questions: where does life come from; where does death take us; is there no way of returning to the living world? even faiths that reject the notion of an all-seeing, all-controlling “God” must grapple with death and contemplate the ideas of reincarnation and souls seeking release from the mortal world.
Yet, evidence points towards cessation of human existence. Like any other living creature, we are born, we grow, given a chance we reproduce, and then we decay and halt. We cease.
We can be buried on land or at sea, or burnt, or left to the vultures. We can turn into dust and manure, or we can line the digestive tracts of some other species. Finally, we will return back into the elements, just as we were created from the elements through a series of magical – if scientifically explicable – processes of nature. We accept this, and still, the question remains. The “me” that was neither skeleton nor synapse, where does that go?
There was a time when I would have unequivocally said, “Nowhere!” The spirit is probably an electrical impulse. You may survive in the memory, or in the DNA, of the living. But no dead person has access to our living rooms, living habits, living bodies. If legs have decayed, on what does a spirit walk? If tongues and vocal chords have decayed, with what does the spirit speak? Dreams, failures, injustices, anger – all of it ceases. I was sure of this.
Then, I was no longer so sure.
CONTINUE READING: scroll.in/article/693137/If-you-don%E2%80%99t-believe-in-the-paranormal