My Family, Myself, and The 6th Sense

My family is very connected to the supernatural, 6th sense world. My sister is a practicing witch, and while no one else in my family really digs the witchcraft stuff (it’s totally growing on me though, I’m not gonna front), it would be nonsense to ignore all the wack shit that we have experienced. Out of body experiences, dreams with implications for the future, seeing black figures before bad things happen, entering rooms and randomly being completely overcome with terror. We’ve had things move, toilets flush, lights and microwaves flicker. Last night I slept in my sister's room because my dog spent a very long time just standing in the middle of the kitchen, frozen in place looking afraid he wouldn’t move even when we called him and pet him, and it took lots of loving coaxing from my sister to get him to move. A few days ago my mom suddenly started getting anxious in the kitchen for no reason; my sister thinks it from her reading more and more about darker magic, weird things happen every time she does. I didn’t fuck with all that, and the mounds of still unpacked clothes in the corners of my room unsettling me so I slept in her room, which is pink and floral and always makes me feel better. I recently have been doing a lot of tarot card readings for my family, and they’ve been eerily accurate each time.





I have a very big “why not” attitude towards the paranormal and that kind of stuff because of this stuff. A lot of people I know are very quick to often very rudely declare these moments as fraudulent, of just random weird things that can only be explained through science, and that any attempt to explore other options is ridiculous. Sometimes I’ll find myself just being pfft this is silly, and then feel weird as if I’m invalidating my own experiences just because of how other people react when I talk about them. I’m not sure what I believe in, or what I don’t. I believe in most things, at least a little bit, and I try to respect every possible supernatural thing, just in case. I don’t know if I believe in demons, but I’m not gonna go out of my way to fuck with them, you know? I think that you can open yourself up to these experiences, that if you actively explore this realm it can reveal itself to you. I guess I don’t know if this revealing is one of another dimension or level of experience actually opening up like some sort of spiritual fairy rock, or if it is just one’s spirituality growing and thus making your own interpretation of the world and its occurrences seem more like the magic because you have created those associations in your own life. It reminds me of the research I did for my group's presentation when I discussed schizophrenia and Tanya Lurhman’s research, where she found, amongst many other interesting observations, that people who were religious were more likely to hear their voices as belonging to religious figures such as angels or God or the Devil. Looking at that statement at first felt obvious to me like in a water-is-wet kind of way like, of course, you can create a life that is filled with religion, where you can believe your God has their hand in every part of your life, and that that would make you more likely to see life and every part of it as having a relationship to your religion, and then have your experience with hearing voices feel religious, be more quickly interpreted something that is not mental illness or something that can even be properly discussed in the world of science. Some people in Tanya Lurhman’s research discussed hearing voices as partially a spiritual experience and partially a result of mental illness, they were able to make distinctions between the voices and the way those voices feel and impact them, and were then able to categorize them as different! I found that so fascinating because it felt like to me, of course religious people will hear their voices as religious, if people expect God to talk to them then when something starts talking to them, that makes sense. And people who do not believe in God not viewing it as spiritual at all also makes sense, we have scientific explanations that they can ground their beliefs in. but the people who had both? Wowed me, I can’t imagine how that must feel, and how that must play into their spirituality and it just felt like another moment where I saw spiritual experience and being able to almost interact with more spiritual realms as a spectrum of openness. I don’t think it is as black as white as it appears, I think people can have these experiences even if they don’t believe in them truly, and people who do believe in them can go their whole lives without ever having an experience, so I don’t think it is just simply belief in the way that it usually is presented I think there is an intermixing of belief and active engagement. In my research for that presentation, I found that there are churches that really base themselves on attempting to open its congregation up those experiences and really try to help them focus and become aware of this that they consider an active ability they have that they can work out to really have their relationship with their God become more tangible, to have him contact them through some sort of direct medium that is often described as possible in many religions. People can decide for themselves if they want to open different pathways of experience, and very often it seems that people are able to impact the types of supernatural and religious experiences they have depending on the type of energy or intention they put out into the world and their spiritual exploration.