Smells and Bells

I am not really a believer in paranormal activity, but I like to keep an open-mind about what others think. I don’t like to shoot others beliefs down, especially when it comes to ghosts, because everyone is entitled to their own opinion. I found a video that talks about why people might have thought they had seen or experienced paranormal activity with a more scientific explanation. Some of the reasons they gave were: misperceived self-representation, sleep paralysis, and grief. With misperceived self-representation, your body experiences sensations, and it doesn’t read as ones created by yourself. This is also what causes schizophrenia. The brain of schizophrenics tell the body what actions to do, but it doesn’t tell the body to expect it. So the brain perceives the actions as someone else – someone imaginary. With sleep paralysis, your body is paralyzed but your mind is partly awake. So if you feel a sensation, you are not fully able to place who or what it is or where it’s coming fr...

“To have an opinion, one must overlook something.” The excerpt we read from The Authors of the Impossible and its discussion of the powers gained by an individual free from the constraints of an ego reminded me, of course, of ghosts and the paranormal. Because humans have physical bodies, we have developed a concept of the “self.” The ego gives us this sense of distinction between ourselves and the world around us. There can be physical bodies without an ego, there can be individuals without bodies or egos, but there cannot be egos without bodies. If there is nothing physical to separate the self from the outside, how can there be an ego? I am aware that very few of Freud’s ideas about the id, ego, and superego are taken seriously anymore, but allow me to indulge myself for just a moment. Some people have overly strong egos, which can make them close-mined or lacking in empathy. The self is all that exists. Others can have no ego, which gives them the “’impossible’ powers” describe...

Sixth sense is a psychic ability, this gives us the ability to perceive the subtle-dimension or the unseen world of angels, ghosts, Heaven.  For this story I personally have not recollection of the event about to unfold and is told to me from what my mother remembers. On one night w hen I was about 7 years old, I was living in our house in New Jersey at the time, my father was on a business trip so it was just my mother and my brothers. My mother in the middle of the night felt the temperature drop in her room so she went to go inspect what was wrong with the thermostat. Upon seeing the thermostat in functioning order, my mom returned to bed with extra blankets thinking the thermostat was malfunctioning. In bed my mom was beginning to fall asleep when suddenly she felt a tug on her big toe and heard a giggle. Thinking it was either myself or one of my brothers my mom was about to get up to lecture us on being awake so late. All of a sudden I came running into my mom's r...

The sixth sense, or as some call it, psychic ability, is our ability to perceive the subtle-dimension or the unseen world of angels, ghosts, Heaven, fairies, astral projection, etc. It also includes our ability to understand the subtle cause and effect relationship behind many events, which is beyond the regular comprehension of the “normal” human brain. This idea is brought up by Jeffrey Kripal in, “ Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred ”. In a society today that taps into our fears of our sixth sense and the paranormal, from horror movies, to haunted houses, paranormal investigator TV shows, the whole thing seems more like a marketing gimmick than a real thing. As a person heavily driven by neuroscience and psychology, sometimes I catch myself trying to biologically reason away experiences of the paranormal, but in the end I come back to my gut feeling that they cannot be rationally explained. As a very spiritual person I tend to lean away from science in these...