Visions of Mary in Fatima or Medjugorje?

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So we must therefore accept they are real without a doubt?

The fact that we don't know as much as think we do is the reason why we should go for parsimony when it comes to these matters. Saying that it's a real miracle that involves the intervention of supernatural beings for whom we lack any clear concise evidence rather than that it's likely something psychological is not really parsimonious if you ask me.

When people try to talk about 'strong' illusions or group illusions, people seeing things that aren't there, etc. they're at least half right - ie. anything you 'see' outwardly that has a supernatural effect is coming up from your subconscious and generally manifesting itself in the five senses.

At the same time though that's where what people would call the 'collective unconscious' resides. Its where reality starts getting fuzzy from the perspective that our autonomy and disconnectedness are less so. If you've ever been in a situation where life seemed incredibly boring, mundane, by the book to the point of tedium and then all of a sudden you and five or six friends had a very strange and traumatic experiences (could be anything 'real world' with strong effect) at the same time but different places and no causal connection - you could call that a group conscious event in the real world, in a sense you see that any time the skin of typical/causal reality rides over a major ridge of some type and all the rules seem to inexplicably change. Also, on the deeper less-disconnected levels you have psychic mediums and clairvoyants nailing things that they shouldn't be able to, ie. they have a skill at reaching down through the barrier or being able to make sense of things that are happening in their deeper conscious levels. Albeit it gets trickier when you're down there to make sense of what you're seeing, ie. its far larger multi-dimensional logic, time doesn't work the same way, it's a bit like sorting through all the stories ever told, all the history that's ever happened, in a psychedelic stew that's not stored in such a strange way that we have difficulty making sense of it. Think of the strangeness of certain Hollywood movies like Pulp Fiction or Southland tales and you're starting to head off in the right direction.

What would make apparitions, whether apparitions of the Virgin Mary (preferably not Isis) or sights of the sun spinning like a disk at whatever holy sight it gets interesting because you have a bunch of people with no known psychic ability having full blown visions - which means they're getting hit with something that's pushing its way through from the subconscious with incredible force. That's not to say that geomagnetics in certain places couldn't aid in such an upwelling but if these upwellings were purely neutral and simply drew out what people were trained by life to believe you'd see occultists and math religions scrambling to these places because they'd be ideal for ritual magick.

Though I understand at Fatima, not everyone present saw the sun move even an inch.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer