Do You See Into The Spiritual Realm?

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Consider this. If we all lived in the spiritual realm, would we believe the physical realm exists as how could we prove it?
The spiritual realm and the physical realm are different. The both are interconnected, but they are different.

How are they interconnected?

What are the principles of the ‘Spiritual’ realm?

How does one access the ‘Spiritual’ realm?

How does on even define the ‘Spiritual’ realm?

Here's a good angle on this.

Grab a spoof on a political email chain where the Navy Seal veteran who did 100,000 tours of Iraq puts his hand up in class with his liberal professor talking in the front of the room about Darwinian evolution and says 'Oh yeah? If evolution's real why isn't this rock a person yet?'.

No one-liner answer to that or is it 'complicated'!? PWN3D by a young-earth creationist! Darwinian evolution DeMoLiShEd!!

Rhetoric and rhetorical traps are a heck of a thing. They're also never easier to implement than when the questions themselves are kept either puerile, leading or both.

Why should we believe anything without proof?

Buying into ideas without verifiable evidence causes all sorts of problems.

What if my experience with a spirit realm involved little green goblins that told me to go around shooting people? I’d be in need of psychological help, not an exorcist.

Unrelated to the green goblins thing, I have a vivid imagination and enjoy using it, but I believe in myself, not a spirit realm.

You'd have a problem if you believed that they had a good point.

In ‘Spiritualism’ a medium is allegedly one with whom spirits communicate directly. In an earlier, simpler but more dramatic age, a good medium would produce voices or apports, ring bells, float or move things across a darkened room, produce automatic writing or ectoplasm, and, in short, provide good entertainment value for the money.

Today, a medium is likely to write bathetic inspirational books and say he or she is channeling, such as JZ Knight and the White Book of her Ramtha from Atlantis. Today’s most successful mediums, however, simply claim the dead communicate through them. Under a thin guise of doing "spiritual healing" and "grief counseling", they use traditional cold reading techniques and sometimes surreptitiously gather information about their subjects to give the appearance of transmitting comforting messages from the dead. Subjective validation plays a key role in this kind of mediumship: The mediums rely upon the strong motivation of their clients to validate words, initials, statements, or signs as accurate. The clients' success at finding significance and meaning in the sounds made by the medium are taken as evidence of contact with the dead.

A rather pathetic example of how mediums rely on subjective validation to get credit for getting messages from the dead involves telling an audience you've received a message from "the grandmother of a woman in the audience" that the woman had been abused as a child and that the abuser is still loose. Patrick Hutchinson uses this trick. It's very safe. He doesn't mention the grandmother's name, so any woman in the audience who has lost a grandmother is a potential candidate to validate Hutchinson's statement. If nobody validates his claim, he can say that grandma says don't repress the abusive experience any longer. Thus, if nobody bites, Hutchinson can leave the audience with the impression that he really did get a message from the dead but the abused victim has a repressed memory of the event or is too embarrassed to come forth. Hutchinson knows that there are many women who have been abused but who have remained silent about it out of shame, fear, or for some other reason. He also knows that if he gets lucky and someone in the audience reveals that she's been abused, it will seem to many of them that the message really did come from beyond the grave. If a woman in the audience not only says she was abused but names the abuser, the media will pick up the story, and thereby spreading the illusion that mediums really do contact the dead. If the woman's revelation results in a conviction of the molester, the medium's reputation is enhanced. It's a win-win situation for the medium. He risks nothing by his claim, but stands to gain substantially if anybody can validate it.

The medium's main method of convincing the client that she is getting messages from a dead loved one involves getting information in rather worldly ways. The medium gets information by chatting up the client before the reading and by asking direct questions during the reading. In television studio sessions, the medium may eavesdrop on conversations, chat up potential "sitters" (those getting the readings), or even use electronic eavesdropping equipment. The messages that the medium claims to be passing on from the dead may be banal or trivial, such as "he forgives you". Messages might also reveal things that are already known but which leave the client wondering how did the she know that? In the good old days of séances and elaborate trickery, a spiritualist fraud would be more likely to pass on the message "give more money to me and my group" (Keene 1997) than something homely like "your dog didn't like his dish" — yes, today's mediums often claim to be contacted by dead pets.

These days, it is unnecessary to be so crude as to directly ask for money or prey on elderly persons who have lots of cash and little time. People are literally waiting for years to give money to those who give hope that a dead loved one will communicate with them. There is also a lucrative book business for those who have messages from the dead and there is good money to be made by doing live shows for hundreds or thousands of people, each of whom will pay $25 to $50 or more for the chance to connect with a lost child, spouse, or parent. There are also television opportunities for some mediums.

There is no valid empirical evidence fo the so-called "Spiritual World", but there is a lot of money to be made from hopeful seekers.

And there is a new seeker born every minute.

But if I believe I’m being contacted by something from a “spirit realm,” wouldn’t that be likely?

It’s like what’s-her-name(?) who thought Jesus told her to drown her kids. If you are a Christian who actually thinks that Jesus is contacting you from a spirit realm, you’re likely to listen, especially when one considers that Old Testament story of Abraham and Isaac.

All of that's well and good until a thing or two happen to you that crack reductive materialism to pieces. Then you're stuck with the results.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22380449

@techstep,
I just wanted to say hi and let you know I watched that video when you posted it a few months ago. It's really nice to discuss true philosophy and psychology on WP. Thanks for your contributions.

No, not unless you're crazy and are having a clean break with reality. It happens all the time to people and it doesn't make its way on to the news or cause them to want to go out and do things, it clearly makes it onto the news when a guy believes his neighbor's dog is telling him to kill people and then goes out and does it.

TY, I just wish there were better ways to talk about this stuff. I'm fine getting plenty of push back even, it's just really annoying when it's strictly point-scoring in nature.

I agree that PPR doesn't accommodate academic, philosophical discourse. It's frustrating when members insult and belittle others instead of engaging in conversation, but I think we're on the right path. Please keep contributing because it elevates the caliber of this site.

But the problem is that where does one draw the line between “crazy” and the “spirit realm.” It’s not easy to differentiate the two. Psychologists make some allowances based on cultural beliefs, but it can be quite a fine line as I know, personally, too well.

If something can’t be verified, then I will doubt and question it’s reality. If it’s a fringe belief, I won’t believe it without extensive proof. Why would spirits (or whatever) care so little about physical evidence if they do, indeed, exist? It sounds awfully fishy to me.

That’s not to say that I don’t believe in myself and my own imagination.

People are actively engaging here. Just because some disagree does not make it an “insult.”

@Tp,

Have you studied metaphysics? How do you know the nature of reality in any circumstance, to verify its credibility?

A good start might be if it comes from what can be called a peak experience, ie. a state where your sense of wellness goes significantly above and beyond the usual. That can happen on a hike in the right scenery, it can happen during sex, the right moment at an outdoor concert, it can happen all kinds of other ways and typically the person has a useful revelation that they can apply to their lives.

Where I do think this gets tricky, revelations themselves can be difficult to source. Iain McGilchrist's thinking about the right and left brain, or 'Master and Emissary' relationship would suggest that there are parts of our own processing that we don't see or make contact with and quite often visionary experiences of the positive sort could just as easily be a eureka moment in your subconscious experience. Most of the time there's no reason to believe that a vision is coming from anywhere beyond deeper aspects of your own mind. The tricky thing there though - that can still have external effects, so the entity question is even tougher to deal with because there's a bit of wash back and forth between external and perceived internal when that sort of thing happens.


The 2nd law of thermodynamics might be a good start, ie. no leverage to do anything. Then again I find myself a lot less interested with the entity question largely because it's so difficult to falsify, what I do find more interesting is all of the suggestive evidence that our minds and their effects don't stop at our skulls. It's something we need to get a handle on as well if we want to find more ways to make less of a mess of politics, mass psychology, and running a society in general.