On my mission, at a zone conf. one of the AP's got up at the podium and pronounced that the night before he had had the 'ministering of angles'. We were all pretty much in awe. Now, 40 years later, knowing he made it all up has provided me with countless hours of righteous indignation contra Mormonism.
See, since my thought experiments say that a disembodied spirit no longer has a physical body vehicle to hang out in, he therefore has no sensory equipment, so he cannot see, hear, taste, walk around, etc. And so anybody who claims to have had an encounter with a disembodied spirit is making it all up, and should prob. have their knuts cut. Just on general principle.
dantana, thinking of thought experiments, Aquinas thought about angels as disembodied spirits and he thought they had sensory experience, navigated, etc. by receiving the information by direct connection to the mind of God. That might sound a bit odd but it is a thought experiment. It is a bit difficult to come to definitive conclusions by way of thought experiments though they might have some worth.
I once encountered a disembodied spirit. It had nothing to say and left me with nothing. Well I have no way of knowing what it was, dream, bit of undigested potato, or something else. The problem is it did not fit any other known conditions, situation of the time, or results so I have no way to focus into what it was.
Hi Shades, as conversation is being slow I figured I could reply to this question but I am unsure if it could bring any further conversation. I remain very open to the possibility that a bit of undigested potato is the cause of the affair.
I saw a pale transparent figure more like a geometric totem than like Patrick (name slipping my memory at the moment). I am unsure why I felt it was a conscious human like awareness. I thought that and told it to leave my room. It did.
Semi dream experiences like this are pretty common. There is one odd detail about this I could mention. A day or two later a paperback book was left on my doorstep. No clue as to who left it. It was a guide to out of body travel for somebody wishing to experience this. I did not really try to pursue this ability or guide. I could clarify that this happened Mid 1970s when there was interest in a variety of sorts of things like that. I read several Carlos Castenada books but viewed them more as amusing fiction than instructions in reality.
Or one could imagine grey areas at the margins. One might also remind oneself that coincidences happen.
I read several Carlos Castenada books but viewed them more as amusing fiction than instructions in reality.
Or one could imagine grey areas at the margins. One might also remind oneself that coincidences happen.
I like to see myself soaring high over the Sonoran desert before landing on the Brujo's porch and finding my spot of power. With luck, Joseph will be sitting on the rocking chair playing his role in Dueling Banjos.
I saw a pale transparent figure more like a geometric totem than like Patrick (name slipping my memory at the moment). I am unsure why I felt it was a conscious human like awareness. I thought that and told it to leave my room. It did.
Semi dream experiences like this are pretty common.
I don't know whether anyone has properly studied this, and I'm not even sure how one would go about doing that, but it seems plausible to me that human brains are kind of always spring-loaded to recognize another human presence in whatever is happening. We have evolved as social animals, with other humans around us most of the time, doing things. So a lot of the time the explanation for anything unusual in our environment is going to be that some other human did something to cause it.
One of the leading causes of faint noises we hear is going to be human whispering. One of the leading causes of any moving glow or shadow is going to be some human moving around. So after millions of years of hominids living with that, I reckon there must be some part of our brains that is always ready to fling up its hand like the keener in class and shout, "I know, I know—it's a person!"
When we're wide awake, we're probably getting enough clear information about things around us that we don't have to guess much about what is happening. If the light is dim and we're sleepy, however, then maybe guesswork steps into the informational void, and that ancient keener part of our brain shouts its guess that a person is there, or at least something person-ish. That's my hypothesis, anyway. It amounts to a version of the "undigested potato" theory, except that it doesn't rely on any particular food items, digested or not.