gattino
Justified & Ancient
- Joined
- Jul 30, 2003
- Messages
- 2,523
Just an observation really, masquerading as a "what do you think?" question. As I now earn my pennies being a host to paying houseguests, I encounter far more people and from so many diverse backgrounds than I previously had with just my own social circle.
And though I can't pretend to put any kind of percentage figure on it I can say with some confidence that I've never once started a conversation with anyone anywhere in which I told them about one or more of my brushes with the paranormal/psychic/whatever you want to call it, without them responding with stories of their own..stories that would never have been volunteered without me starting the conversation. At least some examples of psychic dreams, deathbed phenomena and after death communication seem to be in the unpublished back story of almost everybody you care to ask. Yet collectively we seem unaware of the fact.
It struck me that the whole world..or at least the english speaking western world..is in some kind of unspoken, unwritten collective agreement not to mention these things to each other in daily life. The dominance of the "disbelief = clever/educated discerning; Belief = gullible/uneducated/sad" equation in the mainstream media and the culture of comedy has left people too fearful of ridicule to realise their own experiences aren't remotely unusual after all.
Is it possible that we're as a species going around not acknowledging collectively what almost everyone is experiencing individually?
And though I can't pretend to put any kind of percentage figure on it I can say with some confidence that I've never once started a conversation with anyone anywhere in which I told them about one or more of my brushes with the paranormal/psychic/whatever you want to call it, without them responding with stories of their own..stories that would never have been volunteered without me starting the conversation. At least some examples of psychic dreams, deathbed phenomena and after death communication seem to be in the unpublished back story of almost everybody you care to ask. Yet collectively we seem unaware of the fact.
It struck me that the whole world..or at least the english speaking western world..is in some kind of unspoken, unwritten collective agreement not to mention these things to each other in daily life. The dominance of the "disbelief = clever/educated discerning; Belief = gullible/uneducated/sad" equation in the mainstream media and the culture of comedy has left people too fearful of ridicule to realise their own experiences aren't remotely unusual after all.
Is it possible that we're as a species going around not acknowledging collectively what almost everyone is experiencing individually?