Gregg

RB, I'm pushing 40 and I've never had any "unexplainable" experience.

At one point I was a believer in a New Thought religion and I briefly had a scare that fundamentalist teachings might be right. I started to write a letter detailing my fears to a minister of my acquaintance, but I never sent it because near the end of the letter I had this warm, wonderful feeling of reassurance wash over me which stayed with me for two or three days. But gradually it faded and over the next few years I gradually abandoned theism and belief in the paranormal.

There's no reason to think that this feeling was anything more than something I triggered within myself in response to the mild panic attack I was having. When my wife left me I regularly had blood-freezing panic attacks followed by moments of warmth and confidence. I think it's just a physical response, my brain/body's way of dealing with stress.

The problem is too many people take the fact that THEY can't explain an experience and extrapolate from this that 1) No one else can explain it and 2) It never WILL be explained.

We have barely begun to understand how the brain works. To say that we never will figure out a physical cause for our seemingly "mystical" experiences is the height of presumption. As someone pointed out earlier, we already know that many mystical experiences are triggered by stress, drug ingestion, or starvation. This strongly suggests that all mystical experiences most likely have an entirely physical cause.

The Evil One

In my opinion it was clearly the same sort of thing as a dream - ie random bits of the subconscious floating to the top, odd misfirings in the brain - but it seemed qualitatively different from a dream: it had a more lasting emotional effect, and transitioned into full wakefulness much more smoothly than any dream I have had. This is why I prefer to say it was a trance-vision, hallucination or brain glitch rather than a dream per se. Once it was over I had no trouble telling it apart from reality, though it seemed real while it was in progress.

What it certainly wasn't, however, was a supernatural message from the Sun Goddess or anyone else. But if I were not accustomed to critical evidential thinking, I could easily have interpreted the internal bubblings of my own brain to be exactly that. Think I've covered that above...

Sarpedon

Waking dreams are nothing unusual. I've had them. There are several mental states that are rolled together and called "sleep", and there are several mental states that are rolled together and called "consciousness." Being drowsy, feeling lazy, and being warm can cause a kind of half-sleep, which can in turn lead to dreaming, though conciousness is not lost. There is nothing magical about this. Visions, dreams, and hallucinations are no more magical than volcanos, cannabis, or sodium, but to the primitive mind, they may seem to be.

Starboy

Weird things make almost everyone wonder. The question is how do you explain the weird event and the wonder it has caused? Certainly claiming goddidit is a possible explanation but if you stop there you aren't wondering all that much.

Starboy

openeyes

Can't say that I've had any "supernatural" or "unexplainable" experiences.

Once at work, all of the sudden I couldn't see totally the page/screen in front of me. It lasted about 20 minutes and I felt odd. Later I read that blinds spots can be part of a type of "aura" that precedes a migraine. So I'm sure it was just some cross-wiring in the brain. I can't explain why this happened on that day and why I haven't had anything like that since. (FYI, the health plan did pay for a CAT scan which turned up nothing.)

The Evil One

Excatly. I agree completely. My point, as someone who is not generally prone to waking dreams, and who eventually had one with vaguely religious content, is that I can understand how someone unacquainted with the facts of the matter as you outline them might end up interpreting such an experience as evidence of the supernatural.

In other words, it is my strong suspicion that many if not most spiritual experiences are waking dreams/trance visions/hallucinations, since I had one that was as spiritual as it could be, and I'm quite clear on the fact that it was a dream/vision/hallucination.

fishbulb

You just answered your own question: to have a supernatural experience means, in effect, to have an experience that one concludes is supernatural in nature. Supernatural events cannot be proved to have happened because they don't follow natural laws (otherwise, they would just be natural events). Therefore, it is not possible to tell the difference between a supernatural event and an event with a natural, but unknown cause.

I have experienced many things that I am unable to explain. Does that mean that I have had supernatural encounters? Undoubtedly, a little bit of investigation would have turned up completely mundane explanations for many of these experiences, but it is hardly worth my time to go chasing after every shadow I see out of the corner of my eye -- unusual occurrences are, paradoxical as it may sound, common. (That is, we should expect something unusual to happen every so often, even if we shouldn't expect a particular unusual ocurrence.) Some unusual experiences remain inexplicable even after thorough investigation. Does that mean that they are supernatural in nature? Or does it just mean that the mundane explanation is just well-concealed or unintuitive? Many mysteries remain unsolved for years or even centuries, but that does not mean that they are unsolvable or that they will never be solved.

I've been told of some pretty strange experiences by people whose sincerity I have no reason to question. Some of these experiences, they attribute to ghosts or telepathy or god or whatnot, but there are enormous differences between the facts of an event as it actually ocurred, the facts of an event as someone remembers them (a group of people who witness the same event will frequently remember it very differently) and the hypothesis a person comes up with to explain the event.

I have had experiences that I can't explain, but that in no way means I have had experiences that are unexplainable.

maddog

In answer to the thread title, "No."

I've seen things happen that I can't explain. But I know that there IS an explanation for them, even if I don't know what it is. Magic tricks are just tricks, even if I don't know how they work.

I am not an atheist "simply because" I have "not had anything unusual happen" to me. I'm not quite sure what "unusual" means. In any case, the prevalence of natural explanations for natural things is an important, but not the only, datum I take account of in determining what I believe to be right.

Yahzi

I had two expierences of precognition.

In grade school I dreamed that someone would win the poster contest, and they did,

More significantly, a few years ago my mother went into the hospital with terminal cancer. After 24 hours, I went home to get some sleep while my sister stayed with her I slept for fifteen minutes, then woke up and lay there waiting for the phone to ring. It rang within a minute or so. Of course I already knew what the phone call was about. The unusual thing was that I had been sound asleep from exhaustion, but I woke up before the phone rang.

How do I explain them? In the first case, probably that I just remember the order of events wrong. In the second, because I am not an idiot. I knew what was coming.

Oh, and I forgot: in high school I controlled the weather for two weeks, making it snow and stop at will.

But none of these cases ever convinced me of anything other than the bizzarity of coincidence. I made a lot of money on stocks last month, but I don't think that's necessarily because I am genius. Sometimes you just get lucky.

That's what it boils down to: the guy who makes a windfall on stocks and assumes its because of him, and the guy who does the same but considers it might be due to other factors. The religoius person, like God, is obsessed with their own objective signficance. It's not enough that they matter to themselves: they have to matter to the inert physical universe too.

NeoApostate

I had quite a few 'experiences with God' that I believed to be very supernatural - involved in some charasmatic circles at one point so a lot of the usual there, like 'slain in the spirit' a couple of times (if you are familiar with the term) and the Holy Spirit making me dance - pretty silly stuff in hindsight.

Also had prayers seemingly answered in odd ways.. one in particular I remember is having a hard decision about changing majors - I wanted to go to art school but didn't want to do it for my own selfish reasons; instead only wanted to do what God wanted me to do - so I prayed and told God if he really wanted me to go to art school he would have to give me a specific sign and have somebody call me up and mention art in some way. 20 minutes later my girlfriend called me on her cellphone from her car and mentioned she heard about this art school on the radio and just thought I might be interested for some reason. That's probably the best example of a time when I believed I had a prayer answered that was 100% proof to me of God's supernatural answers to prayer.

Non-Religion related, I've had very odd cases of a sort of deja-vu I guess which I can't really explain.