Mystic experience?

[John Mekki]

I think you were being flirted with.

Why did you ask that particular girl if she pulled your jacket? Is that something she was likely to do, or was she just the closest person to you? Was she smiling when she said this? Had she acted in any flirty way before?

Nope.

 

[xtifr]

I think you were being flirted with.

Why did you ask that particular girl if she pulled your jacket? Is that something she was likely to do, or was she just the closest person to you? Was she smiling when she said this? Had she acted in any flirty way before?

Nope.

"Nope" is not a responsive answer to the question "why?" Why did you ask that particular girl?

And are you sure you'd recognize flirty behavior?

Anyway, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole concept of thinking that God goes around tugging on people's jackets as a mysterious "proof" of his existence. That's up there with "He hides dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith."

(It's amazing how many supposed "tests of faith" resemble tests of intelligence, except that the expected results are reversed.)

 

[dafydd]

 

[ExMinister]

When I first turned toward skepticism, I had a few experiences that I had considered possible mystical experiences for many years. Many of these experiences had fairly easy natural explanations when I went back and revisited them with a more skeptical mindset.

But I did have one experience that was maybe a bit similar to yours.

I was with two friends, one of who is now my husband, and the other his mother, and we were about to take a formal ghost tour at the supposedly haunted hotel we'd been staying at for a week. We were waiting for the tour guide to show up and my friends and I were standing with our backs just next to a wall, at some point leaning against the wall, at others just standing there, when suddenly I felt a sensation as if something kicked or punched me in the middle of my low back. It hit so hard that I sort of stumbled forward. My would-be husband said I turned white as a sheet.

There was no one else around. It wasn't a prank as they aren't the pranking kind, and of course I am married to one of them and the other is now my mother-in-law so I know them well. My mother-in-law to this day believes it was the ghost. And anyway it didn't feel like a physical sensation the way a fist or actual foot would have felt. I didn't feel contact with my skin, more an explosion type feeling.

Five years later I was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy. One of my more common sleep-onset hallucinations is a tingling sensation in my low back in exactly that same area.

If you know anything about temporal lobe phenomena, you know they can involve all sorts of strange sensations, from the tingling I experienced to voices, to the sensation of a presence in the room, the feeling of deja vu, the sensation of leaving one's body, even the apparent sighting of ghost. It is tied up with religious and spiritual experience, and I wonder if being in a meditative state, in your case a prayerful/meditative state, might make it more likely to occur.

Since then I have read of research done by Michael Persinger in Canada. who believes that all of us experience temporal lobe phenomena, but that we vary widely in the amount we experience, from people who experience it rarely, a half-dozen times or less in a lifetime, say, to people who experience it often, such as someone with temporal lobe seizures who might experience it daily, with a whole range of personal variation in between.

So I would tend to think that your jacket tug and my ghost kick may have been that kind of phenomenon. It was my first thought when I read your story. It may be that you will never have an experience like that triggered again, unlike me, whose brain is prone to them.

Anyway, just a thought.

 

[John Mekki]

So I would tend to think that your jacket tug and my ghost kick may have been that kind of phenomenon. It was my first thought when I read your story. It may be that you will never have an experience like that triggered again, unlike me, whose brain is prone to them.

Anyway, just a thought.

The question is: why such experiences happen when they are supposed to happen.
You have experienced it in a ghost house, not at the beach while doing sunbathing

 

[Garrette]

The question is: why such experiences happen when they are supposed to happen.
You have experienced it in a ghost house, not at the beach while doing sunbathing

This has been repeatedly answered: It doesn't just happen when it is supposed to happen; you simply notice and remember it when you wish. Further, even if it did happen only then, it would still not be in violation of the law or large numbers and there would still be no evidence of anything mystical.

The real question is why such evidence and answers are ignored when they are counter to your chosen explanation.

 

[Hokulele]

From my understanding of ExMinister's post, it is something she has experienced in mundane settings. The ghost tour one was simply either the first, or is remembered as being the first, because of the extraordinary circumstances.

 

[ExMinister]

The ghost tour was the first time I ever recall noticing it, true. But Hokulele is right, within a few years it became a common sensation for me as I was falling asleep at night. I have since experienced that sensation even once while driving. In my case this type of thing escalated and I also happened to be diagnosed with temporal lobe seizures.

I don't think the point is WHERE they happen, but just the fact that the brain can and DOES produce these sensations, and that they are not uncommon.

Or in the words of Carl Sagan: "A continuum of spontaneous temporal lobe stimulation seems to stretch from people with serious epilepsy to the most average among us."

 

[Paul2]

I've clearly felt a strong vibration in my pocket and reached in to get my phone, only to find that the pocket is empty and the phone is elsewhere. If this happened in a prayer meeting or in church, would it mean I had missed a call from God?

Cue any number of stand-up comics who could fill 10 minutes with this scenario.

 

[Pup]

I don't think the point is WHERE they happen, but just the fact that the brain can and DOES produce these sensations, and that they are not uncommon.

Exactly. And given that fact, one can see how people would attempt to make up mythical explainations for what seemed to be "unexplainable," just as they attempted to explain lightning as the work of an angry god before we came to understand it. So a whole mythology of ghosts or gods who interacted with people in subtle ways was born, and people tried to extract meaning from the circumstances when they noticed these interactions, just as they tried to extract meaning from when or where lightning struck.