Spiritual Presence

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I wonder why some people can feel a spiritual presence and some people can't

I wonder what percentage of the worlds population can feel this presence

I wonder what percentage feels it without any religious upbringing or background

Is this feeling of presence in itself proof that there is something else out there

Or is it down to something else

Or it might be aliens

I don't think it proves there's something out there just because a lot of people feel there is. Intuition isn't always right.

https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar05/misfires

I've read that people have a natural evolved bias that makes them imagine random events are caused by some being or other. So even if somebody had never been conditioned by the society around them to be religious, they might have an intuitive feeling that there's something intelligent running the show. It may be that people with more of a modern analytical thinking style are less prone to that kind of thing.

There are more things in Heaven than dreamt of in your philosophy.

What philosophy?

Oh right

Horatio’s.

Humans know humans too well, better than they know others.
Therefore, when they encounter something they don’t understand, they habitually apply it to the human template: the sky roars, it must be the sky is angry; the river floods the house, it must be the river god venting; I didn’t hear the sound but I had the feeling: it must be another higher-level human being (Spiritual Presence).When man knew about the sky, it lived in the sky and had wings. When man knew about other planets, it lived on other planets and did not wear clothes.
If I am right, this idea will disappear as people gain a deeper understanding of the world.

I gather the original said "our philosophy" and not "your philosophy," so maybe it wasn't originally meant as a way of slapping down Horatio (and by extension, all skeptics). Anyway Hamlet had just seen a ghost with his own eyes, or he thought he had. I always wanted to see a ghost.

A form of this is known as the “God Wink”. What that describes is a perceived contact from a deceased loved one. It could be a movement. It could a forgotten object associated with a loved one that suddenly appears. Usually is taken as the deceased loved one communicating “I am ok” or “You will be ok”.

My one perceived spiritual presence experience was a God wink. During thunderstorms me and my and my dad would go to the front door and watch the storm. In Judaism there is a memorial prayer that we say for deceased close loved ones at certain times of the year. I had been neglectful about saying it. A few years ago for the first time in a number of years I was saying it when all of a sudden Boom, a loud crack of thunder. It was cloudy but not dark, it was not raining, and that was the only crack of thunder. I looked skyward and said “Okay” as in you got me. I found the incident both freaky and funny.

I would think autistics would feel spiritual presence less then NT’s because they are events that can not be proven. I have no idea if my thought is true.

While this may be true for some people, is everyone who experiences paranormal events imagining what they experienced?

Some years ago a neuroscientist did brain imaging scans of the brains of people who experienced alien abduction. the scans showed the individuals brains all lit up when asked about their abductions indicating they all believed what they saw and weren't hallucinating. Many experienced post traumatic stress. Imagination doesn't do that.

I think human brains just can't fully realise chaos. I mean we have an abstract concept of what chaos would be but we can't really model it in our brains.

A bit like the way that computers can't really generate random numbers. The hardware isn't capable of it.

So I think we tend to project intelligence onto events that are chaotic. It's a way of soothing a brain that's having a panic attack because the information is getting isn't making sense.

I genuinely think if you isolated a group of babies and let them grow up on an island somewhere, it wouldn't be long before the resulting population came up with some kind of spiritual framework for understanding the world around them. They'd invent their own God.

If I've read the original post right, the question was about the feeling many people have of a spiritual presence, rather than individuals observing things that led them to think something paranormal had happened. But to answer your question, I wouldn't say they've all simply imagined what they reckon they've seen. There's also deliberate fraud by the claimant or by somebody who played a trick on the claimant, misinterpretations, poor understanding of probability, suggestibility, faulty reasoning, faulty memory, tricks of the mind, tricks of the light, etc. Bias, magical thinking, and cognitive fallacies are very common in humans. I would think in many cases they've seen something that they couldn't easily explain as being a natural event. I don't think they're necessarily dreaming up the whole shebang.


Without a lot more detail about that experiment, it's hard to know exactly what was going on. I guess it would be widely known by now if it had convincingly demonstrated that aliens have been abducting people. And again, that's not about a spiritual presence, it's about aliens.

God is invented from group think. Consensus to that there's a central point of control/make sense of the unknown. Whether there is or not is irrelevant.

this is perhaps one of the best comments I have read on WP. But! if you accept this as plausible then consciousness itself is effectively a simulation constructed by the brain. We input multiple senses and our perception combines this together and models it in our brain. We project reality, based on our limited senses, it is an illusion, a simple construct. Our existence is the same, We create our selves based on our biological programming and therefore free will is ultimately an illusion.

Life is maya (hindu concept) the power by which the universe becomes manifest in our minds; the illusion or appearance of the phenomenal world. In hinduism we construct reality but its an illusion. We as a "self" is an illusion. We are just too proud (perhaps too scared to rock our ontological perspective) to scratch the surface and find this out.

Our ability to perceive what is outside of our sensory perception is limited. Science is limited, we acknowledge this. But western scientists are egotistical beings, they know this but arrogantly are self-proclaimed gatekeepers who enforce limits on what is reality and what is not.

^
I don't think that's true of all Western scientists.