this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Having experienced first-hand, and from my teens, stuff like NDE, OBE, Remote Viewing, Regressions (Past lives), a lot of hypnosis, trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Religious Inspiration, Automatic writing, and having been directly or indirectly involved with UFOs, Psychophonies, Ouija, mixed Spiritism, Card reading, Magic rituals, Homeopathy, Pendulum Dowsing, Energy healing, Chakras, Hand imposition, Horoscopes, The Urantia Book, Hermes Trismegistus, Gaia... and a bunch more that I'm surely forgetting...
I can tell you that you shouldn't be open minded about any of it.
I won't call those years "lost", but all I got out of them is some Lucid Dreaming, some really cool internal experiences (without any drugs), some fun going to places (nothing beats a spring in a lost nook of a mountain forest at dawn), an extremely developed imagination, the ability to fall asleep whenever I needed (that I lost due to extreme stress overload a couple years ago), a much better understanding of the human brain, and a shitton of skepticism.
I could write a lot about my experiences, but the bottom line would be: mental skills are fine, but science rulez. Or as said by the Dalai Lama: "When science contradicts religion, accept science" (much respect).
I have had many years of formal training and education under the umbrella of science and the scientific method. This requires both skepticism and questioning.
When I say that I am open minded about subjects such as NDE, OBE and the like I mean that I'm using the aforementioned.
Obviously, science does not have the answers to everything. Science still questions everything while, at the same time, acknowledges that there is much more to know.
I have had several experiences, so far in life, that I cannot explain using what we know from science. For, at least, the past decade I've felt much more comfortable and inspired with more questions than I have answers.
Science and/or the scientific method is a tool. A tool that has been developed by humans. But that's all that it is.
As with religion, I will not hold science up on a pedestal.
The problem with the expression "open minded", is that it gets used as a way to bypass any scrutiny, by people who are scammers, believers with a mind so open that their brains fall out, or both (scammers who believe the scam). At this point, I'd rather avoid it.
From my experiences, there is nothing that some Occam's razor can't reduce to scientific explanations. Every time I managed to set up a scientifically sound test, they failed completely. I've encountered many scammers, believers, and scammer+believers claiming plenty of stuff they couldn't even set a test for. One sentence I will never forget from a scammer+believer criticizing another one is: "they are too scientific" 🤦
Like, no, one can not be "too scientific".
Sure, the scientific method is a "human tool", but so far it's the only tool humans have that can provide any useful information. Non-scientific data, is like isolated data points or clusters with no way to relate them to anything, no way to use them to predict something other than themselves, and basically useless.
So far, the only experiences I've encountered that don't have any possible scientific explanation, are 2nd hand accounts from people without a scientific mindset. Since they didn't run any data gathering at the time, and the experiences are not repeatable, they're just isolated tales without any reference to anything real. Maybe they did happen, maybe they didn't, maybe who knows what. Useless. (and it's a pity, since they could've been really interesting if true)
Yeah, critical thinking is an important skill to have. Sadly, there is a very low percentage of people (specifically, in the USA) that have it.
I'm approximating that around 98% of the news media, here in the USA, are biased and/or propaganda. The first year of my university education taught me how to separate fact from opinion. What if you don't go to university? How do you learn critical thinking? I have a college friend that I've known for almost thirty years. He has a masters degree in finance and he is a certified public accountant. However, when it comes to USA politics, he has been completely brainwashed by the media. He is one of those MAGA nut-jobs.
Having second hand accounts of anything is, certainly, unreliable. I wish more people could have, at least, one experience that fell outside of what we know from science. Unbelievably, I've had several of these. I'd say about five that I cannot explain using the best of our scientific knowledge.