Former Paranormal Skeptics: What changed your mind?

I am really agnostic about a lot of these “unexplained” phenomena — paranormal stuff included.

Basically, I don’t really believe in it, assume there’s a scientific explanation, but am open to being proven wrong.

I’ve never seen my long dead aunt Agatha appear at the foot of my bed dressed in the clothes she was buried in, nor do I want to, but there is no law that says it is impossible. My aunt Agatha goes on not appearing night after night just as she went on appearing day after day when she was alive. It is the consistency of the universe which is the most remarkable thing about it and which seems impossible to understand. Fond though I was of my aunt when she lived, I have no wish to see her now she is dead and I believe the feeling is mutual.

I’ve always been 100% a non-believer in paranormal events, but my goofy Irish grandpa paid me a post-mortem visit and there was no doubt it was him, for me.

If I believed in it, I’d be upset that I’ve received no further visits or visits from my beloved grandma.

I’ve had many interactions with physics that have been completely accurate. It can’t be chance.

Nothing firsthand, but heard a chilling story about how my Grandpa appeared to his neighbor when he was working in the field. He told the story to his son on his deathbed, and said he felt like John, one foot in this world and one in the next. I can’t say it convinced me, but I remain open to the possibility.

I was never a “Paranormal Skeptic”, in the sense of the many people who feel compelled to post derisive and dogmatic comments about how they know anything in the direction of spirits or clair senses or anything not proven by (their lay conception of) “science” is a scam or insane poppycock.

But I am NOT un-skeptical and do understand the actual scientific method and respect what actual science and scientists have to say about the things they make scientific statements about. In fact, I’m more skeptical than most scientific people I’ve known, particularly the many cheating physics students who I’ve seen not really do their lab work honestly.

For me, it’s not a matter of being “convinced”. It’s that I, and people whose intelligence, rationality, learning, and interest in objective truth I entirely trust (many of whom hold scientific credentials), have had experiences and have studied credible accounts of various events and experiences that have little or no useful explanation from the perspective of the doctrines of “the only thing that exists at all is understood and material and mechanical” or “ignore your intuition and mental impressions because they are all nonsense” or “traditional ideas or perspectives not proven by modern Western science are all useless random nonsense”. And, I and others appreciate and have found great value in several the various inquiries, explorations, and useful techniques and perspectives that people have developed for them. I remain interested in actual scientific inquiries about them, and in psychology, but mere skepticism is beside the point and of little or no value, and can even cause problems.

Some of my own more striking experiences have involved:

* energy clearing work, where shamanic practitioners have spent a small amount of time working on me (with no effort or faith on my part) with striking and immediate results on my alertness, enthusiasm, energy levels, presence, and sense of “feeling like myself”.

* compassionate depossession work, which was even more effective than above, and included experiences of allowing my voice to be used by a spirit that was not me and did not come from imagination. I found my voice was saying out loud the perspective of the spirit that had been hanging out with me and affecting my way of being for a while.

* dream work, which I’ve been very interested with in many ways, but as far as striking phenomena, the experiences where the dream group I’ve worked with has set an intention to dream about the same subject on the same night, and when we share dreams, there have been uncanny amounts of overlap in the details of the dreams which aren’t anything we had discussed before.

* ancestral healing work, where you develop a connection with your well ancestors. You could de-bunk this all day but it would get you nothing of value to do so, and cost you a potentially life-altering practice.

* mediumship relationships with spirit allies. I was feeling physical symptoms of sickness – fever, sore throat, malaise, and I used techniques I’ve been trained in to connect with spirit allies and asked them for healing, and the symptoms diminished in an hour or so, and were gone by the end of the next day.

As Shakespeare has Hamlet say: “There are more things in heaven and on earth, Hoatio, than are dreampt of in your philosophy.” I’ll leave it at that.

I never was a skeptic, and don’t see a need to be.
I really like it when current science/knowledge can explain what I experience, but I don’t dismiss it when science/knowledge can’t.

I’m skeptical of other people’s paranormal claims, not because I don’t think such things are possible but because people are lazy and will blame angels instead of think about what happened.

But if you have had an undeniable consequential experience that is a chasm away from explanation, join the club.
If you never have had an experience like that, then I think it’s easy to scoff at ‘paranormal’ phenomena, and I really can’t blame you. But ‘wink’ some of us know mind-boggling things are possible.

Part of me will even claim it is all science waiting to happen and that some such phenomena will be mastered and there will be an app for that.