I’m a Christian so this is a bit strange for me to talk about this. In certain situations I sense the Holy spirit as a tangible thing. I had a vision of Christ once. I have also had experiences when I can sense strong emotions coming from people when I didn’t see their face properly because they were looking at me from in their house (I felt the emotion before I noticed them, he was very angry that I walked to close to his property, he then came out and very angrily told me off). The main thing I’m on here for is I have a strange/mysterious thing in the centre of my vision which is always there. I can go about my day and not notice it. If I focus on it I can see things in it, I’ve seen faces, scripture references when I’ve asked God for them which have been extremely precise in answering what I was looking for. For example I had just read the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and very nearly lost my faith. After a lot of hard praying I saw the verse Luke 24:34 'saying, “The Lord has really risen and has appeared to Simon [Peter]!” (my name is Simon) Followed by Colossians 2:8 ‘See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception [pseudo-intellectual babble], according to the tradition [and musings] of mere men, following the [a]elementary principles of this world, rather than following [the truth—the teachings of] Christ.’ Just wondering if anyone else has this vision thing or any similar experiences not necessarily Christian
Just wondering if anyone else has this vision thing or any similar experiences not necessarily ChristianEveryone has this ability. It allows us to recognize what we observe with our senses, after it gets translated into electro-chemical signals which the brain must interpret against prior memories.
Anil Seth calls this process “controlled hallucinations”, and when our controlled hallucinations agree, we call that reality. Unfortunately not all of our hallucinations agree and this can be a good thing for authors who write fiction and are able to “imagine” and write fantastical stories of things that aren’t there while knowing they are just fictional, but it can also be a problem for people who 'imagine" things and believe they are real and not fictional, which can be beneficial or detrimental to one’s peace of mind even if they are just “imaginary”.
This video of Anil Seth explains this phenomenon as observed and modeled after many laboratory experiments. He even shows how the brain can be fooled into seeing things that are not there, but also demonstrates that the brain can make internal adjustments to recognize verbal sentences from what at first may sound as noises. It’s a very interesting and fascinating presentation.
a strange/mysterious thing --Simoncould you be more specific?
What would be cool, is if someone, anyone, in the history of all humans, reported a vision of a god they had never heard of, never read a word of scripture, a god that was from a completely different culture. This would have had to happen more than 50 years ago before there was so much global communication. That vision, if it was then reported, would match up to all the things that children in that religion learned about. It’s really pretty meaningless when you just think about something you’ve read, heard, been engrained with, been told is real, been told is the most important to think about it.
I’m loving the comment on controlled hallucinations. I concider myself a bit of a scientific thinker. That makes sense. It’s a bit hard to describe the dot. It’s a bit like the effect when you wear red and blue 3d glasses. Maybe it’s just my focal point or something to do with astigmatism. I will have a look at the Ted talk in the morning as its 4 am here.
@lauston thank you for your comment, interesting point, I definitely won’t start preaching.
What would be cool, is if someone, anyone, in the history of all humans, reported a vision of a god they had never heard of, never read a word of scripture, a god that was from a completely different culture.Hey it's nice to see someone else say that. Whenever I see someone on these documentaries claiming a vision, it's always a Christian seeing Christ or Mother Mary. And I always turn to my wife and say, you know what I want to see? - A Christian have a vision of Buddha, then convert to Buddhism. Now THAT'S a vision I can appreciate.
Hey it’s nice to see someone else say that. -- CuthbertI might have got it from Loftus, maybe some version of it from Harris. Whatever original thoughts I think I have, I either find somewhere that I heard it and forgot, or eventually I find someone was already teaching it at some university somewhere and has formulated it better than I did and collected the data to back it up.
Or maybe it was this guy
