Synchronicity

[HRDWarrior]

I've never had any such experiences, never any ghost stories or otherwise that I have personally encountered.

 

Supposedly, however, my mother has had two such experiences - the first when she was into nature worship, she claims a rock spoke to her in an audible voice. Rather than thinking it neat, she freaked out, and became a Christian, convinced it was a demon (or is now, who knows what she really thought that day). The second time she heard a musical tune coming from the air vents of our house, and swears it wasn't the wind and repeated on numberous occasions. She insisted the family go through the house and pray in every room to cast out whatever was there, and swears she never heard it again.

 

Of course, no one else has verified any of this information, but hey, makes for good ghost stories when you're half drunk out camping! LOL!

[MultifariousBirdLady]

Yep. I was once considering marrying a particular woman and she was definitely interested in me. I asked some friends and they basically gasped and said Noooooo, bad idea. I didn't see what they were seeing. I mulled it over for quite a while and one morning as I was in bed I decided to ask God straight out. So I rolled out of bed, got on my knees and asked "Should I marry Linda?" "No."

 

It was just like he was in the room next to me. I heard the "No." loud and clear.

 

But I decided to double-check, so I said something like "Please don't be angry, but You know I have a very active imagination, so I need to ask that question one more time. Should I.." "NO!"

 

Much louder that time.

 

I responded "'Nuff said, it's off."

 

Wait.... did you ever find out why the answer was "No"?

Do you think the "voice" you heard simply have been a re-affirmation by your own mind that your friends had given you good advice?

(That's what I would wonder if I had an experience like this.)

 

 

What I want to know is if people from other faiths, beliefs and religions experience these sort of coincidences.

 

Yes, absolutely. I have had some of those myself and so have various other Pagans I've spoken with.

 

It's true, some of these incidents do seem like pretty small coincidences, but when a variety of small coincidences happen repeatedly, one starts to wonder about them.

 

 

When I used to think about this stuff I would get stressed about all the starving people in the world in hideous circumstances and wonder why God wasn't doing anything in their lives? I thought he was cruel. Other christians used to say it was cause it's not a christian continent. (Africa). Then I would think hang on yes it is. Christianity is huge in Africa. Why is it so easy for people to be so irreverant of other people's pain and suffering?

Yeah, that's just nuts. Like god cares about the west but not the third world?

 

Reminds me of those football games where the winning quarterback thanks Jesus for winning the game - just once I'd like to see the losing quarterback blame Jesus for giving the win to the other side.

 

Agreed, this is a problem. In one book I read a true example was given of some Christian who prayed for God to keep his shaving razor sharp. When that supposedly worked, he convinced a bunch of other guys to do the same "test," and they also claimed that it worked. Now why would a God give a damn about keeping a few dozen razors sharp but not give a damn about, say, preventing serious accidents or keeping a tyrannical regime out of power?

 

It's a lot easier to think that the guys who did this experiment either continued to think their razors were sharp when they really weren't, or -- let's suppose for a minute the razors really did stay sharp -- perhaps, as some practitioners of magick might say, it just doesn't take as much "belief-energy" to keep a razor sharp as it does to prevent accidents or influence political events.

 

 

Suddenly I feel like hailing Thor, who of course is the deity responsible for lightning et al in my faith. So I raise my coffee cup... speak out into the night "Welcome Thor, nice to have you close"...

 

...and a second after that I see one chain of cloud-to-cloud lightning directly above my head. After that, it's back to lightshow in the South.

 

That's awesome!

 

That said: How often do those weird things not happen, and how often do we remember the positive and negative occasions? If in one case out of ten something weird happens, how well will we remember the one time and how well the other nine?

 

Yes, selective memory is a problem with this.

However, this is one reason some people keep a written record of their spiritual and/or magickal experiments. Doing so can be very instructive.

 

 

If miraculous things happened in reality and not just in the minds of the believers, the events would be universally witnessed. Hindus would see visions of Mary, German college professors would witness levitations, and Baptist ministers would see ghostly ancestors. It's cultural expectation that creates specific miracles.

 

I agree that cultural expectations affect the way that experiences like this manifest, and it's interesting to look at the differences. What also really interests me, though, is the root cause or force behind those experiences, which seems to be universal and something with the power to convey real insight to people through, or perhaps in spite of, the cultural trappings.

 

 

True...I'm not sure if you know much about Islam, but generally they are very hostile to Christian evangelism of any sort. In the country I grew up in, people were put in prison for becoming Christian. Muslims do not tend to convert to Christianity by argument. This is why the majority of Muslims who become Christian do so because they have visions or dreams of Jesus.

 

Sadhu Sundar Singh was a Hindu Brahman that was about to commit suicide when he had a vision of Jesus.

 

Or the Jewish woman who died, had an NDE, and saw Jesus. She was shocked because she didn't believe in him.

 

I don't think the visions of Jesus necessarily make Christianity true. But people do have weird experiences that defy their cultural expectations.

 

Oh, very interesting. Once I had a vision of a particular Goddess that I did not know -- but who was historically associated with and gave the name of a Goddess I did know -- and I found out years later the significance of the unexpected details I saw. Then again, I second-guess myself and wonder if I had picked those ideas up somewhere and just didn't remember them.

 

I do wonder if the people you describe above had had contact with Christians and were fairly familiar with concepts of Jesus. I suspect they were.

 

 

It was only because one day I heard an audible voice say to me "Hi, I'm God, and I'm a Universalist, what's more I am everyone...so everyone's going to get there in the end".

 

That's very interesting, and I have had the same thought as what I put in bold enter my mind at times during meditation. And in a way, a scenario in which everyone was really "one", living over and over, would in a way be perfect karma.

 

That was not my expectation, neither culturally nor theologically...I didn't think that would happen, and I know it doesn't happen to most Christians in the UK, but hey, it's what caused the crisis of Faith in my life, as I started to question everything I had believed until that point.

 

I always find it interesting when spiritual experiences lead people away from more restrictive forms of religion towards more open and questioning views.