The death of our canine friends has thrown up a whole lot of interesting occurrences and questions at home.
Warren says he still sees the three boys occasionally in their beloved stomping grounds, while by now I no longer see or feel them in the garden or sprawled upon the living room mat. I believe they've moved on, and what Warren is seeing is an imprint left upon the environment. It's a fairly common thing,reportedly,but it's not the deceased person any more than a photo or a film is the person depicted in it.
That's my opinion, anyway.
I find that post-death sightings draw heavy fire from skeptics and materialists - usually explained away as a hodgepodge of grief, human memory and extreme longing to see the beloved again.
They could be on fairly safe ground, there. But something they hardly ever address is the issue of synchro-death sightings. I think I just made that word up. I mean, of course, the cases where a vision of the deceased is received at the moment or slightly before the moment of death.
It's much harder to explain away - I think I've mostly heard mutterings of chance and selection bias invoked to explain them - in other words, if you receive a visit or a vision of a loved one at the moment of their death, even if you had no idea they were anywhere near to dying, it's something that happens fairly regularly(the visitation or vision) and you just remembered this one time as it proved to be significant afterwards.
Pardon me, but that's one of the weakest explanations I've ever heard. I was certainly not in the habit of seeing visions of my Dad at about the age of 25. Not then, not now.
I had no inkling of the fact that he was ill -in fact, I don't think anyone saw this death coming.
Yet on the day he dies I received this very odd vision of Dad, head and shoulders only, looking - yes - around age 25 or so. That's all. No sound, just vision. No reasons given.
And the next day when I'm paging through the newspaper I read his death notice.
I know it's not proof to anybody else. But dammit, it doesn't have to be.
It's just the right amount of proof for me that we're not just the physical components of our bodies. That something else is involved in our living and dying, and - what the heck - I may as well call it Spirit.
Have you read Rupert Sheldrake's book The Sense of Being Stared At? It talks about this phenomenon, as well as telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, etc, from a scientific perspective (I think Sheldrake's a biologist). He conducts experiments and has some interesting theories for why these things happen. He also has a good discussion of why mainstream science refuses to investigate these phenomena. Fascinating read.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah, that whole "it was just a coincidental vision" explanation is bogus, since it presumes people have visions all the time!
Thanks, andygrrrl.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've listened to Rupert Sheldrake rather than read him (except one paper back in 1980 it must have been which was actually in a mainstream science journal!) and he's pretty acurate about some of the hard core skeptics.
And yes, he is a biologist, to the best of my knowledge.
Love,
Terri in Joburg
The one thing that threatens my agnosticism the most is the fact that I have not sensed my beloved Mother in any shape or form since I felt her draw her last breath at her beside when she died. I do remember asking her to send me some sort of signal from the other side some time before she did pass away, but so far....sigh....nothing.
ReplyDeleteStill, I try to keep the faith....in SOMEthing. SOMEthing is better than nothing..........
I haven't sensed my Dad either - except in dreams - since that moment of his death. The only reason I still sense my Mom is that she's one of my Ancestral Guides, and some part of her is still available to me.
ReplyDeleteWhat happens beyond death is still a mystery, but I get the strong feeling that it's better that way.
Time, Death and Consciousness.These riddles make Life still a great exploration.
Love,
Terri in Joburg
Lyall Watson also exploires these themes and comes to some fairly ... "reasonable" hypotheses.
ReplyDeleteThe furtherest science has gone on this thread was the russians i believe. They sent some baby rabbits on a nuclear sub to far away. At randomly generated times, the babies were killed. While monitoring the mother, they found that the mother rabbit showed signs of stress at the exact time of the deaths, thousands of kilometres away.
Aside from the crualty to rabbits aspect, it certainly proved that there IS something. We are NOT just, free floating as it seems, and there IS a web between, well mothers and children for starters, but obviously that is only the tip of the iceberg.
But honestly, we don't need science to tell us these things, and from the multitude of experiences, science would tie itself in knots fast.
I believe that while you remember people, they live on through you.
Peace ;-)