(12-20-2023, 07:30 PM)Chiefsmom Wrote: It is an interesting idea. One that my family believes in.
I have an old newspaper article somewhere, of my great great grandmother. She apparently had a crystal ball and would do readings for people, with a high degree of accuracy.
My paternal grandmother and my mother both read tarot cards for others. They also taught me to always trust my "gut" feelings.
So, I am a believer.
I think it is Isaiah who, in the Bible, speaks of that "still small voice within" - what folks nowadays would call a "gut feeling". I'm wondering if the Inquisition didn't actually seek out people with that "spiritual" connection and mark them for elimination to prevent them from blowing the whistle and giving the lie to the claimed "spirituality" of the Catholic Church, given that many of it's higher ups are anything but spiritual - they are mostly politicians with frocks, who have no connection to The Divine at all, just an appointment to a mostly political office. But, since it's hard to ride herd on people when you are claiming to be something you are not, I think it might lead them to eliminate potential problems from folks who know better and could put the word out on the street about them.
Just a thought.
Regarding the crystal ball, have you noticed that folks claim to see spirits more often in reflective surfaces - mirrors, glass sheets, and the like? I even saw a video of one that was caught in the reflective surface of a plastic CD case. It makes me wonder if there may not be some uninvestigated reason for that in connection with physical properties. Is there something in the physics of light transmission that might make spirit more readily able to manifest in glass, either through it or as a reflection? I note that a number of people claim to have taken spirit photos of things they could not see with their bare eyes - in mirrors, in or through windows, and of course through the glass lens of a camera. Much in the same way that EVPs are often caught on electronic media when nothing was seen or heard at the time by the "ghost hunters".
Just something else to think about.
My Dear Old Dad once saw a face in a window. It startled him so much that he almost shot the window out, as it was entirely unexpected, and he thought that someone was peeping through the window. He didn't shoot, because it just vanished when he thought of shooting at it. He wasn't "ghost hunting" - that was something he never did - he was just sitting there in the living room minding his own business. He later convinced himself that it was just a hallucination, and worried for months over it, that he thought his sanity might be slipping. He didn't believe in ghosts for most of his life, saying "The Bible says 'the dead know nothing; " whenever the subject came up. It was only in later life, not long before he died, that he conceded ghosts might be a thing, since the Bible spoke of the Holy Ghost, and if folks had to specify "Holy", then it stood to reason there might be some unholy ones around, too.
No, he wasn't a terribly religious man, but he did know what the Bible had to say on many a matter from his upbringing as a mountain Methodist.
I have to wonder - do you have any Scottish in your background? There is apparently an area in Scotland where 1/3 of all respondents claimed that "Second Sight" ran through their families. For example, I have documented family connections to Ayrshire in Scotland, and undocumented but genetically verified connections to other areas of Scotland over millennia, from a Bronze age burial 4000 years ago somewhere around Perthshire I think to a Pictish graveyard far north in early medieval times.
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