(01-03-2024, 04:24 PM)quintessentone Wrote: @Ninurta For my family, I'd say yes, but the family members that have psychic abilities the abilities vary widely (or do they? or do we allow or disallow certain abilities?). For instance, my mother can see the immediate future in her mind's eye as well as ghosts.
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I personally think that it's entirely possible there is a gene for it, but that the gene only turns it "on" or "off", and nothing more - what the individual can do with it may lie elsewhere, in another gene or just in the way their brain is wired. Think of a computer - there is a switch to turn it on or off, but that switch does not tell it what to do. The instruction set for what it is to do resides elsewhere.
I don't fool with tarot or Ouja or anything like that. Matter of fact, I won't even allow a Ouija board in my house. One of the daughters of my third wife - the daughter I call a "Barnes and Noble witch", used to fiddle with stuff like that. She fancied herself a "witch" because she'd read some books, and used to call stuff up all the time. Problem was, she could only do it one-way. The spooks came in, but she couldn't get 'em to leave. That fell to me. So, if they got too troublesome, I'd throw them out... but then she'd just call in another one. That got old fast, so I eventually just stopped throwing them out, and let them have their wicked way with her. They never bothered me, so I left them alone to bother her.
Then a few months after I stopped doing that, I left the house, just moved right out and away, and left them there to deal with whatever they could conjure. Or it to deal with them. Either way, I snaked myself out of that loop. I figured it's the only way they'd ever learn.
Ouija boards don't come into this house. I'll break 'em, or bury 'em, or toss them and their owner back down the hillside, but they ain't coming in this house. They cause too much trouble when folks think they're just playing a game. that game can get pretty real and out of hand upon occasion. You can't burn them, as that just releases their evil, or whatever evil tries to come through them, out into the atmosphere. So you've got to break, or bury, or break AND bury, them. OR - just keep them the hell out of the house. All it takes is for ONE person to forget to close a session, and they stay wide open for anything to come through. So best to keep them away.
Most of the spooks folks talk to with Ouija boards are not who they say they are, anyhow. They're usually just bad actors trying to sneak in under the radar and get a toe-hold.
I also don't go around trying to contact spirits. I figure if they have anything to say to me, they'll contact me. I don't feel a need to go looking for trouble. It has a habit of finding me, anyhow, so I don't need to go looking.
Sometimes, they do come calling. When I was 11 years old, while I was on vacation, my best friend died. I had a dream, and when I woke up, I was so convinced that I told my sister that he had died, which of course she scoffed at. But, when we got home, we hadn't been home 5 minutes before a neighbor kid came over and told us he had drowned. I was feeding the dogs at the time, and so I just went on feeding them, but with tears running down my face at the confirmation.
When my Dear Old Dad died, I was pretty stone-faced. We took him across state lines to bury him at his home place, and I sat on the coffin as a seat for the trip. That's just how stone-faced I was. Same, all through the funeral, and the burial at the cemetery. It was later that evening, after we had buried him, that I was sitting on the steps of my uncle's house, watching the dusk come in, when I "felt" dad there, saying his good byes. Might have been nothing more than a mere feeling, but that was all it took for me to break loose.
When our daughter died, I was laying in bed - we knew it was coming, just waiting for the call - when all of the sudden I HEARD her voice in the room with me, Grace was sitting across the room in a chair.. so I was sure she heard it too. It sounded to me like an actual, physical, voice, like the daughter was right there in the room with us, pretty as you please, just making a visit. I heard her say "Oh daddy! It's so BEAUTIFUL here! Take care of momma. Bye!" And that was it. I sat bolt upright in the bed looking around for her, but there was no one there but Grace and myself. Grace wanted to know what was wrong with me, and I wouldn't tell her. Couldn't figure out HOW to tell her. She hadn't heard it, even though I thought she had to have. About 2 or 3 minutes later, we got the call from Grace's mom that the daughter had passed.
Grace kept at me until I told her what had happened, because I felt kinda foolish. You see, I'd never heard the daughter call me "daddy", she always used my first name. ALWAYS. So I told Grace that I must have imagined it, because of that... and that's when she told me that for the last month, while she was in Texas visiting the daughter, that she had been consistently referring to me as "daddy" for the whole month Grace was there. That was just one of those things that make you go "hmmmm...".
There's a few more stories similar, but you get the gist. I don't go looking for them, I wait for them to come to me if they've got anything to say.
Likewise, when a spook comes calling, I don't just automatically toss them out. Everyone has to have a place to "be", spooks included, so if they're not being a problem, I just leave them alone to "be". If they leave me alone, too, then everyone gets along just fine.
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