Three Persuasive Events?

What are your top three personally persuasive ‘paranormal events’? 

I’ve a few, if I had to pick three, I’d say:

1) The Loganair ghostly Pilot. I’ve been in touch with the observers son, and he reckons this changed his fathers whole outlook on life.

2) My close friend swears that while driving like a madman back to the hospital that he’d left his ‘improving’ mother at to have some lunch, before getting a call saying “you’d better come back!” when suddenly a feeling of calm came over him, and he just knew that she had died and everything was all right. 

3) Some NDE testimonies. The early ones, when they were relatively unknown. 

This is not an easy question to answer, at least for me. It largely comes down to believing people, also if testimonies were all that separated proponents from sceptics, I’d be more inclined to side with the sceptics. But it’s much more than that, it’s very hard to explain.The weirdness of Quantum Theory, the sophistication of nature, dreams, personal experience etc, all add up.

Are we allowed to pick lab experiments rather than spontaneous events?

Are we allowed to pick lab experiments rather than spontaneous events?

Yes, Chris. 

Whatever you like, just keep it understandable. 

I took classes in mediumship at a Spiritualist church. 
https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/psi_experience

The first time I tried to do mediumship in class I was astonished with the results. I did exactly what the teacher said and it seemed to work. After a short period of meditation, I looked around the class (we were sitting with the chairs in a circle) and when I got to one particular person it seemed like I was looking at him through a zoom lens. He stood out from the other students in my field of vision. I tried looking around again and the same thing happened when I got to him. Then I closed my eyes and in my mind's eye there appeared a tall man in a uniform. When my turn came to describe my experiences, this person said that his grandfather had been tall and wore a uniform on his job. The teacher of the class encouraged me to try to get more information and I tried again and saw a scene of the sea shore. It turned out the grandfather had also lived near the water. I had never experienced anything like this before in my life. I was in shock for a couple of days afterwards.

Much more at the link.

I gave and received many evidential readings in class and also received many evidential readings during services at the Church. When you go to a class every week and you have visions of people you've never met before and your classmates recognize them as deceased relatives ... it's pretty convincing. I don't believe. I know. And I've had personal experiences that cannot be explained by super psi.

https://sites.google.com/site/chs4o8pt/s...ium_source

Once I was in a mediumship class when I felt the presence of a spirit who I knew from previous readings and who now wanted me to give a message to someone in the room. I said to the spirit mentally, "I don't want to give the message now" and I explained my reasons, I was a new student and didn't want to speak out of turn. I didn't say anything about this aloud. A few seconds later a more advanced student said that he sensed the same spirit and gave the message. Mediums routinely experience spirits as people with initiative and purpose capable of solving problems.

Once I attended a trance workshop given by a visiting medium at my Spiritualist church. We didn't have any trance mediums at our church so none of us did this regularly. During the workshop many people I knew from my church and from mediumship class participated. I was a new student at the time so I was only allowed to observe. These people, who I knew well, each took a turn, and after about twenty or thirty seconds of meditation, (we didn't have to dim the lights) would go into a light trance. They were conscious but a spirit would speak through them at the same time. The spirits told us about who they were in life and what they were doing in the spirit world. Some of the spirits were just as amazed that they could speak through a living person as I was to hear them. It seemed to me that there was a personality there and not just information being accessed. Since I knew the people in the workshop I could tell they not making it up consciously or unconsciously and they were not hypnotized.

What originally persuaded me the afterlife was real was reading the book We Don't Die: George Anderson's Conversations with the Other Side by Joel Martin & Patrica Romanowski. I had been an atheist because of the effects of my scientific education but I wasn't militant about it. When I read the book it was the first time I was exposed to actual evidence and I changed my mind right away. I read many more books on the subject and became more convinced.  

I also had an intuition when my Grandmother died. I called my uncle and he said she had just passed. So I think he was not surprised when I started taking classes in mediumship.

Yes, Chris. 

Whatever you like, just keep it understandable. 

Thanks. Then my choice of experiments is below. 

Of course there are also plenty of meta-analyses looking at whole classes of experiments, but those will always be vulnerable to suggestions of selective publication ("the file drawer effect"). So I've gone for three individual  experimental programmes that produced extremely strong statistical results, and for which I think sceptics have been unable to suggest any plausible conventional explanation:

(1) The Maimonides dream ESP experiments
(2) Daryl Bem's "Feeling the Future" experiments
(3) The Global Consciousness Project's series of Formal Hypotheses.

I can't come up with three. Spontaneous events need to be documented under blind conditions and of the "all or none" type to be evidence, and I don't know of anything that fits that criteria, even my personal experiences.

Research...the only thing I would list is the Ganzfeld experiments. There's a small chance that that research would hold up under the move to pre-register studies to reduce or eliminate researcher degrees of freedom (plus a few other biases). Although, it is a bit worrying that the Ganzfeld seems to have been dropped - I see 2 out of 45 pre-registered studies on the KPU registry are Ganzfeld studies (plus a pre-registered meta-analysis). And one of those is from 5 years ago with no results posted (when they should have been by now).

I'm not at all optimistic that any of the other research will hold up, or will do so in a way which suggests "psi" (something novel and strange, at least).

Linda

Fascinating thread and I am enjoying reading everyone's contributions.  Thanks for starting it Stan.  Really a great idea!

I wish I had something helpful to add here, but I really don't think I do.  I'll give it a whirl none the less.

I remember when I was young a vivid sensation of something grasping my ankle as I slept.  It seemed different from the more traditional "boogie man" type of experiences my younger ages (seeing shadows, hearing noises, etc.).  I remember being quite scared but more amazed that something could be holding my ankle when I "knew" nothing was there.  When I finally had the courage to look the sensation was, of course, gone and, of course, nothing was there.  The physical sensation was remarkable to me and I knew the bedding (sheet only as it was summer) wasn't heavy enough to account for such pressure.

My best friend growing up has gone on to become a dedicated Buddhist practitioner and teacher.  He and I spent many an evening during our late adolescence and college days pondering the big questions.  Both of us were, generally, rationalists and took an evidential type of approach to these things.  Deeply skeptical but both open (perhaps yearning?) to find there was something "more".  Well, he's convinced of it.  We had made a pact when we were young that should one of us gain insight we would share with the other.  A number of years ago he called me to say he was honoring that commitment.  So, indirect for sure but this is someone I trust implicitly and someone who's intellect I hold in rarified regard.  (One of the smartest folks I've ever met.)

Last is an amalgamation of various moments in time when I thought I had glimpses/feelings of something "more".  Witnessing the birth of my children remains nothing other than a miracle in my eyes.  The immediate sense of connectedness to those little balls of barely recognizable humanity was off the charts for me.  Catching sight of an otherwise unremarkable sky can sometimes give me this vague "feeling".  Etc.

Again, apologies for nothing super tangible in there, but my thanks again to everyone who has shared so far (and I look forward to those who contribute going forward!).

I've mentioned one of these in the forum already but I've also had numerous paranormal experiences in my life. Some obvious and big, others more commonly with smaller synchronistic type events.

I actually started reading the Skeptiko forum a month or so prior to this specific event (this was before Psience Quest) so I was going through all the for/against logic and argument in my head, trying to sort out what was real and not real regarding these phenomena/NDE's etc etc. I stumbled upon Sean McNamara's PK videos, which I found to be quite the interesting thing and began trying to move a piece of small piece of paper balanced on the end of a paperclip and an eraser, which was all covered under glass. Nothing happened by myself but I tried again with a friend after a few days and was about to give it up until I decided to leave for bed as it was quite late, even verbally mentioning that I was leaving, and the piece of paper spun around about 4 rapid revolutions on it's own. This was a shocking moment that had both me and my friend in giddy glee at what had just happened, bearing in mind that the glass was still covering the eraser and paperclip/folded piece of paper. Interesting also to note, that phase of my life was much much more open, with many little synchronicities happening.

Another time I had a dream when I was a teenager, that my Grandfather had died. The very next day he did. Surprisingly, I never found it strange to have experienced that dream. It just seemed 'part of life'.

What's also persuasive for me is the feeling of connectedness that I sometimes experience when everything just clicks into place in ones life; y'know, your job is going well, you're on the same wavelength when communicating with others, the lack of fear, the feeling of being apart of something bigger than you, lack of ego....all of that adds up to make everything seem like heaven on earth. I like to imagine that I'm experiencing a possible future for humanity in that state of being. Unfortunately, it comes and goes depending on the weather, as they say! 

I'm always jealous of people who get any sort of direct telekinesis to work even if it's just once or a little bit.