It is more likely that you are wrong than it is that the weird shit you just experienced being anything supernatural.
Why it is not a good idea to draw supernatural conclusions from witnessing seemingly supernatural events? Because the chances are you just cocked it up.
I saw a ghost once. A floating, swaying, haunting figure that was looking straight at me with a menacing, aggressive intensity visible in it’s face. If I had thought about it at the time (instead of nearly parting company with the contents of my bowels) I may have found it odd, ironic even, that this figure of evil was so perfectly and obviously evil, how it fit the Hollywood depiction so neatly. But I was pretty freaked out and shrunk back into the back of the tent and pretended to be asleep, thinking somehow that that would help the situation.
Supernatural experience, whether exciting or frightening, whether spiritual or extra-terrestrial, they are all extremely unlikely. But human error, that is exceptionally common. And it’s programed into how we understand the world around us as a kind of safety mechanism to stop us from getting eaten.
Supernatural experiences such as this are often accompanied with a strong emotional reaction like my near-paralysing fear, but that does not confirm the experience is real any more than having an emotional reaction to a lie makes the lie any truer. The illusion has already been performed – your reaction is genuine and sincere but adds nothing to the authenticity of the event itself.
With my own example the ghost looked like a human figure, but different. It was floating for a start, about a foot off the ground, it also moved in a ghostly and haunting kind of way which I am familiar with from horror films. But it is much more likely I saw something inanimate swaying in the wind that that in the semi-dark of a friend’s garden had a slight resemblance to a human form. That I made an error, that my brain classed this shape as humanoid and that I then added to additional details that I expected to be there from my library of ghostly forms. You see, I can recognise the basic shape of a human easier than almost anything else as my brain is pre-set to quickly asses if what I am seeing is friend or foe. But this can be my brain’s own downfall as it sometimes throws up false positives – it classifies something as human that is indeed not, it only resembles human. Then it adds to this details by recognising features and faces where there is none. Those dark patches look like eyes, but distorted, those hanging parts limbs, but contorted.
Instead of being a poor representation of a human form it is now a contorted, evil-looking, beastly human who surely only has one desire – that I join him in an un-dead existence.
It seems to me that our brains play tricks on us quite a lot, we are programed to create patterns, to recognise human and animal forms and to be fearful of the unknown. All in all; a recipe for oddities.
But in knowing this we should be able to rise above it, not create ghosts or gods out of coincidences or mirages, not jump to a conclusion that involves the whole of the natural order to bend to our every whim. With a plethora of other options available to us, it is simply more likely you have got it wrong than that weird shit you just saw be anything supernatural at all.
It comes down to this:
You are more likely to have made an error in the processing of the information offered to your senses and that were interpreted by your brain than the laws of nature be temporarily suspended to allow for that single, exceptional event you just experienced to be actually true. Let alone happen for any higher reason such as fate, karma, or heavenly favouritism.
And even if your ‘weird shit’ seems so very unlikely, a genuine one in a million event, remember: that one-in-a-million thing that happened to you today – also happened to 7,000 others.
