According to spirituality and aging expert Kuepfer, people like to believe that we can control life by putting it in boxes for our own understanding. "Science has become the religion of our age—it is what we have learned to trust to explain life. But much of the wonder of our experience is beyond explanation. Spirituality allows for mystery, and for life/’God?’ to be bigger than we can get our human minds around," she said.
Kuepfer also shared her belief that, as time progresses, our spirituality may actually increase rather than decrease. "In my opinion, if humanity continues to flourish, we will be growing in the direction of greater openness to spirituality, to wonder, to possibilities beyond what we can contain and control. Spirituality invites us to seek and discover meaning and purpose in life, so I hope we won’t deprive ourselves of it any time soon.
Melisa’s thread had over 185.8k likes on Twitter, as well as nearly 16k retweets at the time of writing. Considering how much attention her post got, it’s easy to say that a lot of parents have been in situations where their kids scare them with what they had to say.
As odd as it may sound, there have been numerous attempts to scientifically prove the presence of the paranormal. For example, books like ‘Children Who Have Lived Before: Reincarnation Today’ have tried to systemically approach and verify ideas about life after death by analyzing children’s stories.
“Eminent scientists explain how many of these children's stories have been followed up to verify whether their statements have any foundation in fact. Incredibly, when subjected to scientific investigation, children's memories about their past lives can invariably be confirmed in every detail,” the book’s blurb explains. Naturally, everyone’s a bit of a skeptic. But once you widen your gaze, you start coming across things that can’t be explained by conventional logic alone.
As Live Science points out, getting solid evidence (pun very much intended) about the existence of ghosts and spirits is incredibly difficult and there are plenty of contradictory accounts between people.
Not to mention that far from every story is true: there are plenty of charlatans out there, preying on people’s grief, as well as ‘ghost hunters’ looking to make a quick buck. On the flip side, there are genuine psychics, spirit mediums, and exorcists, too, who aim to help people (even if they sometimes fail). Completely discounting their experiences would be unfair, just as accepting them word-for-word would be, too.
There are lots of small indications around us that the paranormal might be, well, normal. I’ll let you in on a little secret, dear Pandas, if you promise not to tell anyone else. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had prophetic dreams about small snippets from everyday life that later turn out to be true, just like most of my family members. And while you could try to explain déjà vu away by saying that it’s someone’s brain short-circuiting, being the nosy scientist that I am, I’ve tested my dreams, again and again, to make sure I’m not making things up.
My conclusion? Everything checks out and I’m still waiting for my letter to go study at Hogwarts. So there’s not a shadow of doubt in my mind that there’s something deeper in life that science hasn’t been able to catch up to yet. Either that or there’s something weird going on with the Weave of Time! But whether or not you believe me is completely up to you. However, I know that some of you Pandas might be in the same boat as I am! So be sure to share your own paranormal stories in the comment section below.
