Anything is possible (:p ), but I remember being petrified because the board that reappeared had the same gouges and scratches as the one we had cut up earlier. The board was very thick and it took several of us to cut it. I can visualize the trashcan we threw it into and how we kept eyeing it the rest of the evening. There was a lot of accusing each other of trickery as well /shrug. I honestly don't know how or what happened, but I've never messed with a Ouiji board since.

<Better safe than sorry>

Stormie

Ok, I admit - that would petrify me too.

I did not believe in any of the 3 Ouija sessions I attended, but I managed to convince myself once that the rug in my living room was possessed. So I guess people in glass houses etc :)

Noodle nails it. The MB game itself holds no inherent powers...its users, however, do. Everyone does. Some of us are more able to access the energies of the Universe, some are less able, but all have the potential. Good, bad...makes no difference, because it is all energy. You can't have dark without light, negative without positive, good without bad. They are two halves of a whole.

When I watched "What the Bleep...?" , I did come away with the feeling that there was a certain agenda or group responsible, but the underlying information is perfectly valid. We are a part of the Universe. We aren't separate, outside observers. We are made from the same stuff, and are inextricable from it. The possibilities that this revelation opens are endless.

Or it's all a load of imagined hooey. You decide.

Some of the things which are made clear by shunning convention and following logic are not what you would expect.
Skepticism, when applied with a pre-determined agenda, shoots itself in the foot, IE "garbage in, garbage out" . . .

I didn't come to Paganism easily. I finally gave in when I had enough things happen to me that couldn't be readily explained by science. I can't say that spirituality has explained it all, either, but it has taught me that I cannot and should not expect to be able to express everything as an equation.

Some things you simply must experience and accept that they happen.

I said it before and I'll say it again. Elspode's posts are truly among my favorite.

I sound like a nutjob when I get in a hurry...
 

I firmly believe that everything has an explanation. There are definitely some things which are un-knowable from our limited persepctive, but giving up on a rational explanation is the antithesis of my philosophy. If any part of science or spirituality was in conflict with the other, for me, I would know that there is something which needs to be rejected. If it doesn't fit in my picture, then either it is wrong or my picture is wrong. It just needs to be hashed out. I believe that everything can be expressed as an equation, but it's all the same equation, and most of the complication is created by our own inner struggles. There is one universe, and everything is part of it, or X = 1 where X is everything (including science and spirituality...)

That is the history of humanity: we experience something, we don't understand it, we are highly uncomfortable NOT understanding, and so we ASSIGN some explanation to it. Maybe even assign meaning to it.

Unfortunately, as the mistaken explanations firm up in society, they are passed along in lieu of the real explanations.

But now we know: the stars aren't pushed by Gods, they only appear to, because the Earth rotates. It isn't an earthquake because the beings are mad at you; techtonic plates shift below the surface of the earth. You don't get sick because you were bad; you get sick because you get a virus or infection or other type of disease. (edit: which of course you could get by being "bad", but you get the idea)

"Accepting", in my case, is

A) expecting that probability will cause a number of strange things to happen in one's life, and that no further explanation is necessary;
B) admitting there are indeed some things that science doesn't explain, but this doesn't mean there isn't a reality-based explanation;
C) humans are inexact, faulty, moody and full of error while reality is harshly exact.

It's not hard to do once you get the idea. And it allows you to bypass an incredible amount of bullshit. Such as almost everything in this thread. Frightened by a Ouija board? What are you, children? Are you afraid of the dark too? Do you get scared on Halloween?

There's nothing irrational about the spiritual world, we just haven't created the mechanisms yet that render it measurable and quantifiable on a purely physical level. A lot of it is hooey, some of it isn't. There are too many objective, unrelated accounts that point to the same thing to be able to discount them all. If science is eventually able to figure it all out, it won't be because it's able to squish everything into its current template of how the world works.

When phrenology was big, do you think that any of the scientists involved could have grasped a concept like modern neurology? And what we know today will seem laughably crude in 200 years.

I would substitute for harshly: serenely, implacably, and indifferently

A common problem occurs when "reality" is conflated with the neuro-chemical illusion we are designed to experience.

Depends on what costume you're wearing. :ghost: :reaper:

I had a Ouija board as a kid ... everybody did, didn't they? I never had one bit of success with it ... not sure if that was lucky or unlucky. I was more of a Magic 8-Ball girl, and had my first fortune telling deck at 10 years old and my first tarot deck at 13.

I did have to do an exorcism on a friend's kid's Ouija board once, though.

Ouija boards? Meh. That's kid stuff.

On the other hand, some truly dreadful, terrifying things can be conjured using nothing more than a bottle of tequila and a copy of Chutes and Ladders.

I'm pretty sure that's how Barbra Streisand was able to cross over into our plane of existence.