Thursday, November 01, 2007

All Saints and Souls

I meant to wish everyone a Happy Halloween yesterday, but now I'll just wish you a Happy All Saints' Day and Happy All Souls' Day instead! (For Catholics, on All Saints' Day, we celebrate the lives of the saints, and on All Souls' Day, we remember those who have died.)

In that "spirit" (ha ha!) AP-Ipsos released results from a recent survey:

48 percent of people believe in extra-sensory perception. (ESP, the "sixth sense," includes such psychic abilities as precognition, clairvoyance, clairaudience, remote viewing, and telepathy.)
34 percent believe in ghosts.
30 percent have woken up from sleep with the sense of a strange presence in the room.
23 percent have seen or believed themselves to be in the presence of a ghost.

Very, very interesting ...

2 comments:

El Jefe Maximo said...

I believe there is some sort of sixth sense, but I'm not sure what it is, or what it should be called. I think some people probably have it more than others (as is true of everything else, e.g. freckles, short/tall, etc.). It might be different in different people. But the brain is poorly understood at best -- so the sixth sense is hard to nail down. Sort of like asking a blind person to describe pink.

As to ghosts, I don't think I believe that, except to the extent that we bring our ghosts with us -- that is, the subconscious mind conjures them up for us out of other things in our physical and emotional environment. Mind you I think this is "real" but in the sense that "ghost" is the tag the computer that is our heads puts on some events that it can't otherwise classify.

Candidly Caroline said...

I actually would have thought more people would believe in ghosts (and by "ghosts," I mean spirits,) than in ESP.