TheDonald wrote on May 22nd, 2017 at 3:08pm: Also, if you've read through this thread, you know that ES's verifications are far, far more impressive than the bulk of alleged verifications by New Age astral explorers.
Don,
You say this kind of thing repeatedly, and it makes me so curious to know what your point is. Is it your point to point out that ES had a greater ability than most? Is it your point to discredit anyone else who isn't as great, in your view, as ES was?
Your presence here seems to imply a strong need for you to find someone, anyone, who you think is as good as ES, and that thus far you haven't found one single person. If we were to take ES out of the picture for a moment so that you don't have him to compare anyone to, what would be your interest in astral projection and afterlife exploration? If you had no one to look up to that impresses you like ES, would you yourself want to learn to explore and have your own experiences? And would you continue those pursuits until you fully satisfied your curiosity?
I don't bother comparing myself to anyone. It doesn't serve me to do that. I enjoy learning from others and being inspired by them, but just because someone may seem more impressive than myself doesn't make my experiences any less valuable, less real, or less meaningful to me. I've grown most from my own direct experience.
As for verification, I don't see it as the end-all of an experience. You gave an example of a dream of your dad visiting you, but he didn't speak to you and therefore you don't believe it was a real visit. I can see your point in that statement but only from a flat, logic standpoint. From another perspective, you could look at that experience another way, however only you can do this since it's your experience, not anyone else's. But another way to perceive is to feel, and feeling is the most basic, raw, natural, unfiltered sense of perception. Our perception can be blocked without us even knowing it. When we aren't able to pay attention to those basic, raw, natural feeling-senses, we tend to believe the logic that goes through our heads because it becomes the first thing we notice, when in fact we missed out on the actual first thing that we
should have noticed, a feeling sense. I've been studying this for many, many years and in my opinion that makes me at least somewhat pretty darn qualified to say that I know what I'm talking about.
This is why practicing opening perception is far more important than searching for verifiable evidence and facts. Verifiable things are a great boost to one's confidence, and they are quite exciting, but they aren't the holy grail of experience.
Like your example of the dream of your dad....I too have had many experiences of visits from my dad since his death in 2010. Some were visits while I was dreaming, some were OBEs, and some were in the waking state. I don't have any real proof to speak of, at least nothing that's going to impress you! Nonetheless, verification isn't necessary for the purpose of Dad's visits.
If I had been of the frame of mind to balk at Dad's visits for their lack of "bonafide verification", oh what I would have missed out on!! The love experienced of these visits is MY verification that they are real. So you see why I couldn't care less if my experiences impress you or anyone else? Sure, it's great when someone loves to hear my experiences and they tell me it inspired them. But it's not my goal to impress anybody. It serves me nothing to impress people.
I admit, Don, I don't read much of your posts, so maybe there are posts you share which talk about your ability to perceive nonphysically, about your experiences of PUL and ability to expand your awareness and perception beyond its normal limits?? It just seems to me that you are not even impressed with many of your own experiences.