There are those who say that there is no Spirit world. That this life is all that there is, after that you are no more than worm food.

When I set my mind to pondering that question, I first looked toward science for answers. While science is the source to the answers of our natural world, it is lacking in answering the existence of the supernatural, the beyond natural.

One of the areas I set my mind to pondering was the reports of people, seeing or interacting with spirits. The thought of ghosts or spirits is widely lambasted by not only the unbelievers but by many believers as well, and in many cases rightly so.
There is probably no other tool that is used by charlatans to better effect than the claim of dealing with the spirit world. Folks have used claims of dealing with the dead and other superstitions to manipulate people since the earliest known times.

While I scoffed (And still do) at most claims of seeing or interacting with spirits, some of the accounts I read about seemed very believable. I started thinking of a way to reasonably determine the truthfulness of the claims. At first I was at a loss as to how to determine a reasonable truthfulness of the claims.

The approach I took was to try and determine the truthfulness and motives of the people making the claims. This allowed me to dismiss a large percentage of the claims as being made by people with a motive to make money or control people or to gain power by making such claims. This group was too tainted to be useful.

That left me pondering the reports made by ordinary everyday people. I could write off a large group of these people as either liars or mistaken. Surely not all of them were liars though, so that left me with those who were honest and maybe mistaken. Of that group some were simply mistaking natural phenomenon for things from the spirit world.

An example of this can be seen in the state where I grew up, Louisiana:

When the roads that went through the swampy areas were paved there started to be reports of strange balls of light repeatedly hovering over some areas of the roads.
Many folks thought these balls of light were from the spirit world. Educated people looked for a natural explanation for the lights.

The answer was a simple one, the road beds had been constructed using oyster shells as a base. The shells often times had small bits of oyster flesh still attached. As this matter decomposed, it gave off methane gas. The pavement did a much better job of containing the gas till some small crack developed in the pavement. This allowed the gas to be released in a concentrated form and repeatedly in the same location. As the cars drove through to low hanging gas ball, the engines would often ignite it. There was nothing supernatural about it at all.

That left me with the question, could all the reports from honest people simply be a result of simply being mistaken. The answer for anyone who has studied the subject is No.
No matter how many different ways I sliced and diced it, I couldn’t reasonably reduce the number of the “almost to a certainty real events reported by honest people” to zero.
If the number remains at even one, then the spirit world reasonably exists.

I dare say that, that is why any scientist worthy of his diploma will NOT say to a certainty that the spirit world doesn’t exist.

That is where my mind left the subject for quite some time. Some time later this occurred:

I have always been very good at remembering my dreams. I can remember a few specific dreams from when I was three years old.

I sleep light and I am almost always aware that I am dreaming when I dream. I will control my dreams. I will often times rewind my dreams and make them come out differently.
I have found this tool to be very useful in solving mechanical problems or construction problems. I can build a project in my dreams and when a problem is uncovered I simply rewind the dream and modify the approach till many if not all of the problems are solved. I can often restart my dreams the next night if need be.

One of the dreams, from when I was four or five years old, stuck in my mind.
In the dream my family lived in an old farm house. The house was built very plain. The house was a three bedroom house with plain fixtures. The light fixtures were turned on and off by pulling on a chain that hung from the base.

In my dream my brother James and I shared a bedroom; he is one year younger than me.
We were lying on the bed one night and looking at two orbs of soft light floating around the room very near to the ceiling. It was frightening and we called out to Mom and Dad to do something about it.
Mom and Dad came into the room along with my two older brothers. They all stood looking at the orbs of light, not believing what we were all seeing. The sighting of the light orbs was repeated a number of times over a number of days, the longer it went on the more frightened my brother and I became.
In my dream my Dad finally resorted to speaking to the orbs of light. I didn’t remember the words he spoke, but I did remember him speaking very firmly to the orbs of light. After he spoke to the orbs, they never returned.

I just filed that dream away, along with any other childhood dreams I had remembered.

When I was about 30 years old I was at a family gathering. The topic of conversation turned to my Grandfather and his tale of living in a house as a young man.
My Grandfather had told me of a house he lived in at about the turn of the last century that had the sound of a clock ticking even though there wasn’t a clock in the whole house. He also told me about the front door coming un-latched and having to re-close the door.

The door latch in that house consisted of a lift bar and a hook on the inside. The lift bar had a short piece of cord tied to it. The door had a small hole in it just above the lift bar. During the day a person would hang the end of the cord out through the hole so that the door could be opened from outside. At night a person would pull the cord back inside and then the door was secure.

My Grandfather was a plain spoken man and I never knew him to be un-truthful or prone to exaggeration.

He told me that some nights as he and his kids were sitting around the fireplace they would see the lift bar slowly lift and the door would open slightly, even though the lift cord had been pulled in for the night. They would have to go back and shut the door.

As I was telling the account of what my grandfather had told me, my Aunt took over the account and told what she had remembered from her childhood of living in that house. It was almost word for word a recount of what my Grandfather had told me.
It was more than clear to me that she wasn’t making it up or simply repeating something she had heard Granddad telling about.

After we had finished talking about that, my brother James asked me if I remembered to orbs of light that had kept showing up in a bedroom of one of the houses we lived in as kids.
I just sort stared at him blank faced. My Mom chimed in that she remembered it. She told that when James was about 3 and I was 4 that we moved into the old Thames house.

Mr. and Mrs. Thames had just recently passed away. They died with about a month apart from each other. They had been married for about 50 years when they died.
The bedroom my brother and I shared was their bedroom.

My Mom told how the orbs of light would just float around the room near the ceiling. She told how the orbs appeared repeatedly for almost a full month. She said as more time went by the more a feeling of apprehension becoming stronger and stronger.

She said that she and Dad had discussed what to do about it and why it might be happening.
They came to the conclusion that the orbs were the spirits of Mr. and Mrs. Thames. Dad decided out of frustration that he would just talk to the orbs and tell them that while we meant them no harm we were there to stay.

The last night the orbs showed up, my Dad spoke firmly to the orbs. He said that the house was ours now, and that we meant no disrespect to the memory of the Thames, but we were there to stay and he firmly told the orbs that it was time for them to move on.
The orbs were never seen again.

Their recount was exactly like the dream I had remembered. It was then that I realized that my dream wasn’t a dream at all. It was a real memory of a real occurrence. It was my one and only interaction with the spirit world, but it was also, for me, undeniable.

For me it became impossible (Not just to a moral certainty) to not believe in the afterlife.

That led me to my studies of the 5 major religions. You can look at my “way of life” to see the choice I came to as the most complete and believable.

I know most of you have chosen a different path, that’s ok. The point of this topic isn’t Christianity verses Islam:

It is the question of why you believe.

I hope to follow up with one more thread “Why do you disbelieve?”

Thanks
Nimrod