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That is a lot of coincidence. Made me think of an experience of my daughter's, although it's not exactly a psychic thing, but it made us say "hmmm".
She was in a laundromat in Albany, NY, when a Chinese man walked up to her and asked her in Chinese (Mandarin) if she could help him. He said his English wasn't good and he needed something at the drugstore and he couldn't get the people in the store to understand what he wanted.
She went with him to the drugstore and said she was there to help the man and then she asked him what he wanted. He seemed kind of nervous and awkward and kept kind of waving his hand behind himself and saying "the road is running slow". Finally, a light bulb went off and she realized he was constipated and asked the drugstore people if they could show him products to alleviate that. They took him and her to the proper aisle and found what he needed. He was happy and thanked my daughter profusely.
But--this guy walked into the laundromat and right up to my daughter, who is white. Why did this guy ask HER, probably the only person in that laundromat who understood Mandarin, for help???
And why the heck didn't SHE ask HIM why he asked HER????
(I asked her that, and she said she didn't think about it--she just helped him and went back to her laundry and then thought about how weird it was.)
It's not the first time. We were driving through Albany one day and came across an accident that had just happened. The police and EMTs had not yet arrived. My daughter saw an Asian woman lying on the grass and got out of the car and ran over to see if she could help. The EMTs and cops arrived shortly after, and my daughter acted as a translator between the injured victim and them. It turned out that the woman was a doctor who spoke English, but she had gotten whacked on the head and was stunned and not only could she not speak English at the moment, she was speaking in the her native Sichuan dialect. It just so happened that my daughter had gone to school in Chengdu and understood and could speak the Sichuan dialect as well as "official" Mandarin. The doctor was able to describe her injuries to my daughter so that the EMTs knew what was wrong, and they took her to the hospital. Again, the injured woman thanked my daughter profusely for translating.
Just some strange coincidences about being in a certain place at a certain time.
OK, then we are in agreement more or less. We can't know. My sticking point was that my experience with the "second cousin" thing does not fall into the "numbers game" paradigm. I only know that a stranger seemed to know something about a death that occurred more than 50 years ago, and guessing/numbers/statistics, etc., cannot explain it.
I read your links, especially the one about the Tarot reader in Union Square, but that wasn't any new information. I've taken a Tarot course myself, and relationships and money are the most commonly requested readings and probably therefore the easiest to figure out what the person wants to hear. She put the NYC info on work and relationships twist on it, though.
And by the way, it's Voila!
I've got to sign off now, but before I do just a thing or two to be clear...
I'm sure we have not been in disagreement about what "we can't know." Right? I mean who would argue such a thing?
The numbers game includes your specific experience too. The "numbers game" simply means that with enough tries, there will be a "hit." Say for example if I ask you to think of a number between 1 and 100. You think 14, and I tell you the number you were thinking was 14. You're thinking AMAZING!
I'm thinking I've tried this same thing with 1,000 other people and FINALLY I get one right. Understand? That's just another version of the numbers game. Playing the lottery is another...
Also of course none of my links addresses anyone's specific experience, but as explained before, the more you consider all angles and information about how psychics (and all other similar links to the "beyond" tend to work), you begin to understand the other possibilities a little better.
Yes, "voila!" Of course. Thanks for that at least...
My psychic powers are telling me most people commenting here are women...
Close?
Or just a good bet based on this explained in one of the links I posted before?
"So it seems that despite occurrences of fakery, forgery and fraudulence – as well as mixed evidence – people will still continue to believe in psychic phenomena. Indeed, research has shown that one in three Americans feel they have experienced a psychic moment – and nearly half of US women claim they have felt the presence of a spirit."
My psychic powers are telling me most people commenting here are women...
Close?
Or just a good bet based on this explained in one of the links I posted before?
"So it seems that despite occurrences of fakery, forgery and fraudulence – as well as mixed evidence – people will still continue to believe in psychic phenomena. Indeed, research has shown that one in three Americans feel they have experienced a psychic moment – and nearly half of US women claim they have felt the presence of a spirit."
I've got to sign off now, but before I do just a thing or two to be clear...
I'm sure we have not been in disagreement about what "we can't know." Right? I mean who would argue such a thing?
The numbers game includes your specific experience too. The "numbers game" simply means that with enough tries, there will be a "hit." Say for example if I ask you to think of a number between 1 and 100. You think 14, and I tell you the number you were thinking was 14. You're thinking AMAZING!
I'm thinking I've tried this same thing with 1,000 other people and FINALLY I get one right. Understand? That's just another version of the numbers game. Playing the lottery is another...
Also of course none of my links addresses anyone's specific experience, but as explained before, the more you consider all angles and information about how psychics (and all other similar links to the "beyond" tend to work), you begin to understand the other possibilities a little better.
Yes, "voila!" Of course. Thanks for that at least...
So we would have to go back to the psychic "Trish" in Red Bank, NJ, and ask her "how many times did you take a wild guess that a customer had a second cousin who died in childhood before you hit it right with Mighty Queen?" I'm just not seeing this as a realistic guess that a self-respecting fraud would try. Heck, if she DID, I might indeed go back and ask her for some lottery numbers!
The other flaw in your suspicions is that I never asked her to tell me anything like that. I went for a Tarot Card reading, not to see a medium to contact "spirits". She just said that out of nowhere before she even picked up the cards. What would she have to gain by making up something that was such a remote possibility? If I'd never lost a childhood friend/had a second cousin who died in childhood, she'd risk losing any faith I had in anything she said subsequently, because I would have thought she was just making up crap and would likely have dismissed whatever she said in the card reading.
It may just be a personality issue. There are a few on this forum who seem to assume that their intellect or knowledge is superior to that of the others they are addressing.
This conversation reminds me of a situation from my working years. I worked in the public sector engineering/construction industry. (I am not an engineer, but I could play one on TV because I've lived within it for forty years. )
When I started, I was in a construction field office for a major project. There were a lot of old-time construction inspectors in the office, men who were not degreed engineers but who had worked on construction sites for decades and had seen all sorts of problems and conditions in the field that often required unique and innovative solutions.
Around that time it was decided by the powers that be that such formally uneducated types would no longer be hired, but rather that up and coming construction inspectors must have engineering degrees. The older guys would of course continue to work until it was time to retire, but they would be replaced by degree-holding field inspectors, fresh out of engineering school.
We had a trainee come to work in the office who proceeded to tell the older engineers that what they were doing in the field was WRONG because the books he'd been reading for the past four years told him so. Eventually he was schooled by his own mistakes and what he actually witnessed out there on site and came to realize that his book knowledge was only a part of his education. The real-life, hands-on experience these older men had with actual field conditions trumped what he thought he knew when it came to practical application.
That way of thinking is a common problem on Internet message boards. Links and written information are often great for advancing a conversation, but they have their limits.
So we would have to go back to the psychic "Trish" in Red Bank, NJ, and ask her "how many times did you take a wild guess that a customer had a second cousin who died in childhood before you hit it right with Mighty Queen?" I'm just not seeing this as a realistic guess that a self-respecting fraud would try. Heck, if she DID, I might indeed go back and ask her for some lottery numbers!
The other flaw in your suspicions is that I never asked her to tell me anything like that. I went for a Tarot Card reading, not to see a medium to contact "spirits". She just said that out of nowhere before she even picked up the cards. What would she have to gain by making up something that was such a remote possibility? If I'd never lost a childhood friend/had a second cousin who died in childhood, she'd risk losing any faith I had in anything she said subsequently, because I would have thought she was just making up crap and would likely have dismissed whatever she said in the card reading.
I am reminded of something that happened to me. I had a friend from oversea. For about 3 years I would get a letter from him every 4-6 weeks. I would get home from work and think, "Today there will be a letter", and I was wrong every single time. But every single time the letter arrived one day later. Without fail for 3 years. I can't explain that. But I guess it's another of those coincidences.
I am reminded of something that happened to me. I had a friend from oversea. For about 3 years I would get a letter from him every 4-6 weeks. I would get home from work and think, "Today there will be a letter", and I was wrong every single time. But every single time the letter arrived one day later. Without fail for 3 years. I can't explain that. But I guess it's another of those coincidences.
Or synchronicity, as some call it. That's another interesting subject.
Around 2003/2004, I went to a writers conference in NYC. I met a woman who had co-published a book on synchronicity, which they termed "getting into the flow". It was only a couple three years after 9/11, and writing was part of my working through that. I spoke to her about some of it, and she said she was going to send me a copy of her book.
I got it in the mail a few weeks later, and stuck it on a shelf. May eight or nine years later, I pulled it off and read it while commuting on the train. It was pretty interesting. Haven't looked at it for a while now, but I might pull it off the shelf again.
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Yes, supercilious bore at that.
