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If they do it's too bad we can't figure out a way of dealing with them.
I don't have a suggestion for dealing with them. It's just that some stories are pretty believable, and several have happened to me, so they seem believable to me.
I guess the most significant one I ever experienced was a letter from my sister explaining a progressive infection in my nephew (age 2) that had blinded him in one eye and cost him 50% of the vision in the other. I and two friends prayed for him, and I felt an immediate relief as I prayed. Something was nagging at me, though, like we weren't getting all the way through (whatever that means--it was just a feeling), and we prayed for a long time, but that "not quite done" feeling never went away.
I got a letter from my sister a week later saying his infection had unexpectedly disappeared, and his vision had returned 100% in both eyes, but the infection hadn't quite gone away in one eye. They treated that for the next six months till it was gone, but his eyesight stayed at 100% the whole time.
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There doesn't seem to be any handle to separate them from the mistakes in perception, hoaxes and pure delusions that also happen.
I can't separate them, either, not even the one I just gave. It could have been coincidence, I guess, but I live a lot by those kind of feelings, and they are, at least to me, astonishingly reliable.
Another example. There is a check I get once a month at my business that is quite large. It comes from California, and it is handwritten, so I take it to the branch of my bank that knows me best, even though they're not closest, because they don't put a hold on the check. I like to drive on a wooded road to that bank, even though it's a little longer, because I like the drive. Last month, I felt like I shouldn't. I went that direction, anyway, for two blocks, but I felt even more I shouldn't, so I made a turn and went the short way through town.
From the bank, I was going to another office by my house to set up a computer for a friend. Halfway there it dawned on me that he might not be there, and the office might be locked. I called his cell phone, and I found out he had left and was thirty seconds up the road from me. He pulled off on the side of the road, and I picked up the key from him. Had I gone the long way to the bank, I would have missed him. He'd have turned right where I met him and headed down a highway.
Small thing, but those small things happen to me a lot when I follow those feelings. With time, I could produce dozens of such incidents.
Chance? Maybe, but I doubt it.
How do we get a handle on it? I don't know anything about getting a handle on it. I teach my kids not to ignore those gut feelings, and I recommend to others they learn to be spiritual.
I don't know that any of my experiences proves anything to anyone but me. I do know that it's a rare bird who can write such experiences off when it happens to them.
We're sorry, but something went wrong (500) is a web site that collects "transcendental" experiences by scientists. I am not presenting it as proof of those experiences, but such experiences are hard to ignore, scientist or not, and even scientists tend to get spiritual when something like that happens to them.
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