Good Vibe-rations

It’s great to be rational, but sometimes we fill in the gaps. The notion of “vibes” is one gap that we often fill in.

Good vibe-rations

People who know me know that I am generally quite a rational person. I really enjoyed Carl Sagan’s Demon Haunted World, a book-length essay on skeptical thought. Demon Haunted World encourages people to not accept something if the proof isn’t there (and certainly not if the facts work against it!). To my mind, there are many areas in which humans have very little solid knowledge and may not gain any significant knowledge during our lifetimes: God, life after death, pyschic powers. I think the latter is one place where we have the most chance of gaining new knowledge during our lifetimes. In the absence of facts, and with little hope of proving things soon, people fill in the knowledge gap with “beliefs”.

I believe that many people who claim to be psychics are frauds. They may have a talent at studying people, but I don’t think many have real power. However, the human mind is very complex, and some have claimed that we’re only using a fraction of its total capacity. There is a lot that we may be capable of that is not well explored.

With that background, I’d like to talk about “vibes”. Vibes are non-verbal signals that people send out in regards to other people, events and other things that they are thinking about. I’m sure that everyone has experienced a vibe in a room full of people. If you get a bunch of people in a room, there will very likely be many non-verbal cues as to how people feel. It is less certain whether these vibes can be sent over extended distances. Though I don’t think there are any known laws of physics to support it, I tend to believe that it is possible to send vibes over long distances. Good feelings or bad can manifest themselves in small ways that ripple outwards.

I also feel that if someone is centered and balanced, that is has a good sense of self and is comfortable with their self, these vibes don’t really have much impact. It may be true that no one is an island, but some people are able to maintain their calm through anything.

Some people worry about bad vibes and evil eyes. My feeling is that unless people are actively working against you, these things will have no noticeable effect if you maintain self confidence.

Scientifically speaking, there’s no proof of any of that. There’s probably nothing that concretely disproves it, either. Perhaps this whole vibe thing is just people’s own reaction to how they feel that others think about them. If someone feels that there are evil eyes aimed their way, perhaps that makes them uncomfortable and causes them to make mistakes that they then blame on the eye. I’m certain that, in time, we’ll get a better picture of whether the human mind does have some kind of psychic link to the physical world, or if that whole notion is just an idea in the mind. Until then, we just have to go with what we believe.