Okay, perhaps it is time to get a bit more serious. The title of this thread reveals a problem we've been having in our meandering discussions, that is: what do we mean when we say "supernatural"?
We have posted general questions about stuff we variously call "weird" or "strange" or "spooky" et cetera. It is not immediately clear to me why it is weird or spooky, it just seems to be so because it cannot be explained by conventional means, i.e. what we call science. There is also a general disagreement over whether these things actually exist or not, with at least some people (including myself) being emotionally motivated to "believe" that some do exist. I think it could be enlightening if we go to Mr X's post nr 1 in the original thread and distill those questions into more fundamental ones. Maybe ghosts and bigfoot don't belong in the same category, and I don't think bigfoot belongs in this discussion at all. This is just an example and I'm sure X meant it at least partially as a joke. However... It may be worthwhile to have an initial category for "fantastic creatures", including fairies and sprites and bigfeet to explore if there is something there, even if it is just to eliminate it from the current discussion.
I'm typing this as I'm thinking it, I will go back and look at the questions and I invite you all to do so too. I'm hoping to come up with something along the lines of "violates cause-and-effect" or "thought influences world directly" or "unknown intelligence at work" or some reason why we call it supernatural. I'm hoping that we can eliminate some of the variables so if we build an experiment - even a thought experiment - we're looking at the right stuff.
X, I've now forgotten your exact words, but you asked about the mania. It turns out to be quite easy to describe, it seems to be a mixing of senses happening; lots of visual thoughts, quite detailed, things acquire a feeling like "compact" or "diffuse" or "disconnected".. I remember talking about a flavour, my daily experiences just seemed to "leave a good taste in the mouth". You get the idea... but it was mostly a visual/feeling thing. I remember at one point vividly seeing myself riding (surfing?) the crest of a something like a pressure wave, and I recognized what J4 called "the Age of Aquarius" as this wave (though he posted this much later). It "felt" like really big change going on, like a phase change of matter, or one of those chemical reactions where it goes through a couple of stages... it's a clear liquid... it's a milky froth... bam! it's a spongy solid. I had visions (visual ideas) of a layer of "bullshit" (deception or self-deception) so tightly weaved into our lives that we could never individually unravel it, but the bullshit is connected to itself and looked like it couldn't hold its' form under its' own tremendous weight. It looked like a shapeshifter going through all its' prior forms before it dies...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOdhtZ2l2nY
...and the oppressed breathe free, their ordeal over, the monster lies slain... by other parts of itself.
And then perhaps I realised that we're not there yet, that "something doesn't smell right" and it was the smell of bullshit all around... and I fell off my surfboard and got knocked around by the wave and spat out on the beach of "Huh? WTF?"
Thus spake Garathustra.
