Do you think you have a guardian angel?

Chestnut

snowberryZ You can't possibly know that for certain until you die. Then your guardian angel with wrap their arms around you and take you on a new adventure. ?

Yeah right
Its a fabrication that people make up. It's to protect the mind from the awful realisation that when you die that's it. There is nothingness. Nothingness that stretches for ever.
There is no meeting up with loved ones.

It's not easy to face that fact.
That's why we fabricate things such as angels and ghosts.
Its comforting and helps make death more bearable.

snowberryZ You can't possibly know that for certain until you die. Then your guardian angel with wrap their arms around you and take you on a new adventure. ?

No.
I believe there's no such thing as guardian angels and there's no such thing as life after death.
It's something we comfort ourselves with because we can't face the shocking reality and trurh of death. Which is,
When we die it's the end. For ever and ever.
Sad but true.

That is so funny Shinamae - Thank you for giving me the first - and I hope not the last - laugh of the day!!

This….?

Miss Adventure:

"I was pondering whether a higher power actually comes from within, rather than from an outside force."

It depends what you intend by "a higher power". It may be nothing but Freudian superego i.e. psychological. Or it may be intended to mean an actual power for good, or for universal order, or even a Satanic force!

The advance of science is so impressive it's hard to not believe there is a higher power of orderliness that steers the universe. However I never belief that God intervened in nature or wthat God will occasionally intervene and alter his own laws of nature.

When I fantasise about a personal guardian angel I am helping myself by a combination of wishful thinking plus gratitude and affection towards certain persons who are
deceased.

OTOH, at the other end of the scale, what about ‘bad spirits’?

A Swedish friend who lived in Thailand for some years told me how many of the locals firmly believe in them.

Another Swedish expat friend of hers moved house, taking their maid with them (seems that everybody had a maid.)

Maid insisted from the first that it was a ‘very bad house, bad spirits here!’
Naturally the Swedish woman pooh-poohed this as utter nonsense, but in fact absolutely everything soon started going wrong for the family, including illness.

Eventually they moved again, and things soon improved dramatically.
So who knows? If you believe in one, I suppose it stands to reason that there’ll be the other.

We always seemed to be lucky, things always just appeared to fall into place, often it would seem we were just in the right place at the right time.
Then we had a year of absolutely everything going wrong. Some really big things, others less serious, but if there was a good or bad outcome to something, you can be sure it was bad.
It was across the board as well, in all walks of our lives everything went wrong.
That was twenty years ago, and we’ve never returned to that happy optimism, I thought our luck had just run out, but maybe our guardian Angel retired, and left us to it.

I don’t believe in any god or higher beings but the here and now and all that comes with it good or bad.

Yes I do. Many times I've felt looked after in different situations and the opposite also when I've felt something wasn't right.

I've been thinking about this, following my earlier denial.
Possibly I do. Some strange things have happened in the last few months which have puzzled me. Some disasters which I anticipated have not happened, quite the opposite actually.
I do have a feeling of being rescued, somehow.

I said I didn’t think I had one, but there was one occasion when I thought maybe I did. Or even maybe two.

I was on my way to see my mother, M3 late afternoon, wet road after rain, blinding sun low in the sky. It was a busy time, beginning of rush hour.

I was just thinking that cars in the outside lane were going far too fast - and especially far too close for the conditions, when literally as I passed it, one car didn’t just crash into the next, it mounted it and ended up half on top of it.
So I missed a pile-up by the merest hair’s-breadth.

Another time, decades previously, the brakes on my old Mini failed completely, just seconds after I’d been driving down Reigate Hill behind a big lorry. ? That would have been curtains for me.

Well, that always a good idea. "Be nice" should always include yourself.

Funnily enough I was pondering whether a higher power actually comes from within, rather than from an outside force.

Miss Adventure, sometimes I like to fancy an old friend or a parent is looking out for me, because they know I'm good at heart although I'm extraordinarily foolish. This nothing to do with 'belief', 'religion', or 'life after death' it's about being nice to myself.

Don't know that I want to put a name to anything but there have been more than one really memorable occasions when I/we've have avoided disasters.

First one I remember, many years ago, was visiting Ex in-Laws with plan to visit Tower of London next day. We really wanted to go but another relative turned up to visit, ok we thought we'll go the next day. Never happened, Tower of London was Bombed the day we planned to go.

Another memorable one was just after we moved to Cheshire, planned to go into Manchester on the train and visit the Arndale Centre. We all slept in - yes even the kids - saved again, it was Bombed the day we didn't get there.

When I was working I had a meeting at HO, just as I was leaving the office phone rang so I took the call. Only made me a bit later than I wanted but as I sat on the M11 behind a massive smash I thought I'd have been in that but for that phone call.

Who knows how that happened but I have always been very grateful.

My maternal Grandad died shortly before my 7th birthday and I was always told that he would be my Guardian angel. It was a comforting thought as I was growing up and a lovely thing to offer a child, I think.

If we do have guardian angels, do there have to be only one? Can we not have several? I often hear people say "my guardian angel" as if we have one , but I don't know where this comes from.
I wasn't brought up to believe in angels, but I do believe they exist.

My father believed he had one.
He was profoundly deaf from Childhood.
He didn't allow his disability hold him back

He was an adventurer at heart travelled the world mostly
solo, getting in to many scrapes along the way. ( he should have wrote a book)

But he always pointed up and said his guardian angel was as usual looking out for him . ?

Me ? Only a parking angel ? ?

Maybe. But I doubt it.

I've survived motorbike accidents (some minor but also one serious where I went over the bonnet of a car one dark rainy night), a scuba diving accident (serious case of the bends followed by days of recompression and embolisms in my spine and lung), a parachuting accident (minor, broken ankle) and car accidents (all minor car damage only from being run into by various people). It's difficult to know if someone is protecting me or playing games with me. I don't do anything more risky than drive on the M25 these days.

You are absolutely right Antonia. Our human brains can only understand what we see around us. That is why people try to 'open their minds' with the use of hallucinogenic drugs. They hope to see further than their everyday surroundings. There is far more to the universe than we can ever comprehend. No good asking why this or that happens, the answer is not yet clear to us while we inhabit our earthly body.

I'd like to think that I have one but I'm very doubtful.

But I do think there is more in the world than we are equipped to understand.

I always think of insects and tiny creatures, they go about their lives with, I imagine, no concept of the humans world that's around them. Maybe it's just the same with us, that we just can't see things that do exist. (Or maybe I'm weird!)

Yes, I definitely do, and what's more I believe I actually met him!

He's not a specific person, He's our God. Who keeps an eye on every individual and guides us in our choices.
Whether we choose to follow His advice or not, is up to us.
But I definitely feel He's showing me the way to go in these last years of my life. And for my 'other half'
Not that I always follow His advice.

He too is a man

Another fabrication of a man made church ,and they are all MEN ,well any I heard of were,Gabriel ,Michael even the one who turned bad was a man .I dont need any man to lead me astray or otherwise I'm quite capable of doing that myself.
Like others I talk to my Dad in my head and sometimes out loud and work out what he waould say about the situation thats worrying me ,I usually find an answer from him