It is interesting you mention this.

We recently climbed a technical 6000m peak in the Tajik Pamirs as a team of three. One of use got sick. My partner and I draged the sick and weak third person down through difficult terrain, fixing ropes for him, over 24 hrs on the go with the sick totally loosing it and the two of us going to our limits too to get us all out.
The next day I said to my buddy "you know, yesterday night it feel like we were four, not three. Feels like somebody else was there". He said then that this was very strange, since he felt the same way, that we were four, not three.

Never had that feeling before, but we both clearly had it that day&night.

Know this song?

No I haven´t, read reports of it though.

In my case I call it my Sixth Sense with at little help from the surrounding Spirits.

Those Spirits of course would be the likes of Brutus, Norman, Galen etc!

This all has to do with not my "religious" belief, as I do not have one at all. Rather, my "Spiritual" transparency and foundation that I have chosen to walk this dimension by. There is a big difference. Those that have no true settings in the Spiritual realm, do not understand this very real concept.

I do my best to practice the Taoist philosophy. Believing that my current life is just a product of a greater concept, makes things that much more easier to accept and fathom.

When shit hits the fan as most folks call it, I accept it as just another challenge that comes with the experience. In doing so, I have no gauge of difficulty. Just a moment of clarity to think about the puzzle that I have been handed.

Believe me, I do not expect most here to even begin to understand....

I experienced in on a car-to-car day trip of the Exum Ridge on the Grand Teton. It was really too much for my friend and I to do in a day, we didn't know how to move fast in alpine terrain. But on the descend of the Owen-Spalding Route, we were scrambling carefully down for what seemed like forever. There was a curious, kind of diffident fellow wearing a sweater and white slacks off on my right, descending the rocks with me. Just like most others who experienced this kind of thing, I never spoke of it, but took a vague comfort from the presence.

My thought is that this phenomenon exists to help you "keep it together." It's like a sick patient who will try to hold on or go an extra mile if he feels someone is right there for him and rooting for him. The mind "invents" that person out of need.

It's a really cool thing! I hope I don't ever get tired enough to need it again!

BTW, my friend also had a "double" with him, I don't remember the details. Whew.

Although I have not experienced this personally, I could easily see this happening. During my studies of cognitive neuroscience I remember a specific reference to "the four quadrants": awake/not dreaming, asleep/dreaming, asleep/not dreaming, and awake/dreaming. It's in this fourth quadrant that it is rare for us to travel in under normal circumstances, but that doesn't mean we cannot. (As I recall, there are actually neuro-chemicals that suppress the brain from entering into this fourth quadrant but under certain circumstances, these chemicals are not present.) Circumstances mentioned were: extreme fatigue, dire circumstances, and also schizophrenia.

Dragger wrote:Although I have not experienced this personally, I could easily see this happening. During my studies of cognitive neuroscience I remember a specific reference to "the four quadrants": awake/not dreaming, asleep/dreaming, asleep/not dreaming, and awake/dreaming. It's in this fourth quadrant that it is rare for us to travel in under normal circumstances, but that doesn't mean we cannot. (As I recall, there are actually neuro-chemicals that suppress the brain from entering into this fourth quadrant but under certain circumstances, these chemicals are not present.) Circumstances mentioned were: extreme fatigue, dire circumstances, and also schizophrenia.

Religious folks attribute the third man to God, but I just think it's a product of the subconscious mind. I'm not sure I would call it dreaming though.

Sierra Ledge Rat wrote:

Dragger wrote:Although I have not experienced this personally, I could easily see this happening. During my studies of cognitive neuroscience I remember a specific reference to "the four quadrants": awake/not dreaming, asleep/dreaming, asleep/not dreaming, and awake/dreaming. It's in this fourth quadrant that it is rare for us to travel in under normal circumstances, but that doesn't mean we cannot. (As I recall, there are actually neuro-chemicals that suppress the brain from entering into this fourth quadrant but under certain circumstances, these chemicals are not present.) Circumstances mentioned were: extreme fatigue, dire circumstances, and also schizophrenia.

Religious folks attribute the third man to God, but I just think it's a product of the subconscious mind. I'm not sure I would call it dreaming though.

Most Religious folks believe in an omnipresent God. I would tend to think of it more as an individuals guardian angle. I know that sounds childish, but in my non-domination religion, I believe angles act on God's behave sometimes when your in a situation where your life should be taken, but its not your time to go.

From John Geiger's book The Third Man Factor:

"A world populated by unseen beings that can be summonded as required during times of great need bears little resemblance to the rational world we are supposed to inhabit. It seems like a throw-back to an earlier age, when monks would disappear into the desert for years, only to emerge with accounts of religious epiphanies and encounters with divine beings, or when it was generally accepted that guardian angels watched over each one of us and would come, as needed, to our spiritual and physical aid. The first and most obvious explanation for the Third Man Factor, then, is that it is merely a contemporary twist on a very old idea, that of the guardian angel. The conditions encountered by explorers are, after all, not very different from the isolation and hardship that invited interventions from guardian angels, or God, in the past." (pp 62-63)