Are Psychic Phenomena Illusory?

[universecannon]

I thought this was an interesting chapter on psychic phenomena... includes studies, interesting cases, etc. For some background context, I should note that the book itself covers several topics that are often considered taboo in the scientific community these days.

Are psychic phenomena illusory?

 

[joedirt]

I carried out experiments with return-anticipating dogs to find out whether they really did anticipate their owners returns, even when they could not have known by “normal” means. The first and most extensive tests were with a terrier called Jaytee, who lived near Manchester, England, with his owner, Pam Smart. Preliminary observations revealed that Jaytee usually started waiting for Pam just before she set off homewards, apparently when she formed the intention to do so. He did this whatever the time of day on 85 out of 100 return journeys. On some occasions he failed to react he was sick; on others there was a bitch on heat in the next flat, showing that Jaytee could be distracted. But on 85 percent of the occasions he seemed to anticipate Pam’s return

This is something I have observed many times.
I had a dog that died a few years back named Alley. (May she rest in peace...or evolve to a higher place)

Anyway I remember many times when we would be sitting around and I would form the intention to get up and leave. She knew it. I mean she really knew it. It wasn't a fascial cue she was responding to as on at least a few occasions she was facing away from me.

My wife would report that she would alway's get excited when I was about to arrive home from work, but of course I did usually get home around the same time each day.



I have also experienced precognition at least once on a high dose of shrooms when I witnessed a coworker's wife (who I have never met) throw a cup at him and hit him in the face. This is NOT a coworker I was close to, but we were cordial. Anyway the next day at work he had a spot under his eye exactly where I saw the cup hit him... no I never verified this. Like I said we weren't close to each other and this would have been a very personal event to him... a fight with your wife is not something you want a coworker, who wasn't present, to inquire about. So I let it go and chalked it up to an unverified experience. Such is life.

I have also witnessed passed lives... one in particular was VERY tough for me. I was a slave in the confederate south and tried repeatedly to escape and was tracked down, caught and beat repeatedly. (Note I grew up white in the southern part of the US in this life). These visions started showing up when I started trying to understand what my issue was with authority and the feelings of being trapped...


The thing is with these sort of phenomena is I don't expect they will EVER hold up to scientific scrutiny in a way that others will believe it. Most people are of the mind set, "Well if I can't do or experience it then it's just not real".

DO I think it's real. Well yeah I do. But I look at the entire universe as one large energetic field composed of many more subtle energetic fields. I view our brains as both receivers and generators of consciousness so it's not a very hard leap for me to believe this happens. However, I see a world were the vast majority of people have no spirituality and those that do typically have it so wrapped up in the dogma of a single religion that in effect they also have no spirituality. I'm not equating spirituality with Gods, heavens, or hells here. I'm equating it with a much larger more opened minded view of what the universe is.

I will say this. It think telepathy will be strongly related to the ability of a person to experience and project PURE empathy. And empathy, as I'm coming to understand, is not something most people really experience in any tangible way on a regular basis. It's really hit or miss for most people most of the time..

Empathy means being able to project others onto yourself and to try and deeply understand their experience and POV. This is NOT the same as projecting ourselves onto others which is what most people subconsciously do most of the time IMHO. This is something that is VERY foreign to almost everyone I know. It's something I've been spending more focus on during meditation as of late.... Mothers/daughters seem to express this level of empathy more than others but honestly even this bond is lacking. I think there is a level of empathy that simply can't be experienced with an individual based POV. Not saying there are no individuals, but even as individuals there is a source connecting us all. Understand this source connection and learning to view others as yourself is the key to deeper empathy and the key I believe in unlocking these higher states of consciousness.

I mean there is an energy source moving plants, growing grass, appling on apple trees...and apparently peopling on the earth (to paraphrase Alan Watts).

One last point. In Buddhism the mind is considered a sense organ...and I completely agree with this view after many years of meditating on it.

Anyway I'm gonna go finish this chapter and will likely respond again as something else catches my eye.

Peace

 

[The Neural]

The thing is with these sort of phenomena is I don't expect they will EVER hold up to scientific scrutiny in a way that others will believe it. Most people are of the mind set, "Well if I can't do or experience it then it's just not real".

DO I think it's real. Well yeah I do. But I look at the entire universe as one large energetic field composed of many more subtle energetic fields. I view our brains as both receivers and generators of consciousness so it's not a very hard leap for me to believe this happens. However, I see a world were the vast majority of people have no spirituality and those that do typically have it so wrapped up in the dogma of a single religion that in effect they also have no spirituality. I'm not equating spirituality with Gods, heavens, or hells here. I'm equating it with a much larger more opened minded view of what the universe is.

I like your worldview. It is far more logical than any other preconceived notions around the subject.

Regarding if it will ever hold scientifically, and specifically whether the brain is or is not a receiver as well as a generator, I have this to say: Just because we are looking at the radio set from such a distal view, does not mean that there is no antenna there.

 

[Enoon]

For a long time now I've felt that there is a lot more to what we are able to percieve in one way or another than what we are immediately aware of. The obvious five senses even seem to give a lot more information than we give them credit for. I've had experiences on several occasions that to me seemed like extra sensory perception or rather super-sensory perception. I've always felt there is a certain openness necessary to experience these things well - openness to receive and feel and be touched by the presence and actions of another being. Most of the times I'd say people are not willing to open themselves to that degree. But of course it's very hard to say, for me at least.

 

[jbark]

I've always felt there is a certain openness necessary to experience these things well - openness to receive and feel and be touched by the presence and actions of another being. Most of the times I'd say people are not willing to open themselves to that degree.

That's sort of where the grey zone lies - what constitutes the difference between susceptibility to illusion and "openness to receive" ?

Putting one's scepticism fully aside is as counterproductive, I believe, as indulging an overactive sceptical gland (the hyposcepticus? )

Still very difficult to know where that line lies through the fog of grey...

Cheers,

JBArk

 

[Vodsel]

That's sort of where the grey zone lies - what constitutes the difference between susceptibility to illusion and "openness to receive" ?

Perception and interpretation don't have to occur at the same time. It's not necessarily easy, but being receptive and keeping up your judgement are well compatible. That seems to be the trick.

Intuition is an example... we all have some good degree of intuitive potential, question is whether we pay attention to it. Then, deciding which impression deserves to be taken seriously and which doesn't is what constitutes the difference, not the perceptiveness by itself.

Listening is always good. If we listened the way we meditate, we'd have many surprises. Not judging right away, just observing. Seeing the impression reach us the same way we observe an emotion go by when meditating.

 

[jbark]

Intuition is an example... we all have some good degree of intuitive potential, question is whether we pay attention to it. Then, deciding which impression deserves to be taken seriously and which doesn't is what constitutes the difference, not the perceptiveness by itself.

I've always thought of intuition as a sort of retroactively self-supporting sort of thing. The number of times we anticipate things happening and they don't, in my experience, far outweigh the number of times they do. But we lend importance to the times they do because our brains have a longstanding love affair with pattern - to the point, as I am sure everyone will admit, that we invent pattern where there is none. And often call it intuition, in hindsight.

On a contract a few months ago, I was working with a friend. His girlfriend called and when he hung up he said - that was so weird, I was JUST thinking about her. And the weirder thing is, she almost always calls right after I think about her. And she says the same thing when I call HER. We're SO connected, it's uncanny.

So, being the bubble burster I am , I said: well how interesting. I bet you only think of her a couple of times a day, most often right before she calls.

He said no, that he probably thought of her more often than that.

How often?, I pushed.

Often enough.

Once every 4 hours? 2? Every hour?

After some prodding he admitted, startling himself with the admission, that he thinks about her at least once every fifteen minutes or so.

And I said to him - well you ought to be disappointed with her that she doesn't call you more often, no?

He blushed the blush of a burst bubble and I almost felt bad to have crushed his romantic spirit...

I think that while I don't discount the notion of "true" intuition existing, most often it is a case of our feeble brains grasping at straws.

JBArk the killjoy

 

[universecannon]

I think we're all familiar with many of those kinds of arguments, jbark, which can of course apply at times in many aspects of life. The chapter i linked does talk about this and similar arguments, but sometimes these arguments simply fail to explain what is going on. They are often used by so-called "skeptics" as a sort of magical wand to explain away these experiences and thus ignore them altogether...all because they contradict their belief system of how reality works. In fact the chapter even goes into controlled studies that have been done on telephone telepathy that involved guessing who was calling you, with the results being well above chance levels

personally I'm a lot more interested in the cases that are much more freaky than mundane things like thinking about someone before they call which just defy any sort of logical explanation you try to coat it with, since often times the chances of it being coincidence is astronomical. For example there is loads of cases where people have not gotten onto flights, in cars, etc, because they had an overwhelming 'bad feeling' about it... only later to find that some horrific accident occurred which would likely have killed them had they not heeded this intuition. This is just one example of course and in some cases perhaps there was a subconscious process that involved predicting the accident through a string of incoming perceptual information they weren't fully or at all aware of. But often there simply is no way they could have known these accidents could occur

I'll explain something similar to this thats happened to me but first let me explain something. From what i can tell, after documenting dozens if not hundreds of these instances over the years, intuition, synchronicity, precognition, telepathy, etc, are all sort of jumbled together as expressions of the same thing. Just like taking different psychedelics opens up different expressions of the psychedelic mind-scape...Sometimes it can be impossible to tell the difference between them. They can be very different and vary greatly in degrees of intensity/depth but overall its similar territory. IMO it seems highly likely to me at this point that they are just labels we attach to various expressions of the same exact thing: the non-local capacities of consciousness

It seems to me that intuition, in a more extreme expression, begins to look more like precognition. Just one example of many: Just a few hours before the earthquake and tsunami struck japan i for some reason could not for the life of me stop imagining what it'd be like to be in the middle of an earthquake. I found myself randomly daydreaming about it, exactly in the way that i find myself spontaneously daydreaming before something synchronous/psychic/telepathic happens (which were all becoming daily experiences when i started taking harmalas everyday for over a year). I even remarked to my roommate that for some reason i couldn't get earthquakes out of my head.

I don't have any prior obsession or interest whatsoever in earthquakes...I hadn't watched any shows or encountered any information on them that i could recall in the months preceding this... had never experienced one.. etc... And a few hours later, less than an hour before i learned about what was happening over there, i had an actual image in my head involving thousands of japanese people caught in rushing water..

I've had many experiences like this in my life, and heard of countless others who have as well. I could sit and write page after page of examples like this, especially ones that tie into dreaming. Since this post is already long here's just one other example similar to this which seems way beyond any kind of logical explanation. I once dreamed i was in a warehouse with my roomate near her home town, when suddenly a tornado came in and ripped the roof off. After waking up, i saw on the news that a freak tornado had touched down right near her home town-which i'd never been to- and the only damage was to the roof of a warehouse. Neither of us have ever even seen a tornado and they are unheard of in this area of the north east.

Any of these sorts of experiences alone could definitely have been just a strange coincidence. But when countless cases like this build and build in ones life, way beyond the realm of statistical probabilities, and you remain aware of the general bulk of your (and others) experiences, the chances of it all being coincidence becomes blatantly astronomical and even laughable

When i encountered psychedelics and things started really getting bizarre for me as a teenager i began documenting things and keeping a dream journal..both because it was so interesting and because i was afraid i might loose my mind... admittedly . One thing i discovered was that these things occur far, far more frequently than most people think, and one of the big reasons for our ignorance of this is that we forget nearly all of these instances not long after they occur...and then when another comes around, its much easier to just brush it off as coincidence because we haven't maintained that awareness of our lifelong experience of them- which paints them in a totally different light.

 

[universecannon]

That's sort of where the grey zone lies - what constitutes the difference between susceptibility to illusion and "openness to receive" ?

Putting one's scepticism fully aside is as counterproductive, I believe, as indulging an overactive sceptical gland (the hyposcepticus? )

I agree that there is a sort of balance involved... but i think true openness- the kind of openness that seems to almost always be a prerequisite for these bizarre "psychic" experiences to manifest- requires a release of all forms of judgement and left brain chatter or skepticism before and during the experience itself. Our thinking/interpreting/skeptical neuro-programs can simply be reinstated after the experience ends. I don't mean to say that we should just believe fully in what is happening while its happening, but instead just suspend all belief, judement, etc, and just experience your awareness of whats happening

If you've read robert anton wilson's cosmic trigger you might recall his experiments with rituals that involved high doses of LSD and first listening to the "beliefs unlimited" tape of John Lilly's during the come up. In his experiences as well as my own, dropping all forms of judgement/analysis/skepticism/belief during the experience can allow a different kind of experience to manifest that can't be reached when your constantly analyzing/interpreting/questioning the experience as it happens

 

[Metanoia]

I have also witnessed passed lives... one in particular was VERY tough for me. I was a slave in the confederate south and tried repeatedly to escape and was tracked down, caught and beat repeatedly. (Note I grew up white in the southern part of the US in this life). These visions started showing up when I started trying to understand what my issue was with authority and the feelings of being trapped...

Huge chills. I had an experience, recently in fact, where I believe I experienced what I considered to be a past life. I have been working on trying to access any sort of state where I can tap into this sort of thing. I have been trying to unravel and deal with my hatred for authority lately (it has become extremely intense lately, to the point where I am having a hard time controlling it). So I was deep in meditation four nights ago when I had this insanely vivid vision.

I was a slave working in some rock quarry. I had deep brown skin (my family is as white as they come) and the sun was very hot on my back. There was an overseer on horseback with a whip. He was yelling in some language I couldn't understand. One of the other slaves next to me collapsed and myself and the other slaves all stepped back. The overseer dismounted and walked over to the helpless slave (who had passed out from exhaustion or sun stroke) and beat him to death with a small club. The feeling of helplessness and rage was palpable. I snapped out of the experience with my heart pounding, sweating profusely.

I sat awake thinking about how this could be tied to my issues with authority. Could it have really happened? And if it did, can experiences like these follow us from lifetime to lifetime until we uncover them and find some sort of resolution?

Ah, the mystery of it all.

personally I'm a lot more interested in the cases that are much more freaky than mundane things like thinking about someone before they call which just defy any sort of logical explanation you try to coat it with, since often times the chances of it being coincidence is astronomical. For example there is loads of cases where people have not gotten onto flights, in cars, etc, because they had an overwhelming 'bad feeling' about it... only later to find that some horrific accident occurred which would likely have killed them had they not heeded this intuition. This is just one example of course and in some cases perhaps there was a subconscious process that involved predicting the accident through a string of incoming perceptual information they weren't fully or at all aware of. But often there simply is no way they could have known these accidents could occur

This has happened to me too many times to ignore. Dozens. Sometimes when I'm deep in a psychedelic state or philosophizing with a friend I start to wonder if I'm supposed to be alive at all I could have been killed many, many times over. But something always happens so that I am not where I should be at a certain time, or I get a feeling that is so strong I can't ignore it.

One of the most dramatic was when I was working in a factory when I was younger. This was my first job actually. I worked in a dye house, dying fabrics and garments. I was trained on all the machines so I would often be moved around to run whatever batches through that were urgent or had been sitting around for a while. So this one day I was supposed to run one of the oldest machines in the factory. I had run it for three weeks prior to this. I woke up that morning and went about my usual routine. The entire time I kept thinking "man, I don't want to work today". Now that's not unusual for most people, especially if their job is really crappy But I didn't mind the place, I liked most of the people I worked with. I usually didn't want to work on Mondays or maybe Fridays, but I wasn't really the guy that says something like that everyday. I hadn't even called in sick once since I started at this place.

So I called in sick. I even felt guilty doing it, but I knew that I wasn't supposed to be at work that day. I stayed home and relaxed. I remember barbecueing some steaks and potatoes and having dinner with my girlfriend and young daughter. Later on I got a call from a friend I hadn't seen in a couple years and I thought maybe that's why I was supposed to stay home. Because I would have missed the call if I had gone to work, you know.

The next day I show up at work and the dye house is closed. The other side of the factory was open and all the ladies were working, but the dye house was completely sealed off. The warehouse supervisor calls me over and tells me that the machine I had been working on for three weeks had exploded yesterday and the guy who took my shift because I called in was in the hospital with severe injuries. I broke down and cried right there. I felt relieved, but also intense guilt. My work set me up with a therapist so I could talk about it because for weeks afterwards I was having a hard time working and kept breaking down and crying, overcome with guilt.

The guy survived but never returned to work. He lost a hand and had to have metal rods and screws put in one of his legs. I learned to not blame myself for what everyone else was calling "an unavoidable accident, a strange coincidence." Even the therapist fed me this. I still feel a bit guilty about it when I think about it or tell the story.

I have never ignored an intuition or gut feeling since then.

 

[jbark]

Universecannon - yes you linked me to the article and I began reading it, left it, my machine crashed and then I forgot about it! Sorry!

I'll give it another shot, though Sheldrake is not my favourite thinker. I didn't mean the phone call example as a blanket explanation of psychic phenomena, clearly, but just that often the patterns behind these things may be hidden in varying degrees.

Or not. I am very open to the possibility, but must defer to the null hypothesis in the absence of any widely accepted data.

Cheers,

JBArk

 

[jamie]

In reference to people talking about past lives..I have experienced "past lives" a number of times on psychedelics, but I also had one ayahuasca experience where I was shown that reincarnation is not what we think it is. I literally experienced the lives of my parents and they're parents etc..and even the life of some unborn daughter I might have I guess. As my parents I was the reincarnation of my grandparents..me being the reincarnation of my parents and my future children being the reincarnation of me(and they're mother)..we reincarnate through procreation..we pass on the genetics..our DNA. We never really die, our ego's die. There is also some kind of morphic field like Sheldrake talks about that like updates the species memory or something..and then a sort of gaian level field also that updates all organisms..

Past life rememberance is just a genetic memory. That's what ayahuasca has shown me anyway.

Sometimes I believe it is that way, sometimes I don't.

 

[Metanoia]

Past life rememberance is just a genetic memory. That's what ayahuasca has shown me anyway.

This is exactly the message Salvia has given me as well. After asking repeatedly to be shown/explained, I was also told that every human being has access to these memories. It seems a dizzying prospect, doesn't it...

All the memories and experiences of all the lives that have come before, in unbroken sequence...

Sounds a lot like the Bene Gesserit of Dune