Thursday, November 08, 2007

Meeting of the Minds

"The first attempts at merged consciousness would probably be temporary; after a time the individual minds would separate and work independently again. This would give them a chance to see whether they preferred individuality or the merged state."

Quite a few years ago I took part in a Ganzfeld ESP experiment. (The gist of the Ganzfeld is the creation of a uniform/no information feed of visual and auditory input, which is designed to help you ignore these senses in favor of extrasensory information.)

My partner is this escapade was an acquaintance/friend who took the role of 'sender' to my 'receiver'. The task goes something like this... Sender sees target picture. Sender focuses on target picture for the duration of time (15 or 20 minutes, if I remember correctly) that the receiver is in the Ganzfeld and actively monitoring the impressions and images that pass through his/her mind. Sender is hearing the receiver's verbalizations during this period, presumably because this allows the sender to mentally 'endorse' or 'reinforce' the receiver when s/he gets something right. Sender may also draw pictures to try to reinforce a specific idea or image they are sending to the receiver about the target.

Don't get too hung up on that part of the protocol though. The idea of needing someone to 'send' the information to the receiver presumes that the receiver is most competent at tasks involving telepathy with his/her partner, as opposed to simply identifying information that s/he will be subjected to during later feedback portions of the task and temporally displacing that information to conscious awareness at an earlier time during the task. And by the way, yes, I was able to correctly identify the target picture from a set of four. And, yes, I know that that's not particularly impressive to you all unless I'm able to repeat it quite a few times in a row. No, I did not have the opportunity to try to repeat it.

Now, admittedly, I shouldn't try to draw too many conclusions from a single experience. So let's just say that this experience raised some interesting questions...

The most vivid image that I 'received' was actually an image that my friend had drawn during the 'sending' phase of the experiment. After the judging and feedback portions of the experiment were complete, I had the opportunity to see these drawings and discuss the session with my friend. Naturally I had a strong reaction to that image when I saw the drawing of it, as it was the image I had 'received' during the experiment. Had I gotten that image telepathically from my friend? If so, why hadn't I gotten the actual target image telepathically? Or had I been drawing on my startled reaction to the image when I was casting about for information during the 'receiving' portion of my session? If so, why hadn't I pulled the target image, which I subsequently saw and knew to be the correct image? (And so on.)

Attempting to resolve these questions becomes difficult, as I don't have the time-locked data that would let me compare the time I 'received' that image to the time my friend drew/'sent' it. I was able to speculate a little bit about my friend's ability to 'release'/'send' that image, based on what I learned about what happened during the 'sending' session. I suspect that my friend was able to more easily 'release' this image than the target image, due to the shifting of attention that happened during the 20 minutes or so of 'sending'. I don't think that this was a conscious act on the part of my friend, as neither of us had had any training in 'release of effort'.

And, from what I have read and experienced, in order for telepathy to function in a productive way, the sender must be as equally adept at releasing the information as the receiver is at identifying it and being able to act upon it. The sender must also be able to release/control his/her expectations of the receiver's ability to receive the information and/or act upon it.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Stand and Deliver

"Believe me, I discarded the telekinesis myth long ago. I know I am choosing outcomes, not manipulating processes."

I'm in the process of developing a presentation. And I'm not above cannibalizing my previous work for said presentation. In doing so, I try to ask 'Is there a way I could have said this better?'.

For example, I could have said...

The most promising variable that is not currently accounted for in psi research is the ever-changing knowledge of the system in question. With each observation, expectations of future outcomes within that system are adjusted. If you accept that these varying states of expectation can have some effect on the outcomes that are selected, then it becomes necessary to control either 1) the input of information about the system, or 2) the expectations that can be generated about future observations, or both. (This was discussed a bit in Entangled Expectations.)

Think of motion through our 5th dimension just like you think of motion through time - it is constant; you can't escape it. Each new input of information in conscious awareness modifies the forces that contribute to the process of state selection for future outcomes. Only when you account for this shifting of expectations due to new information, can you begin to see the pattern of motion through Smearland.

...but then, I have a splitting headache right now, so perhaps this only makes sense to me