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Why Bother?
Recently a colleague at work was given a bridal shower. That morning, I went to buy a card to wish her well. I found a pretty card with a wedding dress image on the front. I picket it up and wanted to buy it. But as soon as I held it, I knew I should not buy it. I did not know why. Later as we sat watching her open her gifts, she opened a card from someone else, and it was the card I had put back.
Clearly, my warning was that someone had already chosen that card for her. But why would my future sense give a warning on such a trivial issue. I don’t really care if I give her a card she already has. So why would my subconscious, some other entity, or worse the universe at large care about that enough to warn me?
Too Crowded
On the plane arriving into Chicago, we touched down and felt the strong pressure of braking. I was just thinking that it feels like we are going to run off the end of the runway. Within 10 seconds, a man in my row spoke to his companion and said, “A southwest plane crashed here in XXXX, you know. Yep, it was icy and it went off the end of the runway and through the wall and into the street. It killed a couple in a car.”
I sighed inside. So much for the illusion of peace and privacy in my own thoughts.
Entangled Myth
I recently read the book Entangled Minds by Dean Radin. I have read a number of other books that also review the large body of rigorous, repeatable lab studies that have demonstrated a measurable effect of PSI interaction over the last hundred years. What most impressed me about Dean Radin is that he goes beyond the now thoroughly established, if not well publicized, conclusion that PSI is real. Radin’s multi-disciplinary background as well as personal experience may have given him a bit more insight to begin proposing a mechanism behind the magic.
Basic physical concepts like time, space, energy, and matter were imagined to be fixed, absolute, and fundamentally different substances. It was taken for granted that reality existed in an absolute sense, independent of observers, and it was an additional token of faith that action at a distance was impossible. The concept of mind, then viewed through the fledgling discipline of psychology , and especially its rising fad of behaviorism, was regarded as an illusion created by the clockwork mechanisms of the brain. Because mind was an illusion and action at a distance was impossible, genuine psi phenomena were also impossible.
Radin, Dean (2009-11-19). Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (pp. 241-242). Pocket Books. Kindle Edition.
Our cultural framework is still heavily embedded in a mechanistic world/cosmological view. Even practitioners of other scientific disciplines seem to have little awareness of the potential upheaval that could result from the application of the principles of quantum entanglement to the molecular scale. The social sciences, which include my own academic background, are even further out of touch with the frontiers of the physical, chemical and biological sciences. The foundation needed to understand and apply a new understanding of the fundamental nature of matter and energy rarely exists outside of the practitioners’ discipline.While the public is still unaware of the successful research of PSI events, surveys show that most people do accept the reality of PSI. The remaining mystery is how it might work based on our current scientific knowledge. Radin begins to tie the emerging understanding of entangled particles and quantum physics with the patterns of PSI events. Unfortunately, the public is generally unaware of role of the observer in establishing reality and the measurement of quantum particles’ ‘spooky action at a distance’ as famously labeled by Einstein. So tying one mis-understood event to another probably does not go far to break the stalemate that keeps PSI research on the fringe of science and society.
Psychologists still practice as if the brain and the mind were the same thing. Yet, there are documented cases where the mind is operating without the brain functioning. Any out of place thought is a delusion, rather than a stray idea from a passer by.
Bio-chemists and medical researchers are still focusing on the role of specific disease agents and chemical compounds in restoring health. Yet, their population based research has only partial predictive value in managing illness. The role of the mind in establishing and maintaining health is rarely acknowledge, other than as a placebo effect.
It seems we are stuck at the beginning of a scientific revolution, not because the research is unavailable or inconclusive, but because the general academic community and the public can’t absorb the results. The scope of cosmological and theoretical physics have moved so far out of alignment with the general world view that they have become akin to magical arcane practitioners of dark arts.
Chicken and Egg
This morning as I was chatting at the playground with a grandmother I had just met, we starting talking about zoos. She felt that zoos which confined the animals in small enclosures were depressing. Although I agreed, I also pointed out that large open air zoos make it hard for the kids to see and relate to the animals. We sat quietly for a moment.
Then I thought, it would be great if there were tunnels with observation domes among the animals. So I started to speak, but she beat me to it. You know, she said, if there were tunnels under the animal enclosures, and you could pop up in a dome every so often to view the animals, that would be the best of both. I could only agree and let it go.
No one wants to hear that you accidentally read their mind. After all, I don’t know for sure if I read her or if she read me. Judging by how often this is starting to happen, I am guessing it is me. I wonder how often this happens every day with people all over the world. Maybe we all are constantly hearing each other’s thoughts but never know it.
As we move through our busy lives busting about, working hard, who’s will are we doing? Which of our impulses and feelings are really our own? Is there a puppet master pulling the strings? Or are we all part of a human hive fulfilling some greater purpose of which we known nothing? Perhaps deep within us all is a receiver that is tuned to the signals of a collective whole or an outside entity.
Considering the amazing research I have read recently on psi, I wonder if our conversation attuned us to the same channel and we then somehow collectively processed the problem so that we shared the job of finding a solution. The accumulation of evidence suggests that psi is a low level but common ability which can be boosted by multiple people focusing together. Athletes, performers, politicians among others work to focus the will of the crowd to support their goals. In what other ways are our abilities harnessed without us even realizing it? Are bureaucracies almost alive with the persistent effort and support of their members? Are formal ceremonies more than just a recognition of an event or are they actually a transformational experience? Are researchers around the world working on the same research actually functioning as part of a network of analytical capacity? Is inspiration a flash from our subconscious or is it really the output from shared thought?
Don’t try, do
I have been reading about the research by Russel Tarq into remote viewing. His research among others, clearly found the best results came from learning to step aside from the analytically part of our thoughts. To me it seems automatic to try to name and categorize everything I experience. Remote viewing seems to be a way of learning to hover in a drifting state of mind to receive information, without trying to make sense of it. I find letting go and just opening up to be the hardest skill of all. So perhaps it is a more animal, instinctive part of our mind that taps into the intangible.
Yet, unlike remote viewers, I consistently get warnings without preparing but rarely get visual input. If I could get both the heads up warning and the visuals, my extra sense might be a whole lot more useful. I wanted to see if this was a skill I could develop. Since I clearly have to deal with the unknown anyway, why not learn to be intentionally part of the process.
I found some online randomized psi training tools that replicate the classic card guessing lab tests. After trying them out a few times, I was discouraged. Then I realized what was wrong. I was trying! Duh. So in that one moment of clarity, I just started clicking as fast as I could go on the cards in a 50 card set. When I had been averaging the expected chance results of about 25%, the results this time were 38% or far above chance. But as soon as I started feeling cocky, the results on the next few runs were back to chance. I was trying again. So I stopped the exercise in discouragement.
Later as I was playing a very simple fishing game on my tablet with my toddler, I was getting frustrated at how hard it was to get the timing right to catch the fish. You have to anticipate the vector of the fishing line and the future location of the fish so that they meet up exactly to be successful. To make the game even more difficult, if you miss the time it takes to reset will often cause you to miss a chance at another fish cruising by. I was only catching about 10% of the fish. Heeeyyyyy, light bulb! I closed my eyes and stopped trying. I left myself open to feel a very subtle kind of shift in my mind with no concrete thought or focus. Shift, tap, fish. Shift, tap, fish. For about three minutes, I was almost continuously catching virtual fish while keeping my eyes closed. Once again, as soon as I felt like I was the bomb, the effect disappeared.
As much as I would like to think I have got this whole thing figured out. It is clear that there is more than a lifetime of discipline needed to reach the open, serene, receptive state of mind needed to hear everything the universe has to say.
Out of the mouth of babes
I have struggled so much in my life with relating to others that I am very careful to give my children a conventional upbringing. Even though I am convinced that life is far stranger than most believe, I do not want to let my children become alienated from the culture they live in. I do not discuss the stranger aspects of my life with them yet, but I do tell them that not everyone believes the same thing. I want to let them find their own way as much as possible.
My son is in pre-school and loves to pretend, but he sees pretending as part of playing a game. Most of the time he works very hard at communicating in a concrete and serious way. Like me he is an Aspie and is dangerously honest. He finds any kind of misleading behavior or inaccuracy as totally unacceptable.
Tonight on the way home, we were talking about his best friend at school. Out of no where, he tells me that this boy is his favorite friend. He knew as soon as he saw him that they would love each other and be best friends. He went on to explain that when he first saw this boy at pre-school, a rainbow of light came out of the boy. He claims they both saw it. I asked him to describe the light. He said it was straight up out of the top of the kid’s head. It split into the rainbow colors and went out to points and came back around. I asked him how he knew the other boy saw it on him. My son said that they did not talk about it, but he could tell by the way they looked at each other that they both saw it.
About a year before, in the car on the way to pre-school, my son told me that he could see the ghosts under the road. Now, we do not let him watch scary/horror shows so his exposure to ghosts is strictly through cartoons. He also knows that when people die they are buried in the ‘sad place’, otherwise known as a cemetery. I can’t think of a reason for him to think there were ghosts under the road. He seemed convinced that they were there and they were real. This is the only time I know of where he as spoken about seeing ghosts.
Since he and I are so much alike, I can usually read him very well. Yet, there are times when it seems I am tuned in to him on a deeper level. Oddly, I don’t feel the same level of automatic understanding with my toddler daughter, so it must be something other than just that he is my child. He recently told me very seriously that it was rude of me to say what he was about to say, because it was the same as interrupting him. I told him, I was sorry that I had not meant to do it. Since I so often seem to tune in to the people I am close to, I could see how this would be frustrating if I regularly jump the gun in conversation. I just wish I could tell when I am doing it.
Lately he has started telling me he can smell things from far away. By far away, I mean from the next room or another building. I am not quite sure what to make of that one as it does not sound like anything I have heard before.
When he was about three, he told me how he died when he was with his other mom and dad from before. He said he was on a train with this other family and their dog. Then a bad man came on the train and started shooting people. He said his dog tried to pull him off the train to get away from the person who hurt him. But he said it was too late because he kept bleeding and he died. Hearing about this other family and tragic end did make me sad, but he did not seem very upset about it.
Parenting is hard enough when you realize that every small mistake you make can lead to a lifetime of emotional baggage for your children. I am beyond baffled as to how I am supposed to be parenting when I am such an odd duck and dealing with an odd duckling. The only thing I know for sure is to keeping loving him and giving him support and room to grow. Maybe he won’t grow up feeling that he has to hide from the world.
Hindsight and regret
I think it was winter 2001, I was living in the northern suburbs of Chicago. My apartment complex had a long winding drive that passed a few small ornamental duck ponds that sat in between the buildings. At one point, the road curved around the edge of a pond with only about six feet or so between them. There was an iron fence separating the pond from the road.
One evening after an exhausting day at work, I was driving through my complex past one of the duck ponds and the road was covered in snow. All I could think about was getting home and warming up. Then out of nowhere, an instant strong thought overwhelmed my mind – with so much snow on the road, a car could go straight through the middle of the iron fence and be submerged in the adjacent pond. This thought was not an image or words, but a concrete finished conclusion – more like replaying a memory than a what-if speculation or daydream.
As soon as I thought it, I immediately discounted it as not realistic. This drive had curves, snow and speed bumps. No one goes fast enough on it to have a big accident like that. Although a car could certainly drift or slide off the road, I could not see how it would make it all the way into the pond from that spot. It would have to do a very strange maneuver to go from the outer edge of the curve – which at that point is headed away from the pond – then make a 90 degree turn and hit the fence straight on. That path would be exactly perpendicular from the direction it had been traveling. Based on my limited experience, that was not how cars skidded in snow. Besides, the plowed snow created little berms on each side of the road, which would probably slow down or stop a car. Then I thought that the iron fence would further slow down or stop any car that had managed to drift that far. The whole idea of such a dramatic accident in such an awkward spot seemed ridiculous and I told myself firmly that it just could not happen.
Assuming that my very tired brain had simply cooked up some silliness to make me pay attention to my driving, I was extra careful going the few hundred more yards to my place. After some rest, the next day I headed back out to work. There was still lots of snow, but everything was normal in the complex and I did not think any more about the strange thoughts from the previous night.
Another long day and another drive home, took me back to the apartment drive about the same time of day and with the same snowy conditions. As I carefully made my way along, I could see something was a little different up ahead. There was something yellow flapping in the wind on the fence, but I could not see it clearly from the angle I was travelling. Then as I rounded that last curve and looked to my right, my heart stopped and I started shaking all over.
There were two tire tracks in the snow leaving the road from the furthest out part of the curve. They were exactly perpendicular to the direction of travel. They continued right up to the fence, or what was left of it. Now there was a car sized portion of the fence missing. The tire tracks continued past the fence, through the frozen crust and into the pond. There was a car sized hole in the icy surface. The yellow flapping in the wind had been the police tape warning people away from the scene.
My teeth chattered, my mind stopped completely and I felt devastated. Why? What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know any of my neighbors. I had no way to know which of them I could have warned. I had not even believed the warning, so why would they have listened if I had spoken up. Yet, no matter how I tried to rationalized it, I felt responsible. I felt like I failed and that the consequences were my fault.
I could not handle it. I did not know what to do, so I did nothing. I did not tell anyone. I did not watch the news. I did not read the paper. I completely avoided learning the fate of the person who ended up in that frozen pond. To this day, I do not know the end of the story.
But, I have learned my lesson. Now I do pay attention. I no longer dismiss the odd thoughts that intrude on my days. I try very hard to catch even the small warnings that pop up multiple times a day. I just hope that the next time I get a life or death message, I will know what to do. I can’t imagine anything worse that knowing something awful will happen to my loved ones and not being able to stop it.
Visionary Explorer 