Instructor: Rainsong & Wayfarer
Date: September 14, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: elements and how to improve in psionics, in broad strokes — Saturday, 14 September, 2019 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Rainsong and Wayfarer — Search LECTURE93
Rainsong: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen
Welcome to another seminar here at the social club
Chirotractor: hooraaaay
senpai…: https://tenor.com/view/cat-sleep-mess-so-what-cat-and-chair-gif-14621434
senpai…: ok I’m in my seat
Rainsong: We have two topics for the night.
We’ll be discussing elements and how to improve in psionics, in broad strokes
The two topics conveniently overlap
Rainsong: The really short version……
NevynToday at 6:49 PM
“stop worrying about the fastest way and just do something…consistently” Done
rowinhaToday at 6:56 PM
for input in particular: “look at everything, flinch occassionally, fix filters/shields, repeat.”
Rainsong: But there’s actually more to it than that
senpai…: Why shields not auto fix?
senpai…: my wounds auto heal.
Rainsong: That is a separate question than our seminar topic.
Chirotractor: nod
Rainsong: We’ll start with the element question, I think. Mostly because it is more self-contained.
Rose Cinderfall: i’m occasionally reading along but also socializing irl
Chirotractor: am best at questions
Rainsong: Actually, do you have any specific questions about the element stuff?
senpai…: Can I turn lead into gold?
senpai…: well I guess what would be better is coal into gold
Chirotractor: well what brought the question to mind is how there’s more elements in the chineese sort of cosmology
Chirotractor: and sometimes the greek ones are four or five or two
Chirotractor: depending on who you ask
senpai…: I find it funny how sometimes Trees or metal is a element
Rainsong: nods The Far Eastern versions tend to have five, but not always the same five.
PatchesTheCoydog: (or one if you interpret ‘all is water’ type ideas like Thales as being elemental)
Chirotractor: exactly patches
Rainsong: Western magic tends to use four, and is loosely based on the old Greek. Very loosely
Rainsong: As concepts, the elements can be useful in psionics, especially if you already have a background in or penchant for conventional magic
Rainsong: For example, if hypothetically, you had some reason to be taking a river-water sample, from the middle of a bridge, and your sampler device malfunctioned, using ‘water magic’ concepts or even visualizations based on anime such as Batty posted earlier, can help do a very fast, off-the-cuff PK effort to keep the water from spilling back out
Rainsong: Because of the popularity of Skywind’s website/ebook back at the turn of the century, elemental methods of ‘gathering oomph’ have become a standard in this part of the online psionics community
Rainsong: Whether you use five or four or two or seven is mostly a matter of preference.
Rainsong: Typically, people will tend to favour whatever they learned first, as the basis for further learning, so if your first experience with elemental magic used four, you’re likely to stick with four unless you encounter a really good reason to switch
Rainsong: Practically speaking, it doesn’t make much difference
PatchesTheCoydog: If have any knowledge of ceremonial magic stuff there are correspondence lists for things associated with each element that can be used in constructs made with ‘elemental energy’ as well as more direct/literal stuff like the PK example., “you’re likely to stick with four unless you encounter a really good reason to switch” unless you consider yourself an adherent of chaos magic in which case switching systems and viewpoints will be basically what you do/exploring a new system for doing things and not getting too attached to one way of viewing things in itself is considered a good reason(though there are some negative effects of this as well for some in terms of sacrificing depth though that doesn’t HAVE to be the case necessarily in my view). “Practically speaking, it doesn’t make much difference” in some systems related ceremonial magic and stuff it can make a difference because you’re supposed to internalize these elements and build them up within your body, energy systems and field(similar to how people build up chakras by practicing with them). If you’re coming into it with no previous experience it makes no practical difference as you say but if you’ve started the process of internalizing one system of(even different systems of correspondences for the same elements…) it can in some ways.
Rainsong: You make some very good points there, Patches. The ceremonialists and chaos magicians tend to have a different view on magic generally, that affects both how they do things and which concepts they internalize, as compared with psionicists. Those who do both would probably find that the tenets of one system influence their understanding of the other(s)
Rainsong: Any questions or comments about the elements?
Rainsong: Looks like that’s a ‘no’
Rainsong: Alright then, we’ll turn our attention for a while onto the other subtopic of the evening
Rainsong: Broadly speaking, how to improve in psionics
Rainsong: As Nevyn mentioned earlier, constantly seeking out the ‘latest’ fast method instead of working consistently on something is likely to just waste your time
Rainsong: On the other hand, if you’ve been doing the same thing for fifteen years with no results at all, it’s possible that it isn’t the right method for you.
Rainsong: It’s good to be aware of other methods, aside from what you’re practicing, to compare methodlogies, and also to check whether perhaps you might have misunderstood any part of the method you’re doing
Rainsong: Like most forms of magic, working on rocus and concentration is useful: meditation, colouring, math puzzles, and the like are all helpful
Rainsong: Concentration, however, does not require that you scrunch up your eyebrows and do an impression of a terminally constipated ‘super sayan’, however
Rainsong: In fact, give progressive relaxation a try. In addition to inducing a relaxed trance, backwards by artificially causing the symptoms (weird byt true), it’s also directly useful for getting to sleep when you’re stressed about something, and for preparing to do astral projection, and to get out of your own way when doing some kinds of healing, remote viewing and such
Rainsong: One of the many online sets of instructions for same; https://www.anxietycanada.com/sites/default/files/MuscleRelaxation.pdf
Rainsong: Lyn Buchanan of remote viewing fame suggests making note of the change of feeling whenever you go through a door. It helps your sensitivity
Rainsong: Of course, much like learning any skill, even just fifteen minutes a day is better than several hours once every week
Rainsong: With psionics, specifically, but also in common with language learning, it can be helpful to have a goal in mind that you’re going to use it for
Rainsong: At the same time, don’t push for a result in any given practice session. It’s better to approach each session with a curiously playful view of “what can I learn from this?”
Rainsong: Questions so far? Comments?
Chirotractor: in general ‘keep calm and carry on’?
Rainsong: Something like that, yea
Rainsong: And of course, keep practicing the basics, even if you feel your skill is beyond that point
Rainsong: Of course, strangely, the people who tend to think they are ‘above’ the basics are the ones who tend to need them the most
Rainsong: Sir James Galway and his wife Lady Jeanne still practice flute scales every day. It’s not something you outgrow
PatchesTheCoydog: Strange viewpoint they have since arguably the basics are what you’ll be spending your whole life trying to refine no matter how much develop. What if you are doing things consistently and are getting results but you’re in a “dry spell” when it comes to actually getting better with what you’re practicing(have had this happen before though not currently and in a way it’s almost as frustrating as not getting results at all)?
Rainsong: Those plateaux are certainly frustrating, but they are a normal part of learning. If it’s RV you’re working on, just keep motoring through it: everyone goes through that stage and yea, it’s frustrating
Rainsong: for other skills, take a week or two and practice something else. For example, if you’re working on pendling, spend some time working on pulse-sending or a new kind of shielding. The time away from the specific thing you’d been focusing on can allow it to ‘percolate’ and get some processing done. (Same with music and dance skills, by the way)
Rainsong: I wouldn’t suggest going much longer than a month, though, because then you might start to lose ground
senpai…: Can we automate training with things like tuplas or constructs or what not?
Rainsong: The tulpa would be getting some good practice in that way, I suppose. No idea whether tulpas need practice doing tulpa stuff. Perhaps @Wayfarer might weigh in on that at some point. I believe he knows more about them than I do
Rainsong: If you mean to get them to practice for you, how would that work? Kind of like getting someone else to do your push-ups?
Wayfarer: Lmao are you trolling me rn smdh yes I can weigh in but it won’t be anything too useful for the question. Anyhow offloading practice isn’t a thing, the biggest problem of practice is that you actually have to do it. Otherwise your tulpas or constructs or whatever will get better but you won’t.
Rainsong: But do tulpas need to practice tulpa stuff?
Wayfarer: In some academic traditions taking notes is discouraged even. When I was studying Tibetan we had a teacher who didn’t want us to take notes, because if we took notes our notebooks would learn a lot but we wouldn’t learn anything.
senpai…: Well the easist way to do repeative taskes in reality is to automate them. Thats why I ask.
Wayfarer: It would depend on how you’re defining tulpas to be able to answer if they can even learn at all, let alone need practice. Sentient spirits in general do need to practice to learn skills.
Rainsong: Assume I know close to nothing about tulpas generally, and you won’t be too far off the truth
Wayfarer: Learning is not a repetitive task. Repetition is only useful for learning trivial skills like pushing buttons in a sequence. I’m not sure what the base topic is but any complex skill won’t improve by repetition alone. You need to do something like plan>execute>reflect to improve at non trivial skills, and merely repeating the task is only one of those three things.
Rainsong: Basic topic is improving in psionic skills, generally
Wayfarer: And a lot of the evidence shows that repetition of psi tasks actually results in the decline effect. For example, doing Zener Cards repeatedly tends to have us perform worse, not better.
Wayfarer: There are a lot of theories for that, but the main one is that doing a task like that repeatedly is just mentally boring and numbing no matter how motivated we are. Offloading or automating things is usually done to improve efficiency or to avoid having to do work, but performance and intellectual knowledge are different things and you can’t learn to perform a task without actually performing the task.
Wayfarer: Put another way, you can build a robot that can juggle but that doesn’t make you a juggler. The balls get juggled but you haven’t learned anything or developed any skill at all. Maybe you’ve gotten better at making robots, but if your goal is learning to juggle you’ve wasted your time, not saved it.
Rainsong: Thanks for chiming in 🙂
senpai…: But if my robot juggles, and I made the robot. How is it not I who am juggling by extention? If I “learn” to juggle with a prosthetic arm, does that not count?
Rainsong: Operating a prosthetic arm is another skill in itself, and juggling with it would be very difficult indeed
Rainsong: Not the same as making a robot do something
senpai…: How much AI can I put into the arm till it magically doesn’t count anymore thro?
rowinha: I’ve always liked “typing isn’t good cursive practice”, as far as analogies go.
Rainsong: Put it this way, if you make a prosthetic arm for someone else, and they learn to use it, are you using it also?
senpai…: depends. Do I have a remote master contorl for it
senpai…: https://tenor.com/view/movies-quotes-stop-slapping-yourself-bridesmaids-slap-gif-14851694
Wayfarer: The reality is you’re probably doing neither since the skills required to make the robot in this case are the skills you want to make a robot to learn. But that said the idea that having or even making a robot that can do something lets you do it is disingenuous. Having a calculator doesn’t mean you can do math, it means your can get math done. There’s a subtle linguistic difference here but it’s extremely important with regards to skill development. Being able to copy paste into Google translate doesn’t mean you’ve learned a language. The results may be similar, but skill development isn’t about getting the results, it’s about performing a task.
Wayfarer: There are a lot of lazy people on Earth who don’t want to develop skills because developing skills takes some work (some more than others) and that’s fine, but the idea of automating a learning task is some next level shit I’m not gonna lie.
Wayfarer: Peak result-oriented brainworms that is toxic to skill development of any sort. “I hired a person to cook a meal for me, how is that different from learning to cook?” Well I dunno, I guess just in every possible way? Lmao
rowinha: I…have actually heard that particular argument. About personal chefs in the SFBA.
senpai…: https://tenor.com/view/rick-and-morty-butter-robot-pass-purpose-gif-9358372
Rose Cinderfall: interesting lecture so far
Rose Cinderfall: may i ask a question? or is there a question round?
Rose Cinderfall: i think it’s at least somewhat relevant to the subject matter
Rainsong: Go for it, Rose
Rose Cinderfall: when your accuracy across all sensing types of psionics has gone down, and self-frontloading frequently fools you, what’s a good thing to practice to get your accuracy back up?
Rainsong: Practicing sensing stuff that can be objectively verified: feeling colours on paint samples, predicting the next card to be drawn in a shuffled deck, etc
Rose Cinderfall: what about repeating those tasks makes you more accurate? since, doing that when your accuracy rate is low, logically thinking it seems to me like it’d stay that way
Rainsong: It’s a tricky one, because doing too many will even make it worse.
Rainsong: Just pull perhaps three cards at a time. At first, you’ll probably just get a vague flash of colour or part of a shape
Rainsong: As for what makes it more accurate? The verification gives you objective feedback. It’s either an eight of spades or it isn’t. It’s either a red card or it is not
Rainsong: Any other questions and / or comments ?
Rose Cinderfall: i’m probably overthinking this, but this is what i don’t understand about it:
Wayfarer: Another thing is that it’s good to stop on successes. Don’t keep going one more time. You want to quit when you’re hitting because then your brain will be reinforcing the right thing during the downtime, which is where learning actually happens.
Wayfarer: You don’t want to keep going until you can’t succeed, because then you encode the right stuff.
Rainsong: Excellent point, which is why when practicing music, it’s best to rehearse a difficult piece (or part of it ) so slowly that you can’t miss a note, to end the practice session
Wayfarer: One common thing in the research is that people report feeling like they’re “on” when they are on. People can generally tell when they are actually doing the psychic.
Rose Cinderfall: when your rate of accuracy is low, and you get frequently frontloaded by things your mind makes up, and your sense of what’s real information and what’s frontloading is not working correctly (i used to determine what was frontloading and what was real by the difference in how the information felt to me, but that sense got scrambled), then practicing sensing is working with a broken/out-of-tune guide of what’s real, in order to somehow get it to a point where it is more in tune again and you’re getting more accurate results. To me that’s kind of paradoxical.. so.. how does repeadetly practicing using a broken sense of non-frontloading/frontloading, get your accuracy back up?
Rose Cinderfall: i hope you understand what i mean, this is quite difficult to put into words correctly
Wayfarer: You need to stop overusing the term frontloading because that’s specifically a thing of “giving the psychic too much information up front so they don’t actually need to psychic because they can guess”
Wayfarer: If you’re frontloading yourself on a card task, I’d suggest… Flipping the deck over?
Wayfarer: Like, don’t look at the cards.
Rose Cinderfall: perhaps i’m using the wrong term. By that term, I mean the situation where you’re doing psychic sensing, but fake information pops up inbetween the real received psychic information, and you have to filter that out. Or, sometimes, even, the fake information pops up and the psychic information doesn’t pop up. Say, i’m scanning someone for injuries, and I see a wound at a certain place, and a bruise at another place, but only the bruise is actually there and the wound isn’t there at all. My mind made the wound up, but the bruise was real information. That happens to me all the time.
Rainsong: IMagination is “louder’ than psychic stuff, typically. This is normal
Wayfarer: There’s a reason one of the biggest focuses of RV training is getting that shit out of the picture entirely.
shadowsword: Indeed.
Rainsong: Any other questions or comments for today’s topics?
Rose Cinderfall: So with that cleared up, i repeat this question: “how does repeadetly practicing using a broken sense of what is real psychic information and what is made up, get your accuracy back up? seems to me like repeadetly using something broken without actually fixing/re-tuning it”
Nevyn: If you know it’s broken then the practice can still help you figure out how it’s broken, then fix it. Or work around it.
Rainsong: Observe where the mistakes show up, and narrow down from there
PatchesTheCoydog: Make sure you’re getting accurate and complete feedback and use that to help learn. Are there any slightly different feelings when an impression is accurate vs with not accurate impressions you’re aware of or anything like that? If not, can you become better at analysing your own internal feelings so you can see if there is any such difference that comes up in future(meditation good for self-awareness and you’ve mentioned doing)?
Rose Cinderfall: alright, thank you all for your answers 🙂
Rainsong: Thanks for participating, everyone
PatchesTheCoydog: Thanks for lecture
Rose Cinderfall: thanks for the lecture
Chirotractor: Missed most of it but :thumbsup:
Chirotractor: yesgood