Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: August 24, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: PK- Saturday, 24 August, 2019 at 7:00pm/1900hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE90
Wayfarer: Informal because I’m hella preppin’ for some shit next week for Tibetan Astrology. I’ll be happy to cover some recap on Tibetan Astrology stuff, and elements and so on, and this will also do well with skills as skill development, blah blah. Mostly I’m going to do a book report on The PK Zone. I got press-ganged into standing by at a meditation retreat today in case the teacher needed an interpreter so I am not quite as prepared as I’d like to be but here we are lmao
Rainsong: It happens
Wayfarer: So anyhow, let’s call this thing started. How y’all? Questions, comments, hate mail, threats, etc. about the previous two weeks?
Wayfarer: I’ve done… no prep on those other talks and am desperately behind time because of that standby-interpretation gig but that’s normal as hell, heck yeah.
Chirotractor: No hate mail at least
Wayfarer: Okay, looks like no questions or, apparently, hate mail! So, The PK Zone is a big ol’ book that goes over the state of the field of PK research within parapsychology ca. 2003. In a field that largely relies on a corpus from the 50s-80s, where research funding is virtually impossible to get, this is an incredibly up to date book.
Wayfarer: In keeping with the modern approach to parapsychology, it’s not particularly interested in presenting evidence that PK functioning is a thing. For the most part, as a field we’ve given up on that. The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable, and if the rest of the scientific community is too cowardly to admit that, that’s not our problem. Spinning our wheels trying to build a body of evidence that will convince “skeptics” (that is, disbelievers) is an incredible waste of time.
Wayfarer: You may have heard about Many Labs 2, which is a massive endeavor to essentially replicate a huge number of studies, many from within psychology. This has led to what’s called the replicability crisis. It turns out, a lot of experiments which have shaped our present understanding of the world can’t be replicated.
Wayfarer: This is particularly true of psychology, where formerly unassailable studies that establish what essentially amount to dogmas regarding how the mind and body relate … simply can’t be replicated. Schachter and Singer’s Two-Factor theory of Emotion, for example, with the scary bridge study? Nobody’s been able to get the same result, but it’s been taught in every 101 classroom for nearly 50 years now.
Wayfarer: Interestingly, parapsychology studies have not had the same replicability problem.
Wayfarer: Because parapsychologists generally face a hostile field, experimental design has been incredibly tight. Every conceivable variable has been controlled and well documented. These studies are eminently replicable. And, for the most part, we find that they replicate just fine. Honorton’s Ganzfeld studies, for example? Even Ray goddamn Hyman was able to replicate the results.
Wayfarer: This is particularly telling, because of a phenomenon called witness inhibition, that is, non-believing witnesses tend to interfere with psi task performance. One thing that is consistently true is that having psi-believing, or genuinely skeptical (as opposed to non-believing) researchers generally can see psi phenomena in the lab. Non-believing researchers almost never do. Non-believing researchers like to believe this is because they “aren’t being duped,” but the whole point of a robust research method is to remove that as much as possible.
Wayfarer: Anyhow, bit of a tangent there. The field has moved on. Most PK research now is focused on procedure: how does psi work? What are it’s qualities? We know something is there, so what’s that thing like?
Rainsong: (because science is a thing)
Wayfarer: Research into “how does it work” is geared towards how it can be replicated reliably, “how people do it.” You don’t see a lot of research into how it works with regards to the physics of it, and for a few reasons.
Wayfarer: We can tell pretty handily that in most cases it’s not one of the conventional forces. There’s some evidence that Nina Kulagina might have been spraying histamines out of her hands or something like that, but in most cases it’s uh, that’s not a thing.
Wayfarer: It’s not electromagnetic, though it can interact with electromagnetics forces. It doesn’t seem to be radiation, but it can interact with Geiger counters. It’s not something we can detect easily.
Wayfarer: A lot of people seem to want to speculate, not naming names, about ways it could work within the current model of physics or the bleeding edge of physics. But this is kind of missing the point. We’re not gonna put a psychokineticist in the large hadron collider. There is no funding for this kind of research.
Rainsong: Hadron colliders are expensive
Paranoid Jester: Greetings enigmas
Wayfarer: Sadly, the pursuit of information about the world we live in stops when the pursuit of capital begins, and there’s no funding for what we’re doing here. Where research into this kind of thing is being funded, it’s more about how it can be understood to work, and the subtext there is the more we can understand how a person can do it (procedurally, not physically), the more potential for making money.
Wayfarer: But! That doesn’t mean no research has been done. Again, The PK Zone was written in 2003. A more recent text is Loyd Auerbach’s Mind Over Matter, but frankly despite the fact that I think Loyd is great, I just don’t like how he writes lmao
Wayfarer: Heath’s book is also very academic, whereas Mind Over Matter is more approachable for laypeople. The PK Zone reads like ca. 2003 psychology academic writing. For psychology academics, that’s great. I can understand if it’s not a thing of others, and hence why I’m gonna summarize some of the more interesting bits.
Wayfarer: The first roughly half of the book is historical accounts, case studies, and what kinds of stuff people are doing to get PK to show up in a lab these days.
Paranoid Jester: Say Wayfarer, are you the lecturer today?
Wayfarer: By far the most popular stuff of today is RNG movement shit and computer games that use the same. Other areas of interest include psychokinetic metalbending and, of course, in macro-PK the king remains the humble psi-wheel. The field has recently embraced the term “Mind-Matter Interaction,” which it likes to use so as to include athletes performing better than average.
Wayfarer: Auerbach recalls in this book having been bowling with Marty Caidin, who did a lot of work with psi-wheels. While bowling, he just knew that he was going to get some strikes in a row. He’d know when he was getting them and he’d know when he was going to stop getting them. Martin suggests that was PK. Auerbach has done some other PK things so it’s not his only thing, but he’s big on that.
Wayfarer: (no there’s no lecture tonight sorry 🙁 🙁 )
Paranoid Jester: I’ll be impressed when I finally hear of someone moving a table across a living room
Paranoid Jester: Forget the psi wheel
Wayfarer: Anyhow, the more interesting part to me, and why Loyd recommended me the book and what in particular I was reading, was the latter half, on theory, learning, and what Heath calls the “PK Matrix,” which I’ll discuss a little bit.
Skelly boi: Nah, making a needle hover is enought for me, because at that point you can use pk to kill
Skelly boi: Not because I promote killing, but using a force most of the population doesn’t believe in to kill sounds impresive enough for me
Wayfarer: Generally speaking things like the psi-wheel are regarded good for training. Marty worked his way from a paper wheel up to 18 inch pie tins, but there’s a general consensus that starting small is helpful because a lot of the problem (as we’ll discuss) is one’s personal belief that they can, personally, do it.
Wayfarer: And, no matter how much we like to pretend that personal affirmations and “boy, I sure can do this” self-talk can get us there, there’s a difference between telling ourselves we believe something and actually believing it on a deep, unconscious level.
Paranoid Jester: I suggest hypnosis then
Skelly boi: Of course, small steps, you can’t just go at gym and lift 100kg weights your first day
Wayfarer: Because performance based activities are all activated on an unconscious level, that unconscious level of belief is important.
Wayfarer: So that’s interesting of you to say, Paranoid Jester, and brings us into the performance and learning factors section of the book…
Paranoid Jester: Does this book say qi is the basis for how TK works?
Paranoid Jester: Or is it something else?
Wayfarer: No, because it’s a book about actual science my dude
Paranoid Jester: You mean quantum mechanics?
Wayfarer: It’s not going to speculate on shit that can’t be demonstrated in a lab.
Wayfarer: No I mean actual science and not theoretical woo.
Wayfarer: I.e., it doesn’t speculate where there isn’t evidence.
Azum’ran: (as a side note re: hypnosis, I can perform small hypno demos on weekdays between noon and 5 pm cst, on request and given 24 hours notice)
Paranoid Jester: Ok, and what is this book again?
Paranoid Jester: You mentioned more than one
Wayfarer: So, regarding hypnosis: Gissurarson demonstrated in 1997 that positive affirmations of success improved PK scoring. Most hypnotic research has been focused on ESP, but there’s been some on PK. One fairly neat study by Stewart, Roll, and Baumann showed hypnosis can reactivate RSPK.
Wayfarer: This is a pretty neat thing. RSPK is “Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis,” commonly known as “poltergeist phenomena.” One thing about RSPK is that informing an agent that they are the source of the PK tends to make it stop.
Paranoid Jester: Sounds like what I investigated years ago
Wayfarer: That is, as soon as you identify the person that is the cause and tell them that, it stops. “It wasn’t a ghost, it was actually you!” turns it off. In the cases where that doesn’t happen, unfortunately the experimental process tends to stop it in itself. Matthew Manning, for example, stopped participating in research because he didn’t really like being a subject in study after study, and who can blame him?
Paranoid Jester: How about brainwaves? I was stating earlier today the the delta state is where it all happens. Is this inaccurate?
Wayfarer: But on the subject of hypnosis, even despite some early positive mentions, there isn’t really enough strong evidence there that it is PK facilitative. There are two hypotheses at time of writing: either hypnosis can be PK-facilitative by inducing a psi-conducive altered state of consciousness (ASC), or by increasing the visual effects, vividness and clarity of mental imagery, and so on in the hopes that this serves as a kind of carrier or vehicle for activating the person’s PK effects.
Wayfarer: I’ll answer that in a second, I want to backtrack quickly to mention I omitted psychic healing from the list of PK stuff but it’s probably the second most popular area of PK work being studied, next to RNG-based task games.
Wayfarer: Okay, re: brain effects. I’ve kinda been biting my tongue on the brainwaves stuff. A little about myself… my undergraduate degree in psychology was specialized in psychophysiology. I trained as an EEG technician and operated an EEG in a lab at my school for a while. EEGs are clinically useful tools but… they don’t work the way people think they work.
Wayfarer: EEGs read frequencies of electrical activities. Modern, fancy ones can do this regionally. There are just a ton of misconceptions. For example, the idea that delta waves are found during sleep is…true, but it’s also found during continuous-attention tasks like playing a video game.
Wayfarer: They tend to be found in regions associated with the activity. Theta waves? Also found in waking subjects, normally in areas not associated with the present task, and they are even found while the person is idle. I.e., you just see them show up when someone is just chilling in the lab.
Paranoid Jester: I think that’s alpha/theta
Paranoid Jester: Delta is deep unconsciousness
Wayfarer: That’s fine, you can think whatever you want, but you’re wrong. Delta is found during slow-wave sleep, in babies just all the time, and during continuous-activity tasks, alongside alpha, beta, etc. Which is another one of the big misconceptions. You almost never have just one band.
Wayfarer: It’s not like your brain just goes “okay alpha now, then beta, okay now I’m sleeping, all deltas…”
Wayfarer: You’re looking at a trace with activity along certain bands, and those traces can be divided up by regions, but you’re just measuring frequencies of electrical activity.
Wayfarer: The bottom line to all this is: nobody does EEG research like this because it’s super not useful at all.
Wayfarer: However
Wayfarer: There have been quite a few fMRI and PET studies done!
Wayfarer: And those studies seem to indicate more or less what we’d expect. We tend to see some bilateral activity in regions associated with spatial reasoning. Heath herself actually found activity in the left frontal cortex associated with PK manifestation during a period of intense sadness in a patient. This isn’t terribly surprising, a universal constant in PK research is a sustained focused attention, and that would be consistent with left frontal activation.
Paranoid Jester: Sounds like what I posted earlier
Paranoid Jester: Left frontal
Wayfarer: However, most research has been focused at right-hemispheric activation primarily in the visuospatial processing regions of the right frontal cortex.
Wayfarer: Could be, yeah. Heath’s study in that case was looking at bilateral activation and whether or not positive or negative emotions could be psi conducive. PK doesn’t exclusively involve the right hemisphere, is the conclusion, though that was the dominant thought for about 20 years.
Wayfarer: Just as a point of personal interest, I’m participating in an NIH funded study on the neurological differences between psychics and schizophrenics beginning this coming Friday, and part of that will be an EEG. I’ve talked with the researchers about having access to results, and if there’s anything particularly interesting I’ll share my sample-of-one personal anecdotes.
Wayfarer: I don’t believe I’ll be asked to perform psi tasks though, because you can’t control with a schizophrenic population, so I think it’s just general attentional tasks and such like I used to run in the lab at OU.
Wayfarer: When I say “an EEG” I mean several hours of EEG monitoring while performing certain tasks. When I was at OU I did have abnormal traces on training scans for myself, but it’s been over a decade and I really don’t remember how they were abnormal. In either case that’s not apropos to PK stuff.
Wayfarer: I’m gonna quickly run through some neat shit from this though as it’s been an hour without responding to questions for a bit:
Paranoid Jester: Do you do TK?
Wayfarer: re: physical and environmental factors : Electromagnetic fields weren’t a factor in RSPK performance (Puhle 2001), RSPK increases uring periods of higher global geomagnetic activity (Gearhart & Persinger, 1986), and … local sidereal time may factor in PK performance just as it seems to in ESP performance. Spottiswoode (1997, 1999) did a bunch of tetss over time, and at 1800 LST no anomalous cognition was demonstrated (as opposed to being able to be demonstrated at other times)… at 1300 LST, however, there was a 300% increase in mean effect size. The study went over 20 years and this finding was consistent.
Wayfarer: Psychological factors include the decline effect, the sheep-goat effect, experimenter effects, and goal-orientation. The decline effect is something observed by Rhine, which is that subjects tend to get worse over time at performing an effect. Positive scoring decreased over the length of a run, session, or even battery of runs during dice-influencing tasks just like it did in ESP tasks.
Wayfarer: The basic idea there seems to be that doing the same shit for hours on end or day after day is boring as hell, it doesn’t seem to be a quality of psi stuff on its own.
Wayfarer: Sheep-goat effect is the idea that people who believe there is some possibility of psychic stuff existing perform better on PK tasks than people who don’t believe psychic stuff is possible. That’s… go figure? lmao
Wayfarer: Schmeidler did work on experimenter effects, following up on the idea that psi-believing researchers do better. She suggests that there are two possibilities in play that have to be distinguished among psi-believing researchers.
Wayfarer: One is that there is a psi-permissive type of researcher that creates a positive atmosphere which permits psi performance…and then there is the psi-conducive researcher, who uses their own PK ability consciously or unconsciously to affect the outcomes.
Wayfarer: Psi-inhibitory researchers are those who seem to block effects.
Wayfarer: Her suggestion is that only psi-permissive researcher data is reliable.
Wayfarer: Regarding goal orientation, Palmer & Rush (1986) suggest that PK is goal-oriented and mediated through unconscious processes. But, we don’t know how much of that unconscious mediation is a skill to develop and how much of it is a second gatekeeper to the conscious mind.
Wayfarer: This is more or less what I was talking about earlier: you can believe psi is possible consciously, but it would seem that for some people their unconscious disbelief serves as a second gatekeeper or hurdle to overcome.
Wayfarer: This is consistent with research that shows that seeing PK performed improves PK performance, even if the PK performance the subject witnesses is fraudulent. In particular this is something discussed with regards to Uri Geller’s TV performances and the huge volume of calls after that which reported viewers at home having their own PKMB experiences.
Wayfarer: Moving on to PK training or facilitation:
Wayfarer: Personality factors don’t seem to be a thing. Belief systems, emotions, perception, and so on can all affect PK performance but there is no consistent single personality type that seems associated with PK performance. Confidence seems to be one major factor, with PK performers in particular identifying it as necessary, but there’s some evidence it’s not really and only seems to matter in overcoming witness inhibition.
Wayfarer: With regards to training methods in particular: there’s a lot of shit out there and because nobody knows what exactly is going on, the only thing that can be recommended is that the focus should be on achieving the PK-associated ASC.
Wayfarer: When we talk about the PK-Matrix we’ll go into that a bit more, but a universal thing of PK is an altered state of consciousness. If you can reach that state of consciousness, PK performance is nearly inevitable. But there’s no consistency in what that ASC looks like, just that it is an ASC and seems at least superficially similar to “flow state” or, generally, other peak experiences.
Wayfarer: So, hypnosis, motivational techniques, biofeedback, meditation, visualization and mental imagery rehearsal, all that shit works if it’s focused on reaching the psi-conducive ASC reliably, but otherwise who the hell knows.
Wayfarer: Hypnosis we already discussed.
Wayfarer: Motivational stuff is tough because when you give feedback is not really clear. You can’t use normal conditioning methods with RNG tasks because sometimes by its very nature the RNG will give false “hits” and this will provide a reinforcement prompt and then you’re reinforcing literally nothing
Wayfarer: Better to train people who can already do PK to get into their “PK Zone” than to train them for successful performance, basically.
Wayfarer: Meditation seems to help but nobody knows why and it isn’t universal and it seems to only help with reaching an ASC and then the psi stuff goes from there. Some evidence seems to indicate that meditation only helps with PK because the PK-performer believes that meditation helps, so it does.
Wayfarer: Emotional factors are of particular interest because they’re associated with RSPK. Turns out frustration works really well……so long as the person is normally not stressed. Frustrating a stressed person doesn’t do anything, and you instead have to get them not-stressed.
Paranoid Jester: Ok, with all of that said, how does one activate TK in the beginning?
Wayfarer: It’s not all said yet but I will include the bullet points for “how to learn PK based on the evidence” at the end. For time I might not go through the whole PK matrix but will instead just list it. But regarding emotional stuff: Striving for success seems to correlate with psi-missing.
Wayfarer: I bolded that because it’s really important. If you are looking at the psi wheel and really striving to make it move, you will more often than not perform supernaturally badly at the task.
Paranoid Jester: Ok, that I didn’t know
Wayfarer: Psi-missing is a phenomenon seen in PK RNG studies and ESP stuff. If you expect a certain number of purely random chance hits, psi-missing is when you perform worse than expected by a statistically significant margin. So for example on a 100 trial run of Zener card tasks, you’d be expected to hit 20 of the cards just by random chance.
Wayfarer: Psi-missing would be if you hit, say, 3/100.
Wayfarer: That’s so far deviated from chance that you definitely did something, but it wasn’t what you wanted.
Skelly boi: What are some uses for PK? It seems cool and all, but I don’t see that many practical uses, except affecting rng
Wayfarer: Gissurarson (1992) showed correlation with “striving for success” on computer tasks and psi-missing. This is a pretty big deal. In turn, the best state of consciousness seems to be a calm, detached mind.
Wayfarer: In particular, Caidin and others often reported that they had their success at the moment of stopping-trying.
Wayfarer: That is, Caidin would bear down and strain to move a psi-wheel in the beginning, but it started moving when he stopped and gave up.
Wayfarer: This is called the “release of effort” effect and it used to be a big part of PK focused research but it isn’t included in the modern PK matrix anymore, because instead it seems like it’s just a byproduct of a few other things.
Wayfarer: Punishment and negative reinforcement, that is, for example, shocking someone when they don’t do PK, doesn’t work.
Wayfarer: Imagery training, that is, visualization, is a big part of basically all the psychic development literature in the entire universe. There…isn’t any evidence it helps.
Paranoid Jester: Agreed
Paranoid Jester: I never knew what they meant by “visualize” anyway, lest they meant “imagine”
Wayfarer: That is, visualizing it doesn’t seem to help much. In 1992, Taylor did some research with shooters, jugglers, and gymnasts, and found that the control group did better than the visualization group. But… Gissurarson found that it does seem to help if you visualize the outcome of the PK. The idea there is that people are visualizing the wrong thing.
Wayfarer: In particular, he found that goal-oriented (rather than process oriented) visualization works better. You shouldn’t visualize the thing moving, for example; you should visualize it there.
Wayfarer: This is similar to existing research on visualization where you don’t visualize yourself shooting an arrow into the target (for example), and you don’t even visualize the arrow hitting the target. You need to visualize the arrow in the target.
Wayfarer: Finally there’s a bunch of stuff on NLP and the fact that not all participants in imagery studies are going to be visually oriented. People who aren’t visually oriented just might not be able to visualize well.
Wayfarer: A friend of mine is a musician who I talk a lot about this stuff with because we’re both teachers of skill development and there’s a ton of overlap. He has had students who cannot audiate. That is, they can’t “hear what it’s supposed to sound like” in their head.
Wayfarer: There are a lot of people who straight up cannot visualize and for whom it makes no sense.
Wayfarer: This is extremely bizarre to consider for people who have grown up doing the visualization thing in psi communities. These are people who if you say “picture an apple in your hand” will reply “what do you mean?”
Wayfarer: “How can I see an apple in my hand if there isn’t one?”
Wayfarer: So, if we consider that at least some subjects in these studies might be straight up unable to understand the concept of visualization, it makes sense that it’s not a universal thing.
Wayfarer: But, yes, visualize the accomplished-thing as finished, don’t visualize the process.
Wayfarer: Gonna skip the stuff on learning theory.
Wayfarer: So, the 14 points of the PK matrix:</strong
Wayfarer:
1) an altered state of consciousness
2) a sense of connection
3) dissociation from ego identity
4) suspension of the intellect
5) playfulness and/or peak emotion
6) a sense of energy
7) physical sensations and effects
8) focused awareness
9) trust in the process
10) investment
11) openness to experience
12) a sense of “knowing”
13) guiding the process
14) impact
Wayfarer: Quickly: all PK performance seems to involve an altered state of consciousness. For some people this is a transcendental, meditative state. For others, it’s just a bog standard dissociation. With at least one interviewee in the qualitative study that comprises the back third of the book, it was just extreme boredom in one case.
Wayfarer: 2) there is almost always a transpersonal sense of connection. This connection wasn’t necessarily to the target object. A general transcendent state of awareness seems to be sufficient. The idea of being connected to the broader universe is more.
Wayfarer: 3) dissociation seems to happen.
Wayfarer: 4) If you overthink it you’re fuckin’ it up. Thinking about the process a lot gets in the way. Thinking about how PK works gets in the way. Thinking about the mechanics of the process gets in the way.
Wayfarer: As a personal note, getting around this is my white whale.
Wayfarer: I want to try a run where I have a few PK targets that I can randomize and then assign coordinates as if it were an RV task so that I just can’t think about it and can just trust in the process (9)
Wayfarer: 5) playfulness or peak emotion helps. This is a big thing of “spoonbending parties” where you actually intentionally ham it up and get real damn silly with it and then hit big emotional states. If you go at it like it’s your job — if you strive for success — you’re gonna have a harder time.
Wayfarer: 6) there is a general sense of energy in most PK performers. It’s that “psi stuff” we talk about a lot, maybe? But re: “is it qi” from earlier: nobody knows, and nobody can talk about psi energy without sounding like a lunatic. Some of us sound like better lunatics than others (I like to think I sound more like a coherent lunatic and less like I’m doing word salad than many of my peers) but at the end of the day we’re talking about shit nobody can empirically observe as if it were a thing.
Wayfarer: 7) most people feel some kind of physical sensation when performing PK, but it’s not standard at all. Not with PK, but when I’m actively attending to telepathic input, I feel a slight pulling on my head above and behind my right ear. It’s that kinda shit.
Wayfarer: 8) Focused awareness. Again, it doesn’t have to be focused on anything in particular, but you do have to have a state of focused awareness. For some people it’s on the target, for other’s it’s on the state, for many it’s on the connectedness or on the energy. But this should not be mistaken for striving, which we’ve already said is not great.
Wayfarer: 9) trust in the process. This is really hard because we don’t really know what the process is. You just kinda have to surrender to it, is what the research says. You go for the ASC and you determine the goal and you let the unconscious mind work its shit out. You need to suspend the intellect, so you’re not supposed to try to figure out the process. Just trust that PK is a thing, you can do PK, and it’ll happen when it happens. Relax into it.
Wayfarer: 10 ) investment. It seems to help if it matters and if the person gives a shit about the target or if there’s some general reason to it. This isn’t universal though.
Wayfarer: 11) openness to the experience. You have to believe PK is possible and that you can do it. Avoid disbelief and ownership resistance. It’s okay to be psychic.
Wayfarer: 12) People tend to just know when PK is about to work. They know it’s going to happen. This is not an intellectual knowledge but a deep, intuitive knowledge. It tends to be related to the ASC. Many psychokinetics can tell whether or not it will work because they are in or not in the ASC. They just know if they can do it or not.
Wayfarer: 13) guiding the process, not driving the process. This means gently steering towards, for example, the ASC but not trying to force it. Again with the striving.
Wayfarer: 14) impact. Most people who do PK report a major emotional event after doing it regardless of how many times they do it. This is actually true of most ESP tasks.
Wayfarer: Anyone who has been here for lectures where I’ve demonstrated RV have seen the kind of euphoric state I get into after doing an RV.
Wayfarer: I’ve been doing accurate RV with witnesses and such for about 20 years now and every goddamn time it’s like the best feeling in my entire life.
Wayfarer: Okay so because I said I’d get them from the back, I’ll just block quote this bit:
Wayfarer:
Tips for PK Beginners
ASC appear to be a key constituent to the PK experience. However, since they are difficult to teach beginners, and may result in part as a natural consequence of the other constituents, it might be best to emphasize the following:
1. Be open to the experience.
2. Feel physically energized or upbeat.
3. Narrow your focus of attention and allow a natural loss of awareness of your surroundings.
4. Feel connected to something outside of the self–this does not need to be the target, but can be other people, objects, nature, or the universe.
5. Don’t be too serious. Either approach things in a spirit of fun or feel whatever strong emotions are natural and easy to access.
6. Let go of the sense of individual identity (dissociate).
7. Don’t think (i.e., suspend the intellect), just be and do.
8. Allow yourself to accept information that comes as a sense of “knowing.” Let it guide your actions and help you stay in tune with the process.
9. Be invested in the goal but trust the process. Don’t think of what needs to be done in order to succeed. Allow yourself to be part of the process, participating in it, rather than trying to act on or control it.
Wayfarer: Additionally,
Wayfarer:
In beginners, where there is an inability to trust in the process and a lack of detachment, it may be helpful to use deliberate distraction. Likewise, difficulties with connecting, dissociating from the individual identity, and suspending the intellect might be partially overcome by emphasizing strong emotions, and helping the participant to access these in a natural way (such as by encouraging them to remember peak emotional events).
It should be noted that most, if not all, of the above suggestions are already incorporated into metal-bending parties… and then it goes on to talk about spoonbending parties.
Wayfarer: In terms of inhibitory factors, the main ones seem to be not believing, witness inhibition, and ownership resistance according to the research. Then there are anecdotal/qualitative reports that there do seem to be hard limits on performance but, as I discussed earlier, I think this is related to belief.
Wayfarer: That is, I think that moving a table across the room is an attainable goal – but it will be more attainable if you’re confident you can hover the needle first.
Wayfarer: I also think at a certain point you could just pick it up with your hands I mean what the hell kind of table are we talking about here, I mean maybe ask a friend to help if it’s set for Christ and the apostles but otherwise I mean just go side to side with it.
Skelly boi: Yea, but the needle could be used for assasination
Wayfarer: Anyhow, that’s a brief report on The PK Zone by Pamela Rae Heath, it was very informative to me and it has greatly aided my own efforts at PK. To answer a very much earlier question: I have traditionally tended to say “I don’t do PK” because I’m very specialized in ESP / anomalous cognition / RV / telepathy stuff “naturally,” right?
Wayfarer: However, I’m a teacher, and a teacher that isn’t also a learner is a bad teacher. So by way of getting a better idea of what my students are working with when learning telepathy and so on, I’ve recently committed to learning PK. I picked up this book (and several others, and have talked to a bunch of people and so on) as part of that effort.
Wayfarer: At present, I am reasonable sure I have done a PK. I know for a fact I have done it as a child, but I am reasonably sure I did it the other day as well. However, my dumb idiot science brain decided my controls weren’t adequate, and so I’ve got some hurdled to overcome particularly with suspension of the intellect.
Wayfarer: I will continue to report on my progress as I keep going at it. At this point, however, it’s not about “can I do it,” but “how can I best learn to do it consistently.”
Wayfarer: Psychic stuff, PK included, is just a skill. Some skills come very easily to some people and not so easily to others, but most people can learn most skills. Especially given a sizeable contingent that believes PK and ESP are the same “thing,” there’s no reason for me to think I can’t do PK, or that anyone in here can’t do it. So, if you’re learning PK, I hope some of those points have been helpful.
Wayfarer: And that’s my bit for the night. Thanks for coming out / logging in / reading the website this is hosted on.
Wayfarer: Re the “what is it useful for,” I guess moving shit or influencing RNGs??? lmao
Wayfarer: Tonight was me wearing my parapsychologist hat and less my psychic hat, and I’ve for a very long time been a proponent of “I dunno it doesn’t seem that useful at all, just move shit around using your hands and body” so that’s not a great question for me. Even as I’m learning it it’s more about learning the skill as an end in itself.
B.O.X.: This is all very good stuff. Like really good. Thank you
Rainsong: Thanks, Wayfarer. Always interesting to hear another point of view on these things, and your perspective in particular
Wayfarer: Likewise, as you know, haha
Rainsong: Skelli boi: Yes, a needle can be used for assassination, but there are easier and more interesting methods
Wayfarer: Auerbach has been good correspondence because he’s both a researcher and PK performer, but beyond the book recommendation and getting me Caidin’s manuscript, I haven’t pushed the subject too much.
B.O.X.: I like the matrix because it’s been hard to agree on where to focus your practice with PK
Wayfarer: Yeah, agreed. In particular for me I was looking at “what the hell should I be doing in my brain”
Wayfarer: And while the answer of “nothing shut up just let PK happen” isn’t particularly satisfying, it’s at least something
ceahhettan: Evening folks.
Chirotractor: :thumbsup:
B.O.X.: I tend to run into the trap of trying to control the outcome once I’ve finally lost my patience. Although that’s just me, I wonder if extra weight should be added to the Trusting the Process part
Chirotractor: Good lecture. Best in a while
Chirotractor: I fried an expensive computer in my first pk thing and yknow I’m good with not learning it after that
Wayfarer: Trusting the process is big, yeah. Getting out of the intellect-zone is also big. It’s kinda like… do you do any highly precise sports? Like shooting or archery or golf?
Wayfarer: If you think about shit when you’re actually trying to do it, you fuck it up bad-like. I used to shoot high-powered rifle. You can think about theory, breath control, etc. before you shoot, you can do it after you shoot, but while you’re shooting, you should just shoot.
Wayfarer: We’re in the before/after stage right now. But when we actually go to do it, we have to let all this go and trust in the process.
B.O.X.: Yeah. That’s when you, and any other parts involved in the process, all have to show up together
B.O.X.: I think the “skill” in that exact moment may come down to a kind of rote memory within the subconscious, something you can’t actively control
PatchesTheCoydog: Could the goal-oriented vs process oriented visualization thing be a factor in why I have a lot more trouble moving objects(I suck at that in terms of at all consistently getting that to work) than I do stuff like making scratches on paint(because something moving from a to b is something that it’s easier to think of as a process while something like a scratch on a pop can or a triangle shape imprinted on tin foil is something that it’s implicitly easier to think of in terms of visualizing the goal)?
PatchesTheCoydog: Thanks for lecture either way.
Wayfarer: It could, yes. If you’re trying to move the thing and visualizing it moving rather than being where you want it then that could be a problem. Remember of course that all of this is lab task research and there are a million variables. That study in particular was based on RNG, they were visualizing the results rather than the process.
Wayfarer: If you know the old formilab retroPK pendulum, it would be the difference between visualizing it sitting still / at the end of wide arcs or, even visualizing a big statistical significant outcome, but not trying to visualizing it swinging.