Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: August 10, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: Psychic abilities as skills – Saturday, 10 August, 2019 at 7:00pm/1900hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE88
Wayfarer: Okay, hello, hi, I’ll be back and forth for a bit I think because I’m having another conversation also and also trying to figure out dinner but the good news is this thing is more or less out of a can.
Wayfarer: At the end of the month I’ll be at a festival where I’ll be giving a pair of talks, and by way of organizing those talks I’m going to go ahead and ramble on the topic in here. I’ve roughly outlined it and I’ll roughly follow that outline and if anything pops into my brain I’ll go with it.
Wayfarer: During the actual talk I’d probably pause for questions here and there based on time but since we’re typing on the Internet just go for it. I am not doing this for time, though I do suspect we’ll wrap in an hour or less.
Wayfarer: In part depending on the food thing lmao
Wayfarer: So, I’ve prattled on a bit about psychic abilities being skills and this is basically going to be about what the hell that means. What does it mean that they are skills? Both in terms of how they develop and in terms of what they are?
Wayfarer: Well, it has a lot of implications, which is why there’s a talk involved. Psychic abilities are non-trivial tasks. That is, you cannot master the tax to the highest pinnacle by understanding one weird trick.
Wayfarer: Sometimes we “learn a psychic skill” by following some kind of technique, right? For example I’m working on PK lately and I’m playing around with different methods from different people (though mostly following one method because inconsistent practice doesn’t help, more on that later maybe)
Wayfarer: But the truth is, that’s not how we learn a skill. That’s how we begin to demonstrate something, but performing the skill is the only the first part of learning the skill. Non-trivial, right? It’s not “push button, do psychic.”
Wayfarer: You get it, and then maybe the next time you don’t get it. And there are reasons for regressions and plateaus and all that shit, and the reason for those things, mainly, is that these are skills. You don’t master basketball the first time you make a basket.
Kate Embers: So you’re referring to the thing that makes the stuff work fundamentally and not the things that we do with it, right?
Kate Embers: Like the difference between making music and plucking the string of a guitar?
Wayfarer: Yeah, exactly. Plucking a string is a trivial task. I can train someone to pluck a string in a few moments and they’ll never not do it.
Wayfarer: But I can’t teach someone to play a guitar in a few moments. I can teach the mechanical action, the skill comes afterwards and it has all sorts of things like quality as factors.
Wayfarer: Similarly, I can teach a guy to make a psiball or ground or center or whatever but that does not mean they have mastered the skill, right? It means they’ve done it once. They made one basket. They learned one song. That doesn’t make them a basketball player or a guitarist.
Wayfarer: Normally in the talk I’d go through listing a bunch of examples of what I mean by “psychic abilities” but we’re gonna skip that because y’all are here you know what psychic shit is.
Wayfarer: We also know generally by now that everyone has some psychic ability. I usually analogize this to supertasters, right? Some people who are “born psychic” or whatever might have particularly acute or attuned ESP, but everyone has some degree of ESP, everyone has some degree of tasting, right? Some people taste more acutely, naturally.
Wayfarer: But that more natural tasting isn’t necessarily a good thing. For one, those people won’t work as hard at learning tasting stuff. They’ll just take it for granted. We see this in music and sports all the time: people with natural talent tend not to develop habits of training such that when the time comes that they need to move to the “next level,” they don’t know how.
Wayfarer: Without learning how to learn, without treating things like skills, there’s a certain limit of natural ability that serves as a hard cap. You can train almost anything you do with your body. You can learn to be a “supertaster.” There’s a documentary called “Somme” about sommeliers training for some international recognition, it’s a huge goddamn deal.
Wayfarer: But those aren’t people who just instantly know wine. They are working their asses off learning to distinguish one flavor from another. Similarly, some people are born with perfect pitch, but they tend to have a very hard time playing with symphonies. They aren’t better musicians for having perfect pitch.
Wayfarer: Meanwhile, you can teach yourself to identify pitches. It takes time and work and effort, but you can learn to hear sounds and go “oh that’s an E” or at least “oh this is a third above that”
Wayfarer: Psychically, all of that is also true. You can learn to identify very subtle psychic impressions you’re already getting by being a person. You can learn to suss out what they mean, what they are.
Wayfarer: But the approach matters. And that’s huge. Let’s take telepathy as an example. If your goal is “I want to become a telepath,” what does that mean? Just “be sensitive to psychic information?” Okay, you already are. You’re just not aware of it. Be mindfully sensitive? Okay, that’s pretty easy to learn, but it’s not what people think…
Wayfarer: Using a comparison example, “I want to be a guitarist.” When are you a guitarist? When you can play one song? Two songs? Or is it something you do? And if it’s something you do, and not something you become, then when are you “good enough” to stop practicing?
Wayfarer: The answer is…it is something you do…and you never are good enough to stop practicing if you have the right mindset. We want a growth oriented mindset, and a mastery-based focus.
moonie: Yea, I was just thinking how practice never stops. There’s always something to improve
Wayfarer: Growth mindset is opposed to fixed mindset. Fixed mindset says “I am a telepath” or “that person is a telepath” and by contrast “that other person is not a telepath” or “I can’t do telepathy.” Right? It’s fixed. One thing people think is a fixed quality a lot is intelligence, and that is devastating because you can learn to be more intelligent. You can train those mental habits.
Rainsong: Sir James Galway still practices flute every day
Wayfarer: “Oh but your IQ is…” save it. That shit is extremely not standardized in any way and I’ve taken courses on administering and scoring IQ tests and all that shit, e-warriors get out, intelligence is not a fixed faculty. There might be an upper limit on what any single individual can attain, maybe, but you’ll never find it if you think about it.
Wayfarer: So, a growth mindset doesn’t say “I want to attain this goal, then I’m done.” A growth mindset says, “I want to improve at this thing.” And a mastery-based approach says, “improving at this thing is the goal.” Not “this thing,” right?
Wayfarer: That is to say, if you’re a musician and you play an instrument and you don’t actually want to get better at playing that instrument, you’re not doing it with a mastery-based approach.
Kate Embers: Would continuously setting new goals be a growth-based approach?
Wayfarer: We need both of these with psi skills because we’re already working against a lot of things. Psi skills are already incredibly difficult because of things like witness inhibition (people watching psi performances seem to interfere in them if they don’t believe psi is possible. This is, in itself, a psychic thing) or ownership resistance (people who perform psychic feats tend to try to find other explanations or credit them to other people)
Wayfarer: Kind of-sort of. It can be part of it, but it’s nuanced. If you don’t set goals you don’t have a metric so how do you know that you’re improving? But achieving the goal can’t be the focus. It should be a thing you do because you want to see how you’re doing, not a thing you try to do, if that makes sense?
moonie: Is there a way to block outside interference or is it something that just comes with the trade?
Kate Embers: Setting a standard to compare yourself to but actually focusing on something that isn’t the standard?
Kate Embers: Like trying to run a distance in a faster time and using the actual times only as reference?
Flux: There are ways to minimize outside interference.
Wayfarer: Let’s stay focused with psi stuff, and telepathy. If I make a goal of achieving 70% accuracy on a telepathy task, then I do that…then what? I can set 80%, or 100%, or achieve 70% more often, and so on and so on… but eventually I’m going to run out of those. Also, I’m dealing with a lot of things outside my control, and also I’m dealing with having to do statistics, etc etc
Wayfarer: So setting the goal might be okay on a per-run basis, but in the long run a lot of people will set goals, reach them…and quit.
Wayfarer: “I am going to get 70% accuracy on a GESP card task” “Oh wow I did it, I’ve finally achieved my goal.” And that’s the end of that. I’m good enough now, right? And this is our normal approach in the West. We don’t study in school to learn stuff, we study in school to get a grade and to graduate so we can go to a good college so we can get good grades and get a degree so we can get a good job…….
Flux: Isn’t there some issue with using metrics like that to train some psi based skills?
Wayfarer: A number of issues, and this is one of them.
Wayfarer: It automatically orients us to a bad method of learning that doesn’t keep us enthused and doesn’t develop the habits we’ll need to keep getting better when we’re on a plateau.
Flux: Do we need to be enthused to learn?
Wayfarer: So the mindset based bit is…the goal isn’t to gain some kind of fixed quality, but rather to be improving. And the mastery side of this is, the goal isn’t “become a telepath” but “improve telepathy.” Even in little ways, even in intangible ways, we want to be the best we can be because improving in itself is the goal.
Wayfarer: Yes and no. Psi skills are what a friend of mine calls “cliff skills.” And that requires some explanation.
Wayfarer: We can look at learning a skill as climbing a hill, right? We start at the bottom and we gradually improve until we reach the top, and then we can start the real work of climbing yet taller hills of mastery.
Wayfarer: A cliff skill is a skill that requires significant investment before you can even get started on the actual thing you’re trying to do.
Wayfarer: Cliff skills are difficult (unless you have the right mindset) because you need something to motivate you to put in that significant initial investment.
Wayfarer: Psi skills need mental concentration and discipline and all kinds of other shit before you can even start on the skill itself. And you might not see anything at all for a while. I’m learning PK, and boy is it entirely frustrating doing something and getting nothing out of it. You don’t even know what to improve or change!
Wayfarer: You can’t plan, execute, and reflect because you’re just kinda flailing. We do controlled flailing, we kinda do stuff towards getting a result, and until we get the result we can’t really reflect on and refine our methods.
Flux: Some people are able use psi skills without all that discipline and stuff, correct?
Wayfarer: We have to do a lot of stuff before we can even start. Without some kind of motivation or enthusiasm, people don’t tend to do things they don’t have to.
Wayfarer: Yes, because we have all have the psychic faculty and some people have it more “so.” Some people can just jump in a car and it just makes sense and they get it and they don’t need to spend a lot of time at all on it, too.
Wayfarer: But those people don’t improve well. If the goal is just … do a thing unreliably some of the time? I guess you can just not practice or be motivated in any way, lol
Flux: That seems to contradict the cliff skill idea to me.
Wayfarer: Some people start at the top of the cliff. I’m talking on the average. I did absolutely nothing to learn telepathy, for example, but I am not going to say telepathy is trivial and for someone who isn’t naturally telepathic I would be a liar to say it’s easy to just start paying attention to an intuitive faculty.
Wayfarer: We can use different instruments I think of examples of different things here. A guitar you can just pluck the string. It’s not playing, but you can just do it right away, right?
Wayfarer: A trombone, you have to build up an embouchure. You can’t just start playing. You have to develop mouth musculature and so on before you can even start trying to play notes.
Wayfarer: So there’s a little cliff before trombone.
Wayfarer: It’s not a big one, but there’s a little one.
Wayfarer: Let’s imagine some people just have incredibly meaty built mouths by some fluke, genetics or something, right? Those guys start up the cliff.
Wayfarer: Doesn’t make the cliff disappear for most people.
Wayfarer: And, even people who start “up the cliff” with, say, telepathy, might do abysmally on card reading GESP tasks because they don’t have the discipline to focus on what they are trying to pick up, and so on.
Flux: True, but I don’t think the analogy works without the addition of a mutant power to create embouchure.
Rainsong: or they went up the cliff already, by playing the saxophone for years first
Wayfarer: Okay, then let’s stick with the original example: a supertaster already has the faculty to taste the differences between wines. They don’t know what any of those tastes mean and they still have a lot of learning to do before they are any good at it. A normal-taster will have to practice up to identify distinct tastes, before they can even start to learn them.
Flux: I can go with that.
Wayfarer: Or, for example with languages you’re not used to, there’s an investment. There are three different d sounds in Tibetan that are distinct sounds to Tibetans but if you don’t speak Tibetan you just hear “D” for all of them
Wayfarer: da, dra, and tra are all “d” sounds if you’re not used to distinguishing them.
Flux: I was thinking that writing a book in a language you don’t know makes a good cliff skill analogy.
Wayfarer: It does do, yeah. And to be clear that’s not in the talk – my friend and I are still playing with that idea generally.
Flux: You would be the equivalent of already knowing the language.
Wayfarer: Right, I still need to learn the mechanics of writing a book, learn the subject matter, and so on.
Wayfarer: Now, the question is, and the issue of motivation somewhat, using that example… what happens when I finish the book?
Flux: You’ve met your goal.
Wayfarer: If my goal has been “write a book,” then… I’m done, right? That’s it. I guess I can find another book to write. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just keep writing the same book different ways.
Flux: You can be done.
Flux: Like saying you want to climb Everest. You might have to work up to it, but once you’ve done it…
Wayfarer: I can be. And that’s that. So yeah, I suppose if our goal is to demonstrate a psychic ability exists through some kind of statistical thing, then we can meet our statistical goal and be done also? But that’s not a good way to go about developing a skill, just a good way to go about finishing a book.
Wayfarer: Right, that’s if you want to climb Everest, right?
Wayfarer: But what if you want to… improve as a climber?
Wayfarer: Be the best climber you can be.
Flux: That’s a different thing, yes.
Flux: What if you want to achieve a specific level of telepathy, say being able to read the minds of fellow poker players enough to know their hands?
Wayfarer: And it’s a better thing for developing a skill. The guy who wants to improve as a climber will ultimately be a better climber than the guy who wanted to climb Everest, paid some Sherpas to carry him, and then did it, yeah? (provided he doesn’t die climbing, lmao rip Uli Steck)
Flux: That’s like, I want to be able to run a mile without stopping or something like that.
Wayfarer: I would say if you want to do that reliably, you’ll be better served with the approach where you try to be the best telepath you can be, because you won’t be working against so many internal obstacles as if your goal is to reliably know someone’s poker hand.
Wayfarer: We’re just debating goal oriented vs. process oriented mindsets here though.
Rainsong: And the other players might be working on countermeasures, anyway
Flux: I would agree. But this is a type of thing that people want to do.
Flux: And in most other skill types, the answers are clearer.
Wayfarer: There’s virtue in having and achieving goals, but they don’t make for the best performers of skills. If your goal is to learn to play Freebird on guitar, you can probably learn to do that pretty easily, right? A guy whose goal is to be the best guitarist he can be will almost certainly, categorically be a better guitarist, even if he’s never played Freebird, and playing Freebird will be much easier for that person eventually, right? But you can learn to play Freebird, nobody is saying that’s bad.
Flux: Sure. But not everyone’s goal is to be the best they can be.
Wayfarer: Right. And those people will have a harder time of playing Freebird.
Wayfarer: Or doing a telepathy.
Turbo: This is a lot of different ways to describe the same mechanic
Wayfarer: :v
Flux: Yes, but in the case of learning to play one song, if that’s their goal, they will spend less time on it than moving towards the abstract.
Wayfarer: Okay, does that mean that playing a song is not a skill?
Wayfarer: I guess that’s my question, you’re spending a lot of time caping for sub-optimal learning tactics seemingly to demonstrate that psychic skills don’t behave like skills, and I don’t understand why.
Flux: It is a skill. But, it has an end point in this example. You could then want to play it better than anyone previous or improve your Freebird skills, but that’s something afterwards.
Turbo: I suppose it comes down to how you learned. Music theory from the ground up – which notes are which or memorization – mimicking without really learning
moonie: So what would you say is the first cliff for focusing your psi abilities? Meditation?
Wayfarer: Like any skill, you can learn psychic ability to your desired level of mediocrity. It will be harder for you to do so because the mindsets and methods involved in learning make that more difficult. Rather than debate that, I’m just going to refer you to Mindset by Carol Dweck which details the research that supports why I’m saying that.
Flux: The question is more, if you have a specific goal in mind, what approach do you think is the fastest way to achieve it? If you think working towards the abstract, then that’s it.
Wayfarer: If you have a specific goal in mind other than “improve the skill” I would have to tailor that advice to the specific goal.
Wayfarer: i.e., the fastest possible way to learn telepathy to the degree of being able to reliably and consistently read a poker hand will absolutely be to work towards continuous improvement until that point is reached, yes.
Flux: That was my question.
Flux: That’s been my experience, and I find it weird.
Wayfarer: Gotcha, okay. And I think that adds to the discussion on cliff skills vs hill skills because the goals aren’t something that is the same every time. … Playing a song isn’t great as an example because you could almost make an argument that just playing a song is trivial on most instruments.
Wayfarer: For example you can teach someone “daisy, daisy” on a piano and it’s not like they’re going to be doing a virtuouso performance with lots of emotions and shit but they can mechanically push the butans.
Flux: Maybe we don’t have a good handle on how difficult a thing is. Maybe the poker example is like running a 4 minute mile.
Wayfarer: Whereas you can’t really do the same thing with telepathy, even with a GESP task.
Wayfarer: I would say that knowing the actual cards is absolutely 4 minute mile territory.
Rainsong: (try that same song on the oboe and not sound like you’re inflicting horrible pain on a small animal…)
Flux: That’s me playing any instrument.
Flux: Size of the animal may vary.
Wayfarer: Anyhow more or less at time here but I do want to throw a last part about method. And to answer the question on the basic skills that come first: concentration and focus, meditation is a way to get there.
Wayfarer: You need concentration, focus, mindfulness, and discipline but it’s because those improve your ability to do the task. So meditation helps for anything but it helps more for psi stuff because they are mental skills.
Wayfarer: Once you have the actual skill done, the basic iteration is Plan->Execute->Reflect
Wayfarer: Plan what you are practicing, do the practice, then reflect on it. What went well? What went poorly? What can be improved?
moonie: Any tips for what to do if you’re having a hard time clearing your head? Talking stuff out usually works for me, but if that’s not an option, what do you do?
Wayfarer: From reflecting on it, we go back to planning.
Wayfarer: If there are things immediately bothering you, addressing them helps. If you are just generally having a cluttered head, basic mindfulness meditation. Focus on your breathing, and when other thoughts show up, identify them and intentionally return to your breathing.
Wayfarer: So for example, you’re breathing, then you think about some work you have to do, or some thought comes up, right?
Wayfarer: Just go “okay, but right now I’m breathing.” And then breathe.
Wayfarer: Don’t do this for too long at a time. Don’t set like “5 minutes” as a goal. Practice in short chunks at first. 20, 30 seconds. Then maybe go for a minute, then maybe 5 minutes. The length isn’t the goal, it’s the quality of practice that matters.
moonie: Oh ok, that make sense. Thanks
Wayfarer: What you’re doing is giving your mind a chance to practice resting. Thinking is a habit, and we live very rushed lives these days where lots of thoughts come.
Wayfarer: So we have to train our minds to not bring a lot of thoughts all the time.
moonie: Makes sense
Wayfarer: How that helps with psi stuff is it helps us not distract ourselves. When we break the habit of having lots of thoughts come all the time whenever we’re focusing on meditation, we can also use that new skill when focusing on specific things.
Wayfarer: So instead of breathing, we’re trying to spin the psi-wheel or whatever, right? Or listening for thoughts from other people, or so on, yeah? But when we get distracted and start thinking about tests we have to take later, or making dinner, or whatever, then we can go “oh, okay, but I’m spinning the psi-wheel right now.”
Wayfarer: And the mind will go “oh word? Okay yeah let me tone this down a bit.”
Wayfarer: Okay, this has helped me plan that lecture a bit. I’m gonna call it for the night for now, more on this in the future. Also another lecture I have to prepare is an introduction to Tibetan Astrology, so y’all gonna get more of me later this month as well.
Kate Embers: Thanks a lot for this ^^ quite a new revelation 😀
Kate Embers: Never seen it that way
Rainsong: Thanks, Wayfarer. Interesting talk
moonie: Thanks for the lecture!
Flux: Thanks!
Whisp: applauds
Jael: Thanks for this. It dovetails nicely with one of the books I’m ready.
Jael: *reading
Chirotractor: :thumbsup: