Messages

Well, since this is in a thread about Tom Campbell... it's funny, because if his theories are correct, then the Scientific Method is actually not only obsolete, but anything and everything ever determined accurate by it is now unfounded again. 

Actually, if his theories are correct, it means that for all intents and purposes the Scientific Method is still accurate in PMR, since it is categorically impossible to prove that it is inaccurate according to the rules of the system. He kind of shoots himself in the foot with this catch-22 of the PUP.

The vast majority of people who apply to get Randi's money have claims like the following:

- I can find water with dowsing rods
- I have invented a perpetual motion machine
- I can tell you what a random person is thinking 100 miles away, but they have to be one of a pair of twins
- The government is trying to read my thoughts, give me a million dollars???

If there is even one authentic demonstrable use of paranormal abilities, Randi has no choice but to use rigorous scientific standards, exactly like you would use in testing the efficacy of a new drug, in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. He posts all communication and test results on his forums. I've read a lot of them and his testers are very fair and accommodating to even the nuttiest applicants.

Calling him "close minded" and "superskeptical" (whatever that means, how can you be TOO reliant on evidence to test the truth of a claim? Should you use half evidence and half hearsay?) does nothing except raise the smugness level of people here on the forums. It would be more helpful to figure out a way to demonstrate or record your abilities to let someone with a skeptical mindset begin to take you seriously.

The majority of people supporting the existence of paranormal abilities don't have a basic understanding of the scientific method or of the common cognitive biases. If someone experiencing a true psi event is indistinguishable to an observer from your common nutjob, it's not exactly the observer's fault for being "close minded," is it?

I have found that when I used to practice this "noticing" stuff I would focus on my peripheral vision, and this would force my brain to do "passive noticing" as opposed to "active looking" just because the physical act of keeping your eyes still and being aware of sensory data is basically the exact mindset you're trying to cultivate. A sort of passive, curious awareness.

Eventually my brain would start injecting colors and shapes and then finally concrete objects and scenes. It was a smooth transition from physical vision to "metaphysical" as Cententeo calls it.

Also, try noticing what's happening in your entire field of vision, not just in the center. If you expand your attention to include your peripheral vision you will be forcing yourself to do this right.

[Wake up early]

I've had promising results so far, here's what I'm doing right now and what my current roadblock is:

Wake up early
I have to get up for work at 8 so I set my alarm for 6. I brush my teeth and take a shower, which seems like enough time for me to wake up mentally yet still feel tired.

Lie down and relax
Since I've been doing daily breathing meditation this part is pretty easy. I count my breaths (relaxed, natural breaths) up to 20 and back down to 1. Then I relax just my face and head. This takes about 4-5 minutes and I reach the "Novocaine State" (great name btw).

Visualize
I can visualize pretty easily, and I can feel them getting more and more realistic, but then 90 minutes later I wake up from a vivid dream. I can remember my dreams pretty well so I'm just falling asleep as the visualizations become more engrossing.

At this point I'm just going to keep doing the exact same thing and hopefully I'll just get better, but any tips to prevent falling asleep would be appreciated!

I sincerely wish I could peruse this site.  Judging from your comment, it seems like it's full of good reads.  However, since I am a professional web designer.... I can't look at it. 

I simply won't.

I feel you, man. Help is at hand, though. If you use the Chrome browser, create a bookmark with the following URL in your bookmark bar:

Code Select Expand

javascript: (function(){ var newSS, styles='* { background: white ! important; color: black !important } :link, :link * { color: #0000EE !important } :visited, :visited * { color: #551A8B !important }'; if(document.createStyleSheet) { document.createStyleSheet("javascript:'"+styles+"'"); } else { newSS=document.createElement('link'); newSS.rel='stylesheet'; newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles); document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(newSS); } } )();

When you click it while viewing a terrible page, it removes all styles and just makes it easy to read.

Thanks, that's very helpful. I was spending a lot of frustrating time and effort trying to come up with long, scripted visualizations that would invariably be impossible to maintain or to remain interesting.

Contenteo: When you said "visualize some stories," could you elaborate?

Are you literally daydreaming whatever comes to mind, or do you have a script and location? How specific are your scripts beforehand?

Some examples would be nice!

Practice meditating. A little bit, 20-30 minutes a day, will see results in a few months. Could be much quicker, or could take much longer. Everyone is different.

It sounds like you are trying too hard to "get there".

When you fall asleep and have a dream, what are you trying to do? Nothing, you just lie down and close your eyes and everything takes care of itself. Now you just need to do the same thing but add an element of awareness. Just awareness, no effort.

Pick something to focus on, like your breath, and just stay with it in the present moment. Remove all thoughts of progress and self-evaluation (how am I doing, am I getting there, what's happening now, what sensations am I feeling). Just notice your breathing and any sensations that you feel without analyzing them or judging them. If you catch yourself striving to do something or thinking about what you will be doing once you get to an OBE, just calmly let the thought go and return to your focus of attention.

Hey Xanth, can you reach PoC fairly regularly? How long does it take you during the average successful attempt? Are there any stages you pass through on the way there that you have learned to identify?

Sometimes a subject is very simple but hard to grasp. There's no substitute for legwork.

Stookie it sounds like you're trying to fit everything into a single framework. Applying terminology to everything can be misleading. The concept of narrowing your focus until your consciousness occupies a single point is a pretty standard experience in meditation. Monroe's "Focus 10" is the exact same thing. If you read that long article describing the sensations of Focus 10 they describe this state explicitly. Many people are probably familiar with it but they give it different names and oscillate between describing it as a real location or a state of consciousness...

Maybe it's more helpful to think about things in terms of how they appear to a person through subjective experience, rather than trying to slot them into a unifying theory of reality. The more I think about it this way the simpler it gets.

The human mind is very susceptible to delusion. Just look up some of these on wikipedia to see what I mean:

Confirmation Bias
Pareidolia
Selective Exposure
Cognitive Inertia
Anchoring
Congruence Bias
Ambiguity Effect
Clustering Illusion

If you think about the purpose behind a reality check when Lucid Dreaming, it seems clear that our ability to accurately perceive and make judgements about our environment is very limited.

I noticed this happening to me sometimes, it's very distracting.

I have found that if I do some light exercise and stretching beforehand, it doesn't occur. A few yoga sun salutations stretch all the muscle groups so that's what I do for a few minutes before lying down to meditate.

If you decide to try this please let me know if it helps, I'd be curious to find out. I don't have a theory for why this works, I think it's more of a biological reason than a mental one, though.

For the most part, it's exactly what Frank always talked about... but never knew he was talking about it.
And I didn't realize it either until I actually began to read more, open my horizons more and actually considered it myself.

The process of Phasing = Transcendental Meditation.

But everyone needs to call it whatever is most comfortable for them.  For me it's the PoC State now. 

I agree that Frank's highest focus level was just him reaching the deeper levels of meditation. His F4 sounds like ego death, the absence of the sense of duality, what you're supposed to get when you observe yourself long enough to reject everything that gives you the illusion of individuality.

That said, there's many different kinds of meditation, they can broadly be said to be striving towards the same thing. Transcendental Meditation can probably be exchanged for vipassana (mindfulness) meditation, yoga, etc...

If you were lucid dreaming, you were already astral projecting. They're the same thing. Does that help with your fear at all?

Everyone knows that sleeping with purple quartz crystals in your ears is the only reliable way to project.

If you read the obe4u ebook, it says no single technique works for everybody. Try a bunch and see which one seems to work best, and stick with it for a while.

Eventually techniques stop working and others, which didn't work previously, suddenly become very useful, so if you hit a roadblock you should try all the techniques again to see which one is most effective.

Have you tried sending your focal point of awareness out through the top of your head? It usually causes vibrations for me.

Once you're in a deep trance and you mostly can't feel your body:

Imagine a golf ball stuck to the crown of your head. Once your mental image of it is stable, focus on it in a relaxed way. You may feel some strange sensations. Try moving it another foot away from the top of your head, and then further and further.

I guess I'm just frustrated because I would sincerely love to see a good validation, and instead am always disappointed. It's like someone asking you to try a tasty slice of cake and finding it to be full of sawdust.

The validations list is interesting:

In one of my projections, some years ago, I decided to go to visit my parents' house, which is 15 km far away. It was 10:00 in the morning. I overflew my city, following the way to the hose of my childhood. I could recognize all the details, the highway, the fields...
When I arrived the house and I went into it, I see my mother cooking in the kitchen. I tried to call the attention but she did not react at all, like she couldn't see me.
Later, I went to my sister's bedroom. In that time, she was still living there, but in that moment she should have been working in the office. I checked all was normal in the room. She wasn't there, as I expected. Some thing attracted my attention. There was a paper on the table. I approached to it and I could see it was like a note. I had many problems to read it (like usually reading something out of the body). But at the end I was able to understand what It said: "PRESENT FOR _____ (my real name)"
More things happened, but to summarize I went back to my body and made a decision: I would go physically to my parents' house to check all those things. I did it, what it took twenty minutes, and my mother was there, in the kitchen cooking. I say hi and I went into my sister's room, very thrilled. There was a note on the table, exactly like the one I saw being out of the body, which said: "PRESENT FOR _____ (my real name)". Then I imagined she was thinking in my birthday, that would be in two weeks.
I think it is a perfect validation of an out of the body experience....."

To sum up, the person is surprised that their mother is in the kitchen and that their sister has a birthday present for him. He ignores the fact that the kitchen is a very common place for someone to be (my mother is regularly in the kitchen, throughout the day) and that HE KNOWS his birthday is coming up. Is it really that unusual to dream about receiving a present shortly before one's own birthday?

In the next validation the person is surprised to see their father wearing the same clothes he was wearing in a dream. People wear the same clothes all the time, especially men, especially around the house. When I visit my father's house in the evening I could probably guess what he is going to be wearing with 50% accuracy.

Is it really being close-minded to see the flaws in these validations?

Thank you for the Dean Radin link, that was a refreshingly honest and empirical discussion. I'm truly agnostic about those experiments he talked about, especially the Ganzfelt and presentiment (random picture) experiments. I can't think of a flaw in the studies, and while that doesn't mean one doesn't exist, for now there does actually appear to be something strange going on. Inexplicable!

That said, there's a huge temptation here to create a deductive link where none exists, ie if there is a statistically significant result showing small signs of presentiment or telepathy, this somehow relates directly to OBE experiences. I think they are categorically very different experiences from the tests Radin described. The degree of statistical significance is worlds away from anything that would cause a reasonable person to think they were actually leaving their body during an OBE. If the receiver of a Ganzfelt experiment does 7% better than chance would suggest, this only tells us that only about 7% of an OBE experience has anything to do with objective reality. The entire experience might be generated by the brain and only a single detail, like the color of a dream character's dress, would have any relation to the world at all, and without an experimental context to interpret the results (such as a group of four pictures from which to choose) the results are almost meaningless. Maybe even then it would only apply to a small percentage of people who have OBE experiences, the talented pool, for which these experiments preselected. It becomes impossible to separate validations from coincidences, no matter how convincing they appear to be.

Is it better to be utterly credulous, or to have a skeptical attitude? (by skeptical I mean requiring evidence before reaching a conclusion, not having pre-defined expectations leaning one way or the other) We can't simply choose to believe something: exhortations to have an "open mind" are meaningless to a skeptic. An idea must appear to be true before we can identify with it and adopt it as a belief. In this sense a belief about reality is analogous to a belief about moral values.

Anyway, great post, Volgerie.

When you put it that way....

Which physicists are you talking about? I'd be interested to read about their theories.

TurtleSnake: Interesting theory. I wonder if you're confusing cause and effect here, though, i.e. when the brain is relaxed the neurons fire at slower speeds approaching 4-7Hz, rather than the brain perceives EM radiation in the upper atmosphere. It has been proven that electromagnetic radiation can affect the brain at very close range at at much higher magnitudes (EM helmet, basically), but there's no way the scattered standing waves miles above the earth would have any effect.

If that was true we'd be far more strongly influenced by all the other EM radiation caused by humans in the last 100 years, which appear across the entire spectrum.

Also, babies and young children learn quickly because they have much higher brain plasticity (growing neural connections) than an adult, where the connections are mostly formed already.
Our eco-system "self-balances" due to natural selection, and it isn't always a nice balancing act. There are often cycles of over-breeding followed by mass starvation in the wild (deer, rabbits, wolves, fish, kangaroos, various plants). Sometimes an invasive species arrives on a piece of driftwood and devastates an entire ecology.

I think vibrations are caused by your inner ear and proprioperception disconnecting from your body gradually: for a minute your brain is getting very confusing signals, until it's disconnected entirely and the vibrations stop. That's why sometimes if feels like you're spinning (sense of balance upset) and sometimes your hands or feet seem to be in strange places or at weird angles (proprioperception is wonky).