A Sad State of Affairs
I used to be in the New Age Movement — back in the day. I taught myself psychic healing and taught others how to do it, although I quickly realized that I did not know much about it. Unlike medicine, there isn’t a wealth of scientific information to draw on. In fact, at the time, there was next to none. So I was flying blind. Because of the ubiquitous presence of bad skepticism, I had no idea that there was any science behind psychic ability at all.
Psychic Ability
It’s been like that for psychic mediums, remote viewers, dowsers and pretty much anyone else pushing the limits of their psychic ability. There is a lot that people don’t know and that has been a big problem. It has opened the door to all sorts of speculation by people who have asserted that they understood THE TRUTH. Countless books have been written offering someone’s version of what reality is and those range from rejecting the existence of psychic ability, to viewing it as a gift of God to the work of the Devil.
The problem with all of these random theories, is that they have no explanatory power. These theories tell you nothing about how psychic ability functions or why. They are useless for going forward because they have no knowledge base to build upon.
The Actual Experts
Parapsychologists; those scientists who do scientific experiments and publish papers in journals while carefully building a body of knowledge, have learned a great deal about psychic ability. Their theories come from a solid body of knowledge based on investigations and published experiments.
The most popular theory among parapsychologists; (i.e. the one with the most explanatory power), is that psychic ability is fundamentally a subconscious ability. The subconscious operates with full psychic functioning, and it’s always “on.” We access this psychic information by accessing the subconscious. To get to it, we have to navigate deeper parts of our personalities that we’re not normally aware of. This isn’t normally an easy thing to do and it may open up hidden fears and buried memories, which are also in the subconscious.
The theory speculates that we normally use our ordinary senses to accomplish our goals and it’s only when we enter into an ambiguous situation that cannot be resolved by our other senses that our psychic ability will kick in. So if we’re still trying to accomplish something with our other senses, we’re not likely to utilize our psychic ability.
My Own Thoughts On Psychic Ability
I have theorized that based on some studies, that psychic ability tends to be stronger based on need, and somehow the subconscious knows what that is. The more you need your psychic ability, -combined with a realization that you’re not going to get the help you want any other way,- the more likely you are to access it.
I have also theorized that psychic ability tends to be emotionally based. (This ties into need.) Reading other people’s emotional state, even when they’re not physically present, is what psychic ability is “tuned” for. Especially when people are deliberately hiding their emotions. I think that it’s the thing that it does best.
Psychic Ability Explained?
So how does this explain anything? Well, for starters it answers the question of why we don’t use psychic ability all the time. Our other senses can and do handle our day to day functioning just fine. It explains that a person’s ability to tolerate ambiguity will affect their psychic functioning. People who can stop thinking, stop trying and just relax and let things be, will do better psychically than people who keep hammering away and never give up.
This also describes the creative process, so we would therefore expect people who are better at creative tasks and holistic thinking to perform better at psychic tasks (which require entering into an open, receptive state of mind) than people who excel at linear thinking. It doesn’t take much of a leap to realize that the latter more or less describes skeptics.
The Trouble With Skeptics
The skeptics, who pride themselves on their linear thinking, are revealed to be lacking in the qualities that would make them good at psychic ability. A lack of ability to enter into a receptive state of mind means that they are most likely not good holistic thinkers; this would explain why they have trouble making the necessary connections to understand psychic ability. Another aspect of this is that the more linear your thinking is, the more trouble you have changing your mind.
We would expect psychic people to be inclined towards holistic thinking, to be creative in other areas and to have personalities that capable of having quiet moments and self reflection. This does, in fact, describe psychic people as a group quite well. It’s also been shown that creative people do better than others at psychic tasks.
That’s what explanatory power is. The theory matches what is observed and explains it, and also provides a map towards future knowledge.
The Psychic Process
The psychic process is challenging to describe because it occurs solely within a person’s mind, where it cannot be directly observed by anyone else. Psychic information, because of how it’s obtained, is difficult to distinguish from one’s own thoughts.
To sift through one’s own thoughts, one must first have strong inner awareness to know what one’s own thoughts look like and from there discern what psychic information personally looks and feels like. All of this must occur without trying to hard, which will disrupt the process. It’s a delicate balance that requires discipline, good intellectual awareness and strong holistic thinking skills. Not everyone is capable of this. So when researchers test for psychic ability they should expect to see some people do far better than others. In the scientific lingo, they would not expect to see homogeneous results. (Yes, this is also confirmed in scientific testing.)
Suspension of ordinary thought processes is so crucial to the psychic process that the Ganzfeld experiment is constructed around it. Ordinary sensory input is reduced to the absolute minimum. Unsurprisingly, this experiment also yields some of the most reliable results.
How This Relates To Physics
Of course, eventually we get around to the question of what the mechanism is. How does it work? And that is a damned good question. Psychic ability does not rely on sending or receiving signals. All forms of electromagnetic waves have been ruled out, even including ELF waves. (That is a story for another time.) In order to understand it at all, we need to look at reality differently, and here is where quantum physics comes in.
The question lands us smack in the middle of the mother of all scientific debates of our time: Is the universe fundamentally material, like a giant clock? Or is it fundamentally like a giant mind? If we look at the universe as material, then psychic ability is impossible, end of story. But it plainly IS possible, so that avenue does not match the evidence and we can safely dismiss it. So we conclude that the universe is like a giant mind and consciousness is therefore fundamental to the universe. Consciousness shapes our reality.
Time and Space Reality
Moving on from there, time and space are not absolutes. They utterly relational to one another, (You measure time with distance and without time you are everywhere at once and distance doesn’t exist.) which is why the term “spacetime” was coined. If consciousness is fundamental to reality, -and there are good arguments for this- then the mind has the ability to transcend this aspect of reality. Thoughts do not travel from one person to the other because their minds were never separate in the first place. With telepathy, we’re only making particular connections stronger and bringing them into conscious awareness through our own intent. They were already there.
This is what entanglement shows us: a universe beyond space and time. Bell’s Inequality Theorem states that QM only works if the universe is entangled. A lot of people miss the implications here and act as though entanglement was just another feature of QM instead of realizing that it’s showing us something fundamental about reality.
Space and time must be something created by a more fundamental reality; they cannot be fundamental themselves. If photons can entangle and behave as though space and time don’t exist, then space and time can be treated as though they don’t exist. That’s why psychic ability operates as though it’s time and space independent. Because it is. It seems spooky and weird and in defiance of physics only if you’re stuck in a Newtonian materialist view of the world. Once you understand the implications of quantum physics, and you view consciousness as fundamental to reality, psychic ability is not only possible, but predictable.
Sources:
The theory is called “First Sight” by psychologist Jim Carpenter: Here is a PDF four page description: http://www.drjimcarpenter.com/about/documents/FirstSightformindfield.pdf
Theory of need is based on these sources (and others) because of their extremely high success rate: A healing study by William Bengston with a cure rate of a whopping 87.9%. https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/gtpp/Documents/jse_14_3_bengston.pdf
Neuroscientist Diane Powell, who investigated telepathy in autistic children with a mind blowing success rate of over 99% You can read the article here: https://drdianehennacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/ES_Issue23Article.pdf
The sources for a link between consciousness and physics are too numerous to list.