Dr. Jim Carpenter's First Sight theory

[Jones]

Here's one way that 'time' might help.

In dog training/behavioural psychology there is the concept of contiguity. In that field there are definite timings for optimal learning. If behaviour and consequence are paired within 0.5 to 1 second, there is optimal learning. If the time between the behaviour and consequence is stretched to 1 second - 3 seconds, there is still learning but the results are a bit sloppier. If it's stretched out more, from 3 seconds - 10 seconds learning may happen but there are no guarantees and it's a very grey area. After 10 seconds, there is no learning at all.

When I first learned this I found an online timer to practice what if felt like to have the timing correct for optimal learning when I was training a dog. There could be a lot of things going on so I couldn't count off time or watch a clock to be sure I'd gotten it right. I had to be aware of my own internal state so that I wasn't being distracted from the training. I had to be aware of the dogs internal state so that I was acting to support the classical conditioning necessary for the training objective, I had to be aware of the dogs behavioural sequences so that I could deliver either the encouragement or discouragement at the right time and I had to keep the ultimate goal of the training in mind.

So finding a way to practice the timing and get a felt sense of it away from training the dog seemed a good idea. In each 0.5 - 1 second interval I had to make a decision and I had basically 6 choices.

1) Encourage the behaviour
2) Discourage the behaviour
3) Ignore the behaviour
4) Stop and return to an earlier segment of the behavioural sequence to solidify that in the dogs mind.
5) How would I effect the above? What area of training/behavioural psychology would I rely on? Would I change methods based on what I was observing from the dogs response?
6) Take a break from training.

When everything come together, things started happening that I referred to as 'One Second Wonders'. The dog would make a leap in understanding and you can see an 'aha' on their faces or a penny drop kind of expression of relief, or I would get the impulse to do something totally left field, a new combination of old methods or something unusual, and I couldn't tell you where that impulse come from, but I had to act on it inside that one second for the best benefit of the dog.

I kind of liken it to the ouija board process that started out really slow, but as time progressed that planchette moves around that board like it's got skates on and those with their hands on the planchette are perceiving and responding to something within that one second time frame that each letter is delivered in.

Then the murmuration of birds and how the latest session suggests that this is an expression of joy.

Also the C's saying that time is an illusion, but it's necessary for learning in this dimension.

I've noticed that by learning to pay attention in these fraction of a second increments, then I was seeing a lot more - didn't always have answers for exactly what I saw but I was seeing stuff. For example, a friend who had just done a relaxation exercise and was then asked a troubling question - it's almost like I could see or perceive something - nothing that I could accurately define - but it was like a movement of energy from his body to his head. This fellow ordinarily has a kind of expressionless face and is very private about his feelings and emotions. So to perceive that shift in him was new to me.

In any case, here's the kind of timer that I practiced with when I first started out:

Human Benchmark

www.humanbenchmark.com

 

[Approaching Infinity]

Just a heads up that there are some interesting articles up on SOTT on the topic of idealism (all is mind) vs. physicalism (all is matter):

Information Realism: Why physics is pointing inexorably to mind

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly...

www.sott.net

And another heads up that we talked about this article on today's MindMatters:

 

[Cosmos]

I just started to read this book and I'm pretty intrigued by it so far. Somehow I think what Carpenter tried to get at here is quite revolutionary and strikes me as something which might very well explain a lot of things, and at the same time raises a lot of questions not only about Parapsychology and the Paranormal itself but about many other fields including psychology, being and reality itself. It also seems to provide some solid and well-founded ideas/theories/models that can enable fruitful further research into various fields including the makeup of reality itself and provides a ground structure for how it might be done in the future.

For quite some time it seemed to me that there might be something that happens in reality constantly including and especially between people that we don't usually have direct conscious access to, but nonetheless has a big role to play in everything that happens. Like for example a nagging feeling/sensation that something is going on right now in this or that experience or interaction that goes far bejond just the physical senses. It is hard to put into words, but Carpenters seems to have managed exactly that with this book. His idea seems to directly address this elusive and mysterious aspect of reality, which according to him might be even the fundamental element of it.

It is almost like he describes the big elephant in the room we all interact with and are a part of constantly; That reality that is right in front of us all the time, yet we usually have no clue of its existence whatsoever, even though he goes as far as to suggest that this is actually the "first sight", meaning, that this is what happens at the initial and first level all the time. Somehow I think he is unto something with all of that. In fact, I think he has done an excellent groundbreaking job here that strikes me as something that might be pretty close to what actually is happening and going on all the time.

I find his analogy of "psi" to electricity also very helpful and I think he is onto something big time in suggesting to approach this subject from this angle; of something that is real, all around and in us all the time and nothing seldom or rare at all, yet we can't usually directly see or grasp it. His comparison of "rare" paranormal happenings that we consciously are aware of, like a Telekinesis experience for example, to a lightning bolt, is also very interesting and appropriate IMO. He suggests that like electricity, "psi" in all its forms is constantly all around us, in us, and we use it all the time, and that a lightening bolt is like a consciously experienced/measured paranormal experience that reaches our rational awareness out of the myriad of other happenings of that sort that constantly happen and remain in the "unconscious".

I also think his conclusion that any paranormal researcher should and has to educate himself about the psychology of human beings in all its aspect, from the cognitive level up to every aspect of it, as best as possible, is very fitting and right on the money.

So far the book seems like a treasure trove to me that opens up so many questions and ideas. I'm at his "Corollaries" about his theory at the moment, which are quite dense and hard to understand for me at the moment. It is like reading the descriptions in Lobaczewski's "Political Ponerology" and Collingwoods "Idea of History" for the first time, in the sense that every sentence seems to be so packed full of useful information (that you can hardly understand at the beginning), yet you can't quite grasp the depths and full implications of it even though it rings so true.

 

[Approaching Infinity]

I just got around to reading a blog post from Michael Prescott, posted originally on April 9. He usually focuses on parapsychology, but this post was on the similarities between psi phenomena and UFO phenomena. Anyways, at one point he writes this, in line with the discussion of Carpenter's work:

Opening the door

I’ve been noodling a little more on the subject of UFOs after reading a second book by Jacques Vallee, The Invisible College, and part of a compendium of UFO reports edited by Leslie Kean, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials...

michaelprescott.typepad.com

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down. It’s been reported that when Uri Geller came on the scene with his spoon-bending displays, ordinary people who watched him on television suddenly discovered that they, too, could bend spoons. Jack Houck, who for years has hosted “PK parties” where people bring their own cutlery and learn to manipulate it via PK, has said that the energy of a group is needed to, in effect, raise the vibrations in the room, and that the group’s initial skepticism and doubt must be broken down before dramatic effects will take place. Similarly, the spread of spiritualism in the 19th century seems due, in part, to the fact that people really were getting inexplicable results – and the more results people reported, the more likely other people were to get results. As barriers to belief were broken down, the phenomena snowballed.

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

Of course, Carpenter would argue that they're not "latent powers" - just as seeing the color red is not a "latent power" when you happen not to be looking at something red. Conditions just need to be conducive to the experience, and in the case of psi the conditions include the aims and meanings of the moment.

But what stuck out for me most was the bit in parentheses: the idea that social contagions might have a paranormal aspect. No idea if it's true or not, but it's an interesting idea and would make sense. And it would give some potentially sinister undertones to the spread of social contagions. Just think of the examples of such in the past 30 years or so: MPD, satanic ritual abuse, bulimia, gender dysphoria, suicide... Who might want such things to spread? And if such things are expressions of unconscious aims, whose aims might they ultimately represent?

Back to the UFO aspect, Prescott argues for the "collective unconscious" explanation, but then at the end writes that he's not entirely persuaded by this argument. It's a bit of a copout. So he gives some alternatives:

An alternative is that UFOs and their occupants are real, independent existents that are invisible to us under ordinary circumstances, but which become perceptible when we activate our seldom-used ability to perceive other planes of reality.

Or perhaps there is no contradiction between these two possibilities. If we could see things from a higher perspective, like a Flatlander lifted off his sheet of paper and looking down at his world from above, we might see that the same phenomenon can be both a subjective, symbolic thought-form and a real, independent entity in its own right.

Actually, I suspect something like this is probably true. I also suspect that my regular mind, as opposed to my higher-dimensional subliminal self, cannot possibly make sense of it.

Hyperdimensions, 'free-formal imagery', symbolic nature of higher realities. He might be closer to reality than he thinks!

 

[genero81]

"Perhaps the subliminal self has far greater capabilities than we commonly suppose, notably the ability to get in touch with other realities or even to manifest pseudo-realities. Perhaps it takes a certain key individual, who is in some way a generator or facilitator of the phenomena, to get the ball rolling. Then, if other individuals happen to perceive the results, their own belief systems are knocked askew and they are able to contribute to the phenomenon and keep it going or even cause it to escalate. After a while, emotions die down, the mechanism (whatever it might be) is worn out, and the sightings subside – until such time as another portal to the subliminal self, another of "the doors of perception" (to use Aldous Huxley's phrase) is opened, and another series of sightings is inaugurated."

This is very interesting. The power of a group of people believing the same thing whether subjective or more knowledge based/ objective, I think we may be just getting an inkling of what's possible.

Reminds me of Castaneda's concept of an assemblage point:

“Inside of every human being is a gigantic dark lake of silent knowledge, which each of us can intuit. Sorcerers are the only beings on earth who deliberately go beyond the intuitive level by training themselves to do two transcendental things: first, to conceive of the existence of the assemblage point, and second, to make that point move.

“The most sophisticated knowledge that sorcerers possess, is of our potential as perceiving beings, and the knowledge that the content of perception depends on the position of the assemblage point.”

* * * * *​

“Any movement of the assemblage point is like dying. Everything in us gets disconnected, then reconnected again to a source of much greater power."

In other of his writings he explains that the assemblage point is 'fixed' by all of the people that one is influenced by during the process growing up. Parents, siblings, relatives, teachers, etc. In other words, our perception is fixed within the context of the cultural norms in which we develop. This is of course a good thing, but we really don't know to what extent that limits us. Or what a group of people enlarging that perceptual field might be able to experience.

 

[Mike]

This discussion of "beliefs being broken down" impacting psi, etc reminds me of this discussion with the C's:

(Ark) Okay, so energy anomaly certainly. But when I am asking about poltergeist, I have in mind something like a table rising and flying across the room and being overturned and landing upside down somewhere. But... It just flies! It will fly normally. I don't see any laws of physics broken because it just flies. The whole table, you know? It doesn't go like half a table or something. It flies like if there was wind, and the wind took the table and moved it. So, it looks like all laws of physics are satisfied. It's not something strange like UFOs that move instantly from one place to another. They disappear. But this table just flies nicely.

(Pierre) You mean you just need a normal physical force to...

A: 3rd density.

Q: (Ark) But I would like to know whether conservation of energy is satisfied. This table when it's flying, does the energy come from the person that is responsible, or it comes from the vacuum, or it comes from... I don’t know from where?

A: Vacuum utilization by human information decoding.

Q: (Ark) I don't know how can we use this vacuum, except that there are some quantum things... Does it have anything to do with quantum theory?

A: Generally, yes.

Q: (Ark) Does it need hyperdimensions? Extra dimension?

A: Yes

Q: (Artemis) Is it sort of like an energetic alchemy?

A: Depends on what you define as alchemy.

Q: (L) Go back to the one before... [Review of answers to Ark's questions] So, what I want to ask is... Is it consciousness - whether it's conscious or unconscious - that acts as the bridge or the decoder... Well, let me ask this: Is the decoding the same thing as bridging the dimensions?

A: Close

Q: (L) Is it the human consciousness - whether conscious or unconscious - that does this?

A: Yes

Q: (Ark) I would like to understand why with this poltergeist phenomenon, we have flying bottles, flying chairs, swinging chandeliers, but we don't have like flying mountains or flying houses. I mean, what...

(Andromeda) What limits it?

(Ark) What limits this kind of phenomenon? You see? Why people are not flying, but tables are flying?

(Pierre) There are cases of levitation.

(Ark) Why dogs are not flying but tables and chairs are flying?

A: Some humans and dogs have flown. Consensus limits possible objects.

Q: (Pierre) The beliefs. It reminds me of a question I wanted to ask for months. With Artemis and the guys here, we made this game here in the kitchen where we put our hands on someone's head. And then you concentrate and we were repeating something like 10 times or whatever. Then we put our fingers under the knees and armpits of the subject, and we lift them up. So maybe my first question is: Am I mistaken to think that in some cases, the gravity or the weight of the individual was really reduced?

A: Yes. Coral Castle.

Q: (Pierre) Yeah, exactly! So, through intention... Well, what I want to mention now: There were some cases where the consensus of the belief - maybe concerning the subject... It was with Atreides. He's heavier than the rest of us. He didn't seem to believe it. We did the same procedure, and it didn't work. He was the same weight, and we didn't manage to lift him. So if we didn't manage to lift him, is it because he didn't believe the experiment?

A: Active resistance.

Q: (Pierre) Okay, so he was not into it, or it was scary or whatever, he was not into this state of mind and we didn't manage to lift him.

(Andromeda) Sometimes there are people who don't necessarily believe it, but they're not actively disbelieving it.

(Pierre) Fighting against it.

(Andromeda) Right.

(Pierre) But in this case, he was opposing. We were not on the same wavelength.

(Mikey) Is that related to the Belief Center that the C's mentioned several times?

A: Yes

Q: (Ark) I would like to have a hint about which direction - if I want to understand this poltergeist thing - which direction in physics I have to go first of all?

A: Matter as manifestation of consciousness as a function of algebra between dimensions.

Q: (Scottie) That's easy!

(Pierre) Crystal clear. I would like to go back to this experiment we did. Obviously, we altered a physical constant, gravity, in a direction we wanted. It worked in this case because... I didn't believe it would work. I wasn't fighting against, but I didn't believe it. But then I suspect the girls were in such a state where the intention was stronger than the beliefs. Their intent, their will, was stronger than their belief.

A: Decoding subconsciously.

Q: (Pierre) Again, they use the word "decoding". Decoding means there is a code. What is the code they're referring to?

A: Information.

Q: (L) Well, okay... What is decoding information? In information theory, you have information and send it. The simplest example is the telephone. You pick up the telephone, you call somebody, they pick up their phone and say, "Hello?" You speak into the telephone, and your words are transformed or encoded into electronic signals which then travel across the line and are decoded by the telephone on the other end. That's not the end of it. It's just the mechanical part of it. There's another part of the decoding. The first is the information that exists in the head of the person who says the words. And then the reception of those words that have been coded and decoded by the machine into sounds, which make words. So there's a whole series of steps for decoding of information. If there is information in another dimension and that dimension is possibly something that your deep subconscious is connected to, then you're able to access that information; then you decode it even if unconsciously.

(Pierre) Okay, following you... Gravity is a consensus, and most of the time consensus applies. It's explicit. Acceleration, gravity, 9.81, etc. However, this concept of gravity, this physical law or norm or constant is related to more than that. There's more than the explicit information we have about gravity. If an individual managed to tap into it, decode it, and interact with it, he can make this constant NOT a constant anymore because he has access to more information relating to this physical entity.

A: Exactly.

Q: (Ark) Gravity is affected here, right? That's what we were told. And the gravity was affected in this poltergeist phenomenon. And in the poltergeist phenomenon there was this vacuum there. Is it in this case also gravity involved in changing then...?

A: Yes

Q: (Pierre) What they're saying is flabbergasting to me. What they're saying is all those physical constants...

A: Unstable gravity waves. Vacuum is information.

Q: (Ark) Now, when we use the term "vacuum" here, is it the same that other people would call ether?

A: Close

Q: (Joe) What do you mean by the vacuum?

(Ark) Quantum vacuum, zero point energy, right?

(Pierre) Non-local information?

(Ark) It's not clear, but among the physicists that were talking a lot about paranormal and vacuum, there was this CIA guy Puthoff. And the CIA is still studying this subject. How much did they progress? Is it in military use, or is it too fragile and depends on consciousness and so on?

A: They are frustrated by inconsistency of results. They do not realize the implications of STS vs STO on information in the vacuum.

Q: (Arky) Okay, I'm done.

(L) Well, I want to ask: What are the implications of STS vs STO on the vacuum?

A: STS is constrictive and inhibits flow.

Q: (Pierre) Since their project is based on STS motivations, it doesn't work very well because the foundation is decoding in interaction with information field and it doesn't flow.

A: Yes

Q: (L) So in other words, there is some truth to issues of good and evil in terms of STS and STO, and in terms of what can and cannot be manifested?

A: Yes

Q: (Joe) Don't have many people of the right orientation...

(L) I remember the C's said something one time about some kind of... what was it? The Ark of the Covenant could only be handled or used by somebody who had a pure STO profile because anybody else would be killed. Is that basically what we're looking at here?

A: Yes. Close.

 

[Keit]

It may also be the case that more and more people can access this faculty as barriers to belief are broken down.

Probably that's how Placebo effect works: "I believe this thing can cure me", and it does!

(In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

This excerpt comes to mind:

A: It is not just "waves" beamed by such things as HAARP or microwaves, it is also a quickening of the cosmos. Those who are not integrated will disintegrate at an even faster rate than ever.

(L) Okay, you wanted to ask something about... (A**) What about these suicides in Bridgend, Wales? What's going on there?

A: Location amplifies the kinds of waves mentioned earlier leading to rapid disintegration.

Q: (L) So it's like underground water, or electromagnetic, or some kind of power point or something like that?

A: Yes

Q: (A**) So people are just disintegrating, and they're all hanging themselves. (Joe) Twenty four of them, all hung themselves. (A***) All under the age of thirty. (L) Well, you've got HAARP going, you've got microwave towers going, you've got cosmic waves going. (DD) I had a friend commit suicide in Tulsa last week.

A: Expect a lot more unstable behavior all over.

And there is also the following radio show on a similar topic:

The Truth Perspective: The Strange Contagion: How Viral Thoughts and Emotions Secretly Control Us

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss Lee Daniel Kravetz's latest book Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves. When Lee and his wife moved to Palo...

www.sott.net

Today on the Truth Perspective we discuss Lee Daniel Kravetz's latest book Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves.

When Lee and his wife moved to Palo Alto, California in 2009 they hoped for a bright future for their baby boy. Unbeknownst to them a tragic string of suicides was threatening to rock the entire county. What began with one tragic event in 2008 morphed into entire suicide clusters that claimed the lives of several hundred children. Shocked, Kravitz and others set out to investigate why so many of the youth - strangers to one another - would take their lives in affluent Silicon Valley.

What Lee discovered was a veritable contagion of ideas, emotions and behaviors that, like others in history, swept across their society. This social contagion, when at its most malevolent, threatens the vulnerable and shakes communities to their core. But at its most positive it can inspire courage, bravery, and point our way to a brighter future.

Are our goals, emotions and ideas really ours, or are we each at the mercy of this strange contagion'? And, if we are at the mercy of these forces, is it possible to turn their tide to our benefit? We'll be discussing these questions and more today, on the Truth Perspective.

 

[Ca.]

And this is also why learning (continual knowledge input) is so important! Our mind can only work with what we give it. And the more knowledge we have, the better prepared we are to pick up on the subtle signs and nuances of reality, and thus the better prepared we are to choose the best course of action in any given moment.

Case in point was Flight 1549 Miracle on the Hudson

Chesley Sullenberger
Early life
Chesley Sullenberger was born in Denison, Texas.[6] His father was a descendant of Swiss-German immigrants named Sollenberger.[7] He has one sister, Mary. The street on which he grew up in Denison was named after his mother's family. According to his sister, Sullenberger built model planes and aircraft carriers during his childhood, and says he became interested in flying after seeing military jets from an Air Force base near his house.[8] He went to school in Denison, and was consistently on the 99th percentile in every academic category.[9]

At the age of 12, his IQ was deemed high enough to join Mensa International.[9] In high school, he was the president of the Latin club, a first chair flutist, and an honor student.[10] He was an active member of the Waples Memorial United Methodist Church in Denison,[11] and graduated from Denison High School in 1969,[10] near the top of his class of about 350.[8] At 16, Sullenberger learned to fly in an Aeronca 7DC from a private airstrip near his home. He said the training he received from a local flight instructor influenced his aviation career for the rest of his life.[12]

Civil aviation career
Sullenberger was employed by US Airways and its predecessor airlines from 1980 until 2010.[3][19][20] (Pacific Southwest Airlines was acquired by US Air, later US Airways, in 1988.) He holds an Airline Transport Pilot Certificate for single and multi-engine airplanes, and a Commercial Pilot Certificate rating in gliders, as well as a flight instructor certificate for airplanes (single, multi-engine, and instrument), and gliders.[21] In total, he has more than 40 years and 20,000 hours of flying experience. In 2007,[13] he became the founder and CEO of Safety Reliability Methods, Inc. (SRM), a firm providing strategic and tactical guidance to enhance organizational safety, performance, and reliability.[22]

He has also been involved in a number of accident investigations conducted by the USAF and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), such as Pacific Southwest Airlines Flight 1771 and USAir Flight 1493.[23] He served as an instructor, Air Line Pilots Association Local Air Safety Chairman, accident investigator, and national technical committee member.[15][24] His safety work for ALPA led to the development of a Federal Aviation Administration Advisory Circular.[17] He was instrumental in developing and implementing the Crew Resource Management course that is used by US Airways, and he has taught the course to hundreds of airline crew members.[17][25]

Working with NASA scientists, he coauthored a paper on error-inducing contexts in aviation.[17] He was an air accident investigator for an NTSB inquiry into a major accident at Los Angeles International Airport, which "led to improved airline procedures and training for emergency evacuations of aircraft".[18] Sullenberger has also been studying the psychology behind keeping an airline crew functioning during a crisis.[26]

Sullenberger was active with his union, serving as chairman of a safety committee within the Air Line Pilots Association.[15]

He was a featured speaker for two panels: one on aviation and one on patient safety in medicine, at the High Reliability Organizations (HRO) 2007 International Conference in Deauville, France, from May 29 to 31, 2007.[27]

 

[Tuatha de Danaan]

Heroes that just do their jobs,. A wonderful breed.

 

[lilies]

This book is very useful for the diligent and astute investigator to find out what NOT to do. Mistakes: how to avoid them, so increase the chances of PSI working. Then its a lot easier to figure out what works. Best are Carpenters mentions of the statistics, the studies, what researchers found out did work in statistically significant number of cases and what didn't work.
The language of the book is horrible, a deliberate obfuscation, his decision to use either his newly made-up terms or use ridiculously snob - Hasnamuss - expert terms, when he could have used simple words, so we laymen would have instantly understood, WTH he is talking about here.

This book is clearly Political Warfare in Defunct Public Science. None of the publicly allowed-stamped-approved Public Sciences work and they are in a horrible state of deliberate neglect and criminal wrongdoing, considerable damage from vandalism done by influential psychopaths in science.
Carpenter first has to get through an insane amount of excrement that was thrown at the field of Parapsychology - first - and then can he get to ESP.

I just realized the excellent statistical utility of this book. Carpenter cannot and doesn't say how exactly can You make your ESP work via useful exercises and diligent work, but he says a lot, what mistakes the human mind makes - proven by numerous studies - mistakes that prevent ESP from working.

Statistical data and simply stating well studied facts is the real worth of this book. You won't find secret treatises and "magic" methods to enhance your PSI in this one.

Carpenter is more like David Paulides in his books, the Missing 411 series. We get lots of raw data and facts and the reader's task is to make up his/her own mind and think with a hammer and figure out how to use the excellent, dry statistical data and the descriptions & analyses of neurological processes provided in this theory.

I hated Carpenter for his stupidly convoluted terms he uses in this book, until I got to the chapter titled: PSI-MISSING AND ANXIETY. Then it dawned on me, what is going on here and how to make best use of his research in this excellent work!

 

[lilies]

This does have the appearance of a social mania or mass hysteria, but it could also be seen as the escalating activation of latent powers that are ordinarily unsuspected. (In fact, one might ask whether mass hysteria in general has a paranormal component, a kind of subliminal transference of thoughts and emotions that allows a certain state of mind to spread like wildfire and override rational restraints.)

I think similar mass mind-programming on the social level is going on with cancer: Government spreads the main idea - with heavily suggestive Mind-Inhibiting Instructions - that cancer cannot be healed. Only Big Pharma's expensive Chemo works against cancer and expensive surgical operations work => the nowadays widespread horrible slaughterhouse Butchery committed by professional surgeons. Therefore most idiots believe cancer cannot be healed to the point that many people die from cancer.

In contrast Souled individuals effectively disbelieving the Governments hypnosis clearly can heal themselves of serious cancer by taking any substance, like eating sand or swallowing Vit C. Doesn't matter what these people eat, they apparently have the powers that can heal cancer.

If the liberating ideas of these Souled individuals would be widespread - and Big Pharma's Anti-Life Ideas were demolished on the societal level - I think then similarly: a lot more people in this world would wake up to the idea that it is a working fact, that if they dine on sand or chew tree-bark or eat Vit C, they can perfectly heal their advanced stage cancer. Just because the Souled can do it.
Anything works literally, as long as something is consumed, chewed, eaten, so stuff taken into the digestive system convinces the instinctive thought-center that because a substance was taken into the body, now its time to fully authorize the process of activating latent psychic powers, which sweeps up cancer in mere days.

 

[lilies]

Reading this book further.. and trying to make some sense of it..

Comments in blue are mine.


Okay, so Mister Carpenter was useful, as long as he cited various statistics, hard results that were created by many parapsychological studies. These studies mostly involved a pair of unfortunates trying to guess each others thoughts or more interestingly cards guessing**. Why is card guessing interesting? See ** at the end of this post.

When no lab experiments were involved then of course he lists - or rather gives references to - exotic PSI accounts and researchers trying to make some sense of those, calling it Re-Evaluations of these and these famous anomalous events (that did NOT happen in a lab environment). White papers of these publications can be found on the net freely available. For example, one interesting white-paper I found, re-evaluated a historically important medium's manifesting water leaking into rooms either as a trickle or a flood on multiple occasions with witnesses present. Mediums fake then real, talking to the dead and bringing back info on the deceased they couldn't have known at all.

But when poor idiot Mister Carpenter STOPS citing DATA / statistics in this book - this type of book of his aptly called by G. a result of "Scientists Of The New Formation" - Mister Carpenter is starting to pull his apple-cart back to his Half Cooked-Cooky Theory. A theory, which he is UNABLE to formulate in simple words so everybody might decide if his proposal about PSI is valid or not.. But he is very stubborn to use his own needlessly convoluted phrasings, so people have a hard time making out What The Heck Mister Carpenter is WiseAcring about???!! As a result people are almost unable to decide if he should be called a researcher or just..
The Village Idiot = Hasnamuss™ ©(Master Gurdjieff).

He is making a serious mistake in chapter 6:

Three things that are commonly assumed, implicitly as much as explicitly, are that
1. psi is a collection of anomalous experiences,
2. that psi is some kind of ability, and that
3. psi stimuli somehow cause psi responses. [numbering is mine]

From the First Sight perspective, these are not helpful assumptions [?? says The Hasnamuss], and some alternative ways of construing things are preferred.
To sum up in advance, [here comes Mister Carpenter with all his guns firing]
1. psi is not a kind of experience,
2. nor is it a collection of abilities,
3. nor are psi responses caused by psi stimuli.

Okay, so he then starts to enumerate why PSI is not consciously used and PSI users really don't have an ability just some weird high luck at happenchance / coincidence to happen to find things that went missing with a pendulum over a map. And of course there is no pre-cognition at all. But most importantly PSI is NOT used voluntarily as a result of a determined, serious, conscious intent.

== So I couldn't take any longer his denial of - to our understanding - PSI as the result of lucky "juiced up" individuals having power centers (C's), that allow the use of PSI.. the same way as a hunter is allowed to hunt masterfully, when he procures a masterwork hunting rifle (now having a tool) and goes practicing in the wilderness. ==

What Mister Carpenter is unable to understand is above between ==

Here is the simplest explanation of PSI: [I think]

PSI users can use/manifest PSI as long as they have FUEL = a rare type of energy that they gain very slowly, just as a very thirsty movie-actor placing his cup under the meager outflow of a spring in the desert, which spring is almost dried up and the water droplets come verrrrrrry slowly. As a result the cup is only very slowly getting filled up with "precious spring water" = fuel for PSI. That's it.. just a couple of lines of explanation.

1. I think, people - PSI users described in section marked by == - are able to use PSI, because they have the power-centers = as tools AND because they are alive, meaning they have life-energy / life-force, which is slowly re-charged.

2. Life force - as G. described - can be converted into various types of Hydrogens = various types of energies. The type of energy or Hydrogen that is converted into PSI-fuel, I think, is Archangel Energy Type 6: Look at it in this picture. As you can see a Human and an Archangel (higher than 3rd Density being, probably 6thD?) share energy type 24 and 6.

Impressions enter the human machine in the top-floor as Hydrogen 48 and can become transformed into Hydrogen 24 and Hydrogen 12

Angels - probably 5thD or 4thD beings - don't share any energy type with humans on 3rdD, only Archangels do.


The difficulty of gaining energy types 24 and 6 is implied in G.'s explanation. I think it is 6, because it is even rarer and more mystical energy type. Obviously humans SOMEHOW gain or transform Type 6, I think, and they do it Oh-So very slowly!! Don't hang-up so much on G.'s Hydrogens, just take them as types of rare energy that - in order to be gained - MUST BE TRANSFORMED from lower energy types in order to be used as PSI fuel. Type 24 will do, but of course if you want "High Octane Nitro Rocket Fuel" for PSI, then you have to use 6.
Oh.. you used PSI and you are already out of energy? Oh, boy.. Then you obviously ARE DOWN to a bad compromise and you are forced to use energy Type 24, which is a lower octane fuel and I think you will be only able TO SEE LESS with lower type / lower octane energy.
I deliberately didn't mention Type 12, because serious PSI (for a TASK / Project C, which every parapsychologist denies that it can be done) demands a very rare energy type and I think, it must be Type-6. That's it.. Thank you for reading.


**
Well, cards guessing should be more interesting, since I think we can all agree that any card to be guessed first has to have a number printed on it. Or a picture, or a letter. So any card that can be guessed is printed.
Well.. who wants to guess cards in a lab?? Just to use up your precious PSI energy, that you labourously transformed by hard Work? Are you getting paid as a psychic in a lab? I doubt it..
So why might be getting really good at cards guessing an excellent idea?
Well, as you can see here, lottery-scratch tickets

are just like laboratory guessing-cards, they have numbers and symbols already printed on them. So they are like guessing cards, right? And also these scratch-tickets are in the PRESENT, meaning the data is already on them and a PSI user just has to go clairvoyant and SEE the numbers and symbols under the protective layer that needs to be scratched away. So what's holding a PSI user back?
Well.. ENERGY. These scratch tickets are very numerous and a winning ticket is very rare and "PSI-scanning" all the tickets - by hand like Geller and other experienced pendulum users do - takes a lot of energy.... just to determine the - probably disappointing - result: there is no winning "scratch-ticket" in the lottery booth this day.
This unfortunately would consume many months worth of super-precious and very slowly trickling / recharging PSI-energy.

This is why Geller went for the gold, detecting - essentially Radar-Locating it - literally By Hand. Just as experienced pendulum users become able to use their hands as Sensing Instruments.
Gold under the earth is the winning ticket, its stationary, its always there and Geller allegedly went to find it with a helicopter. Well, he must have been successful, because when I saw a video of his house on YT, I could only describe amount of super-expensive furniture and gold ornamentation there as "obscenely rich".

 

[whitecoast]

Near the start of the book James Carpenter provides a (long) summary of what his research has found to be the "corollaries" of PSI, i.e. what types of circumstances or situations or temperaments correlate with a certain expression of ESP, and whether that expression percolates up into the conscious awareness or if it just remains in the subconscious awareness, influencing action in a more subtle way.

Personal Corollary

A person’s psychological transactions with the universe are best understood in terms of personal meaning rather than impersonal process. Even in regard to unconscious processing of reality, things are essentially what they mean to an individual in the context of the individual’s concerns. These transactions extend beyond the physical boundaries of the person and cannot be adequately represented by reductionistic accounts in the impersonal language of chemistry and physics. Such accounts are useful within their frames of reference, but they are secondary to the psychological meaning of events and not primary to them. The unconscious psychological processes that constitute consciousness are personal and unconsciously volitional. Personal proclivities, emotional preferences, personal memories, and personal goals are important aspects of these processes for each organism. More abstract factors such as beliefs, intentions, values, and attitudes that potentially may be articulated are also important considerations for these processes in the case of human beings. Unconscious thinking is automatic, but it is also done purposefully by an individual in the context of personal intentions.

Ubiquity Corollary

Meanings engaged distally by way of psi contribute actively and continuously to the array of sources for unconscious thought. Their distance from the sensory, potentially conscious boundaries of the organism may be along axes of space or time. These nonlocal meanings constantly contribute to the formation of experience and are used to guide other unconscious behaviors as well. Therefore, psi is a normal, continuously active, unconscious aspect of psychological functioning. ESP contributes to the formation of experience by bringing distal meanings to the task of creating consciousness and guiding unconscious choices. Since its contribution is always available prior to any sensory information, it may be referred to as First Sight (as opposed to its traditional designation as second sight, which would imply that it is an unusual phenomenon, occurring to some persons in a secondary, supplementary way following the primary process of sensory perception). PK contributes to the formation of experience by bringing intention to bear upon the physical processes of the nervous system. It contributes to the formation of intentional (conscious and unconscious) action by engaging the object of intention.

Integration Corollary

Other preconscious processes in addition to psi contribute to the formation of experience and action. These include motives and values held by the individual, memories, imaginary possibilities, and subliminal sensory information and other visceral activities. These different streams are processed together in the formation of experience and action in a rapid, holistic, efficient, unconscious manner to form integrated products of action and experience.

What is integrated we may call the unconscious psychological situation of the person at the moment. This understanding of the situation is different from the one we would expect from the physical sciences as normally understood. An ESP target in an ESP experiment, for example, is not in any sense physically present and active for the percipient in the experiment. If it were available for the senses it would be a poor ESP target. Since such a target exists as a part of the confluence of interpersonal meanings active at the moment (basically as an intention of the experimenter, interacting with the cooperative intention of the percipient), this implies that meanings and intentions regnant at the moment primarily constitute the situation. Representations of some of these meanings and intentions are immediately present for consciousness (as by a memory or a sensory sensation), while representations of others are not.

Processing of the different streams of potential information is assumed to follow similar patterns. Patterns found in regard to one stream of information will be generally expected to obtain in others as well, although it may also be that some patterns are unique to a given source. For example, many patterns observed with the contribution of memory material to experience will be expected to be obtained when studying the contribution of subliminal information, and patterns found with the contribution of extrasensory perception will be expected to be observed in the functioning of memory. Such “mapping” of patterns across these different domains of study should be heuristically useful.

Anticipation Corollary

The mind seeks to anticipate events.2 In its pursuit of the construction of the meaning of experience, the mind uses preconscious processes in anticipatory ways that are not in themselves conscious but that may be inferred from other acts of consciousness or behavior. For example, an unconscious subliminal stimulus may lead an individual to interpret a later ambiguous situation in a direction that is congruent with the prior stimulus. It is as if the mind is using the subliminal stimulus to help to anticipate the meaning of the situation as it comes to develop. Another way of saying this is that the subliminal stimulus is contextual for and anticipatory about the ambiguous situation. In a similar way, a thematically congruent mood may be evoked by a subliminal stimulus, and this affective posture then serves as a prompt for the individual to behave in some way congruent with that mood when an appropriate situation becomes apparent. Memories, personal concerns, and extrasensory information all contribute to the formation of experience and behavior in similar ways, evoking an unconscious interest in certain lines of meaning, both cognitive and emotional.

Weighing and Signing Corollary

Along with switching, these are the most important new constructs in First Sight theory. They are used to explain how unconscious thought uses unconscious material in constructing consciousness and behavior. Implicit information (sensory and extrasensory) is first acted upon unconsciously by an action of weighting, in which all of the items in the vast array of potentially available information are sensed to be more or less important. The sense of importance of some piece of information is determined by its pertinence in terms of the needs and goals that are predominant at the time. The item that is weighted most heavily at any given moment will be focused upon by unconscious attention. These needs and goals may be relatively stable and chronic: for example, the need for air to breathe or the need to avoid danger or the wish to protect a loved one. They may also be transitory and situation specific, like the need to win in a competitive situation or the wish to avoid a particular obstacle while driving a car. The heavy weighting of an item does not automatically assure its direct participation in experience or action. After it is weighted, an item must be signed.

A heavily weighted item of potential information (one sensed to be important in the moment) is signed3 either positively or negatively. If it is signed positively, it is included in the developing experience and/or action. If it is signed negatively, it is excluded. As elaborated below (Bidirectionality Corollary), signing is a function of unconscious intention.

Weighting and signing are generally applied hierarchically and sequentially in complex situations. Two concerns may present to a person, one of which is weighted more heavily than the other. Then that pair of concerns may itself appear in the context of some other concerns that are weighted more heavily still. For example, a person with a high need for achievement and also a strong wish to defend a primary relationship may first sense that one of two possible courses of action offers more opportunity for achievement, and it is more heavily weighted. Then the person may sense at the same time that a loved one is in danger, and this concern preempts the achievement concern. Then the course of thought or action that offers greater protection for the loved one is weighted more heavily than anything else that is unconsciously present at the moment. Then this apparently most pertinent element of meaning is signed either positively or negatively. In ordinary life outside the laboratory (in which a few variables are controlled and presented at a time), this complexity must be the rule rather than the exception.

These processes of weighting and signing are presumed to go on continuously at all levels of mental functioning, conscious and unconscious. Priorities are established (weighting), and then a point of focus is chosen (signing). The formation of a visual experience shows one employment of this process. Out of the huge array of potential visual experience that is available in the moment, some aspect is selected as most pertinent using cues of depth perception (say, someone approaching in a crowded room). The person coming closer and still closer is sensed as more immediately relevant than others (such a use of depth perception has obvious survival value, from an evolutionary perspective). Once depth perception and perception of motion help us understand what is most immediately pertinent, then focus is used to sharpen the visual experience of the person approaching and at the same moment suppress immediately surrounding visual information that would be distracting if experienced. The approaching individual (perhaps especially his face and hands) is signed positively and discriminated, while surrounding visual stimuli are signed negatively and excluded from awareness.

Summation Corollary

The content of conscious experience and the thrust of implicit experience such as emotional states and behavioral choices are constituted in a summative way by unconscious thought. Elements are weighted (assigned a degree of importance), signed (positively or negatively, for inclusion or exclusion), and then roughly averaged. The individual’s values and goals and understanding of the current situation and its requirements are referred to in this weighting and signing of elements. This process of implicitly averaging (analogous to mathematical averaging) is carried out on the numerous sources of potential meaning, and a “best fit” is decided upon. The amount of potential information that can be processed holistically in this way is of indefinite extent.

Sources of information that are close in time to the present moment, important to the concerns of the organism, and potentially verifiable in terms of sensory experience (current or remembered) will tend to be weighted most heavily, but a vast amount of less local meaning is continually apprehended as well. Different streams of implicit meaning may reach some degree of summation and still not contribute additively to the final content of consciousness. For example, elements implying danger may summate sufficiently to arouse a mood of agitation in an individual, but this mood may not be apparent to the person himself or herself (although it might be discernable through a measure of galvanic skin response). Consciously, the individual might only be aware of focusing upon something else, such as some conceptual problem. Streams of implicit meaning may also summate sufficiently that they influence nonreflective behavioral choices (to drive more slowly or more quickly, to fly to a certain meeting or decline to do so), but they still never contribute additively to the content of consciousness to a degree that would permit an awareness of their participation in the choice.

Bidirectionality Corollary

This corollary elaborates the notion of signing, which is part of the process of summation. The organism makes use of each element of meaning available to unconscious thought in either of two ways. It may either “turn toward it” and appropriate it as such in the construction of experience, affect, or action, or it may “turn away from it” and exclude it from the construction of experience, affect, or action. In the first case we may say that the element is signed positively, and in the second case it is signed negatively.

If an element of potential experience is “turned toward” (signed positively) and appropriated into consciousness, it is said to be assimilated. For example, if one assimilates the memory content or subliminal exposure or the extrasensory meaning of an apple, the assimilation tends to be expressed in the conscious experience of the idea of an apple. If the element is “turned away from” (signed negatively) and excluded, it is said to be subject to contrast, and more generally, disassimilated. The conscious experience will not include the idea of an apple, and if many such conscious experiences and unconscious behaviors are compiled, the idea of apple will be found to be expressed less often than it should by chance alone.

The same thing applies to unconscious behaviors, although the term has not been used in this way before. If apple is assimilated, unconscious behaviors will tend to move toward the potential involvement with an apple. If it is disassimilated, such behaviors will tend away from that possibility. As these unconscious behaviors accrue over time, the encounter with an apple will become distinctly more likely or unlikely. Assimilation and disassimilation are the two modes of preconscious processing.

Thus, we may say that unconscious thought is bidirectional—meaning is either assimilated or disassimilated (avoided). It is important to remember that disassimilating something is not the same thing as ignoring it or making no use of it at all. Disassimilation is an active avoidance. These alternative modes of making use of implicit meanings apply to psi and also to other streams of potential information, such as subliminal stimulation, unattended physiological processes, and latent memories. The mind also treats these streams bidirectionally.

Intentionality Corollary

These two modes of utilization, assimilative and disassimilative (or additive and subtractive), are a function of unconscious intention in regard to an element of potential meaning. If the element is sensed to be useful and desirable in the context of the individual’s situation in the moment, then the mode chosen will be the assimilative one. If the element is sensed to not be useful or desirable, the mode of contrast will be chosen.

If an element is assimilated, the resulting experience or action will be seen to reflect aspects of that meaning. For example, if a subliminal prime is a red apple, and it is assimilated, an elicited free association frequently will be found to express qualities of redness and/or roundness and/or suitability for eating, etc. The element will contribute additively. These positive references will be seen, across instances, to occur more frequently than in the case of other free associations not so subliminally stimulated.

If an element is disassimilated, or subjected to contrast, the opposite effect will be observed. The consequent experience or action will be found to not express those qualities. The element will contribute subtractively. In regard to a sensory subliminal stimulus, such references will be observed to occur less frequently than in the case of other free associations not subliminally stimulated by the pertinent material. (This is an important distinction that may be initially difficult to grasp. In a situation of disassimilation or contrast, the potential meaning is not simply ignored or left out of consideration, it is positively excluded and avoided to a degree that can be statistically discernable).

Assimilative use of psi-apprehended meanings in a psi experiment is called psi-hitting by parapsychologists. It is expressed by scores in ESP or PK tests that are significantly higher than the level expected by chance or by an increased likelihood of other emotional or behavioral expressions of the target. In a study on the formation of perceptions or judgments with sensory information, cognitive psychologists call it positive priming. It is expressed by associative or affective expressions of the primed material.

Disassimilative use of psi meaning in a parapsychology study is called psi-missing. This is expressed as scores that are lower than the level expected by chance or in the evocation of feelings or behaviors that are contrary to the implications of the material. Cognitive psychologists call the analogous suppression of sensory information negative priming.

Several important guides for this intentional choice can be listed, and others surely await elucidation. Most are drawn from research in cognitive, social, and personality psychology.4 Several considerations pertain to qualities of the information being psychically prehended:

1. Because sensory information (either coming directly from physical events or from other persons) is a reliable source of experience, intention will habitually and normatively turn toward sensory information when it is available in preference to lingering with the innately implicit information of psi, or other purely unconscious potentiations of experience.

2. The degree to which a bit of potential meaning is congruent with other available cues and with the content of conscious experience that is already forming is one consideration. Material sensed to be congruent will tend to be assimilated, and material sensed to be incongruent will be disassimilated. For example, if one is engaged in a task of quickly naming colors, suboptimal primes involving color will tend to be assimilated while primes involving irrelevant meanings will tend to be disassimilated.5

3. Material that is associated with previously rewarding experiences and that is valued will often tend to be assimilated, as opposed to material associated with previously negative experiences.6

4. Material that is understood to be pertinent to an individual’s general values and goals will tend to be assimilated, as opposed to material that is sensed to be irrelevant to those values and goals. For example, a person with a habitually high level of concern for his or her social presence in situations (an “extravert”) will be more assimilative of unconscious cues regarding interpersonal attention and interest and less assimilative of less interpersonal cues; or a person whose racial attitudes are highly salient will be more responsive to unconscious cues involving racial grouping than will persons without such a high level of that concern.7 Similarly, information that is congruent with a person’s stable attitudes is more accessible to long-term memory recall than is information that is discrepant with such attitudes.8

5. More specifically, material that is of a sort that frequently has been found to be pertinent and useful before will tend to be assimilated as opposed to material that has not been found to be pertinent and useful. For example, a person for whom religion is very meaningful will be more prone to assimilate cues implying religion than more secular cues.9

6. Material that is of a sort for which the individual has a working frame of reference based upon prior experience will tend to be assimilated as opposed to material of a sort that is strange and outside of the individual’s frame of reference. For example, English-speaking persons have been found to assimilate ESP targets in English and disassimilate targets in an unknown language.10

7. Material that is understood to be pertinent to the task at hand will tend to be assimilated as opposed to material that is sensed to be irrelevant to the task at hand. People will tend to assimilate unconscious cues that are mathematical when they are engaged in mathematical work, or verbal cues while writing an essay, or musical cues when composing a sonata.

8. Material that is sensed to come from a source that is understood to be reliable and important will tend to be assimilated as opposed to material that is sensed to come from some source seen as unreliable or irrelevant. For example, persons with different political attitudes toward certain candidates have been found to respond differently to unconscious cues associated with those candidates11; and persons who believe that ESP is a real source of potential information tend to assimilate ESP information while persons who do not believe that tend to disassimilate such information.12

9. Material that is sensed, via psi, to be relevant to some desirable outcome will tend to be assimilated, and material that is sensed to be associated with a less desirable outcome will tend to be disassimilated. Thus, psi information may provide a moderating context for assimilation/disassimilation of other psi processes. As one example, an ESP study by Stanford and Rust (1977) arranged a contingency unknown to participants such that their assimilation of targets resulted in a positive outcome for another person, while their disassimilation of the targets resulted in an unpleasant outcome for the other person. Results showed a statistically significant excess of outcomes in which persons were helped by successful assimilation. Such results suggest that a psi prehension of such contingencies provides a meaningful context that guides the unconscious approach to ESP targets.

10. Material that is sensed to be pertinent to highly critical issues in terms of an individual’s needs will tend to be assimilated, even if it might be disassimilated for other reasons. For example, information about the life-or-death welfare of a loved one would be expected to be assimilated as opposed to information that lacks such critical importance, even in situations in which that source (ESP or memory, for example) would ordinarily be thought to be irrelevant.13

11. Material that is congruent with a person’s emotional state at the moment will tend to be assimilated, while material that is not congruent will tend to be disassimilated. For example, subliminal primes connoting unhappiness aroused greater activation of the amygdale (as measured by a functional magnetic resonance imaging [FMRI]) for depressed persons than for persons who were not depressed, while the amygdale response to subliminal primes involving happiness showed the opposite pattern.14 Similarly, research participants in an ESP study who were in a more anxious state of mind tended to disassimilate (psi-miss) targets that were packaged together (out of sight) with potentially threatening, erotic material and tended to assimilate (hit) targets that were packaged with neutral material. Nonanxious participants showed the opposite pattern.15

12. The extent to which cognitive closure has already been attained is another consideration in determining what kinds of material will be assimilated or disassimilated. If the individual is already fairly clear about what is being experienced (or should be experienced) or intended, then only preconscious material that is highly congruent with the determined experience will be assimilated. The criteria for assimilation will be stricter and narrower than in the case in which cognitive closure is still unattained. In the case of relatively clear cognitive closure, a much broader range of other potential material will tend to be disassimilated. If I look at some stimulus array that I construe definitively as “a swarm of bees,” my mind will automatically exclude from consideration preconscious information from any source that is contrary to the idea I have reached. On the other hand, if I think of it only vaguely as “a confusing cloud of shapes,” unconscious processing will be open to sampling a broad range of unconscious material for potentially helpful information.16 This is congruent with the maxim from remote viewing literature in parapsychology, that one must “say what you see and not what it looks like” if positive access to extrasensory information is desired,17 because the mental act of deciding the meaning of a thing is cognitive closure. It is also congruent with the observation that participants whose utterances in a ganzfeld experiment were more cognitively elaborated were especially likely to miss the correct target.18

Switching Corollary

Over a period of time, the unconscious posture of assimilation or exclusion may be relatively constant in regard to a particular source of meaning, or it may switch from one to the other. This switching will occur at some frequency, sometimes more rapidly and sometimes more slowly. This constancy of posture is a function of the consistency and purity of unconscious intention, and this in turn is determined by the relative weight of the information over time and by other variables. These variables include situational factors that promote or diminish critical analysis and changes of approach in a task, certain moods and states of mind, and persistent individual differences in those conceptual styles, moods, and states of mind. Something that is the most heavily weighted thing over time will evoke little switching. Something assigned less weight will be more subject to switching. Another way of expressing this is in terms of the concept of preconscious attention. The mind focuses unconscious attention on whatever most seems to fit the criteria of unconscious intention. Switching psi modes is presumed to reflect a change in unconscious attention in regard to the content. A heavily weighted item is given relatively consistent attention, and this is expressed as little switching of direction. Something with little weight, or with ambivalent weight, will be subject to more rapid switching. Many things can influence the consistency of unconscious attention. These include characteristics of the material itself, the nature of the situation, the mood of the individual, and more lasting characteristics of the person.

1. Information that is highly central to the dominant concerns of the person will be expected to dominate unconscious attention and receive little switching. For example, danger to oneself or to some loved one is a universally dominant concern. Indications of such threat have been found to command attention in processing sensory information.19 Threats that are understood to be severe and imminent evoke attention strongly and quickly20 and hold it over time,21 even though cognitive processing may be impeded. These things are expected to have similar effects on unconscious attention with extrasensory information. Sustained attention is expressed by slow directional switching.

2. Situations that facilitate critical, self-conscious analysis of performance and alertness to shifting situational concerns will tend to speed switching, and situations that promote a consistent direction of purpose and undistracted focus will tend to slow it.

3. As a consequence of this, shifts in situations with their contextual demands will tend to hasten shifts in unconscious direction of inclusion/exclusion.

4. Moods or states of disinterest, fatigue, fitful distraction, skeptical disengagement with a psi task, emotional distance, and shifting of intention from irritation or uncertainty will all tend to speed switching.

5. Moods or states that are unusually expansive, socially responsive or generally stimulus-bound will tend to produce rapid shifts of attention and lead to rapid switching.

6. States in which one is markedly self-conscious22 or self-objectified23 will be accompanied with more rapid switching.

7. Moods of strong motivation regarding the psi task, self-confidence, consistent purpose, and emotional security all tend to be associated with less switching.

8. Feeling that one is performing something with unusual “flow,”24 or that one is “in the zone,” will be accompanied by very little self-consciousness and self-objectivization and will tend to involve little switching.

Several more or less stable dimensions of difference among people are also expected to be pertinent to rapidity of psi switching in a psi task. Persons who are disposed to switch rapidly include those who:

• tend to approach situations cognitively and analytically
• lack consistent purpose and motivation
• take a detached-observer posture toward most situations
• are chronically ambivalent are cognitively disorganized
• are highly distractible

Persons who tend to switch slowly, conversely, tend to be persons who:

• approach situations globally and holistically
• are strongly and consistently purposive
• engage themselves wholeheartedly in situations
• are not overly self-doubting or uncertain
• are well-integrated cognitively are prone to hold focus purposively and not become distracted are dissociative (when in certain states). Highly dissociative people often experience altered ways of being that are more complex and enduring than simple moods. They may experience what is called “alter personalities.” For many such persons these subpersonalities are characterized by intentional approaches that are unusually single-minded and lacking in what cognitive psychologists call “cognitive flexibility” (the ability to shift cognitive sets based upon changing circumstances). As one such person once explained to me, her parts existed because each “has a job to do.” With her, as with others I have known, when a given part is dominant, its single job is all that matters and things that would provoke a shift in tack or attention in most people are scarcely perceived. When a person is in such intentionally simplified alter states, such persons would be expected to show little switching. When shifting between inner states, they would be expected to show marked switching.

Extremity Corollary

This corollary defines the consequences of the rapidity of switching. If switching occurs relatively slowly over some period of activity (for example, in a psychological or parapsychological test), then there will be a relatively dense accumulation of either additive or subtractive references to the meaning in question across the time of observation. When looked at as a whole, a clear additive or subtractive reference to the potential meaning will be discernable across the elements of response (for example, calls in a forced-choice ESP test, bits counted in a PK trial, or ideas expressed in a free-association procedure).

If relatively slow switching continues to obtain across a number of blocks of performance (as in the case of several runs of ESP or PK testing, each made up of several guesses or bits of activity), then the level of reference seen in the blocks will be relatively extreme and clearly discernable. In an ESP test, the run scores will tend to be consistently divergent from the line of chance expectation. In parapsychology, an accumulation of highly chance-divergent scores has been referred to in several different terms, including extreme scoring, large variance, or high scoring magnitude.

If switching occurs rapidly over a period of activity (for example, several times within the span of an ESP test or free-association exercise), then additive and subtractive influences will tend to be expressed with roughly equivalent frequency, with the result that neither will be discernable as such. It will appear in this case as if the potential meaning had no influence at all in the formation of the experience or action. In terms of chance expectation, a score indicating degree of reference will be near the level expected by chance.

If relatively rapid switching is sustained over a number of blocks of effort (for example, across several runs of ESP responses), then the resultant set of scores will be seen to hover so closely to the level of chance expectation that the overall result is not reasonably attributable to chance. In parapsychology, this phenomenon has been referred to as small extremity, tight variance, or constricted scoring.

In terms of a parapsychological experiment, the accumulation of either chance-level or chance-divergent scores may be referred to as the degree of scoring extremity.

Scoring extremity is assumed to express the rate of unconscious switching between the postures of assimilation and contrast in regard to the psi information within the periods of performance. Scoring extremity is a characteristic either of performance that samples independent bits of response (as in the runs of forced-choice ESP calls) or of the more complex performance in tasks in which many subresponses are subjectively combined into single, general responses. For example, in a ganzfeld or remote viewing trial, a participant expresses a string of images, thoughts, and feelings. Someone then subjectively combines these elements into an overall impression that is then compared to the target. The degree of correspondence is expressed by the extent to which the summed impression can be seen to be associated with the correct target, as opposed to its degree of association with a field of decoys, or pseudotargets. A strong hit is the case in which the correct target is chosen in first place out of a field of several (often four or five) potential targets. A strong miss is the case in which it is chosen last. A chance-level score is the case in which it is picked in the middle of the set. A collection made up largely of highly chance-divergent scores (such as one, two, seven, and eight, when a field of eight potential targets is used) thus expresses extreme scoring, and it may be assumed to reflect relatively little switching across the different elements of performance (images, feelings, etc.) for each trial. Conversely, a collection of scores that hover closely to the chance line (three, four, or five among eight alternatives) expresses tight scoring, and this is assumed to represent rapid switching within the periods of performance such that one image might lead toward the target, then the next away from it, and so on.

Both slow switching and rapid switching are useful in everyday psychological functioning for different purposes. Slow switching is useful for making it highly likely that a given meaning will either be accessed or avoided in experience. Rapid switching is useful for rendering some potential meaning utterly irrelevant to ongoing experience, averting any distracting influence that might otherwise arise from the potential meaning.25 Rapid switching is presumably adopted unconsciously in order to assure that the information involved plays no part at all in the formation of experience and action.

While rate of switching in a psi task is expected to affect the extremity of psi scores, in everyday life we might say that it affects the experiential psi density of experience. Persistent unconscious attention upon something will lead it to be densely represented (implicitly) in experience. Rapidly switching unconscious attention will lead its implicit referents to be dense or definitively excluded.

I listed various considerations in the discussion of the Switching Corollary that affect the rate of switching, such as meaningful versus meaningless information, situations favoring set shifting versus those inducing consistent focus, purposeful and cognitively organized persons versus ones who are indifferent or distractible, etc. These will all be important predictors of scoring extremity in psi tests. They will similarly affect the implicative psi density of everyday experience.

Inadvertency and Frustration Corollary

Psi engagements as such are intrinsically unconscious and not available to an individual’s conscious experience. However, they do regularly contribute to the formation of conscious experience, and they do this by the arousal of anticipatory networks of ideas and feelings (assuming that they are heavily weighted, afforded slow switching, and approached with the intention of assimilation). Because of this arousal, their action can be glimpsed consciously only by observing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are inadvertent; that is, not intentional and not obviously caused by any current experiences.

When a perception is formed and securely construed, or an action is carried out and completed, the contribution of the preliminary unconscious processes that have led to these things will be invisible. Closure will have been achieved both cognitively and behaviorally, and this closure will dominate awareness to the exclusion of implicit constituents. However, if a perception or action is blocked or otherwise not completed and the intention guiding those things is thwarted, then implicit expressions of the unconscious anticipatory processes may be visible in the form of inadvertent aspects of experience (for example, dreams or slips of the tongue) or behavior that is unconsciously expressive or sometimes in a physical activity on the part of something beyond the individual’s body.

Even as unconscious material available to the processes of unconscious thought, extrasensory “information” is only allusory, pointing to its potential content by virtue of the anticipatory cognitive and conative networks that are aroused by it. Since it has never yet reached consciousness and been construed as having the explicit content that is potential in it, it cannot provide more explicit information to unconscious thinking. This is in contrast to information that has been encoded consciously in verbally explicit form (“the new car is red”). Consciously encoded information is available for unconscious thought in its fully explicit form as an unconscious memory.

Individuals differ in the frequency at which they generate such consciously available inadvertencies and in the facility with which they correctly interpret them. Someone who generates many such experiences and has become skillful in interpreting them is thought of as relatively psychic.

Liminality Corollary

From the point of view of consciousness, we may think of such inadvertent and allusory experiences as liminal ones, in terms of the boundary between conscious and unconscious thought. In them, unconscious thought is not directly available to awareness (by its nature, it never is), but some of its implicit expressions are. Conscious experiences that are liminal include such things as dreams, moods, impulses, spontaneous internal imagery, preferences and aversions, acts of forgetting, hunches and vague impressions, jokes, judgments, and odd symptoms or errors (ranging from benign slips to psychotic symptoms). To one person observing another, nondeliberate, nonverbal but expressive behaviors may also be liminal in regard to the unconscious processes of the person being observed. In addition to considerations pertinent to a specific source or item of information (as spelled out in the Intentionality Corollary), individuals differ in the extent to which they tend to make use of such liminal experiences. Some variables affecting this can be specified.

1. Habitual interest in aspects of experience that are liminal facilitates expression of psi processes. We may think of this as a person’s openness. The more such interest or openness on the part of the person to the kinds of experiences that imply unconscious thought, the more they will make unconscious reference to psi material (and other streams of unconscious material), and the more they will be likely to consciously grasp elements of it. They will also be more likely to express these elements in their less conscious goal-directed behavior. On the contrary, a very practical, analytical, and concretely realistic orientation to life that systematically ignores liminal experience will tend to lead one to either disassimilate psi processes or subject them to rapid switching. There are a number of psychological constructs that to some extent imply this openness toward liminal experience. Openness to experience has been found to be a dominant factor in general personality batteries. It is most often measured by the NEO-PI test. On that inventory, the facets of openness to feelings, openness to fantasy, and openness to aesthetics are especially pertinent to liminal interest as it is conceived here. Besides openness itself, other relevant constructs include transliminality and intuitiveness. Several other, more general, constructs may partially reflect this dimension as well, such as competence, ego strength, and resilience.

2. The degree to which a person is engaged in creative work should be an important predictor of the extent to which they make use of liminal experience. Artists, creative scientists, and other creative persons habitually make reference to a level of experience that is not completely or easily verbalized in order to give form to some new meaning. Such persons are more likely to make use of psi prehensions along with other implicit sources of information in their creative efforts.

3. Highly dissociative people show an unusual tendency to compartmentalize areas of their experience and volition. They do not “smooth over” internal inconsistencies in emotional states, wishes, and memory streams into a single, socially presented persona, as most persons do. Rather, in different states they may display segregated memories or structures of intention or senses of identity that are unusually distinct from each other, and perhaps even strongly contradictory to one another. Such persons sometimes grow accustomed to noting and interpreting their own implicit expressions of meaning in order to keep track of what other parts of themselves are doing and feeling. Some such people I have known appear to comfortably make use of psi-implying information along with other implicit, liminal material. This is an area that has not been explored scientifically very much, but it may be fruitful.

4. Persons high in what has been called “merger motivation”26 may tend to be especially open to liminal information, particularly as it pertains to the experiences of other persons. Some parapsychological research27 has begun to explore this question, but only further work can determine its reliability and generality.

5. Fearful (anxious, neurotic) people can be expected to narrowly restrict the range of the liminal material that they will assimilate. More emotionally secure and less anxious persons should generally tend to be more open and more prone to assimilating psi prehensions when they are otherwise pertinent to their intentions. Generally fearful people who are also dissociative (see number 3, this section) should tend to be exceptions to this rule when they are in more dissociated states.