I reckon there must be timing aspects too. My own ('non-scientific') experiences with influencing outcomes is that the influence often needs to be sustained for some time.
Sunil

Thats really fantastic info, very exiting news! almost as much as this chocolate cheese cake Im indulging in right now! very yummy!
Love to hear more
V

Yeah ... and the trick or challenging part is to be able to play the role you want within the One Mind, i.e., so you've got to do what it takes to be what you desire, as there are all these rules that the One Mind follows. But there is always room for change in the One Mind, and that can be the hardest part, especially if one challenges the many parts of the One. Plus, I think there are a lot of dark corners in the One Mind that are waiting for the light or to be woken up. Oh well ... just imagining and thinking out loud. This reminds me of another song that I heard on the radio this morning that I really liked, which said something to the effect that 'craziness was an aspect of the dark.' So the Light is freedom from all this madness that entertains us until we cannot bear the pain anymore. ... I guess :-)

Thank you Deepak!

Love, Char

Dear Deepak,

This is old news. You didn't give specific dates
but it seems to be from about 25 years ago. I've read about these results in a few books from the 90's.

1% or 2% better than average does not constitute
an 'outstanding' achievement in my book. And I've
flipped a few quarters for dollars in my day.

Professional gamblers do way better than average.
We all have the ability to "get on a roll", the trick is in
knowing when to stop while you're ahead, so you don't lose your
you-know-what. The risk is what makes it fun.

In this experiment there was no pressure applied to produce
favorable results. Let's see these hot shots pull it off
when their wallets are on the line. I would bet
they end up on the 1% to 2% negative end of the deal.
Neither would they find boredom a nuisance.

PEAR parapsychology lab at Princeton is now CLOSED for good, after more than two decades of failure to producing convincing results.

I would be happy if Deepak Chopra presents us new experiments which haven't already been debunked.

Deepak Chopra: Yet like the psychics, ordinary people could will more zeros than ones, or ones than zeros, about 51-52% of the time. This seems like a slim margin, but it turns out to defy chance by a ratio of a trillion to one. It’s the utter certainty of the outcome that is so staggering, since random chance is a bedrock of quantum physics, Darwinian evolution, and many other fields. (A dozen other studies, when wrapped into the Princeton ones, also came up with results in the 51-52% range.)

This claim of odds of trillion to one and replication of results is complete misleading and no wonder Chopra would believe and report anything that confirms his prejudices.

"In 1987, Dean Radin and Nelson did a meta-analysis of all RNG experiments done between 1959 and 1987 and found that they produced odds against chance beyond a trillion to one (Radin 1997: 140). This sounds impressive, but as Radin says “in terms of a 50% hit rate, the overall experimental effect, calculated per study, was about 51 percent, where 50 percent would be expected by chance” [emphasis added] (141). A couple of sentences later, Radin gives a more precise rendering of "about 51 percent" by noting that the overall effect was "just under 51 percent." Similar results were found with experiments where people tried to use their minds to affect the outcome of rolls of the dice, according to Radin. And, when Nelson did his own analysis of all the PEAR data (1,262 experiments involving 108 people), he found similar results to the earlier RNG studies but "with odds against chance of four thousand to one" (Radin 1997: 143). Nelson also claimed that there were no "star" performers.

However, according to Ray Hyman, “the percentage of hits in the intended direction was only 50.02%" in the PEAR studies (Hyman 1989: 152). And one ‘operator’ (the term used to describe the subjects in these studies) was responsible for 23% of the total data base. His hit rate was 50.05%. Take out this operator and the hit rate becomes 50.01%. According to John McCrone, "Operator 10," believed to be a PEAR staff member, "has been involved in 15% of the 14 million trials, yet contributed to a full half of the total excess hits" (McCrone 1994). According to Dean Radin, the criticism that there "was any one person responsible for the overall results of the experiment...was tested and found to be groundless" (Radin 1997: 221). His source for this claim is a 1991 article by Jahn et al. in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, "Count population profiles in engineering anomalies experiments" (5:205-32). However, Jahn gives the data for his experiments in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 352-353). McCrone has done the calculations and found that 'If [operator 10's] figures are taken out of the data pool, scoring in the "low intention" condition falls to chance while "high intention" scoring drops close to the .05 boundary considered weakly significant in scientific results." According to McCrone, the "size of the effect is about .1 percent, meaning that for every thousand electronic tosses, the random event generator is producing about one more head or tail than it should by chance alone" (McCrone 1994).

These data should remind us that statistical significance does not imply importance.

Furthermore, Stanley Jeffers, a physicist at York University, Ontario, has repeated the Jahn experiments but with chance results (Alcock 2003: 135-152). (See "Physics and Claims for Anomalous Effects Related to Consciousness" in Alcock et al. 2003. Abstract.) And Jahn et al. failed to replicate the PEAR results in experiments done in Germany (See "Mind/Machine Interaction Consortium: PortREG Replication Experiments," Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 499–555, 2000).

Based on the results of these experiments, Radin claims that “researchers have produced persuasive, consistent, replicated evidence that mental intention is associated with the behavior of …physical systems” (Radin 1997: 144). That sounds like a hasty conclusion to me. He also claims that “the experimental results are not likely due to chance, selective reporting, poor experimental design, only a few individuals, or only a few experimenters” (Radin 1997: 144). He's probably right except for the bit about it being unlikely that the experimental results are due to chance or to only a few individuals."

http://skepdic.com/pear.html

Hello Deepak,

I was bored so I thought I'd drop by to see what nonsense you're up to. Looks like I stopped by on a good day.

Here's a link to debunk your claims about Jahn at Princeton: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/sunday-snack-finishing-up-pear.html

Oh, and Carl Jung never proposed that our "participation" takes place in a "collective unconscious". Rather, he attributed commonality of myths and archtypes to a collective unconscious which he claimed could very well have its roots in our DNA.

Is that enough science and math for you for one day? Keep slingin'! (I know you will!)

Hello Deepak,

I was bored so I thought I'd drop by to see what nonsense you're up to. Looks like I stopped by on a good day.

Here's a link to debunk your claims about Jahn at Princeton: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/sunday-snack-finishing-up-pear.html

Oh, and Carl Jung never proposed that our "participation" takes place in a "collective unconscious". Rather, he attributed commonality of myths and archtypes to a collective unconscious which he claimed could very well have its roots in our DNA.

Is that enough science and math for you for one day? Keep slingin'! (I know you will!)

Hello Deepak,

I was bored so I thought I'd drop by to see what nonsense you're up to. Looks like I stopped by on a good day.

Here's a link to debunk your claims about Jahn at Princeton: http://goodmath.blogspot.com/2006/04/sunday-snack-finishing-up-pear.html

Oh, and Carl Jung never proposed that our "participation" takes place in a "collective unconscious". Rather, he attributed commonality of myths and archtypes to a collective unconscious which he claimed could very well have its roots in our DNA.

Is that enough science and math for you for one day? Keep slingin'! (I know you will!)

CRITIQUE OF THE PEAR
REMOTE-VIEWING EXPERIMENTS

By George P. Hansen, Jessica Utts, Betty Markwick

_________________________________________________

Conclusions

"The PEAR remote-viewing experiments depart from commonly accepted criteria for formal research in science. In fact, they are undoubtedly some of the poorest quality ESP experiments published in many years. The defects provide plausible alternative explanations. There do not appear to be any methods available for proper statistical evaluation of these experiments because of the way in which they were conducted."

http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/PEARCritique.htm

Scientists are finding that there are entangled connections between atomic-sized objects over many miles. In an interconnected Universe would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance?

Reality is woven from strange, "holistic" threads that aren't located precisely in space or time. Psi becomes and unavoidable consequence of living in an interconnected, entangled physical reality. For millenia, the universe as an interconnected whole has been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. Western science is slowly beginning to accept this idea.
Dean Radin writes of these findings in "Entangled Minds".

Scientists are finding that there are entangled connections between atomic-sized objects over many miles. In an interconnected Universe would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance?

Reality is woven from strange, "holistic" threads that aren't located precisely in space or time. Psi becomes and unavoidable consequence of living in an interconnected, entangled physical reality. For millenia, the universe as an interconnected whole has been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. Western science is slowly beginning to accept this idea.
Dean Radin writes of these findings in "Entangled Minds".

Scientists are finding that there are entangled connections between atomic-sized objects over many miles. In an interconnected Universe would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance?

Reality is woven from strange, "holistic" threads that aren't located precisely in space or time. Psi becomes and unavoidable consequence of living in an interconnected, entangled physical reality. For millenia, the universe as an interconnected whole has been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. Western science is slowly beginning to accept this idea.
Dean Radin writes of these findings in "Entangled Minds".

Originally published in the Journal
of Parapsychology.

Consequences of an Inappropriate Statistical Model

"As can be seen, in this case the PEAR method gives a probability value incorrect by about five orders of magnitude. The statistical method of PEAR is fundamentally flawed."

Optimal Guessing

"In an article on deception, Hansen (1990, p. 52) mentioned that an optimal-guessing strategy may allow a sophisticated form of cheating. Even without conscious deception, some subjects might have a response pattern which would naturally produce high scores. We will describe here how such a strategy might be implemented. As mentioned earlier, PEAR used five different formulas to calculate scores. We will illustrate the optimal-guessing strategy with PEAR’s susceptible Method A. Tables 41 and 42 of Dunne et al. (1983) show that Method A tended to produce more extreme p values than the other methods. "

http://www.tricksterbook.com/ArticlesOnline/PEARCritique.htm

My Hypothesis of a Potential New Discovery.
Dr. Chopra talks of the discovery of a mind field by mainstream science. I think it is very likely the field to be investigated more thoroughly is the planetary electromagnetic field which extends to the human electromagnetic field. I am basing what I am saying now on my discoveries of conscious energies that are emitted from the physical body during out of body experiences. I was a test subject in The Monroe Institutes Brainmapping project in which I was connected to an EEG as well as a Galvanic skin voltage test during an OBE. The technique I use magnifies the electric field in the body to the point that the entire body is vibrating intensely with a similar sensation to a limb falling asleep. I hypothesize the meditation increases the bodies electric field to the point that your intention organizes an electromagnetic (form). If it was just the so-called astral body leaving in such an experience then why would the entire physical body vibrate with such intensity while the Galvanic skin voltage is off the scale. Another factor I have experienced is some OBE's emanate from the area around the heart. Some think the astral body is exiting from the solar plexus chakra but I am telling you it is a concentration of the heart's electric field. OBE's eventually evolve and then finer radiations emanate from the head (brain) region. Think about it! Heart and brain (OBE) centers. These are the major electromagnetic organs of the body. It is then plausible that upon death the bodies electric field is reabsorbed into the planetary electromagnetic field like a wave being brought back into the ocean. It is very evident that humanity has disconnected itself from the planetary consciousness (field). Perhaps scientists can discover the dynamics of the human consciousness field more fully and realize it is related to the planet's consciousness (energy) field. Moreover the reabsorption and remanifestation of human consciousness, reincarnation as well as archetypal energies fits well into this hypothetic framework.
Todd

Scientists are finding that there are entangled connections between atomic-sized objects over many miles. In an interconnected universe would we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance?

Reality is woven from strange, "holistic" threads that aren't located precisely in space or time. Psi becomes an unavoidable consequence of living in an interconnected, entangled physical reality. For millenia the universe as an interconnected whole has been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. Western science is slowly beginning to accept this idea.

To learn more of the findings of modern scientists in this field please check out, "Entangled Minds" by Dean Radin. He has also authored another book entitled, "The Conscious Universe".

Betsy S...click post ONLY once..it will appear eventually. you can check it by opening a new window and click F5/refesh the window.

Two considerations: first, as a species, we're uneducated as to mind field possibilities, in terms of learning to sense them and use them with intent, if they exist; second, if mind fields have characteristics of quantum phenomena, the presence of obeservers, including the conscious self, can change the nature and frequency of events.

I've posted my Yahtzee story on IB twice, once on an OT, and once as a paste on one of Kavita's threads. For me, it showed that mind field exists, though the term "mind field" is new to me; and it showed that self-consciousness distorts the intentional use of mind field, as might be expected if it has quantum characteristics. I'll paste the story here again, from Kavita's thread -- http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2006/06/reincarnation_s.html -- #34:

"...One summer my family and I were lying around on the grass, playing a dice game called Yahtzee, that involves predicting how a single die will roll. I was losing round after round. I had done a Zen retreat about a year prior, and had a notion that if I got into a meditative state, I might be able to sense how the die would roll, and do better in the game. So I went into a bit of a trance, and ended up winning with a perfect game -- 100% perfect predictions. I was totally excited, and tried again, and failed totally. I was able to see that I was distracted by the thought of gain -- winning the game -- which broke my meditation. So I tried a third time, and was pretty good but not perfect, as I was still too much in the world with thoughts of winning..."

Btw, I was wrong in my recollection of how Yahtzee is played -- you roll five dice, not one.

I never wrote what I'll share now: that for the one perfect game, all I did was look at the Yahtzee score card, decide which combination of numbers I wanted to come up for my next roll, then roll the dice. The numbers came up each time, just as I wanted them to. I didn't tell anyone what I was trying to do. The perfect game was observed by family members, but the intention was hidden.

If you accept I'm honest in describing what happened, including my attempt to meditate to a win by concentrating on individual numbers coming up, rather than on winning the game, what are the odds of that perfect game? The game is played by rolling 5 dice in a series of 13 rounds. You must match 13 different combinations of numbers exactly, to be able to complete the Yatzee score card with a perfect game.

But if I'd been observed while I was making the attempt, I'm sure I would have failed. After all, when I just observed myself too closely, as in the second attempt, I failed completely.

love, Heath

Are the dimwitted more prone to a beleif in the Paranormal?

I enjoyed your post Todd. I suppose that experience is the best teacher and the skeptics cannot possibly understand until they have experienced what it is that is unknown so that it becomes known. And even with an experience, one spends a great deal of time trying to explain it and duplicate if they can. Life is mysterious and a great adventure!

Well, time to go home.

Love, Char

But if I'd been observed while I was making the attempt, I'm sure I would have failed. After all, when I just observed myself too closely, as in the second attempt, I failed completely.

"But if I'd been observed while I was making the attempt, I'm sure I would have failed. After all, when I just observed myself too closely, as in the second attempt, I failed completely."

Failing completely is also a result which deviates from the average. That is an indication of intentions influencing the experiment too. Odds of the game would tell us what "success", "failure" and "complete failure" is.

Anyway you can(if you haven't already, it would be surprising) meditate in a closed room and roll the dice and see what happens.

"So I went into a bit of a trance, and ended up winning with a perfect game -- 100% perfect predictions. I was totally excited, and tried again, and failed totally. I was able to see that I was distracted by the thought of gain -- winning the game -- which broke my meditation. So I tried a third time, and was pretty good but not perfect, as I was still too much in the world with thoughts of winning..."

Have you repeated this experiment again? If so, what were the results? If not, why not?

"Btw, I was wrong in my recollection of how Yahtzee is played -- you roll five dice, not one."

"If you accept I'm honest in describing what happened, ..."

Accepted that you are honest about the perfect game...that doesn't rule out your not so perfect recollections.

Dear Keith,
So you think this data contained in Deepak's article is not current?

This line intriques me:

"It’s the utter certainty of the outcome that is so staggering, since random chance is a bedrock of quantum physics, Darwinian evolution, and many other fields."

Thanks for your article, Deepak.

Dear Heather,
Thanks for sharing again about your experience playing Yahtzee.

Do you think you could try again playing the game, with the intention of a perfect score, as Hypocrite suggests?

~ Kate

p.s.
you can never step into the river the same way twice,
which is my experience,
(but not a phrase I first originated)

love,
~ Kate

dear Heather,
not that Hypocrite indicates in his suggestion in post # 23 - what the score would be.

It would be neat to see if you can play the game, and again achieve a perfect score!

~ Kate

"Btw, I was wrong in my recollection of how Yahtzee is played -- you roll five dice, not one.

I never wrote what I'll share now: that for the one perfect game, all I did was look at the Yahtzee score card, decide which combination of numbers I wanted to come up for my next roll, then roll the dice. The numbers came up each time, just as I wanted them to. I didn't tell anyone what I was trying to do."

Perhaps you are also wrong about how the game is played.

In Yahtzee you can roll the dice 'thrice' in each turn(of a total of 13 turns) and choose to keep the set of dice which help you to complete a combination, as yet unused of the 13 possible in the table, and roll the other dice. If you complete all 13 combinations in the Yahtzee table, with the highest possible score, you get a perfect game. This game is not just of pure 'luck' but is also of intelligence, to know where to stop and what combinations to choose to maximize the score.

Dear Todd,
thanks for sharing (post # 15)

"It is very evident that humanity has disconnected itself from the planetary consciousness (field). Perhaps scientists can discover the dynamics of the human consciousness field more fully and realize it is related to the planet's consciousness (energy) field."

I am not sure what you mean here.

Do you feel humanity is on the wrong course? As aligned with the planets?

Thanks for clarifying,
~ Kate

dear Hypocrite,
what are the odds that we would comment - twice now, in this thread,
at the exact same time!

wow
:)

~ Kate

Dear Kate..it is just another proof of the synchronization in mind fields. 'WOW!'

btw, it isn't the 'exact same time' but is the 'same minute'.

The odds that we both comment in the 'exact same minute' is the same as the odds of us comment say with a 3 minute differential.

amazing! wow!

Keith :Professional gamblers do way better than average.
We all have the ability to "get on a roll", the trick is in
knowing when to stop while you're ahead, so you don't lose your
you-know-what. The risk is what makes it fun.

This a typical gambler's fallacy

Kate: what are the odds that we would comment - twice now, in this thread,
at the exact same time!

This is a fallacy that interesting patterns are less likely to happen.

interesting patterns

fallacy
or
fact

PS: my post #19 is not a response to #18. It was a follow up to #17.

The gambler's fallacy often takes one of these forms:

* A particular outcome of a random event is more likely to occur because it has happened recently ("run of good luck");

* A particular outcome is more likely to occur because it has not happened recently ("law of averages" or "it's my turn now").

Similarly

* A particular outcome is less likely to occur because it has happened recently ("law of averages" or "exhausted its luck");

* A particular outcome is less likely to occur because it has not happened recently ("run of bad luck").

A more subtle version of the fallacy is that an "interesting" (non-random looking) outcome is "unlikely" (eg that a sequence of "1,2,3,4,5,6" in a lottery result is less likely than any other individual outcome). Even apart from the debate about what constitutes an "interesting" result, this can be seen as a version of the gambler's fallacy because it is saying that a random event is less likely to occur if the result, taken in conjunction with recent events, will produce an "interesting" pattern.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy

I was just driving home, thinking that there are no random events in the universe. Then I came upon this thread.

The reason I was thinking about this is how various events played out in the last several hours with a friends issue with a computer and what then unfolded at a bar where we were eating, and events that occurred in the last several weeks that played a supporting role.

In Infinite Play the Movie there is this Mysterious Force operating behind the scenes, I have experienced an exponential increase evidence of this Mysterious Force that I have begun to trust it. I have also experienced visual disturbances created by a presence. I by the way think it very unlikely that "ghosts" and such exist, other than in your own mind.

I won't go into all the details (there are several hundred events with correlations) but I would say it is enough to be disturbing and uncanny and lead one to question one's sanity based on the classical science.

I am still capable of rational thought, and pure fantasy does not qualify. There must be demonstratable and repeatable manifestation of the phenomena. In other words it must statistically defy randomness.

Either there is a God (undefined) or there is not and the universe is simply an accidental mechanical structure.

I wrote a challenge like this before, but now I add a twist thanks to Chopin.

I challenge science to prove the existence, in other words write a proof, of the existence of a conductor and a written piece of music in a symphony orchestra, minus any physical evidence representing the music or conductor using only a single incidence of the phenomena.

So the only evidence you have is the movements of the musicians, the instruments, and their collective output, the sound produced. How would you prove that these individual entities were not simply each producing random output but were operating with collective intention to execute a shared script?

three times now

interesting patterns

fallacy
or
fact

When the facts or outcomes are random, weighing interesting patterns with greater odds and a "WOW!" is a fallacy or a fantasy or plain ignorance.

Oh and I am not the only one experiencing the visual disturbances / manifestations of energy. I know of at least a half dozen people. So I know that it is not just my eyes and brain, or some brain tumor or something.

Recognition of such, leads to questions of "how" and asking "who" gives the answer.
Love
V

Kate where is your "amazing!", "wow!" or "astonishing!"

accurate to only a minute and a gambler's fallacy again.

The odds that I get a head one more time after getting an head after 20 successive trails, is not "less likely" or "more likely" but is 50-50.

Therefore the odds that we comment within the same minute again is the same and not of even more extraordinary odds given the previous history.

Richard, your so cute,
No brain tumors silly!
Love you!
V

Is there an intelligence greater than the sum of it's parts operating at some quantum level, orchestrating and manifesting events based on some collective, divine, or evolutionary intention. That is following a plane that consists of an outline but is absent the exact detail.

The first question I ask myself is am I just making the connections between events and giving them meaning in my own mind. Or is there an actual planned product that is being produced?

I am fairly confident of the answer based on my subjective direct experience, what would be nice is to demonstate it using objective evidence that would come from probability and statistics.

not that it really matters...... convincing anyone of such a thing that is.

here it is
for you
Hypocrite

amazing! wow! astonishing!

My love for you dear is the only thing that is real, and no scientist can measure it. :)

Fancy that.

FYI Everyone - there is a new way to get high, very high, and it is legal. Stop watching the news. I haven't watched for some 5 or 6 weeks now.

I am not saying become ignorant, the alternative is say "user" selected news that you read and decide what to review and fill your head with. You control your attention.

When you watch the news on TV someone else is deciding for you what you should put your attention on and that is really a bunch of mind fluff. Maintence of the collective illusion that benefits a few, to the detriment of the many.

Enjoy the adventure.

Very well put dear! Id rather watch the sparrows play!
V

I would rather be the sparrows at play ;).

Or better yet soaring with...
V

Of course I am also sure the sparrows like to be watched, and there is a thrill in watching. Of course the watcher and watched are all one in the same.

To~shay Richard!
V

Oh yes, soaring together, flying higher and higher... soar with me, free to be

Shhh...don't tell Deepak

Posted on: November 19, 2006

You may vaguely recall that Deepak Chopra claimed the results from the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) labs supported his religious ideas. In a very timely bit of news, Jeffrey Shallit reports that PEAR is closing after 27 years of embarrassing futility. About time.

PZ Myers
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/shhhdont_tell_deepak.php

**********

Jeffrey Shallit:

The PEAR Has Finally Rotted

From the November 8 Princeton Alumni Weekly comes the welcome news that PEAR, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory, is closing.

Don't be fooled by the fancy name. "Engineering Anomalies" is just a fancy name for good-old-fashioned parapsychology. PEAR's director, Robert Jahn, has been trying to show psychic phenomena are real ever since I was an undergraduate. But with funding reportedly drying up on his unsuccessful efforts, PEAR could no longer be sustained.

PEAR has been an embarrassment to Princeton alumni since day one. Jahn and colleagues never succeeded in demonstrating any significant effect; one of the strongest results they claimed was an 0.02% advantage in coin flipping. Other claimed results, such as the ones dealing with "remote viewing", have been criticized for sloppy experiment design. And to my knowledge no one has succeeded in replicating their results.

There is one way to send the goddess soaring to heights never before achieved, a rocket ship to oblivion, this neat little trick, the rose petal effect... performed at the entrance to the sacred cave.

There are only a handful of the most adept in these matters that know of it.

Dear Hyp and Kate

When I played the first game, I was __not__ working on strategy -- "know where to stop and what combinations to choose to maximize the score."

Instead, I would look at the open combinations on the Yahtzee score card, choose a combination to throw based on nothing more than where my eye fell and how I felt about what I saw, then I'd put the dice in the cup, close my eyes, shake the cup, and throw.

Yes I did try again for a perfect game, in the second and third games, as I said. The second gaem was a bust because I was focused on winning. When I got back into my meditation a little, with the third game, I did pretty well, though I don't remember the score. I do remember being satisfied, yet humbled that I hadn't gotten a perfect score again.

Hyp, being a complete failure at games with large chance components is the norm for me, not the exception. In other words, in games of chance, the mean is failure, for me.

If you google "yahtzee rules" you can find the rules for the game.

To try again with the intention of proving something, puts me and those interested in the results in the position of observer, which changes how the effect seems to work. That's why I think it may have a quantum-like quality to it. This is the same reason I don't bet on horse races whan I have a sense of which horses will win. The interest of myself and others in making money by betting corrupts my sense of what's going on.

Now here's the question no one asked:

Did I control the dice, or was I picking up on how thing were going to go before they happened?

My sense is it's the latter. My picking combinations from the card was done in the same way that I pick horses from a list of names. I look at the possibilities, and a sense of sureness come to me, for no apparent reason. If it's true that I was sensing what was going to come, perhaps mind field effects are at least slightly independent of space / time /dimensions.

Hyp, a few things about sharing this story: when I wrote it first, and when I pasted it on Kavita's thread, and again when I pasted it today, I was terrified of ridicule and being thought mad. Rationally, I figured I coud handle it, but emotionally, that is what I felt. Also, when I wrote it, I said things like "I went into a bit of a trance" when in fact it wa a deep and purposeful trance. That downplayed description, and others, were forms of self-defense. Though I've spilled my guts about my experience three times now, it still doesn't make it any easier to share. One feels completely vulnerable sharing it.

Hyp and Kate, you're both intelligent, sensitive people. I would guess you've both meditated before. Why don't you try the experiment yourselves?

Hyp, I would guess that intelligence has nothing to do with belief. It probably has more to do with character and life experience. Just a guess, though.

Sync'd-up comments are pretty common on talkative threads, I've noticed, especially since the server was changed and posting got slower. If Nirav changed the config to show seconds, you'd see the incidence drop.

love, Heath

"Btw, I was wrong in my recollection.."

Memory is a complicated process, only partly understood; but research suggests that the qualities of a memory do not in and of themselves provide a reliable way to determine accuracy. For example, a vivid and detailed memory may be based upon inaccurate reconstruction of facts, or largely self-created impressions that appear to have actually occurred. Likewise, continuity of memory is no guarantee of truth, and disruption of memory is no guarantee of falsity. Finally, memory is believed to be a reconstructed phenomenon, and so it can often be strongly influenced by expectation (one's own or other people's), emotions, the implied beliefs of others, inappropriate interpretation, or desired outcome."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory

Todd,
You have interesting experiences. That the brain and the body have associated em fields is an established fact of science. Recently, an Electromagnetic Field Theory of Consciousness is emerging in brain science, which proposes that the brain’s em field is the physical substrate of conscious awareness. It is possible that heart is a major center of em field also and that in an OBE, the field intensity is high because it is an unusual conscious experience. The hypothesis you conjectured may be true who knows, scientists may indeed confirm it some day.

synch! :)

jus' jokin', Hyp.

Hyp, being wrong in one respect does not make the entire memory wrong. I told about the dice problem because I'd doubted my recollection on that point from the first. Today was the first time I researched the rules, and corrected the die to dice.

I have a pretty decent memory, though it's not perfect. And I don't claim it's perfect. But I know certain things pretty reliably, like my name is Heath, and I've had one perfect Yahtzee game that I got by synching up with the moment somehow.

Bonne nuit, all.

love, Heath

If you google "yahtzee rules" you can find the rules for the game.

Thanks but you don't seem to have remembered the rules yourself. One dice..now five dice..OK, but about choosing combinations and the number of times you can throw a dice and about using intelligence in the game. Everything is blurry to you except that you had a perfect game.

Kate and I are asking about not proving something but about trying it out for yourself with meditation and dice.

In my many years of playing card, dice games and po*ker and guessing on sports outcome(without waging money) I tried lots of things(meditation, taking God's name etc) and I am a witness to a lot of superstitions and believed in them myself. I have had extra ordinary odds too but I realize that there is nothing psychic about it.

"Yes I did try again for a perfect game, in the second and third games, as I said. "

That is apparent from your original comment. Is it that you NEVER played the game again in your life. That would be surprising. Or it may be that you don't want to recall those instances where your meditation might have failed again and again.

o lord, I wrote a nice answer to you, Hyp, and thought I clicked post, but I guess I didn't, cause it hasn't posted. yes, I haven't ever played the game again. don't doubt my memory so severely. its not too blurry, that's Hyp-argument-drama. and that's the gist of the lost answer, except:

you and Kate asking me to do that makes you observers, and you disrupt the effect. when I plan to re-test myself, I become the observer and disrupt the effect. if it is quantum, the best result comes when there is no observer, i.e., when it's spontaneous. get it, dear Hyp?

now I'm sleepy, so bye bye til tomorrow or whenever. sorry for my snippy attitude, it's directed at me, it was a decent answer and I'm sorry it got lost.

love, Heath

You don't even remmeber the most basic rules of the game!

Point is in Yahtzee you roll the dice thrice in each try and use your intelligence to get the best possible comnbinations in the table. If you meditate and if youare lucky then you can use your intelligenc better and can even score in all possible 13 combinations(includiong the one for 'chance' which doesn't fit any other 12 combinations) .You might call that a perfect game...but if you dont use your intellgence well and are unlucky, you will lose the next attenmpts.

By the way throwing dice has nothing to do with quantum effects of consciousness given it exists.

A dice turns up based on the way the hand releases and the physcial forces that act on it. To predict the turn of one die might take a super computer more than a year. If your intentions can bring a chnage in the orientation of the dice( the effects are small acording to PEAR research) then it would mean that you can increase your chances of the dice by a very minute percentage which doesn't bring any difference to the outcome of the game. And that's the reason they say the gamblers cannot influence the outcome in random games at casinos.

"if it is quantum, the best result comes when there is no observer, i.e., when it's spontaneous. get it, dear Hyp?"

When the outcome comes extraordinarily there is no obsever. The other times I am observeing or have motives or others are observing. This doesn't tell anything about the nature of no-observation, even in no-observation state I can be completely wrong in predictions..its just that I don't consider it a no-observation state in retrospection or hindsight due to my built in human bias.

Anyway....you can't even recollect what you mean by a perfect game in Yahtzee and what odds are involved and if even your inteligence is involved in making possible combinations as against picking combinations which would reduce your chances even further.

"yes, I haven't ever played the game again."

How many years ago did this incident take place? Did you play this game before this incident took place..if so why did you stop playing abruptly.

As a child 8 - 12 years old, I used to have a facination of playing coin flips with a few neighborhod kids. I used to believe that i can influence the outcomes and had many superstions while I performed the acts of guessing during the game. I flipped the coin to make Heads 9 times in a row. That was a record for me. a friend of mine had a 8. During that process I believed that I had some psychic powers to have achieved such feat. When my guess used to go completely wrong I used to think something was bugging my mind and my concentration and belief in God is diminsihing or something. If I had known about quantum effects then I would have believe that it has something to do with the no-observation. Oh yeah I remmember that I used to go into a kind of trance when I got my guesses right extraordinarily well..that may be due to no-observation of quantumness...I would have believed.

"I would guess you've both meditated before. Why don't you try the experiment yourselves?"

You would recommmend these experiments to others but would not do it yourself, becuase it would mean testing(observation) for you.

Our very same suggestion to you means that we are observing you, but this doesn't apply to your suggestion. Interesting.

No-observation state is when we get lucky. When we get uncluky it is 'observation'. Quantum effects you see.

The 'Mind' is never Inside the body.
OSHO says:

"OSHO, IS THE GOOSE REALLY OUT?

Anand Bhavo, the goose has never been in, the goose has always been out. It is a Zen koan. First you have to understand the meaning of Zen and the meaning of a koan.

Zen is not a religion, not a dogma, not a creed, Zen is not even a quest, an inquiry; it is non-philosophical. The fundamental of the Zen approach is that all is as it should be, nothing is missing. This very moment everything is perfect. The goal is not somewhere else, it is here, it is now. Tomorrows don't exist. This very moment is the only reality. Hence in Zen there is no distinction between methods and goals, means and goals.

All the philosophies of the world and all the religions of the world create duality; howsoever they may go on talking about non-duality, they create a split personality in man. That has been the greatest calamity that has befallen humanity: all the do-gooders have created a schizophrenic man. When you divide reality into means and goals you divide man himself, because for man, man is the closest reality to man. His consciousness becomes split. He lives here but not really; he is always there, somewhere else. He is always searching, always inquiring; never living, never being, always doing; getting richer, getting powerful, getting spiritual, getting holier, saintly - always more and more. And this constant hankering for more creates his tense, anguished state, and meanwhile he is missing all that is made available by existence. He is interested in the far away and God is close by. His eyes are focused on the stars and God is within him. Hence the most fundamental thing to understand about Zen is: the goose has NEVER been in. Let me tell you the story how this koan started:

A great philosophical official, Riko, once asked the strange Zen Master Nansen, to explain to him the old koan of the goose in the bottle.
"If a man puts a gosling into a bottle," said Riko, "and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?"
Nansen gave a great clap with his hands and shouted: "Riko!"
"Yes, Master," said the official with a start.
"See," said Nansen, "the goose is out!"

It is only a question of seeing, it is only a question of becoming alert, awake, it is only a question of waking up. The goose is in the bottle if you are in a dream; the goose has never been in the bottle if you are awake. And in the dream there is no way to take the goose out of the bottle. Either the goose will die or the bottle will have to be broken, and both alternatives are not allowed: neither has the bottle to be broken nor has the goose to be killed. Now, a fully-grown goose in a small bottle... how can you take it out? This is called a koan.

A koan is not an ordinary puzzle; it is not a puzzle because it cannot be solved. A puzzle is that which has a possibility of being solved; you just have to look for the right answer. You will find it - it only needs intelligence to find the answer to the puzzle; but a puzzle is not really insoluble.

A koan is insoluble; you cannot solve it, you can only DISSOLVE it. And the way to dissolve it is to change the very plane of your being from dreaming to wakefulness. In the dream the goose is in the bottle and there is no way to bring it out of the bottle without breaking the bottle or killing the goose - in the dream. Hence, as far as the dream is concerned, the puzzle is impossible; nothing can be done about it.

But there is a way out - which has nothing to do with the puzzle, remember. You have to wake up. That has nothing to do with the bottle and nothing to do with the goose either. You have to wake up. It has something to do with YOU. That's why Nansen did not answer the question.

Riko asked: "If a man puts a gosling into a bottle and feeds him until he is full-grown, how can the man get the goose out without killing it or breaking the bottle?"
Nansen didn't answer. On the other hand, he gave a great clap with his hands and shouted: "Riko!"
Now, this is not an answer to the question - this has nothing to do with the question at all - it is irrelevant, inconsistent. But it solves it; in fact, it dissolves it. The moment he shouted: "Riko!" the official with a start said: "Yes, Master." The whole plane of his being is transformed by a simple strategy.

A Master is not a teacher; he does not teach you, he simply devises methods to wake you up. That clap is a method, that clap simply brought Riko into the present. And it was so unexpected... When you are asking such a spiritual koan you don't expect the Master to answer you with a loud clap and then shout: "Riko!"

Suddenly he is brought from the past, from the future. Suddenly for a moment he forgets the whole problem. Where is the bottle and where is the goose? There is only the Master, in a strange posture, clapping and shouting for Riko. Suddenly the whole problem is dropped. He has slipped out of the problem without even knowing that he slipped out of it. He has slipped out of the problem as a snake slips out of its old skin. For a moment time has stopped. For a moment the clock has stopped. For a moment the mind has stopped. For a moment there is nothing. The Master, the sound of the clap, and a sudden awakening. In that very moment the Master says: "See! See, the goose is out!" It is dissolved.

A koan can only be dissolved but can never be solved. A puzzle can never be dissolved but can be solved. So remember, a koan is not a puzzle.

But when people who are accustomed to continuous thinking, logical reasoning, start studying Zen, they take a false step from the very beginning. Zen cannot be studied; it has to be lived, it has to be imbibed - imbibed from a living Master. It is a transmission beyond words, a transmission of the lamp. The lamp is invisible.
Now, anybody watching this whole situation - Riko asking a question, the Master clapping and shouting - would not have found anything very spiritual in it, would not have found any great philosophy, may have come back very frustrated. But something transpired - something which is not visible and can never be visible.

It happens only when the silence of the Master penetrates the silence of the disciple, when two silences meet and merge; then immediately there is seeing. The Master has eyes, the disciple has eyes, but the disciple's eyes are closed. A device is needed, some method, so that the disciple can open his eyes without any effort of his own. If he makes an effort he will miss the point, because who will make the effort?

Christmas Humphreys, one of the great lovers of Zen in the West, the founder of the Buddhist Society of England and the man who made Zen Buddhism very famous in the Western world, writes about this koan, and you will see the difference. He says:
"There is a method of taking the problem in flank, as it were. It will be nonsense to the rational-minded, but such will read no further. Those who read on will expect increasing nonsense, for sense, the suburban villas of rational thought, will soon be left behind, and the mind will be free on the illimitable hills of its own inherent joy. Here, then, is the real solution to the problem of the opposites.
"Shall I tell it you? Consider a live goose in a bottle. How to get it out without hurting the goose or breaking the bottle? The answer is simple - 'There, it's out!"'"
From GOOSE IS OUT

"...One summer my family and I were lying around on the grass, playing a dice game called Yahtzee, that involves predicting how a single die will roll. I was losing round after round. I had done a Zen retreat about a year prior, and had a notion that if I got into a meditative state, I might be able to sense how the die would roll, and do better in the game. So I went into a bit of a trance, and ended up winning with a perfect game -- 100% perfect predictions."

Yahtzee is not about predicting the outcome of dice.

"I never wrote what I'll share now: that for the one perfect game, all I did was look at the Yahtzee score card, decide which combination of numbers I wanted to come up for my next roll, then roll the dice. The numbers came up each time, just as I wanted them to."

"The game is played by rolling 5 dice in a series of 13 rounds. You must match 13 different combinations of numbers exactly, to be able to complete the Yatzee score card with a perfect game. "

Wrong! There are several 'possible combinations of numbers' for a specific combination in a yahtzee scoring table.

You DONT have to match 13 differnt combinatioins of numbers exactly to score a maximum.

And you can roll the dice thrice in each turn with the option of keeping the dice which might fit your combination and re roll the remaing dice and also an option to use one or two chances alone if you think that the score is good enough and cannot be risked.

You show a poor understanding of what you mean and want to convey by having a perfect game. YOu also don't show a recollection of some basic rules.

Round after round you lost and tried to zen yourself into the game and you succeeded and won having a very good game scorig in all 13 slots..but you failed in next two rounds and never ever tocuhed the Yahtzee game again. Interesting.

Roll the dice again in mediation alone without the motivation of winning and see if you can predict the dice combinations, not perfectly but with a good accuracy than the odds demand over a good enough sample space.

Or just try flipping coins and see if you can get a series of heads or tails in trance.

I'm telling y'all, mind is an "inside" phenomenon. If two different cultures, separated by oceans,develop rituals with close similarities, it's due to similarities inside the human psyche and inside our genes and bodies, not because of field fluctuations completely outside ourselves.

I guess my objections are different from the rational science types that debunk your posts (although I believe they make valid points).

I'm kind of astounded that after a lifetime of meditation, you're still looking outside yourself to vindicate spiritual realities.

What we have in common are deep bonds within us. When God works through us, it's an inside job.

Even if the fields exist (I have no problem believing that), then what you have is fluctuations in a medium (such waves in water). Wave and particle fluctuations are caused from agents disturbing the medium, not because the medium itself is intelligent and decides to make a wave. So the source of the intelligence is us, not the field itself.

The only possibility for the field itself to be intelligent is that the entire cosmos is a single intelligent being. That would be a hypothesis of God.

If that's true, my assertion still stands that the intelligence comes from inside a living being.

I seriously agree with Yogi-one

That is the essence of Advaita Vedanta and the teachings of the great spiritual master too.

Deepak Chopra not only lets down rationality and science he lets down the true spiritual insights.

He is spreading
superstitions in spirituality
and psuedo-science in science.

"Goodness gracious", Hyp! Do you ever sleep?

About gambling...and living without taking risks...

Personally, I spend $4.00/week on lottery tickets.
That is the full extent of my gambling as far as dollars are concerned.

Kill me for not knowing exactly or leaving spam behind me,
but the last study I heard about 'winnings' gave results
implying that one must win at least $1,000,000.00
in order to be really happy and secure.

So I's don't fart around with puny amounts of change.

There was a man who won the same lottery twice.
He wasn't my friend, so I don't care who it was.

One of my friends inherited half a million dollars.
I learned from him the true meaning of 'squandering'.
He was also the most generous person I have ever met.
He is currently in jail...again.

Now, what can money not buy?

AH another day is dawing and another round of playing in the mind fields is about to begin.
Isn't there a better game than playing mind-fuck all day ? Back and forth where does it go ?

One day you will encounter the royal bomb called Para Brahman -
it will simply explode all the concepts and words and mental creations into fragments that disipate into Nothingness.
What will remain in it's wake is simply Now. Nothing to Chase .
Nothing to banter about. Nothing to debate for Truth is Unchanging and Whole .

If Para Brahman has been entered then the illusions of ego form have been torn assunder. Mental creations are known to be simply more scattered waves of pollution for the most part.

Being tired of pollution in all it's forms and the mental banterings and tirades which are being passed as knowledge and understanding of realizations . I leave the mind fields to those that still feel the need to debate . How can one truly debate the Now which IS ?

Phenomena arises in the vastness . Phenomena is transient the vastness is Eternal . Words arise in the Silence . Words are transient the Silence from which they emmerge is Eternal. Mental cognitions come and go Awareness is Eternal.

When the games have been played then one puts away the toys and simply enjoys the Peace and Vastness the stage where the plays take place. If you want to play then play Love as the first dynamic . A much nicer game than playing in mind mine fields of one upmanship . Or ego - ego who has the ego . Petty games .

Is it not better to BE life rather than to sit and speak of dead philosophy's .

-N -0-

Nice read, Deepak! Thankyou.

Love,
North

Dear Deepak,

Thank you for this post, interesting to read about the aborigines and the songlines. Reminds me of the Toltec teachings about the day-time dream being similar to the night-time-dream, and their methods for arriving at lucid living.

Dear Todd and Syamala,

you speak about OBE. I find it such a funny term. Out of body? Inside the body? What exactly is inside the body and gets out of it? Besides, what is a body?
I don't see it this way. Human awareness is often used to the point of view we call "inside the body" and doesn't notice that it is not confined to it and has never been. When one observes how things work, one notices that the contents of the mind (thoughts and emotions) are vibrations circulating freely both in human forms and everything else, and are often arising in several "places" at the same time. The human body is just a denser vibration of one and the same field. The mind-field is open and infinite, we can navigate it by simply applying our attention to any part of it. I don't see anything leaving a body or arriving anywhere, there is no real movement, only an apparent one. In OBE or remote viewing, this field that we all are is using its awareness in another point of itself to collect information/experience. This would probably be possible to be expressed as in your hypotesis of the planetary and the human electromagnetic field being one and the same.

But I don't see how the following would be possible: "humanity has disconnected itself from the planetary consciousness (field)" We cannot be outside or disconnected from what we are, just like the wave cannot be disconnected from the ocean. Humanity may feel disconnected, but it is only a matter of a faulty conclusion based on us identifying ourselves with the form.

Dear Yogi-one,

what if there is no difference between what you call inside and outside?

What if the events inside and the ones outside are co-arising?

We are all speculating on what can be, and what cannot be proved by science. Often, facts of reality revealed by a major scientific discovery appear unbelievable to the ordinary mind unless it follows all the scientific reasoning that has led to the discovery. Who could have imagined that particles of matter behave like waves if De Broglie did not come up with his thesis! who could imagine that a particle located in a single point of space has field (influence) all over space if it is not for field theories! We did not know that matter cannot travel faster than light before Einstein proved it. Even today, his Relativity cannot explain quantum entanglement, which is so real that it is being used in quantum computers. We never know what science discovers. If matter has field what prevents mind from having a field?
It is not easy to understand spirituality whether it is Adwaita, Buddhism, or anything else. So, people who study them or practise them have different interpretations which sometimes are not consistent with one another. That may cause aversion to spiritual talk in the minds of some scientists. Also, science has so far explored matter a lot and it has not yet gone that far into spirit (what is not perceived by the external senses).
To me it seems we are arguing here over speculations.

Yogi,
While it is true that one has to look inward to understand what thought, ego, spirit, consciousness, etc. are, Vedanta tells us that once you understand them (so called enlightenment), you no longer see yourself as an isolated individual but that you identify yourself with everything in the universe both inside and outside. Spiritual Masters have talked about this "all is one" experience as being True not imaginary. If it is Truth, science must be able to discover it, or be able to use it in someway - I think this is one of the arguments being made on IB here (which btw I do not agree with).

Dear Hyp

#60: Some of the 13 possible combinations are: 1 pair, 2 pairs, 3 pairs, 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, 5 of a kind, 4 in a row (small straight), 5 in a row (large straight), 3 of a kind and 2 of a kind (full house), and 5 of the same value (yahtzee). The dice are shaken and thrown from a cup, not the hand. For each round, I threw the dice once, in other words I didn't use the option for two rethrows of some of the dice in any round. I did not throw the dice, then decide how to use the resulting numbers. I looked at the card, decided what combination to hit next, and threw the dice. That is why I say I used no strategy.

The way I did it is not the way the game is played. I was talking to the dice, so to speak -- the score card helped me image the combination to throw, then I threw the dice and what I'd imaged came up.

#61: I had played the game perhaps once or twice before this took place; on the afternoon it took place, we played for perhaps 90 minutes, which would have been 10 games max. I never played thereafter because I don't like the game. None of my friends or family like the game much, so there's no one to urge me to play it.

I'll come back to #61 in another comment.

#62: It may be that if you try this yourselves, you'll find your effect on yourselves is less powerful than mine is on myself. You may succeed where I would fail. In other words, neither you nor Kate are me. Why not try it yourselves and see what happens? Is there any downside to trying?

#63: I was describing how it feels to me. When I failed and partially failed in the two succeeding games, I could feel my own awareness coming in the way of the pure meditative state I'd achieved in the perfect game. When people who know what happens with my mind and the names of horses for big horse races urge me to try so they can bet, I get the same feeling of pressure that interferes with my ability to sense the top names clearly. They become observers, and I can't block the intensity of their interest in the outcome, so my meditative connection with the names becomes corrupted. I usually can't even get a sense of anything when that happens.

#64: Exactly -- Yahtzee is not about predicting the outcome of dice rolls. But it was for me, that day. That was how I got the perfect game. I did not play Yahtzee as it was meant to be played, for that game. I didn't use after-the-roll strategy or mutiple throws per round. I just looked at the card, decided which open combination I wanted to see on the dice, rolled the dice, and the combination came up. That is what made it such a surprising experience.

What I did poorly was describe the game when I first wrote it up on IB OT in 2005. This was very much due to the diffident pose I struck, to allow myself to describe this experience at all. As I said, describing things like this makes one feel very vulnerable.

To try to force dice to come up as I will, or force a coin to fall as I will, is exactly the self-observational pressure that interferes with success.

I'll be back to write to you about #61. Dear Hyp, I hope your night wasn't too fraught, thinking about this. Because you wrote about it all night long.

love, Heath

Dear Hyp

#61 explains, for me, both your intense interest in this subject, and your strong skepticism.

You say: "During that process I believed that I had some psychic powers to have achieved such feat. When my guess used to go completely wrong I used to think something was bugging my mind and my concentration and belief in God is diminsihing or something. If I had known about quantum effects then I would have believe that it has something to do with the no-observation. Oh yeah I remmember that I used to go into a kind of trance when I got my guesses right extraordinarily well..that may be due to no-observation of quantumness...I would have believed."

This sounds exactly like what I experienced with Yahtzee. The difference is only this: I wasn't a kid when it happened. I'd been meditating for a while, so I recognized what was happening when it happened, and I take full credit for my ability to connect the image of dice and the results of rolling the dice.

That would mean with meditative practice, your childhood ability to zone in and have some control over the flip of a coin or other chance events may awaken. The problem we adults have is we want to win all the time. Ahem. ;) That makes us very intense self-observers, indeed. Which interferes with the meditation.

Now, was I put in your path by fate or chance, to point you back into youself, where you may rediscover your own power, dear Hypocrite?

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d
I cried to dream again. -- The Tempest

love, Heath

Deepak,

It's always fun to see how the threads of your blog inspire and lead me to a specific response:

Without human affection, we become sick, frightened, hostile. Lovelessness is a broken circuit, loss of order. The worldwide quest for community typified by the networks of the Aquarian Conspiracy is an attempt to boost the attenuated power. To cohere. To kindle wider consciousness. When man reclaims this energy source, the sublimation of the spiritual-sensual love, Teilhard once said, "for the second time he will have discovered fire."

During the second New York blackout, while some people were looting, others were beaming their flashlights from apartment-building windows to the sidewalks, "moving" pedestrians from one building to the next, creating a path of light and safety. In this time of uncertainty, when all our old social forms are crumbling, when we cannot easily find our way, we can be lights to each other.

From Marilyn Ferguson's book The Aquarian Conspiracy

Keep shining!!!

Trish

Hypocrite,

Have you ever had the feeling that someone was watching you from behind your back and then turned around and noticed that someone was watching you? A lot of people have had this kind of experience and I think it’s fascinating to try to understand how this could be possible.

I think Heather makes a very interesting point - that it’s very difficult to influence the “mind-field” if you are under pressure such as in a scientific experiment. And that’s something important to keep in mind.

Everyone knows that we perform differently under stress and desperately wanting something to happen will be very counterproductive because it impairs our abilities to function optimally. Intuition, art, creativity, paranormal abilities etc all have to do with the right side of the brain. There are endless studies that have shown for instance that you will be far less creative if you are being watched or judged. Why couldn’t the same be true for paranormal abilities?

Yes, this problem makes it difficult for science to prove certain things, but just because science cannot prove it satisfactorily for you yet, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. There are many things that science cannot explain for us yet.

It’s great to see how you question things and you seem to want to “help” everyone here by making them adhere to your point of view but I think that at the same time you have to respect others and consider the possibility that they did experience things in the way that they say they did. And that life may be far more mysterious than you think it is. It’s just that you may need to have the right experiences, or open-mindedness to make you see that. I think a lot of people will have had some sort of paranormal experience in their lives but will desperately want to dismiss it because they fear the unknown or things that are not yet fully explainable scientifically.

Take care,

Lars

The experiment I described was just that (a scientific experiment on consciousness). My view and observations were presented as a hypothesis. Not to undertake such experiments on consciousness would be an act of ignorance. Of course the mindfield is all-encompassing (infinite). As far as I'm concerned the whole universe is a cosmic dream. Inside and outside are perceptual artifacts as is time. Yet, we study the human body in detail every day to further our understanding. Why then would we not want to know more about the human energy system. Do you think in the last 200 years we have learned everything about electricity and electromagnetism. Only an arrogant mind would say yes. Syamala, I greatly appreciate your point of view and thank you for the information with it. Reading the responses, I was surprised to see the so-called skeptics not attacking my views yet one or two people I thought open-minded (try) to pick apart the hypothesis. Maybe oneday we will all have an answer and realize we are (one)!
Todd

Aurora,
Mankind is out of sync with natures rhythms. That is obvious. Plants or animals arent destroying the planet. We are! We ravage the planet for it's resources then destroy it even further with our waste. Perhaps at the deepest level (unmanifest infinite) everything is as it should be.
Todd

I would rather meditate and enjoy life!
Todd

Lars
I have been trying to put in words what you just said in #76.
I have had many experiences"paranormal or spiritual or psychic" whatever you want to call them, that are personal and can not be confirmed or proven by science or any other belief system for that matter. Being a sensitve person opens me to the subtle energies. Being a sensitve person, it is also difficult at times to want to share these experiences, especialy here.

We have a right side of or brain and a left side. When they are out of balance then one becomes dominant. It is through logic AND intuition that we find balance.

I don't need science to prove there is a spirit and I don't need spirituality to prove there is gravity. They both exist without our defining them. In my opinion it is in the defining and proving that we lose site of both, spirit and science.

Hypocrite
I have watched people share thier experiences here only to watch you pick them a part with irrelevant points that are not provable and are a matter of perception. This is a typical arguement strategy that ties the other person up in deffending facts that take away from the true point of the other person. It is possible to discuss differences of opinion here without using this condesending strategy. I do respect you and your expression of your experience........namaste Hypocrite.

I will continue to share my thoughts here which are just as valid and no more valid than anybody elses. My perceptions, my experience, unique in this universe and when I'm gone ten million years from now, no one will have believed and experienced the universe like I have.

peace comes from peace

derek

My life has been full of mysterious experiences, miracles, mystical coincidences and the awareness of our oneness.

I will share them but I will not argue if they are real.

To me science and religion are just expressions of the need to explain the unexplainable, spirituality only the electrical vibrations that connect us all.

derek

You're all right in my book Derek!
Todd

Dear Derek,

I daresay you have many signs and symptoms of the condition Chandra refers to in another thread, "How do you stay calm..."

Thank you for sharing your peace with us.

Peace and Love to you, Melissa

Heath....synch!

Frustrating isn't it?

Ed, x

Yoo-Hoo Aurora!!

I am still "on duty" with the fire department, and should not be communicating. But I am here alone and wanted you to know ............IT'S RAINING!!!

Kate!
Amazing!
Wow!
Astonishing!

Gloria in Excelsis Deo!!
Bonnie

Of course it's raining, Bonnie, did you doubt it? :))))))))
Intelligent, playful, humorous and consequent... the field :)

Well, wish I could manage reading all these replies, but I cannot. It must be ADD and more ADD.

Hey, Richard:

I did scan all your posts on this thread, as I found one of them interesting, not that they are not all good, but we all have different interests at specific times.

Richard - What did you see? Did you hear anything, i.e., the angelic music? Just curious...

Anyway, there is a lot of stuff out there, whether one wants to call it the astral plane, heaven, or hell ... or maybe all of the above and more.

I think all of that stuff is in the One Mind, as we have created these images and sounds over the eons. Kind of like an attic or store house of junk with of course, treasures. And what one might call junk, another may call a treasure - only to throw it away later for someone else to find.

So what do you think? I am just thinking out loud as random thoughts come to mind.

But it would certainly make sense to me, if this is what all that unseen and unheard stuff is - well, not so unseen and unheard, as all can see and hear, if they open their eyes and ears. In the ACIMs, it talks about the things that the children create and that God keeps the good stuff and discards the bad stuff.

You know, being a parent of child with shared custody and not really being apart of my son's life as much as I would have desired, since he prefers to work in the family's business on his dad's side 3000 miles away and has always preferred his dad's BIG and friendly family.

Anyway, as a parent, I have saved every little piece of artwork that my son created when he was young. I cannot bear to part with any of it, nor trash it. I suppose God is like this and much more so...how precious our creations are to God :-) Just think of all the creatures of God creating stuff, i.e., us, the animals, the plants, the earth, the sun, the moon, the angels, etcs! No wonder we cannot tell what is real anymore. Well, I can't. But I can choose what I play with and what I create, as freedom is our gift.

Love, Char

BTW: The ACIMs does say that we do not know what is good or evil; and in fact, it goes further to say that evil is an illusion and that only good exist - if I remember correctly.

I think it all depends on where someone is coming from and the point they are trying to get across as well as the audience ... such as, I am still in the so-called 'good vs. evil' mind set, as I don't know how else to classify stuff, i.e., this is good for me and that is bad for me, helps me to decide which way to go on my journey. What might be good for me, could be bad for another and visa versa.

Evil probably really is ignorance as the Vedas say, because what else could it be? Like the Bible calls it blindness, which is pretty much the same thing. And some call evil darkness - same thing. Many say that the light is the truth, and that pretty much sums it all up, I would think???? Like, what else could there be for us in this state?

Yes, I am still learning and trying to understand it all :-)

Love, Char

Hi Char,

Really busy, but you are on the right track with ACIM, as for that BIG family, the probability right now is that they will not survive. But you will, and you will save your son.

It is because of where your mind dwells that you will know what the many do not you will know where to go for safe haven.

A few will see and hear, but the many will not. There is the possbility that the world could overcome it's ego problem, and implement a solution taking great measure, but it looks unlikley at the moment.

As such most will most likley perish, and so will those difficult neighbors you spoke about, but such is the nature of conscious evolution.

For this knowing we must thank the bees.

Richard and Char4,

If knowledge is power,
and absolute power corrupts,
and an omnipotent God is all-powerful,
whence does evil come, but unto the powers that bee?

Bees mind their own mine *field*,
and I should mind mine for buzz words.

The Centerfielder

Sometime back, around a decade back, Dalai Lama asked a surgeon, during a conference or meeting, if mind could influence brain? And the surgeon shot back with an empathic no.

Now, we know that mind can change not only the functionality of the brain but also the architecture of the brain.

Gradually, it seems that scientists are finally considering the possibility of mind as being different or apart from brain. Some of the initial research is pointing toward that evidence as well.

A recent study relating to this issue is just published in PLOS Biology.

With love, Parmjit
www.ParmjitSingh.org

Hey Richard,

.... Well, I don't know how to say this, but I don't really believe we understand it all. I think the stories that we have all heard might not mean what we think they mean, but on the surface, they might literally be a form of evolution, which is okay. I am one who does not care about what happens because I believe that what is real can never be destroyed. Do I worry about stuff? Surely I do, just like everyone else. I do not want to suffer, nor do I want others to suffer. It's like shedding our skin for a new skin and it should not be painful, nor frightening, or more to the fact of giving up our clothing and not being afraid of being naked - the bold unhidden truth.

I think the signs around us, are just that - signs, which can help us to change what we are doing in order to live a better life and evolve without so much pain. For example: like the bees are a warning and we need to correct what is dis-eased within ourselves, which reflects the condition of our planet.

It's not scary or freaky, but darkness. I presume we all have shadows and we need to shine the light on all the dark places in the One Mind in order to heal.

BTW: I don't worry about my son as he is a like a young Deepak. My son talks about all the things that Deepak talks about and my son has not read any books about enlightenment, nor has he read the Bible (just a few chapters or verses). Of course, my son has shadows just like me and the rest of us.

I believe that our end co-existed with our beginning, so it's already written, i.e., already done and over with, yet NOT ended as we can perceive it...(or never happened and we are sleeping) I really don't understand the purpose in all this, but I guess I will keep trying, as everyone else. Can you imagine being like Buddha or Jesus Christ? Pretty amazing ... huh?

Well, it's time to go home and I still have some work to do, so bye for now. You got me going, i.e., thinking, so that is very good as I must face some core illusions within myself to rise above my blindness. :-)

Love,
Char

Keith -

I have no problems with what you are saying. I don't think we know God ... our shall I say ourSELF

Love, Char

Well Char, I don't know for sure either, perhaps it depends how we write our story. I just right what comes to mind. However there are a certain number of clues and indicators that arose from the CCD research.

There is something unprecedented, in recent history, going on, on this planet.

We might say it is gearing up for change and humanity certainly isn't prepared for it. So there are some logical conclusions one can draw. Especially looking at the general intention of life, nature and consciouness.

Not based on anything other than known cause and effect.

Anyway I am not attached to any specific outcome, since all solutions are the same.

I am sure it will be an adventure.

Hi heather...interesting that you are now fine tuning your story. One important change in your retelling of your story is this: you didn't predict the exact combination of numbers in each turn as originally recollected but hoped for a particular combination to turn up and the dice came up with that combination.

"Some of the 13 possible combinations are: 1 pair, 2 pairs, 3 pairs, 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind, 5 of a kind, 4 in a row (small straight), 5 in a row (large straight), 3 of a kind and 2 of a kind (full house), and 5 of the same value (yahtzee)."

There are 13 possible "scoring" combinations.
You can think of a specific lower level scoring combinations(6): small or large straight, full house, 3 or 4 of a kind, Yahtzee, chance. (all of them have a different point values). The max score can be possible by simply aiming for an outcome of 5 6's. That will give you a perfect score for these 7 specifc combinations. Although it isn't necessary in a full house, straights or Yahtzee.

For the upper level 6 scoring combinations, you have a score added up the chosen die face.
The max score can be achieved by having Yahtzee (five of a kind) for all 6 die faces.

If scoring maximum is understood as a perfect game, this is how it can occur:

"Maximum Score

The maximum score of 375 is achieved by scoring 5x1's (5pts), 5x2's (10pts), 5x3's (15pts), 5x4's (20pts), 5x5's (25pts), 5x6's (30pts), Bonus for top row score equaling or exceeding 63pts (35pts), 3-of-a-kind as 5x6's (30pts), 4-of-a-kind as 5x6's (30pts), Full House (25pts), Small Straight (30pts), Long Straight (40pts), Yahtzee (50pts) and Chance as 5x6's (30pts)."

I remember you asked for the odds of a "perfect game"

Since you insist that you didn't have to use re rolling option the calculation of odds become much simpler.

Basically in a perfect game scenario you have to come up with 1 Yahtzee, 8 Specific Yahtzees, a full-house, small and large straight, in 13 successive trails in a single game. ( If you need max score for your "perfect game" in "chance" category you need to have a specific Yahtzee too 5 6's)

The odds I calculated (without going into details) for the above scenario is not a thousand to one, a million to one or a billion to one but is in the order of a billion billion billion billion billion billion to one.

(But if you use the re rolling option and game strategy..the odds of scoring optimally comes exponentially down to much saner levels.)

PS: Had some friends of the family visiting my place from another city, the other day. Didn't have time to respond to your posts before I gave them a send-off.

Dear Hyp

What fine-tuning do you see, dear sir? In my initial description, I don't mention numbers. In fairness, my first description was so vague that it's reasonable to assume I'm talking about numbers, if the reader hasn't been exposed to Yahtzee, which is probably the case for most people. Thanks for calculating the odds. They're much higher than I thought they'd be.

So will you be trying meditative practice to see if you can reawaken your own chance connection?

Visitors are more important than IB comments, and you must have had a hundred things on your mind. I appreciate your return to IB.

love, Heath

"#63: I was describing how it feels to me. When I failed and partially failed in the two succeeding games, I could feel my own awareness coming in the way of the pure meditative state I'd achieved in the perfect game. When people who know what happens with my mind and the names of horses for big horse races urge me to try so they can bet, I get the same feeling of pressure that interferes with my ability to sense the top names clearly. They become observers, and I can't block the intensity of their interest in the outcome, so my meditative connection with the names becomes corrupted. I usually can't even get a sense of anything when that happens."

Do the simple experiment suggested above.

"To try to force dice to come up as I will, or force a coin to fall as I will, is exactly the self-observational pressure that interferes with success."

You can repeat the experiment any number of times and this repetition without checking the results might help you bring down the pressure or success or failure like in a game or sports betting. If you check the results later that might give some interesting observations.

..are you doing what the odds predict or less than the odds predict or more than the odds predict. The case of a perfect prediction or unlikely odds of prediction would be a bonus but isn't the point. If you do slightly better than the odds, even with the likely pressure levels of observation...given the meditation factor involved, will be something insightful and would classify as an objective experiment rather than what the subjective feelings of success in predictions a human mind can experience.

That's a good idea. I'd need someone with me to record the results as they occur, or I'd need a lot of dice or coins.

"#61: I had played the game perhaps once or twice before this took place; on the afternoon it took place, we played for perhaps 90 minutes, which would have been 10 games max. I never played thereafter because I don't like the game. None of my friends or family like the game much, so there's no one to urge me to play it."

90 min is a very low estimate for 10 games. Considering other opponents use game strategy and it takes considerable time to choose the right scoring combination to fill the card to improve the score.

The unfamiliarity with the relatively complex game of chance and strategy coming from inexperience of playing the game corrupts the recollection and retelling of the story.

"Why not try it yourselves and see what happens? Is there any downside to trying?"

You can also try it not in a game but in the confines of your room by simply imagining certain combinations and rolling the dice while practicing mediation. Keep a record on a paper. Write your imagined numbers and note the numbers that turn up. Try to be disassociated with them in meditative state and after a hour of such experiment see the results. There's no pressure of winning here or proving a point. It is a simple experiment to see what comes out. you don't have to be "perfect" with a trillion to one odds but if you do better than the average odds that's enough. (The Princeton PEAR reported subjects being able to influence the outcome two times in 1000 coin flips or so. Which is a great achievement. It isn't a trillion to one probability here. These subjects have no pressure of performance too.)

As for me I do meditative pratcice in a game like Chess (and po-ker).

I could beat an exceptionally ranked player( in chess) without conscious strategies but by just letting my mind make decisions in a trance like state ....but then when I start loosing ground to a lower ranked player than me....I seem to come out of trance and start making silly mistakes and eventually loose. So for me the no-observation, trance like state and doing good go hand in hand.
It isn't "trance" causally influencing the game..but the 'fortunes/state of the game'(could be 'opponents' ability or outcomes in a 'chance' game) also influencing the "trance".

I am a big time Poke-r enthusiast and have a poke-r table in at home where a bunch of friends play regularly. Being alert helps you read the cards of your opponents by intutively watching them and the way they bet. I had some extraordinary games of poke-r and recollect them very vividly where a r four of a kind beats a full house and a straight.
I remember extraordinary games but not the average ones.. doesn't mean that the out of ordinary games happened more frequently in my experiences.

PS: This post was supposed to be posted before #97. It didn't show up because of wordpoker

"The problem we adults have is we want to win all the time. Ahem. ;) That makes us very intense self-observers, indeed. Which interferes with the meditation."

I have a different take on this. children more often than adults want to win in a game. For one, children play more games than adults. I have seen others and myself, as kids, wanting to win in all types of games...the wisdom of playing games for fun is seen in adults more often than in children. ( I am not atlking about sports betting, playing professional games and supporting sports clubs.)
Its about playing games in a family and among friends. It's mostly about ego for a kid, trying to prove his abilities. I had a huge ego problem when playing chess as a kid. I could never take a loss and would challenge others(kids, adults, friends anyone) immediately if I lose. I have seen the same problem among other good players who were friends too. now that I grew up I don't have the ego problem of losing to a known person, online, or to a stanger. Recently I was forced by a friend of mine to challenge a old gentleman in an area where tens of simultaneous clocked games happen outdoor. I lost, although he wasn't playing an exceptional game. I didn't have the instinct to challenge him again... to prove a point to myself or my friend. I shaked hands with the stranger and felt blissful that i actually lost.

Winning and losing is a ego problem and children have to learn to be sportive and as a adult I see my self more mature and learned humility and I no longer have the pressures of wining in any game(if not for some real money. sports betting was made illegal in US recently and European bookies no longer accept sports bets from US. State lottery , Horse racing and online casinos are not my cup of tea. I had some very good results in soccer and baseball betting due to my knowledge of the game watching the betting trends and calculating odds better than many.)

Dear Hyp

The games went fast because no one was serious about the play.

It sounds as if pride is an issue when you get thrown out of your chess trance. Have you read about micro-expressions, which are part of the process of reading people?

(When I was young and had trouble reading humans, I'd imagine they were dogs. As soon as I could visualize what kind of dogs they were, I knew whether or not to trust them, and if to trust them, how far. Using that base, I could read them accurately thereafter. The trust positioning gave me some kind of base context for everything else, shayad.)

I don't think most kids have significant ego, I think it's in development -- the exercise of building ego is partly what games-playing is about -- kids are less sophisticated about hiding their real motives from themselves and others, so perhaps it appears they have more ego and desire to win than adults. But I've never felt in any kid the killing desire to win that so many adults have. Perhaps as people grow up, their learning to suppress the overt expression of a desire to win causes a compression of that urge, which increases its intensity. I know lots of adults who, if asked, will say they don't like to compete, win, etc. And their social behaviors support their self-assessments. Yet if you watch a trail of their actions (not their social behaviors), their desire to win is clear.

You very neatly turned away my hint that you intensely want to win. Your social behavior is usually more than polite, and your words and intentions are fair and compassionate. But the trail of your actions says you also like to win or dominate situations. You say, "Recently I was forced by a friend of mine to challenge a old gentleman in an area where tens of simultaneous clocked games happen outdoor. I lost, although he wasn't playing an exceptional game. I didn't have the instinct to challenge him again... to prove a point to myself or my friend. I shaked hands with the stranger and felt blissful that i actually lost." First, kudos to you for your honesty and humility. Second, that you feel the need to describe this says it's not yet fully natural to you.

Hyp, can you recommend a good way to learn to play chess decently? Or does one simply need lots of practice against a good opponent?

love, Heath

Premonitions, Quantum and the Mind.

Quantum reality is weird when we talk about 'past' and 'future'. Feynman's 'sum over histories' explanation is a good way to understand this weirdness. There are also experiments which talk about 'Erasing the past' history of a subatomic particle, and most weirdly there is an experiment which talks about 'Shaping the past' of a particle after certain delayed information of the experiment is observed in the future in batches.

In quantum world it looks as if consistent and definite history becomes manifest only after the future to which it leads its fully settled. It's as if the particles have premonitions of their future(this has been observed in countless experiments.)

This has close parallels and similarities to premonitions in humans and how human beings recollect the past - this can be explained by the following example:

The similarity can be seen from your experience of deciding to sell a painting which is close to your heart. Before meeting with a certain client you were in a ambiguous, undecided , fuzzy, mixed state of being both willing and unwilling to sell the painting. But talking with the person about the art world and learning of his affection for your aunt made you increasingly comfortable with the idea of selling. The conversation lead to a firm decision. which in turn allowed a history of the decision to crystallize out of the previous uncertainty. In retrospect it felt as if the decision was really been made all along. But if you hadn't got so well with that person. If he hadn't given you confidence that your beloved painting would be in trust worthy hands, you might have very well decided not to sell. And the story of the past you might tell in this situation could easily involve a recognition that you would actually decided long ago not to sell -- that no matter how sensible it might be to sell the painting, deep down you have always known that the sentimental connection was just too strong to let it go. The actual past of course did not change one bit, yet a different experience now would lead you to describe a different history.

In psychological arena rewriting and reinterpreting the past is a common place; our story of the past is often informed by our experiences in the present. But in physics which is objective it doesn't seem so, not really, it is in the quantum world. The "quantum eraser" and "delayed-choice quantum eraser" experiments proposed by Marlan Scully and Kai Druhl mhints at this kind of strangeness in quantum mechanics.

"The games went fast because no one was serious about the play."

...and no one was serious about scoring.

"It sounds as if pride is an issue when you get thrown out of your chess trance. Have you read about micro-expressions, which are part of the process of reading people? "

pride is a strong factor for me in "chess" till recently. It isn't any more or so I would claim. Understanding my abilities and my game gave me a certain level of comfort in loosing to better players more often and loosing to lesser players less often. Now I play the game as it unfolds rather than play the opponent. I see winning in chess as sharpening my mental skills, as an exercise.

"You very neatly turned away my hint that you intensely want to win."

competing and winning by suing tactics, cheating and manipulating and anything is an instinct that we inherited by evolution.

Children start developing these skills of manipulating , cheating and being competitive with others from a very early age. Babies and small kids have the instinct but they don't have the necessary skills to implement those instincts by being manipulative. With age they learn to hide their motives better. But the instinct is common for a kid or an adult. An Adult might learn to suppress those instincts with a greater understanding of the world, but a kid doesn't.

"Second, that you feel the need to describe this says it's not yet fully natural to you."

Yes, the instinct was there but I suppressed it consciously and I am 'proud' that I could do it. My description makes me see the past clearly. what was in my mind then was blurry, fuzzy, all natural. But I see it the way I described (and reinterpret it now)in light of the dialogue. Similar to the experience of selling the art work I mentioned above.

"can you recommend a good way to learn to play chess decently? Or does one simply need lots of practice against a good opponent?"

You can learn the rules and start playing online and can choose the level of opponents you want. I can recommend a few sites if I know your present skills.

Dear Hyp

What you write in #102 is so interesting, I read it and have been thinking about it all this while. It fits with an idea I'd had about chaos theory.

About the non-seriousness of the game, and your other comments about winning, I'm half Scandinavian, half Anglo-Irish. The Anglo-Irish side of the family are very competitive. The Scandinavian side are not. My dad, older sister and brother have the Anglo-Irish competitiveness. The rest of us have the Scandinavian diffidence. On the day of that game, the Anglo-Irish contigent wasn't playing. We played with supreme diffidence. Though we were diffident in our play and games went fast, another aspect of our Scandanvian family heritage came into play: care in playing by rules, care in recording scores, fairness, etc. So there was no sloppiness in the scoring, though we didn't care too much about who won or lost (except for my getting momentarily very p.o.'d at always always losing games of chance). I have no instinct for cheating and manipulating, at least that I'm aware of. My son doesn't have that instinct either, and appears to have never had it. However, he's more competitive than I am. His dad liked, and was good at, competing and manipulating, but he hated cheating. So just based on what I see in my family, I don't agree that competitiveness, cheating and manipulating are common to all kids, as an instinct. A great point of difference between my older sister and me is her competitiveness, her willingness to do anything to win. I know one thing you may write to me, after having read the previous. Shall I tell you what? :)

I smiled when I read your story of holding back on competitiveness. You might say I was proud of you, too.

My chess skills aren't, basically. Supposedly I know the game. No family, and not many friends, play it, so I've rarely played. Your recommendations would be valued.

Did you read DK's ATCA post about 10 asymmetric, low-probability, high-impact threats? If so, what did you think?

love, Heath

Dear Lars thanks for you thoughts.

"...at the same time you have to respect others and consider the possibility that they did experience things in the way that they say they did. "

I respect other peoples experiences. If I differ I differ in the 'story' which explains those experiences.

Much as similar to the interpretations of quantum mechanics like the proposed "many worlds" , Feynman's "sum over histories", Bohms "hidden variables" approach or the modified Schroedinger's wave equation of the Ghiradi-Rimini-Weber proposal of explaining the quantum reality and the connection between QM and the everyday experiences. Quantum mechanics explains the predictions of the theory to great accuracy, but it falls short of accurately describing the 'explanation' itself.

While GRW proposal makes some predictions which cannot be tested by todays technology. All the other three standard proposals agree fully with the standard approach and they all yield the same predictions for things that can be observed and measured. They differ only with what happens in the backstage as it were. They only differ in what Quantum Mechanics implies for the underlying nature of reality.

The biggest problem hindering the explanation the quantum reality is the quantum measurement problem of why an observations from experiment or a human observer seems to compels a wave to collapse making if choose a certain output out of infinite potentialities. quantum measurement problem problem still remains unsolved but a framework is under development for a likely solution is gaining ground: decoherence.

Basically, he interaction with environment cause the collapse. The environment could be human observer, measuring devices, neighboring ,molecules, atoms, photons, electrons or anything that can interact with the probability wave. Many are convinced about dechoherence but the bridge has not et been fully built between classical and quantum worlds.

"And that life may be far more mysterious than you think it is."

Sure there are a lot of things as yet unexplained. In quantum mechanics too..we have such mysteries. We don't yet have a Quantum Law to tell us why we observe things being unfold only in certain ways and not the other way around which don't contradict the quantum theory or the Relativity theory. We don't have a set of equations which gives a test of what can happen and what cannot.

"So just based on what I see in my family, I don't agree that competitiveness, cheating and manipulating are common to all kids, as an instinct."

I feel that instincts to compete and win are more primitive to human nature ..which breeds other skills(as against instincts) of cheating, manipulating, or more fairly... tactics to out maneuver your opponents by hiding your motives and your game strategy. The expressions of those instincts can be seen in the open in a cas-ino (although not cheating) or less dramatically in chess games etc. If you ever watch the po-ker championships you would see the passion, the pride and tactics.

If you like playing rapid chess ...my suggestion would be try instantchess.com (you can play for free) and see how it feels. You can try Yahoo Chess too..but i don't prefer it. I haven't read DK's blog.... may be later.

Dear Derek thanks for your thoughts #88

"I have watched people share thier experiences here only to watch you pick them a part with irrelevant points that are not provable and are a matter of perception."

On the other hand I feel that they are 'relevant' points in expressing my views but agree with you that they are a "matter of perception" which would mean that they are open for interpretation. My explanation is relevant in explaining the nature of a subjective experience.

"Thanks for calculating the odds. They're much higher than I thought they'd be."

The odds of getting even a single specific Yahtzee in the course of a game(over 13 turns) using the re- rolling option is about 100 to 1

With out using re-rolling option..that would be something like 500 to 1(over the course of a single game)

But to succeed in at all 13 combinations without re-rolling would mean odds of zillions to one.

So to make the story sound more believable, relatively speaking even at the paranormal scale...you can think of defining the 'perfect game' more finely by recollecting the details of the past(or imagining your past as you go on...like the quantum insights or the art lover example.). Of course if you believe that the combination of 6 numbers you got in each turn is what's imagined in the first place in your mind then the odds would be even more drastic than the odds I first calculated for the perfect game, but would be believable simply because of the zillions to one odds for the lack of any other plausible explanation than shaping your past similar to quantum effects. (the family members with whom you played might each have a different story to tell) seeing into and predicting the future in any meaningful way. Although it talks about shaping the past history though. The belief in paranormal predictability has nothing to do with insights of QM although it does hint at a similarity with shaping of the past. Also to remember that quantum effects take place at subatomic scales and not at the size of dice.

Quantum Mechanics rules out seeing into and predicting the future in any meaningful way. Although it talks about shaping the past history though. The belief in paranormal predictability has nothing to do with insights of QM although it does hint at a similarity with shaping of the past. (Also to remember that quantum effects take place at subatomic scales and not at the size of dice.)

Are the pretenders listening? (A Guest Comment by Skeptisch)

If only we had less appetite for “super” and more for “natural”.

More of us would then be into the natural world. We would not want to take the shortcut to the supernatural “unworld”. We would worship the scientists’ god, the one that reveals himself in the order of what truly exists. More of us would be into the normal rather than the paranormal, into science rather that pseudo science. We would all know a little more from the very small to the very big, from micro to macro, from biology to astronomy.

If we still needed religion, it would be natural religion. Our spirituality would come from the “awe” we experience in the real world and its natural beauty. If we still needed mysticism it would be Richard Feynman’s “natural mysticism”. His Quantum mechanics, predictable and repeated to an unbelievable accuracy. Real quantum mechanics, not one cooked up by preachers and gurus who pretend to know more about the quantum world than Mr. Quantum Mechanics himself.

More than one physicist has said something like: "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory."

Are the pretenders listening?

If we had really and truly examined the natural world we would realise how fortunate we are to be here, on our beautiful pale blue dot, at a time in our evolution when we can look at ourselves and plan our own future.

We are here at a time the universe is looking at itself through our minds, WITHIN our brains.

We don’t need the supernatural world that argues and kills in the name of the gods!

-Skeptisch

Dear Hyp

Chaos theory often uses images developed from fractal equations to illustrate how initial uncertainties may have evolved into complex semi-ordered structures. Fractal images help one visualize how pattern A can evolve from pattern B, and how pattern B, though different from pattern A, contains elements related to pattern A because it evolved from it.

My sense is there are points in any pattern where the similarities to previous evolutions of the pattern are more strongly felt. And that those stronger areas may act as predictors as to how a current pattern may evolve. If one can position oneself along such a boundary of strong evolution, to give it a made-up name, by sensing the nature of that boundary one may be able to intuit how the pattern will evolve, to some degree, in the relatively near future. And when the boundary of strong evolution has grown from relatively recent iterations of evolution, it might affect only the future moments of one person, or a small number of people; this might be called a local pattern predictor. But when the boundary of strong evolution has persisted in some form through many old interations of evolution, it should have become part of the initial input to a large number of now-dispersed patterns, and may thus affect a large number of people; this might be called a global pattern predictor. The local pattern predictor might allow one to understand how dice might roll in the next 40 seconds, or whether one might be in an accident in a day or two. The more global pattern predictor might allow one to understand how horses may finish in a big race in five days, or whether there might be a plane crash or the start of a war in two months.

Regarding the possibility of gtlobal pattern predictors, I remember Jung writing that before the start of WWII there were many signs of psychological disturbance, including depressions and anxious dreams, to a degree that was notable.

These are just my thoughts; some of the terms home-grown.

One of the most amazing fractal images I've ever seen is:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Fractal_Broccoli.jpg

I believe only the "broccoli" florettes themselves "grew" from a fractal equation; however, I may be wrong, it may be that the leaves were develoepd fractally, too.

Google "fractal images" to see many more examples.

love, Heath

"The local pattern predictor might allow one to understand how dice might roll in the next 40 seconds, ...."

I appreciate your seeking alternate explanations but it is a fallacious application of chaos theory to the outcome of a roll of dice in the special case where the patterns are less likely to happen.
If there are more ways for a an "out of order Yahtzee" to happen in the roll of dice, chaos theory predicts that it is more likely to happen and that is what we would intuit. Entropy and order arising out of chaos are closely related. complexity and order low entropy can evolve out of disorder high entropy. According to second law of thermodynamics physical systems tend to evolve towards states of higher entropy. The simple reasoning is this: there are more ways for a system to to have higher entropy and more ways means that the system has "more ways " to evolve into one of high entropy configuration. this isn't a Law in conventional sense but there is always a chance of a less likely even like throwing a jumbled pages of book thrown into air and upon piling them up see that they are in exact order although the chances are very less. The outcome o dice or is classical probability which can be predicted by knowing the exact orientation an spin on the dice at the time of release theoretically speaking but when it comes to quantum chaos it becomes strangely weird though.

I have written some programs to generate fractals and I am fascinated about them too.

"The local pattern predictor might allow one to understand how dice might roll in the next 40 seconds"

Of course I can predict with great accuracy that the dice will roll a non-yathzee(which is a pattern) as there are many ways in which it can happen. But you cannot predict that an unlikely Yahtzee would occur accurately as there are only 6 ways out of about 7000 for it to happen.

Coming to global patterns...one can predict the path of a hurricane using chaos theory and butterfly effect only to a certain accuracy. And patterns can be observed in human behaviors and collective psychology due to the expose to similar environmental inputs in a global world. I don't se any paranormality in it. In case of a dice a small fluctuation in the blood flow in the hand or in the vibrations in the floor would change the outcome of the dice. And there is no way human mind can sense it let alone a super computer running for years to make this simple calculation of the orientation of dice. If the humans have that accurate senses of the forces they impart, it would mean that golfers can have the ability to find the hole time and again with great accuracy over distance. In case of dice, since you are blind to the exact orientation of dice at the time of releases it becomes even more random and unpredictable.

picking the right moments and actions would be feeds into a pattern's evolution. intuition may involve sensing not only evolutionary possibilities, but also where one is placed on a strong evolutionary boundary, and how shifting an action's nature or moment of time can modify the outcome. the person is part of the pattern, but as a formative point on it -- an active, and possibly conscious and willed, input to the next step. if one can sense the pattern one is within, one's actions and timing can help form the next iteration in a slightly more predictable way than normal.

about global patterns, there were people who dreamed of things like the Challenger explosions, and 9/11. I mentioned the WWII depressions and dreams -- they were very widespread, supposedly.

Dear Hyp and All

that fractal broccoli is not -- it's real!!

here's a link to a page about it...

http://www.fourmilab.ch/images/Romanesco/

sorry and love, Heath

Here's a beautiful fractal image that's really a fractal, not a vegetable:

http://www.cs.princeton.edu/introcs/22library/flaming-fractal.jpg

picking the right moments and actions would be feeds into a pattern's evolution. intuition may involve sensing not only evolutionary possibilities, but also where one is placed on a strong evolutionary boundary, and how shifting an action's nature or moment of time can modify the outcome. the person is part of the pattern, but as a formative point on it -- an active, and possibly conscious and willed, input to the next step. if one can sense the pattern one is within, one's actions and timing can help form the next iteration in a slightly more predictable way than normal.

and another...

http://dev.gentoo.org/~dberkholz/wallpaper/shore_of_the_fractal_sea-1600.jpg

good night to all.

love, Heath

Lost the last comment. I will try it again.

"about global patterns, there were people who dreamed of things like the Challenger explosions, and 9/11. I mentioned the WWII depressions and dreams -- they were very widespread, supposedly."

These dreams( a very few in number)are almost always reported after the events happen, but that is natural and not the point but there are a very large number of similar dreams which go unreported. This is consistent with classical probability of more likely patterns happening more often then less likely patterns happening less likely.

"picking the right moments and actions would be feeds into a pattern's evolution. intuition may involve sensing not only evolutionary possibilities, but also where one is placed on a strong evolutionary boundary, and how shifting an action's nature or moment of time can modify the outcome. the person is part of the pattern, but as a formative point on it -- an active, and possibly conscious and willed, input to the next step. if one can sense the pattern one is within, one's actions and timing can help form the next iteration in a slightly more predictable way than normal."

This is all nice to speculate but there is no hint of evidence of collective predictions overtaking the classical odds. or an single individual over coming odds consistently in a chance game except for some subjective recollections. Of course an individual can intuitively predict a pattern which is more likely to happen more consistently than a prediction which is less likely to happen less consistently. This applies for all global events too.

Hyp, I had Challenger and 9/11 dreams myself. they were so scary I didn't report them. to whom would I have reported them, anyway? I might have been labelled paranoid or overstressed at the time. this is a problem in western culture, at least. so little credibility is given to these things that they're almost never spoken of. one is often penalized and ridiculed, or worse, if one speaks of them. there's no way to know their true frequency yet. there's no cultural support for discussing and recording such things.

dear heath, fractal pictures are good but you might want to see some fractal videos which show a simulation of the the evolution of the fractals from its simpler beginnings. I have a collection of some high compression fractal videos. you might find a few good ones from google.

is it possible for you to downsample one or two of your own, and post them on YouTube, to share with IB readers??

"Hyp, I had Challenger and 9/11 dreams myself. they were so scary I didn't report them. to whom would I have reported them, anyway?"

Why do you think the 911 planers chose that target?It is in the collective psyche of the americans.

Ans what's so improbable about the challenger disaster...considering the risks involved as learned from the news and the events that lead to the launch. many peope, would have got such dreams whoever know anythig about the challenger mission.
But many people have drms which are not rembered simply becuase those events did not happen in real.

ya, but the image of things flying into it wasn't. I'm not a big news freak, and I paid little attention to shuttle launch schedules. when you argue against my experiences, don't forget how essentially weird I am, meaning I'm not in the middle of anyone's bell curves, my actions are not according to average patterns.

Dear Yogi,

You are right. Mind is an inside phenomena. The Personal Conscious and the personal unconscious are both accessed within, and the it is also true that the Masters down the ages tell us to look within to experience IT.
However, they also say, you are not your mind. You are not your body. Like a radio, the DJ is not inside the radio. Not only is the DJ not inside the radio, but the source of the DJ is not inside, it is only an instrument for picking up a frequency on which the voice and thoughts of the DJ travel.
The Masters say you need to come to a point of "no-mind". If mind is an internal phenomenon, then removing mind allows your consciousness to expand beyond mind, beyond the personal self.
The term "getting out of your head" is literally applied. That is not to say that consciousness is a physical aspect of the cosmos. Like gravity, it is something we sense and experience but it cannot be seen. Like gravity, the moon and the planets all are linked and held together by the gravitational relationship between them.
Any idea of separation is illusory.
There is no separation.
Mind separates.
The body and the mind (personal consciousness) are impermanent. The Universe too is impermanent.
The real you, which is one with the superconscious, with Intelligence itself, is timeless, and occupies no place in this dimension. Like a remote spacecraft on a distant planet, mind and body are simply the vehicles, cameras and gismos with which to experience life.

I enjoy reading your posts and for someone who has not experienced so called "Enlightenment" you have a terrific intellectual grasp of Reality. So what are you afraid of? Castenada says, "Fear is your first enemy".

However much you read about water, you will never get wet from the words. You need to let go the books and the theory and jump in. No words can give you the experience of wetness.

But I do understand.

"You are right. Mind is an inside phenomena."

Gajji kuka Taomaster, neenu entha chepthey kuda ardam kadu. Self correcting mohron when will you correct yourself? Phenomena is plural of phenomenon! Such a put off the moment you read that in the beginning line!

Dear Hypocrite,

Thank you for your reply.

Even if I don't know if I'll ever agree with everything you say or the harsh way in which you've responded to other peoples' personal experiences questioning their ability to recall events etc... I have to say that I like the fact that you seem to be very passionate about what you have to say and that you have offered a lot of interesting thoughts to this debate.

Take care,

Lars

Dear Hypocrite
Sometimes we get lost in the interpretations and get away from the intent. Sometimes the intent needs some interpretation to keep it in check. The balance that I am learning here.

peace

derek

Derek,

I am glad to hear that you thought I helped you (with my post #76) to put into words what you wanted to say to hypocrite.

Stay true to yourself and your experiences! Some of my personal experiences also suggest, no matter how much I try to rationalize them, that life really is far more mysterious than many of us are led to believe.

Take care,

Lars

Dear Hyp

Thanks for the chess site ref, and for your challenges, which made me think more deeply.

love, Heath

Hyp, from DK's Black Swan post...

...The risk of missing some High Impact events altogether increases with the complexity of our world. This statistical phenomenon has been dubbed Black Swan by statistician N N Taleb, who describes them as ‘outliers’, ie events which lie "outside the realm of our expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to [their] possibility." This retrospective but not prospective predictability is the critical distinction between a Black Swan and a ‘normal’ Low Probability High Impact Event. Its impact is further exacerbated by our tendency “to act as if they do not exist.”...

I think this can be applied to being aware of, investigating and reporting mind field events.

love, Heath

Heather.... When I was in high school I read Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams"...in an effort to understand the phenomenon.

You might like the critically acclaimed surrealist French movie.."the science of dreams"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Science_of_Sleep

"I'm not in the middle of anyone's bell curves, my actions are not according to average patterns."

Human psyche has common roots and average patterns are common. When this happens subconsciously we have a tendency to overestimate out abilities or experiences and most people believe they are special and their experiences are special. One should not be surprised if the master mind behind 911 was was also triggered by a dream with the plan to attack WTC with planes. Of course the "average patterns" are more likely ..."out of ordinary are less likely and considering there are billions of humans and billions of events, these less likely patterns do happen frequently. Recollection of events are very subjective and when we recollect dreams it turn out to be even more the case. We in fact give a story, and solidify our memories of past (of real events and of dreams) based on our new experiences. The psychology of human brain, cognition and memories is fascinating.

Hetaher...

I would highly recommend Taleb's "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable"

It's true predicting events in real life is different from a game of dice. We are ignorant of many thinks and make fallacies in making predictions or analyzing the oddity of the event. There are a lot of things we don't know in real life to make predictions. I don' see ant suggestions of paranormal and mind fields in Talebs' work. It is still scientific and statistic but it's just that it is hugely complex and it would be fallacious to draw conclusions and make decisions from cognitive biases and simple observations.

I suggest you read the book before you can interpret his words and other ideas towards paranormal mind fields.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Swan_(book)

"The narrative fallacy

Another issue is the "narrative fallacy" which refers to our tendency to construct stories around facts, which in love for example may serve a purpose, but when someone begins to believe the stories and accommodate facts into the stories, they are likely to err."

"Limited human knowledge

Why do people tend to neglect rare events? Partly because humans underestimate their ignorance in most situations - the effect of unexpected events is far more significant than people often imagine. Taleb argues that the proposition "we know" is in many cases an illusion - the human mind tends to think it knows, but does not always have a solid basis for this delusion of "I know". This notion that we do not know is very old, dated as far back at least as Socrates. Some felt[attribution needed] that the advancement of science has rendered the world well-known; Taleb argues that while science added knowledge, the world did not turn into a fictitious world where everything is known. Socrates' dictum "the only thing I know, is that I do not know" is as true as ever, Taleb concludes. Taleb characterizes the trait, in part, as the Ludic fallacy."

""outside the realm of our expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to [their] possibility." This retrospective but not prospective predictability is the critical distinction between a Black Swan and a ‘normal’ Low Probability High Impact Event. Its impact is further exacerbated by our tendency “to act as if they do not exist.”..."

"Higher frequency

Rare events do occur much more than we dare to think. Our thinking is usually limited in scope and we make assumptions based on what we see, know, and assume. Reality, however is much more complicated and unpredictable than we think.
Also, assumptions relevant to average situation, are less relevant to iregular situations, especially when the "rules of the game" themselves do change."

Taleb talks about unpredictability of Reality and also about the fallacy of claims to predict the reality based on their subjective recollections and stories.

"...The risk of missing some High Impact events altogether increases with the complexity of our world. This statistical phenomenon has been dubbed Black Swan by statistician N N Taleb, who describes them as ‘outliers’, ie events which lie "outside the realm of our expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to [their] possibility." This retrospective but not prospective predictability is the critical distinction between a Black Swan and a ‘normal’ Low Probability High Impact Event. Its impact is further exacerbated by our tendency “to act as if they do not exist.”...

I think this can be applied to being aware of, investigating and reporting mind field events.

I don't think so. Mind fields is about claiming to predict the future with our subjective feelings which are subject to even more fallacy than just retrospective approach to the predictions which Taleb talks about. In Taleb's view Reality is more complex and unpredictable than we think it is.

I ran across this article that some of you might be interested in reading:

"Why Great Minds Can't Grasp Consciousness"

http://livescience.com/health/050808_human_consciousness.html

The fractal videos I have are of high res. over 500 MB short videos(less than 10 min.). I would have to convert them to low res. formats to make it less cumbersome on youtube. There are some excellent video's already available on Youtube and Google. You might like them:

http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=fractal

www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fractal&search=Search+YouTube

Bonnie..thanks for link although it is old news for many of us.

Biases in probability and belief

* Ambiguity effect — the avoidance of options for which missing information makes the probability seem "unknown".

* Anchoring — the tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

* Anthropic bias — the tendency for one's evidence to be biased by observation selection effects.

* Attentional bias — neglect of relevant data when making judgments of a correlation or association.

* Availability heuristic — a biased prediction, due to the tendency to focus on the most salient and emotionally-charged outcome.

* Clustering illusion — the tendency to see patterns where actually none exist.

* Conjunction fallacy — the tendency to assume that specific conditions are more probable than general ones.

* Gambler's fallacy — the tendency to assume that individual random events are influenced by previous random events. For example, "I've flipped heads with this coin so many times that tails is bound to come up sooner or later."

* Hindsight bias — sometimes called the "I-knew-it-all-along" effect, the inclination to see past events as being predictable.

* Illusory correlation — beliefs that inaccurately suppose a relationship between a certain type of action and an effect.

* Ludic fallacy — the analysis of chance related problems with the narrow frame of games. Ignoring the complexity of reality, and the non-gaussian distribution of many things.

* Neglect of prior base rates effect — the tendency to fail to incorporate prior known probabilities which are pertinent to the decision at hand.

* Observer-expectancy effect — when a researcher expects a given result and therefore unconsciously manipulates an experiment or misinterprets data in order to find it (see also subject-expectancy effect).

* Optimism bias — the systematic tendency to be over-optimistic about the outcome of planned actions.

* Overconfidence effect — the tendency to overestimate one's own abilities.

* Positive outcome bias — a tendency in prediction to overestimate the probability of good things happening to them (see also wishful thinking, optimism bias and valence effect).

* Primacy effect — the tendency to weigh initial events more than subsequent events.

* Recency effect — the tendency to weigh recent events more than earlier events (see also peak-end rule).

* Reminiscence bump — the effect that people tend to recall more personal events from adolescence and early adulthood than from other lifetime periods.

* Rosy retrospection — the tendency to rate past events more positively than they had actually rated them when the event occurred.

* Subadditivity effect — the tendency to judge probability of the whole to be less than the probabilities of the parts.

* Telescoping effect — the effect that recent events appear to have occurred more remotely and remote events appear to have occurred more recently.

* Texas sharpshooter fallacy — the fallacy of selecting or adjusting a hypothesis after the data are collected, making it impossible to test the hypothesis fairly.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Hi Bonnie,

Some nice posts from you on the other thread too. Thx for the link. Yes, at least a certain section of scientists are really exploring consciousness. We all hope, that someday they reach a stage which the mystics experienced. The word "mind" is quite loosely used. It means different things to different people. I know Deepak mostly uses it as that entity which is outside of us and universal, but mind is generally used for meaning the abstract part of the physical brain. Like in "mindless dud" meaning no mind to comprehend, even though the physical brain is still intact. LOL!

Like Aurora had said before "We all are already in rome". True! But some realize and some think they are either roaming in paris or in kenya, even though deep inside they are in rome like all others. LOL!

It is a fallacy to come up with mind fields and other subjective theories to explain away the complexity and unpredictability of Reality. According to Taleb there are a lot of unconsidered factors(rational, not paranormal) which makes reality unpredictable than most people think.

Hasela you are absolutely right...has the weather cooled down....did the monsoons hit you bringing you smiles? I heard that rabid dogs go even more madder in the rainy season......

Is Taleb from Taliban??(Just for laughs) LOL!

To Kill a Rabid Dog

I recently saw some pictures of a rabid dog being put down. It was someone's pet; a best friend. Sad, but facts of life. Quarantine is not an option as this dog has the tendency to keep escaping and keep biting. It's said that Every dog has it's day, it is also true that there is always a dog out there to take the place of a dead one, if the pet owner so desires. A dog can be judged by the company it keeps, it's owner, it's home, and its behavior. If it turns rabid, it is begging you put it out of misery. I don't know if one can see and predict the future but the premonitions are always there.

Did we ever leave Rome?? Worth pondering! If that is so, then why do people think they are either in zimbabwe or norway? Somehow, thru an ingenious experiment we've to show those who think they are roaming in norway and drinking beer on the roads are in Rome actually. Your Kind thoughts on this Bonnie? LOL!

Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

In statistics, apophenia would be classed as a Type I error (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity). Apophenia is often used as an explanation of some paranormal and religious claims. It has been suggested that apophenia is a link between psychosis and creativity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Read this article about influencing/predicting the future outcomes:

Illusion of control is the tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they demonstrably have no influence over.

The predominant paradigm in research on unrealistic perceived control has been Ellen Langer’s (1975) “illusion of control”. Langer showed that people often behave as if chance events are accessible to personal control. In a series of experiments, Langer demonstrated first the prevalence of the illusion of control and second, that people were more likely to behave as if they could exercise control in a chance situation where “skill cues” were present. By skill cues, Langer meant properties of the situation more normally associated with the exercise of skill, in particular the exercise of choice, competition, familiarity with the stimulus and involvement in decisions.

One simple form of this fallacy is found in casinos: when rolling dice in craps, it has been shown that people tend to throw harder for high numbers and softer for low numbers. Under some circumstances, experimental subjects have been induced to believe that they could affect the outcome of a purely random coin toss. Subjects who guessed a series of coin tosses more successfully began to believe that they were actually better guessers, and believed that their guessing performance would be less accurate if they were distracted.

Taylor & Brown (1988), have argued that positive illusions are adaptive as they increase motivation and persistence. This position is supported by Albert Bandura's claim that ‘optimistic self-appraisals of capability, that are not unduly disparate from what is possible, can be advantageous, whereas veridical judgements can be self-limiting’ (Bandura, 1989, p.1177). We should, however, note here Bandura’s use of the qualification ‘not unduly disparate from what is possible’. His argument is essentially concerned with the adaptive effect of optimistic beliefs about control and performance in circumstances where control is possible, rather than perceived control in circumstances where outcomes are genuinely non-contingent on an individual’s behaviour.

Bandura has also suggested that: "In activities where the margins of error are narrow and missteps can produce costly or injurious consequences, personal well-being is best served by highly accurate efficacy appraisal." (1997, p. 71)

Taylor and Brown argue that positive illusions are adaptive, since there is evidence that they are more common in normally mentally healthy individuals than in depressed individuals. However, Pacini, Muir and Epstein (1998) have shown that this may be because depressed people overcompensate for a tendency toward maladaptive intuitive processing by exercising excessive rational control in trivial situations, and note that the difference with non-depressed people disappears in more consequential circumstances.

There is also empirical evidence that high self-efficacy can be maladaptive in some circumstances. In a scenario-based study, Whyte et al. (1997) showed that participants in whom they had induced high self-efficacy were significantly more likely to escalate commitment to a failing course of action. Knee and Zuckerman (1998) have challenged the definition of mental health used by Taylor and Brown and argue that lack of illusions is associated with a non-defensive personality oriented towards growth and learning and with low ego involvement in outcomes. They present evidence that self-determined individuals are less prone to these illusions. In the late 1970s, Abramson and Alloy (1980) demonstrated that depressed individuals hold a more accurate view of their control of the social environment than do non-depressed individuals. This finding holds true even when the depression is manipulated experimentally.

Fenton-O'Creevy et al (2003) argue, as do Gollwittzer and Kinney (1989), that while illusory beliefs about control may promote goal striving, they are not conducive to sound decision-making. Illusions of control may cause insensitivity to feedback, impede learning and predispose toward greater objective risk taking (since subjective risk will be reduced by illusion of control).

In a study of the illusion of control in a population of traders working in investment banks, Fenton-O'Creevy et al (2003, 2004) found that traders who were prone to high illusion of control had significantly worse performance on analysis, risk management and contribution to desk profits. They also earned significantly less.

One important explanation for illusion of control may lie in self-regulation theory. To the extent that people are driven by internal goals concerned with the exercise of control over their environment, they will seek to reassert control in conditions of chaos, uncertainty or stress. Failing genuine control, one coping strategy will be to fall back on defensive attributions of control—leading to illusions of control (Fenton-O'Creevy et al, 2003).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control

It's said that reality is a magical masterpiece
and that to each viewer it presents a unique
view. What is baffling is that despite the distinct
individual views there are also the consensus
views of several groups: religions, science,
philosophies, and civilizations have different
views about how the real looks. Underlying
and, sometimes, in conflict with these babel of
views is the instinctual view.

So, a viewer is left with the job of reconciling all
this conflicting models of how reality should
look with their senses' impressions. Most people
are not bothered by the latent schizophrenia of
juggling all these views. But seekers, and
philosophers are obsessed by the task to find
the ultimate real view of reality, the true, and
absolute masterpiece.

It's hard for a seeker to surrender to viewing
pleasure, to the simple enjoyment of the ever
shifting views. Searching for the immutable
they forsake the spectacle of the never to
be repeated moment by moment unique
masterpiece.

Very nice, Divya!

"Seek and ye shall find."

"Knock, and a door shall be opened unto you."

Pioneers do find. They are smart enough to know
when they come across a Master's piece.

Treasures are loved and cherished when found.

The soil that is underfoot is mistaken for dirt.
Be careful where you tread. "Stay Off The Grass!"

Why? Because we are in the process of bringing it enlightenment.

And when that finally happens, I am going to stay put.

Dear Hypocrite,

I think the problem with this debate is that we’re dealing with the unknown and we’re dealing with different ways of analyzing events.

Just because a statistician may say an event is purely random and insignificant - it doesn’t mean that it could not be significant if we look at it from a different perspective. Statistics and numbers don’t always tell the whole story.

You seem to think that your way of looking at things is the only valid way. I’m sorry, but it’s just one way amongst many others. No-one has a monopoly on truth. Truth itself is just something that a large number of people have decided to be true and as we progress and change - so does ‘truth’. What if you, and the people you are quoting, are the ones who are deluded and are desperately clinging to one way of perceiving life? Have you ever considered that possibility? The earth was once flat, remember?

Even though I have experienced a lot of highly unlikely coincidences in my life which answered questions or wishes I’ve had – I am prepared to accept that some people will never want to accept that a coincidence (no matter how unlikely and amazing it is), is more than a coincidence. So I’m keeping an open-mind, they could just be amazing and very intriguing coincidences or just random ‘collisions’ in a chaotic world. What I find a bit sad is that it seems you’re unwilling to accept that you may not be right, and you will not let anyone believe anything that’s not in line with the way you choose to view things.

Take care,

Lars

Dear Hypocrite,

Thinking about this topic reminded me of a TV show I watched about a competition for psychics in which skeptical scientists set up many different experiments to test psychic abilities.

The interesting thing with the show was to observe how incredibly accurate and detailed the information the psychics gave at times. An experiment which proved to be particularly interesting was to make the psychics find someone hidden in the woods (the person who gave each psychic the instructions to find this hidden person had no idea where the hidden person was). Some of the psychics were unsuccessful with this task and some took a very long time - this was not their speciality, I think they would say :) But one psychic took approximately the same time in finding the hidden person as a professional search team with a trained dog had done. This was so astonishing to the scientists who set up the experiment, that they repeated this experimented. This time, however, the professional search and rescue team they employed was unable to locate the hidden person even after a very long search but the psychic managed to do so in a relatively short period of time. Even the scientists had to admit they were impressed by that.

A criticism psychics often get is that, even if some of the information they give is accurate they also give a lot of inaccurate information and they may therefore just be guessing. I think psychics will respond to that by saying that there's a lot of information in the ‘mind-field’ so they may sometimes ‘pick-up’ the wrong information.

What do you think about that, can we argue against that sort of argument? Of course, if they’re not accurate all of the time it makes if very difficult to prove scientifically that they’re psychics – for that we need to see very high success rates repeatedly. But does that necessarily mean that the accurate information that a psychic gives can’t have been picked up from the ‘mind-field’? If we’re going to be objective about this, wouldn't we have to infer that we can’t prove that the information came from the ‘mind-field’ but we can’t disprove it either?

Take care,

Lars

"You seem to think that your way of looking at things is the only valid way. I’m sorry, but it’s just one way amongst many others. No-one has a monopoly on truth. Truth itself is just something that a large number of people have decided to be true and as we progress and change - so does ‘truth’. What if you, and the people you are quoting, are the ones who are deluded and are desperately clinging to one way of perceiving life? Have you ever considered that possibility? The earth was once flat, remember?"

You are talking about consensual 'truth' here. Many people believe that they have psychic powers that doesn't make it 'true'. You can believe whatever you want but you cannot claim that science supports your beliefs or science validated you beliefs.

"Even though I have experienced a lot of highly unlikely coincidences in my life which answered questions or wishes I’ve had – I am prepared to accept that some people will never want to accept that a coincidence (no matter how unlikely and amazing it is), is more than a coincidence. So I’m keeping an open-mind, they could just be amazing and very intriguing coincidences or just random ‘collisions’ in a chaotic world. What I find a bit sad is that it seems you’re unwilling to accept that you may not be right, and you will not let anyone believe anything that’s not in line with the way you choose to view things. "

No co incidents are not so much random and unlikely as most people might believe. There are a lot of unconsidered factors which make them more likely and less random to have happened more frequently. This lack of acknowledgment of the more complex reality and the subjective nature of our perception makes us a very likely candidate for our beleif in the paranormal.

"This time, however, the professional search and rescue team they employed was unable to locate the hidden person even after a very long search but the psychic managed to do so in a relatively short period of time. Even the scientists had to admit they were impressed by that."

psychics are good at cold reading and processing clues and using their intuition to make guesses. But there is noting paranormal about it as far as the evidence goes.

"A criticism psychics often get is that, even if some of the information they give is accurate they also give a lot of inaccurate information and they may therefore just be guessing. I think psychics will respond to that by saying that there's a lot of information in the ‘mind-field’ so they may sometimes ‘pick-up’ the wrong information."

They are not just wildly guessing but making the more probable prediction based on the available information.

"What do you think about that, can we argue against that sort of argument? Of course, if they’re not accurate all of the time it makes if very difficult to prove scientifically that they’re psychics – for that we need to see very high success rates repeatedly. But does that necessarily mean that the accurate information that a psychic gives can’t have been picked up from the ‘mind-field’? If we’re going to be objective about this, wouldn't we have to infer that we can’t prove that the information came from the ‘mind-field’ but we can’t disprove it either?"

You cannot disprove something that doesn't exist. It then becomes a matter of faith. Deepak Chopra is trying to show us that it can proved by experiments.

Lars: If we’re going to be objective about this, wouldn't we have to infer that we can’t prove that the information came from the ‘mind-field’ but we can’t disprove it either?

Imagine this scene: A person holding a black box walks up to you and says, "I have a purple monkey in this box."

You turn the key in the padlock, open the box, and look inside. There is no monkey, purple or otherwise. You close the box and look up to the person presenting it. "I don't see a purple monkey."

"LOOKING DOESN'T KNOW EVERYTHING!!!!111!!11!"

That's exactly what it means when a woo says, "Science doesn't know everything!" Science isn't a collection of unexpanding, eternal facts. That would be dogma, and the province of religion.

Science is a method, despite what our public school system says. The quick and dirty way to describe this method: 1. Form a hypothesis. 2. Do everything you can think of to prove it wrong. One simple assumption involved in this method: Everything that continues to stand despite our efforts is probably close to the truth. The great thing about the scientific method is that it knows it's fallible: If one of the conclusions it comes to is wrong, anyone can prove it's wrong with an appropriate experiment: All conclusions are tentative.

Another related bit of doggerel that comes up is often an "appeal to other ways of knowing", which are seldom, if ever, described. Those that are described are more like faith: Belief without or despite evidence.

Also related is the assertion that science was wrong before. Of course, this is true: Science can and has been wrong. But it's designed to catch those errors. Think about it: Would you associate with:

A: Someone who makes mistakes, admits them, and takes measures to catch his errors, just in case he makes one,

OR

B: Someone who never admits he's wrong, makes accusations about people who point out apparent errors, and makes special exemptions to make it impossible to prove him wrong?

The Bronze Blog
http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com/2006/06/doggerel-12-science-doesnt-know.html

Lars: No-one has a monopoly on truth. Truth itself is just something that a large number of people have decided to be true and as we progress and change - so does ‘truth’. What if you, and the people you are quoting, are the ones who are deluded and are desperately clinging to one way of perceiving life? Have you ever considered that possibility? The earth was once flat, remember?

"They Once Thought the Earth Was Flat!"

Welcome back to "Doggerel," where I ramble on about words and phrases that are misused, abused, or just plain meaningless.

A lot of woos out there like to try to paint skeptics as being like flat Earthers: People who vigorously deny some new idea and cling to the ways of the old world or some crap like that. The problem with their characterization is that it's more like a description of woo: Relying on superficial observations for all their conclusions while rejecting all detailed, controlled, and just generally rigorous observations and experiments.

Take a moment to put aside your knowledge of the Earth's shape. Look around. The ground looks pretty flat, right? (Well, I live in East Texas, so it pretty much is, but you people who live in hilly/mountainous areas just go with it.) If you wander around for long distances, you don't feel any change in the direction "down" is. If you don't take any detailed measurements, it's not all that hard to conclude that the Earth is flat.

Now, take a look at Eratosthenes: He didn't just trust the general impressions he saw: He took detailed measurements and performed appropriate calculations. Aristotle also noticed some evidence that the Earth wasn't flat: As you went south, southern constellations rose higher above the horizon. That was quite early on, and the evidence since grew. That's the key: evidence. The evidence that all those scholars gathered went against the predictions you would expect from a flat Earth.

All of this is pretty much another take on the Galileo Gambit, trying to assume his mantle without evidence, and attempting to change the subject from a discussion of the evidence into an unjustified claim that we're opposed to new ideas by using one bad "new" idea as an out-of-context example. An idea that has no evidence for it, maybe even some evidence against is not on equal ground with one that has strong evidential support. Ideas are supposed to be treated according to their merits. That's what fairness means. We aren't supposed to support any crazy idea just because someone proposes it with a straight face.

Evidence is what matters, and skeptics like us went along with the round Earth because it had the most evidence going for it. That's what science means. Treating all ideas as equal is what "journalism" is.

The Bronze blog
http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com

Lars: What I find a bit sad is that it seems you’re unwilling to accept that you may not be right, and you will not let anyone believe anything that’s not in line with the way you choose to view things.

"When a skeptic expresses a view, the only force behind it is that of logic, evidence, and so forth. Contrary to how woos like to imagine us, we do not have any sort of thought police going around threatening violence to people who hold contrary opinions. At most, we have people who make loud counter-arguments, which isn't forcing in any sense, but woos often like to portray it as such anyway."

The Bronze Dog
http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com

Lars: A criticism psychics often get is that, even if some of the information they give is accurate they also give a lot of inaccurate information and they may therefore just be guessing. I think psychics will respond to that by saying that there's a lot of information in the ‘mind-field’ so they may sometimes ‘pick-up’ the wrong information.

Whenever a skeptic points out a spectacular failure of some psychic, altie treatment, or whatever, there's always some woo who leaps to the defense by spouting this doggerel. This, however, completely misses the real skeptics' stance on woo: We don't demand that it operate at 100%: We only demand that it operate better than chance, placebo, or whatever baseline measurements are available.

There is a point behind popularizing spectacular failures: It means that psychics and quacks can fail in a manner that can't be easily ad hocked away. These failures often reveal the type of trickery involved, which can lead to a questioning believer to examine the lesser failures, and maybe even realize that their successes are meaningless and explainable without invoking magic.

Most woos who invoke this defense don't seem to realize that it's a bit of a backfire: If psychic powers always worked 100% of the time, there'd be less demand for a test. The fact that they don't work all the time is a good reason to perform a test: "Subtle" effects require rigorous experimental standards to measure, and it's not the skeptics who are afraid of that rigor.

The Bronze Dog
http://rockstarramblings.blogspot.com/

Lars is not even there. Posting is like Uncontrollable Diarrhoea. LOL!

Hypocrite,

Thanks for you interesting replies. I don't agree with all what you have to say and if I have more time for this later today, I'll try to elaborate more on that. There are so many things that you mentioned that we could debate...

For now, I think we can agree about the fact that science cannot claim to know everything. We can question scientific studies for their reliability but science cannot yet exclude the possibility that a mind-field exists.

Regards,

Lars

Scott,

Thanks for your interesting thoughts. I thought that the analogy with the monkey hidden in the box was a bit unfair.

If psychics come up with very detailed facts about someone's life it is something that exists and you can test whether it is true or not.

The only problem, of course, is that it's difficult to know if psychics manage to get clues from someone's body language or responses or if they are really getting their info from the 'mindfield'. This is why I don't see psychics because even if I believe it may be possible that a mind-field exists and that certain people can tap into it, it'll be hard for me to know which psychics out there could be genuine. But the answers they give sometimes, like I saw in that tv-program I mentioned in my previous post, are so accurate and spot on (and there were very little clues that the psychics could pick-up on because of the way they were tested) - that I'm still willing to consider the possibility that some psychics can at times tap into a 'mind-field'.

Regards,

Lars

" We can question scientific studies for their reliability but science cannot yet exclude the possibility that a mind-field exists."

Good try but science cannot disprove that the flying spaghetti monster exists either.

"that I'm still willing to consider the possibility that some psychics can at times tap into a 'mind-field'."

No one can stop anyone from believing shit. There simply isn't evidence that people have psychic powers or there is a so called 'mind-field' out there into which people can tap into. The parapsychology experiments presented by Deepak Chopra as a proof are easily debunked.

Many claims of psychics reading others peoples thoughts and their past can be explained by conscious and subconscious cold reading. No experiment till date has reliably shown any evidence that psychics do better than the mind reading and intelligent guesses. It might amaze the gullible human psyche but objectivity and truth is something else and parapsychologists are desperately trying to prove other wise with their biased motivations, but they continue to fail decade after decade. They do claim that their experiments proved the phenomena...while carrying all trade marks of pseudoscience. I will consider all parapsychology experiments which are of scientific study and don't brush them away out of hand. Till the day there is evidence which qualifies as science.....anyone can keep believing shit but all foolish claims and speculations may not be true just because they aren't disproved. The burden of proof rests on the parapsychologist who makes the claim. So far none of the experiments proved anything substantial of the so called psychic phenomena.

If you want to believe mind-fields are real you can..but don't call it science as Deepak Chopra claims. Call it philosophy or meta physics or faith.

I call it superstition, pseudo-spirituality, pseudoscience, bad science and plain nonsense.

Dear Hypocrite and Scott,

I think that Scott actually summed up what I wanted to say in one of his latest posts in this thread. There are many things that science cannot prove (or disprove) yet, so some things are a matter of faith – even not believing in some things can be a matter of faith. I choose to believe or speculate about certain things and you choose not to believe in them and call people with different beliefs gullible or victims of the brain’s tendency to want to make sense of something or find meaning in something…

Many skeptics throughout history have called Galileo or other people that chose to speculate or challenge the status quo all kinds of things. I’m not claiming to be Galileo but my point is just that it’s important to keep an open-mind. It sounds at first like a good argument to put other people down by claiming that they are fooled by a biological need to make sense of chaos – but actually it’s that need that has enabled man to make all kinds of discoveries.

If we’re going to be talking about the psychology involved in choosing to believe in something and disregarding everything else - I could easily argue that skeptics are motivated by fear and will desperately cling to any piece of data or science they can find and refuse to acknowledge the limitations of science because they fear the unknown or the implications of what other people believe in or have experienced.

I find it sad that you won’t even consider the fact that it’s very difficult for science to investigate certain things in a fair way, some things can only be tested through case studies and cannot have a standardized test or statistics applied to them.

Regards,

Lars

Scott and Hypocrite,

I think that Scott actually summed up what I wanted to say in one of his latest posts here. There are many things that science cannot prove (or disprove) yet, so some things are a matter of faith – even not believing in something becomes a matter of faith. I choose to believe or speculate about certain things and you choose not to believe in them and call people with different beliefs gullible or victims of the brain’s tendency to want to make sense of something or find meaning in something…

Many skeptics throughout history have called Galileo or other people that chose to speculate or challenge the status quo all kinds of things. I’m not claiming to be Galileo but my point is just that it’s important to keep an open-mind. It sounds at first like a good argument to put other people down by claiming that they are fooled by a biological need to make sense of chaos – but actually it’s that need that has enabled man to make all kinds of discoveries.

If we’re going to be talking about the psychology involved when we choose to believe in something - I could easily argue that skeptics are motivated by fear and will desperately try to find any piece of data or science to claim that they are right and won’t acknowledge the limitations of science because they fear the unknown or the implications of what other people believe in or have experienced.

I find it sad that you won’t even consider the fact that it’s very difficult for science to investigate certain things in a fair way, some things can only be tested through case studies and cannot have a standardized test or statistics applied to them.

Regards,

Lars

"I find it sad that you won’t even consider the fact that it’s very difficult for science to investigate certain things in a fair way, some things can only be tested through case studies and cannot have a standardized test or statistics applied to them. "

that's tryong to be dramtic here again. with your "I find it sad.." , "it is sad...." nonsense.

In your language..it is sad to see your silly skewed views regarding skepticism and your lack of basic understanding of what science is...especially considering what Deepak Chopra's article is claiming here as a scientific evidence.

If it "very difficult" for science to prove your subjective claims then shut your filthy melodramatic mouths and stop claiming that some science experiments validated your dubious claims.

Keep your beliefs to yourself and don't spread lies about scientific proofs validating your paranormal claims.. trying to convince the gullible masses ingnorant in sciences.

I had to laugh at #168. Pure ignorance of what skepticism is and what science is. She/he obviously doesn't understand what Hypocrite and I said about paranormal claims, parapsychology and beliefs in many of our comments. And he/she is dramatizing by expressing her feeling of 'sadness'. He/She is making strawmen arguments with bigoted views of science and skepticism. Making over generalizations, presenting black and white thinking and providing cliched examples and silly arguments on science and skepticism. He/she even suggested that Hypocrite was not allowing others to believe in their own beliefs. How dramatic and presumptious can one become. sheesh!