Originally Posted by
shadowofwind
McWillis,
Thanks very much for your response. To clarify a little bit where I'm coming from, I'm not skeptical because I don't believe in paranormal phenomena, or because I'm trying to undermine other people's mystical beliefs for the sake of pushing my own. Its that I want to understand such things, so I want to cut through the bullshit surrounding them so that I can get at whatever's really there. And I try to involve other people when I do this, because I don't seem to learn as much if I don't. I think that the motivations of Sageous are similar.
Like other people, my experience occurs within an internally generated representation of the outside world. There's a correspondence between this representation and the outside world because my mind builds sensate information into it. But when I 'see' something, what I'm really seeing is a mental cartoon representation of it. Color, for instance, is supplied by my mind to finely label the apparent sources of different frequencies of light, a lot like how pigments on a map are used to represent different countries. Similarly, when I hear a sound, my brain involuntarily guesses where the vibration is emanating from, and gives me an experience of there being a 'sound' at that location in my internal model of the world. In both cases its possible to manipulate the mental map independent of what the map represents. For instance, when wearing stereo headphones the sound seems to be located inside one's head, even though the source of the vibration is eternal. And contextual tricks can be used to alter the appearance of colors.
By consciously manipulating the same map that is fooled by the stereo headphones, I can make it seem as if my thoughts are located outside of my head. By warping my visual map and my tactile sense of location in the same way, I can have a full-blown out of body experience. There are also electromagnetic devices that will stimulate the same kind of experience, for people who aren't mental contortionists.
As an easy way to demonstrate the sound-map warping, try thinking about a sound in words, locating the thought in your head, then think of speaking it. For me, the location where I internally 'hear' it moves from inside my head partially into my mouth. Am I moving some invisible thought-matter into my mouth, as I prepare to project it out of my body? Judging solely from the experiential information I have just described, there's no way to conclude that the invisible 'thought matter' is any more real than the band that's playing in my head when I wear headphones.
All of my experiences involve the manipulation of mental images in this manner, even though there are many other kinds of images besides picture images or sounds. Buoyancy, inertia, electrochemical potential, personal power, identity, choice, all of these are mental simulations, and I can consciously alter them without altering the realities the represent. And I can account for most paranormal phenomena that way, including experiences of energy balls such as I might myself create. And yet, despite all of this, I also have paranormal experiences that are objectively verifiable, and which can not be accounted for in the manner I just described.
So it is plausible to me that there are people who really throw energy balls. But since I myself can seem to throw energy balls, without really doing it, I wonder in what sense they're really doing it. Maybe they are really doing something real and supernatural, but the energy ball interpretation of it is mostly incidental. A few days ago I turned my head and looked at a coworker, who had his back to me, and he turned around to see why I was looking at him. I asked him why he turned around, and he joked about something emanating from my mind. Maybe I was doing the same thing that you do when you throw an energy ball? Yet I didn't experience it as an energy ball at all. So I want to understand what is the essential part of the experience, to whatever extent it can be separated from what is pretend. Maybe it can't be cleanly separated, but we still need a way to distinguish an authentic experience from a fake one.
As I suggested earlier, people I have met who think that they have paranormal powers are pretty much as a rule not aware of the distinctions that I just described. They take their experiences at face value, assuming for instance that if they seem to be out of their body, then they are really out of their body. I know they're significantly wrong about that. But I also think that they're not entirely wrong about everything - some of them do appear to me to have actual powers, facilitated by their unquestioning and partially delusional self-confidence. Is the energy ball that turns someone's head a weaker version of the same kind that could knock someone down in a fight? Or is it something different entirely? If you cultivate those experiences, do they really lead to where you assume they lead? Two other examples of this sort of thing are astral projection, and being-conscious[ness]-bliss from meditation. Different people teach that one or the other of these lead to freedom from the physical body. I have experienced both, and I'm fairly sure that they do not, that a dependence remains, even though the nature of the dependence is not shown by the experience itself. So I'm skeptical that either experience, when sought as an ends in itself, leads anywhere. This matters because people waste many years fighting against themselves, trying to climb mountains or find peace in mental states that aren't really what they seem to be. I think that ashtanga yoga, for example, doesn't lead where it claims to. It yields remarkable results but in the end it doesn't work. I want to find out what really works.
I hope that makes more sense than my first message.
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