Hey, how you doing? (in advance) I thought I would throw this up here to hopefully guage some reaction. It is an article in press in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology which deals with, and proposes empirical evidence for, retroactive influence - a form of precognition. That it was accepted for publication in that journal is something in itself as as the JOPASP is very prestigious and obviously subject to stringent peer review. A word of warning. The article is lengthy (60 pages) and written using scientific method and terminology. However, it is certainly very readable to those with a non scientifc/psychology background. http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf Feel free to say anything you want about it, I'm not the author nor have any connection with him. My doctorate is in cross-modal cognition and multisensory perception though so I find the paper, well, interesting for a number of reasons. I assume from the nature of the forum that the users here would probably be more 'open minded' to what it proposes than the biology/psychology undergrads I have to conduct a seminar with. It would be interesting to see how opinions differ. No pressure obviously, it's perhaps worth a read even if you don't feel like commenting. take care
Interestingly, we discussed this a bit in a previous thread. The op posted a link to a Psychology Today article summarizing Bem's experiments and saying the paper would soon be published in the JPSP: http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=411014&f=49 I'm glad to see the article was indeed published - the positive peer review lends credence to the validity of the experiments. I might read through the entire JPSP article at some point - on the surface, from the PT summary, it sounds well designed. Now that it's published of course, we need to see if other researchers can duplicate the findings. But right now this looks like a promising line of inquiry. I'm making note of both links - I might want to mention them at some point in the book I'm writing about my personal psychic experiences. It seems like just a matter of time before science starts to find inroads like this to illuminating these trickier aspects of physical reality and consciousness. One difficulty is that we're so far from having any kind of coherent theoretical view of reality that incorporates phenomena like these, it's hard to even know what questions to ask in order to make experimental progress. That's one reason I prefer my personal, anecdotal approach to the whole area of psi research. I would imagine your biology/psychology undergrads generally don't have much experiential basis for believing in the validity of psychic experiences - though there may be some exceptions. So it would be interesting to see their reactions to Bem's paper.
"In fact, 34% of the psychologists in the sample declared psi to be impossible, a view expressed by only 2% of all other respondents." Not sure what YOUR thoughts on this are...however you might be interested in reading a bit about my experiences just for your information: http://www.hipforums.com/newforums/showthread.php?t=415730&f=49
thank you for your response zengizmo and the links which I will certainly browse through. I have the seminar tomorrow afternoon so will respond in full after that so I can include my students ideas on the paper. I have to generate discussion on the psychological make-up of the paper (it is an ingenious design) but will certainly probe for reactions to the subject matter on a whole. I anticipate incredulity. My personal opinion on the highlighted text is one of complete unsurprise to be honest. My experience of psychologists, in general, is a strict adherence to the 'scientific method'. Even qualitative report (anecdotal) needs to be quantified to produce a statistical inference, often at the expense of intuitive thought. Whilst I understand the reasoning behind this I think the rigidity of this line of thinking is too severe for what is a subject of vastly divergent subject matter. This is not to say there isn't valid research done in 'leftfield' areas of psychology but the peer review system always seems to confine this to minor publications - hence my surprise at the Bem paper. This can also be found in my line of research which isn't based around psi but perception. As we argue against the conventional wisdom of neural and cortical networks specific to sensory modalities, favouring a metamodal design, we face an uphill struggle in the psychological community. It frequently doesn't make sense and yet 'works'. That we don't have precise explanations, based on previous theory, for why it works shouldn't be a barrier to discussion or development.. and yet it is!! my apologies, I am found on this soapbox quite a lot in the working environment. I should leave it at work perhaps ahh, if it's of any interest, I research artificial synaesthesia amongst other things, and think I am informed enough to take everything my perceptual system tells me about the 'real world' with a huge pinch of salt. Perhaps I should also mention that prior to picking up a psychology book for the first time at 32, I had a very ermm , different, life... I'm not on these specific forums for research purposes. Apart from in a generalised way. anyway, I should sleep. Thanks again for the response and I will come back to this after reading your links and having brutalised my class. cheers
Hi Arigami Style The article was interesting. Knowing the future is not yet written, but created with an over lapping of 3 worlds the human brain travels through during its lifetimes, to help play out the blue prints we set up in the Akashic records before we took on this human form, one can understand the scientific platform and difficulty in connecting the proverbial dots of what is real and what is not. The three worlds or plains of awareness are formed much like a triangle with the flat side starting on the bottom, and then rotating in a spiral fashion for our best growth and the greater good of the journey we are on. The two bottom points of the triangle are Illusion, and Human Thought Form. The top point represents The Sacred, or Divine Love from which we all are created. This is where our precognition, premonition, and seemingly cognitive skills , or lack there of come from, and the information we use to process and create our own growth, to get where we are in this moment. Then much like a snow ball rolling down a hill we add to that which is... to create a future direction that seems all ready written. I believe we are first and foremost here to grow. We come here for the purpose of living the consequences of that which we create with out thoughts, intent, and desires. Depending on how your brain works, {and we as humans use less of our brains than we dare to imagine}, we get a myriad of wonderful lessons, experiences and scientific fodder for learning. Here is an example for you. When I first read your post and looked at the name you used, I saw a gilded bird cage with the door open and hanging by one hinge. The bird cage itself was made from the seven elements and seemed to be coming apart more so than staying together. The seven elements are Earth, Air, Wind, Water, Fire Spirit, Dark and Light. This tells me you are in process of a major life change and place of transformation that has been happening for several years in our time frame. Because you like to cling to what you know this un-named fear inside you pushes you out of your comfort zones into new places of awareness. This to me feels like a living Treadmill if you will. You have not reached the core of why you came through yet, and I look forward to the book within you, you have yet to write. With all that said your aura to me looks like a kaleidoscope of colors ever turning in on itself. I am smiling here because I was thinking how would one put this in a test tube to understand. A few books you might enjoy are; 1. The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolf Flesch, Ph.D. 2. Beyond Reality By Shelley Kaehr, Ph. D. 3. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell &Bill Moyers 4. Many Lives Many Masters by Brian L. Weiss, M.D. When we remember what we limit....Limits us, maybe the greater question science should be asking is...If We do things the same way won't we get the same results? When we are not afraid to see the whole dream...the whole realty...will we not also understand that change is our constant window from which we set up and create the "NOWS" we live in. Past Present, and Future falls into the triangle mentioned above under the world of Illusion. Only as we can imagine our future, can we begin to see and create ourselves within, so we might know who we really are. How did I do at stirring the Pot of soup you placed before us? Just imagine how each thing we add to the pot changes the flavor of the all. Could science be so brave to enter this simple awareness.
Not at all - I'm finding it refreshing to be able to discuss psi phenomena with an interested person who is an actual researcher. I have an undergrad degree in biochemistry and worked for a while as a technical writer for a pharmaceutical company, and in a forum like this one I sometimes need to start almost from ground zero when talking to people about the scientific approach. However I'm also aware that on the other hand, scientific credentials don't necessarily reflect completely rational thinking skills... So your struggle within your chosen field is interesting to me. Likewise when you say you anticipate incredulity from your students, I can well imagine it. There is a tendency among the "scientific-minded" to forget that scientific knowledge is a moving target - as it must be, by its very nature. Just because a phenomenon has not yet been illuminated in the literature does not necessarily mean that it doesn't exist. In the case of observations that are common to almost everyone, this isn't a problem - it's "common sense" that we have a sense called vision, and to understand how it works we need scientific experiments. Not so with a sense that is NOT common to all, and even among those who do experience it, seems to a large extent inconsistent and unpredictable. Thus you get a response like Old Crone's which comes from a direct seeing into realms of the spirit that are largely opaque to me, versus my own experiences, which though striking in some cases are confined to much more practical and limited applications. I think if you read the link I sent you to my personal thread, you'll see that I think there's a reason for differences like these that goes to the core of our reason for existence - a bit far down the road from the current state of scientific inquiry. And admittedly highly conjectural from a scientific viewpoint. But if you've had any experiences at all that fall outside the "normal" boundaries of consensual reality, as I THINK you might be alluding to, you might tend to be a bit more flexible than average in your thoughts about the relationship between perception and reality. I'm looking forward to more of those thoughts from you. I hope you won't lambast your students too roughly...
This shows progression in the field of Psychology. In the past, a psychologist would have been "shunned" by the accademic community for attempting such research.
Hey, don't think of the 'Akashic records' as some special grand library or holy sanctum of information, all deeds ever done ect ect. It's just a term used to describe an experience of connecting/merging/remembering your spiritual essence as pure awareness ... not separate from anything and united in everything. It's one of those experiences where people say they 'became one with the universe' or suchlike. It's like your conciousness has just expanded a trillionfold because the boundarys keeping one in their normal human conciousness have just dissolved. Spirit is omnipresent in a holographic way and the same light shines through us all from the source and as such, in that state, things are known and our intention can carry us to any information we seek. Was it black Elk who said something like "I saw more than i knew, and knew more than i saw' in describing such an experience. maybe it was someone else. I think Edgar Cayce might have coined/popularised the term as his life kind of demonstrates the benefits of accessing such knowledge, which is really just the knowledge of spirit. Everything leaves ripples, energy signatures, memories and everything in existence hums and talks.
