Developing tk/pk

RyuJin wrote: Humans are the only species that seeks to quantify it's abilities...

I take it you never heard of pack animals and how they have hirarchies based on prestige and skill, have you?

As for the articles, what should ring all of the alarm bells is how in the first it names one of the requirements to learn TK/PK is to believe in it. I don't know how it can get to sound any more fake than that. Name one class that requires you to believe you can learn something before you have any indication that anybody could.
There are of course other things in it like the nonsensical explanations of how it is supposed to work. Magnetic fields are a property of mass. To move them around is equivalent with moving that which generates them around. Humans do not generate a magnetic field that is distinguishable from something even as weak as the Earth's (that's why a compass doesn't point towards the user but is actually useful). One could shrug off one occurrence of "creating energy" as bad phrasing, but of course the article mentions that multiple times so either they don't mean energy but rather use a pretty word to sound credible without any explanation as to what they mean or they openly admit that their ideas defy all of the physics that is necessary for the computers where the article is stored to even exist.
Anyway, I wouldn't call any of this findings or research results or discoveries. I'd call this claims. Claims of a world of pure imagination (too soon?) and you can have it for only the small price of dedicating countless hours of your life to them, making yourself believe in them short of any evidence and, of course, checking out the website of the world-renowned (oh, no, wait, that was Uri Geller, the single most discredited psychig fraud in history "respected" professional psychic Ellie Crystal...
Need I go on?

A class that requires belief? How about hypnosis. It is to the best of my knowledge impossible to hypnotize a person without the person believing they can be and wishing it to happen. Also Gistron is is possible for you to ever word things without sounding condescending? Other people manage to be polite and engage in disagreement without being so rude why is it you have trouble with such things? It's not hard at all and changes nothing about your message. Pro tip: silence is better then rudeness


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A couple of articles with interesting findings/claims on Psi...

http://www.imagesco.com/articles/psi/developing-your-esp-psi-abilities.html

https://weilerpsiblog.wordpress.com/evidence-for-psi/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cassandra-vieten/esp-evidence_b_795366.html

MadHatter wrote: A class that requires belief? How about hypnosis. It is to the best of my knowledge impossible to hypnotize a person without the person believing they can be and wishing it to happen.

Well, to the best of mine, the trance state induced by hypnosis is an actual state a brain can actually be in and one of the primary ways to achieve it is by overloading said brain with impulses. That is not to say you need high voltages (in fact, please, do never use capacitors on people unless you are a trained paramedic) but rather there is a very limited number of discrete information flows our brains can process at any one given time and it is rather easy to bring in more than that in quick enough succession. Genuine hypnosis does not depend on either the hypnotist or the patient believing that it can and neither take a class where belief is a prerequisite for success. In fact, it works better if the patient is not ready for it or ignorant of how it works. Hypnosis has application, too, unlike telekinesis. Indeed, I'd be not surprised at all if inducing a state of hypnosis would be easier with some sort of machine or chemical input than through a professional hypnotist, given as the latter has most of the same limitations to their brain as the patient would. But hypnosis is, at the end of the day, a skill one can learn. Psychokinesis, on the other hand, is something you just believe in, or fail.

Gisteron wrote: As for the articles, what should ring all of the alarm bells is how in the first it names one of the requirements to learn TK/PK is to believe in it. I don't know how it can get to sound any more fake than that. Name one class that requires you to believe you can learn something before you have any indication that anybody could.

Despite the fact that I believe in some sort of paranormal phenomena (due to experience), that does not automatically make all things categorized as paranormal automatically true. And I think it is important, both as a reality check and as a warning to those who might be fooled out of their money, that even if paranormal phenomena is real, it is unlikely someone has developed a system to develop and control these abilities in a predictable fashion, otherwise this would be outside the realm of esoterism and part of mainstream science.

Gisteron wrote: Anyway, I wouldn't call any of this findings or research results or discoveries. I'd call this claims. Claims of a world of pure imagination (too soon?) and you can have it for only the small price of dedicating countless hours of your life to them...

I think it all comes down to this issue. Why spend so much time and energy trying to push yourself to do something that is unproven with a methodology that is unproven... what is the benefit? I can understand people who genuinely are pursuing this as science - studying it in a lab and following empirical evidence to reach a better understanding of these things. But for the common person? I think their energy is better invested elsewhere. Even in religious texts these "powers" are described as distractions from the Ultimate Truth, a diversion that is a side effect of higher consciousness, rather than an end in itself.

Gisteron wrote: Psychokinesis, on the other hand, is something you just believe in, or fail.

Im not picking sides, I find the subject to be interesting, but have yet to develop strong opinions regarding one side it the other of the argument centering around Psi and similar abilities.

With that said, there are in fact many things people do, and do successfully, because they "believe" they can. The gnostic state, or what Anton LaVey described as the "intellectual decompression chamber" is a process utilizing disbelief centering one mentality, and belief for another. It is a key component in what many call magic.

Granted there are machines that can replicate the effected of hypnosis, the fact that thousands of individuals are able to induce alternative mental states like those found in Yoruba Voodoo and can go through extreme amounts of pain with no sign of discomfort, or the Tibetan Buddhist monks who are able to meditate in extreme low temperatures while maintaining their core body temperature, is evidence of what belief can do.

The groups of people mentioned do btw, know fully well beforehand that they are about to willfully enter an alternative mental state. Some call it hypnosis, meditation, others call it possession, they're aware if it regardless, and do it successfully because they believe they can...

Genuine hypnosis does not depend on either the hypnotist or the patient believing that it can and neither take a class where belief is a prerequisite for success. In fact, it works better if the patient is not ready for it or ignorant of how it works.

Sorry for the derail!

]As one who has been hypnotized, researched it, and feeling that I understand it, I disagree with your stance here...

I was self-hypnotizing since I was very young, only I didnt know that it was what I was doing...

I HAVE looked into it, and feel I do understand it... Im not a licensed practitioner, Ive thought about it, but, no time as of yet, lol...

You HAVE to be willing (believing of it), and if you understand the goal/point of it, then it is resoundingly easier...

Articles Ive read say the more intelligent one is, the easier to hypnotize... It is because it is understood, and accepted...

To those who dont understand it, it is harder, and the 'Mesmer' Effect (being mesmerized) is thought to be fact, and is something that practitioners fight to get past...

I tried to help my son self hypnotize, and he ended up giggling, and it went nowhere, lol...

I do iself hypnotize, instead of meditate, and I am almost always in a state of hypnosis/meditation, lol...

RyuJin wrote: Humans are the only species that seeks to quantify it's abilities...animals can sense when something is going to happen, they can recognize when something is sick/contaminated, and they do this with no interest in knowing/understanding why or how...humans simply found a way to label things in a manner that inflates their ego and sense of superiority....

Yes but those are known and quantifiable abilities based on heightened natural senses the animal posses. Animals have better ability to see, hear and smell using photons entering the eye or molecules and vibrational sound waves transported through the medium of air entering the nose or ear respectively. These processes allow them to better detect changes in their environment or anothers physiology through these understandable mechanisms that can be reproduced easily. There is nothing ultra-natural in any of those abilities.

What we are talking about when we discuss PK though, are emergent manifest abilities that allow the possessor to directly manipulate the laws of physics. Something that has never been accurately documented or reliably reproduced in any species at any time since man began recording history. I just feel that if these things did exist we would not have to strain and struggle and try so hard to produce them. I see people on u-tube claiming to have spent months and months in training only to be able to move the slightest bit of paper suspended on a sharp toothpick. That seems totally impracticable to me. Why so much effort for so little gain? I would think that if these abilities are something manifest in nature that it would come much easier, not only to humans but to many other species as well, through the natural process of evolution. In effect if it were real, we would see it everywhere and it would be deployed as a practical application!

It seems these "assertions" that are not backed up by any evidence nor any reliable theories as to how they could be real boil down to little more than an exercise in ego inflation. I don't say that to be derogatory towards anyone that pursues this. Its not my place to judge anyone's pursuits. But simply what I mean by this is what I was referring to in my original post. That man seems to have this strange need to set himself apart from nature/the universe and even each other and proclaim that they are unique in the universe; that we alone have some special knowledge or special ability that no other creature in existence has, when there is really no evidence to support that. This extends beyond just things like PK but also things like belief in something like a sentient, vengeful, judging deity. I find it an attempt to separate ones self from the very thing that we claim to be the greatest part of - the Force/nature itself. If we could truly comprehend what that means we wouldn't need to be any more special than that!

Some people are just more sensitive than others.

Rickie wrote: Some people are just more sensitive than others.

Its ok, does somebody need a hug? :silly:

Here is where I get extremely skeptical. Any practice, done over time, should become more efficient.

I practice, and teach martial arts.

I have put in thousands of hours, and as such, my training reflects that.

TK/PK claims and practices have been around for, well stretching back thousands of years, many thousands perhaps.

So, how come the method of practice, and transference is still so shotty, spotty, and based in " belief" in it.

You see, you can believe, or not believe in BJJ, but, get on the mat with me and you will know it works by the lack of air in your lungs, blood flow to the brain, and pain in the joints.

I can teach it to anybody, and by that I mean BJJ has amputees ,and such practicing and winning competitions.

For as long as these "practices" have been around, it has not become more efficient either in practice, or transference.

Now, as to the sensitivity claim, fine, in martial arts, you have people that have natural talent, in a wide variety of areas.

Still, hard work beats talent many times, hard work, should compensate. Yet all the evidence of these "practices" are still but anecdotal.

Over time, people teaching and practicing should have ironed out by now a methodology of transference, that while will have a sliding scale given sensitivity, talent, etc, would be something almost anyone could do with repeatable, tangible, measurable results.

Instead, we get the " No crap man, there I was when"

Which is as good as nothing really.

I mean, c,mon, if this stuff was even remotely measurable, you would have droves putting in the time and effort to get such abilities.

If it is only something the "special" "sensitive" or whatever other word you would like to use can do, sense, or whatever, then I cannot see how that doesnt put up some red flags for peoples B.S. detectors.

Jestor, I was specifically referring to the hypnotic state triggering through signal overflow. If a patient is ready for that, and able to concentrate on a few signals and exclude the rest that are incoming, they are not as likely to be overwhelmed as the patient who does not know this is coming or is not ready to react when it does. Resistence to hypnosis is an acquirable knowledge and skill much like hypnotizing is and the latter works better the worse the target is at the former. Nothing like this can be said of PK/TK, but the "it won't work unless you believe it really hard" is something we hear all too often from proponents of almost every other ineffectual thing.

I'm a serious skeptic when it comes to this kind of stuff. I've never seen any real evidence for telekinesis/psychokinesis. I get the feeling that a lot more people would be moving things with their mind if it were possible. Furthermore, what's the use of telekinesis? Does it help in daily life? Bending spoons is a nice parlor trick but it doesn't have any practical use. Nor does spinning a piece of paper or making a pen roll across a table. Now if you're talking about picking things up and actually moving them around then there might be a use for that. I'd never strain my back picking up something heavy again. I don't think this kind of telekinesis is possible.

I'd have to see a lot of good evidence for TK abilities before I started to believe in them.

Belief is a state of certainty, and sometimes complexity needs certainty to allow the brain to maintain the complex structure.... probably as a result of having both conscious and subconscious parts of the brain. When you build a skyscraper you don't leave the workers in the wall at each level, you trust the structure is sound and move the team up to create more structure for example.

I tend to think if something was being emitted from the body which interacted with another object it probably would have been detected by now BUT going into this discussion I think it can be safely assumed that it's topic is beyond science at least until someone demonstrated its possible - so it is kinda irrelevant that science says it does not exist - think Plato's cave maybe, but this time science is looking at the wall!

Consider say animism, if a 'spirit' permeated all things and the world we knew was an illusion based on the plane of existence's nature, these spirits who inhabited is might be bound within the plane - all it takes is a bit of imagination to understand how our view of the world was an illusion and some other universal order existed beyond... what the term metaphysical or supernatural is used for.

But personally, I limit my belief to higher order information states like which might allow detection and prediction slightly into the future but never had any reason to think moving things with my mind was possible. The only thing I could think of to exercise TK/PK might be to meditate and visualize the orbital configuration of a particular element, and do so on it in a crystallized form where it has another level of order, and try to recruit ones brain power to imagine connecting to it's energy signature....
:silly:
Maybe the state of information inside the body can resonate with the physical matter... I'm not sure how, but if one was to believe all things were connected through a single form of energy then that might serve as a medium.

If reading this sort of stuff upsets the scientist in anyone (everyone!), then perhaps consider it a meditation rather then a claim.

Adder wrote: ... going into this discussion I think it can be safely assumed that it's topic is beyond science at least until someone demonstrated its possible...

If I may have my obligatory little nitpick, in order for something to be beyond science it must be untestable. Any claim about something actually detectable (and thus falsifiable) is technically a scientifically accessible claim. The failure to produce or reproduce a result is not a testament to either the nature of the claim or the reach of the scientific method. If anything, it is itself a result we may try and cautiously draw conclusions from, if we are so inclined.

... it is kinda irrelevant that science says it does not exist...

Science says no such thing. Saying that we have no documented and reproducible cases of it is not the same as saying that there will not or cannot be any. Now, given the countless tests that either failed or left us to conclude fraud, does the scientific community still find it worth their time and money to keep testing when there are so many diseases still uncured? Of course not. That is a choice we make though, not a definitive conclusion we draw.

Gisteron wrote:

Adder wrote: ... going into this discussion I think it can be safely assumed that it's topic is beyond science at least until someone demonstrated its possible...

If I may have my obligatory little nitpick, in order for something to be beyond science it must be untestable.

Scientific discoveries are often stumbled upon in accidental discovery when looking for something else. So currently, yes, of course what lies within the body of knowledge defined by science.... but exploration allows that to be expanded and new things discovered, if they exist. Ruling things out because they are difficult, so difficult it might be seemingly impossible, is no reason to abandon efforts. I read the OP as about efforts more then belief. Sure it is posited that belief is a requirement, but that I also addressed.

Gisteron wrote:

... it is kinda irrelevant that science says it does not exist...

Science says no such thing. Saying that we have no documented and reproducible cases of it is not the same as saying that there will not or cannot be any. Now, given the countless tests that either failed or left us to conclude fraud, does the scientific community still find it worth their time and money to keep testing when there are so many diseases still uncured? Of course not. That is a choice we make though, not a definitive conclusion we draw.

And? I'm not saying your saying its impossible, nor science asserts the limits are its current limits..... I'm just defending the effort to try, and how I interpreted the topic of the thread to be about that effort.

At one point it was "impossible" for 1 object to be in 2 places at the same time...then they achieved it with the hadron collider...

At one point it was "impossible" to bring someone back from the dead...then we developed defibrillators...

Imagine the impossibilities we'll overcome in the distant future...

RyuJin wrote: At one point it was "impossible" for 1 object to be in 2 places at the same time...then they achieved it with the hadron collider...

At one point it was "impossible" to bring someone back from the dead...then we developed defibrillators...

Imagine the impossibilities we'll overcome in the distant future...

Imagine telling someone about the internet back in the 1600s. You'd probably be hung or burned at the stake. :laugh:

Interesting how all the things you mentioned that werent possible at one time were also brought about through a very specific methodology which again gets more efficient over time and better at transferring that knowledge to others to again make more things possible at an exponential rate.

However, one thing does not apply simply because of that.

Again, those practices mentioned(Tk/Pk), are still not possible on any more consistent, efficient, or repeatably verifiable process of improvement in methodology, or practice.

Hell, aside from anecdotal evidence it is still, after thousands of years not even close to possible in the same vein of the other things you mentioned.

Thats a serious flaw in logic you have tried to apply here.

At most, you could make the argument that man will create a way to make TK/PK possible, but that is not the argument you made, more you say because we have done some other things then this validates "x".

Sorry, not the case at all.

Khaos wrote: Interesting how all the things you mentioned that werent possible at one time were also brought about through a very specific methodology which again gets more efficient over time and better at transferring that knowledge to others to again make more things possible at an exponential rate.

However, one thing does not apply simply because of that.

Again, those practices mentioned(Tk/Pk), are still not possible on any more consistent, efficient, or repeatably verifiable process of improvement in methodology, or practice.

Hell, aside from anecdotal evidence it is still, after thousands of years not even close to possible in the same vein of the other things you mentioned.

Thats a serious flaw in logic you have tried to apply here.

At most, you could make the argument that man will create a way to make TK/PK possible, but that is not the argument you made, more you say because we have done some other things then this validates "x".

Sorry, not the case at all.

Nah, its just a measure of difficulty.... unless assumed impossible. That is the crux of the issue probably, one view wants to discover if its possible (and may or may not believe it is) and the other has no interest (and may or may not believe it is), and sitting out there on the periphery of different view we have those who believe it is and want to find it, and those who don't believe it is and don't want to find it. This thread is about one and not the other IMO.

It's a bit like atheists telling theists Gods don't exist maybe.... but at least this particular topic does suppose some physical interaction is possible and so has some basis in the hope of being discovered - if its real. But I agree, people have been trying for thousands of years I'd guess, but only recently do we have a whole range of new learnings and tools for those who might have an interest, and/or belief.