Merkabah

[Lingo]

I think I do know how to meditate. I dont have any outside guidance - read some articles here and there but I am mostly self taught. It comes somewhat naturally to me. I use sometimes imagery but I would say it is mostly breathing that brings me in to that state.
Back in high school I found in some magazine that best exercise for focusing is to think of nothing. It was also suggested to start with watching one dot on the wall - i did that. Did not think much of it and about same time I discovered energy in my hands what I now believe is Chi or Qi. I did not continue to do that regularly - just sometimes when I was extremely bored. Probably years has past that I done nothing. Fast forward when I was about to give birth (35/6 yo) - watching me breathing trough pain nurse asks my husband if I was meditating - we both just laugh it off.
I do not remember when I started actively (or knowingly) meditating. I have some memory blockage of that time due to negative circumstances in private life - I started using meditation to ease my mind.
I would like to share with you the rest - not sure is this best place to do it - I am still somewhat confused with my experience.

 

[Skarekrow]

I think I do know how to meditate. I dont have any outside guidance - read some articles here and there but I am mostly self taught. It comes somewhat naturally to me. I use sometimes imagery but I would say it is mostly breathing that brings me in to that state.
Back in high school I found in some magazine that best exercise for focusing is to think of nothing. It was also suggested to start with watching one dot on the wall - i did that. Did not think much of it and about same time I discovered energy in my hands what I now believe is Chi or Qi. I did not continue to do that regularly - just sometimes when I was extremely bored. Probably years has past that I done nothing. Fast forward when I was about to give birth (35/6 yo) - watching me breathing trough pain nurse asks my husband if I was meditating - we both just laugh it off.
I do not remember when I started actively (or knowingly) meditating. I have some memory blockage of that time due to negative circumstances in private life - I started using meditation to ease my mind.
I would like to share with you the rest - not sure is this best place to do it - I am still somewhat confused with my experience.

It sounds like you have a natural predisposition to it!
Yes…breathing can be very powerful…it’s through years of breathing exercises that some Buddhist monks are able to raise their core body temp and withstand sitting in freezing water for extended periods.
If you don’t want to share here you can PM me…if you share in my group just be aware that it only lets you write so many words…much less than on a thread or PM.

 

[Flavus Aquila]

It sounds like you have a natural predisposition to it!
Yes…breathing can be very powerful…it’s through years of breathing exercises that some Buddhist monks are able to raise their core body temp and withstand sitting in freezing water for extended periods.
If you don’t want to share here you can PM me…if you share in my group just be aware that it only lets you write so many words…much less than on a thread or PM.

Any scientific literature on the subject?

 

[Skarekrow]

Any scientific literature on the subject?

Sure!

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2002/04.18/09-tummo.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tummo

A 1982 study[SUP][12][/SUP] of the physiological effects of Tummo has been made by Benson and colleagues, who studied Indo-Tibetan Yogis in the Himalayas and in India in the 1980s. Conducted in Upper Dharamsala in India, it found that the subjects, three monks, exhibited the capacity to increase the temperature of their fingers and toes by as much as 8.3 °C. In a 2002 experiment reported by the Harvard Gazette,[SUP][13][/SUP] conducted in Normandy, France, two monks from the Buddhist tradition wore sensors that recorded changes in heat production and metabolism. A 2013 study[SUP][14][/SUP] by Kozhevnikov and colleagues showed increases in core body temperature in both expert meditators from eastern Tibet and Western non-meditators.

 

[Skarekrow]

​

 

[Skarekrow]

This is a rad picture of Mt. St. Helen erupting in 1980.

 

[Skarekrow]

[video=youtube;7YgEhvZDZVg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=7YgEhvZDZVg[/video]​

 

[Lingo]

There is also 'crazy' dutch iceman that holds world record staying in ice or something like that.

I enjoyed very much video on his page http://www.icemanwimhof.com/vice-documentaire#vice-video

 

[Kgal]

I, psychonaut.

I will tell you firstly that I’m not advocating that anyone break any laws in their states or countries, but I will however say that it is YOUR consciousness not theirs!

First steps…taking the leap.

There is no way around it, I mean you can pussyfoot around it and just take a little bit and see what happens and get disappointed and underwhelmed…but why bother?
I took enough…made into a ginger tea, to give me at least a level 3 experience -



I felt the Remeron I did a quick taper off was possibly still in my system and though I’m not disappointed with the outcome, could have blocked some of the effects but - WTF do I know? It was my first time…I took the leap and popped my cherry if I can be so crass.
First of all…I prepared myself of a loooong time for this in every aspect that I could think to prepare.
Going out and making the person to person connections that facilitated this experience has introduced me to a whole group of incredibly caring and sincere individuals.
So preparing myself yesterday I tried to avoid too many negative things (why I don’t do that all the time was the first realization), though it’s practically forced upon us in every way possible.
Like the little pamphlet that someone inched through the door jam over the course of 5 mins. - this guy is standing on my doorstep, clearly having seen the No Solicitation sign and deciding to not ring my doorbell (which is wise for many coming to preach at me), still…it eventually gets through enough to fall inside my house. What does it say? “End of the World!!!” “You can only be saved from Hell fires if you convert!”
Well fuck you very much for shoving your fear and hate into my sanctuary…clearly the Lionel Ritchie No Solicitation sign needs to be more specific than “Hello?…It’s NOT me you’re looking for! - No Soliciting” I guess should also include - no shoving shit through my doorjamb!
My point being…we’re practically water-boarded with fear and anxiety on a daily basis and we ignore it for the most part…and sometimes when you ignore something long enough and you don’t face that fear being fed to you - it becomes true. It has given you a fear of that thing you weren’t afraid of before. Remember how fearless you could be as a kid…that’s not ignorance of things and lack of knowledge…that was you.
That was the real you that wasn’t afraid of this or that…and now I want to replace the word “fearless” with the word “stillness”.
The stillness of the innocent heart.
Isn’t that what we all crave in our daily lives? Some form of stillness…for our mind to not be lost in the past, recreated over and over, sometimes exaggerated upon…for them not be lost in the infinity of futures possible which are most definitely exaggerated!
For our mind to be fully present and to maintain that presence is no easy task for anyone who has undertaken the challenge…or for some the necessity.
That is what I got the most from this experience - it forced me to be present.
For some, I would imagine that would be uncomfortable, but it wasn’t…it was okay for everything to be how it is…and even this morning it still is.

So the time came that I had set for myself and I made the worst tasting ginger tea ever…but it was also very strangely familiar both in taste and smell. (Why no, I have never eaten a gym sock, why do you ask?)
Before hand I lit some of my favorite incense and also smudged my house with sage and dragon’s blood.
I said a prayer of gratitude to the spirits of the tea and chugged it down along with the bits….no stomach discomfort.
After 15 mins. I get slightly light-headed.
After 40 mins. I decide to go lie down, put my eye-shades on (last thing I looked at was my alarm clock reading 5:55), and listen to the music/nature sounds/etc/etc. playlist that I put together earlier.
The geometric patterns you faintly notice when you close your eyes are very noticeable with eyes open or closed.
The shapes quickly change from the familiar geometric designs to more fluid shapes…like paisley but a bit more squiggly some colors…purple, green, yellow, white.
The music and sounds feel as if they are echoing around in my head…stereo is given a whole new dimension ;-)
It’s probably a hour and a half in now…same as before though more intensified.
I cannot close my eyes though I feel as if I am falling asleep, I see slow-building pulses of white light that begin in my lower periphery and fade out as they reach up and to the sides.
I wonder if this is my Qi?
The Qi of the substance?
My aura? (at least it wasn’t black)
Any remaining nervousness, uncertainty, and expectations are let go now, I feel comfortable and surprisingly in control of myself and my senses.
Throughout the whole experience though - I am present.

I think it was about 8pm when I felt like getting back up again…though I said little about my experience to Sensiko as I think I was still processing this myself.
So far so good.

Had a bit of a time getting to sleep and staying asleep last night, but didn’t have any wild dreams.

First steps - done.

Next step - go deeper.
I’m ready.

Oh wow there is so much positive in everything you did leading up to and including drinking the tea!!!

You met nice people who gave you support and love to help you take the journey. You felt this in your heart and were grateful. You received divine wisdom and came to us and share in the form of the Stillness quote. Truly a grand, eloquent, compassionate statement. [i wish very much to steal it from you :w:]
Your experience taught you how to be present in a nanosecond compared to those of us practicing for years and years.
You received a Gift from the entheogen experience. [bows head in honor]
You also received a download of codes by seeing the geometric shapes.

You cannot close your eyes but you feel as if you're falling asleep reminds me of when I merge with my higher self and move into stillness. You were seeing into 4d....and I'm thinking you were seeing your electromagnetic field... noo...that's not it....hmmm...It's the vortex field in the lower body. There are two...lower...and upper. When these vortices grow to expand and overlap in the center you form your merkaba?
Maybe...

Hah! "....at least it wasn't black..." :lol:

and!!! You received what i think is the most important gift - and that is - your fear is gone.

Woot! Total success!

 

[Skarekrow]

A very interesting artist named Paul Laffoley just passed away.
May he RIP and all his brilliant schematics come true!

[video=youtube;VYr21sQbuqs]https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=VYr21sQbuqs[/video]​

 

[Skarekrow]

Oh wow there is so much positive in everything you did leading up to and including drinking the tea!!!

You met nice people who gave you support and love to help you take the journey. You felt this in your heart and were grateful. You received divine wisdom and came to us and share in the form of the Stillness quote. Truly a grand, eloquent, compassionate statement. [i wish very much to steal it from you :w:]
Your experience taught you how to be present in a nanosecond compared to those of us practicing for years and years.
You received a Gift from the entheogen experience. [bows head in honor]
You also received a download of codes by seeing the geometric shapes.

You cannot close your eyes but you feel as if you're falling asleep reminds me of when I merge with my higher self and move into stillness. You were seeing into 4d....and I'm thinking you were seeing your electromagnetic field... noo...that's not it....hmmm...It's the vortex field in the lower body. There are two...lower...and upper. When these vortices grow to expand and overlap in the center you form your merkaba?
Maybe...

Hah! "....at least it wasn't black..." :lol:

and!!! You received what i think is the most important gift - and that is - your fear is gone.

Woot! Total success!

I think it was a success, and I have had some residual effects as far as how I approach my own problems, which is more direct now I feel.
As far as it being the key to unlocking my depressive tendencies is still to be seen, not that I am currently feeling depressed.
That’s something else - I am better able to differentiate between feeling sad about something vs it impacting me at a deeper level which may not necessarily be a healthy state of being to always be in.
So there have been no negative downsides that I or anyone else has noticed.
Also, IDK…there is less fear about the future, less fear in general.
All these things I feel will only have a positive effect on me.
It could have been a Merkabah perhaps…it was too indistinct during this experience to tell…it didn’t pulse with my breathing, my heart, or the music…it had it’s own very steady rhythm though which I found interesting.
Also…a few times the shapes a forms seemed to move with the music but when I focused my attention to that aspect it would seem to stop…hahahaha…it actually made me laugh at the time because I imagined the substance as having it’s own sense of humor and it was teasing me.
Overall, I would say it was a positive experience and step forward.

 

[invisible]

have a happy and safe deeper voyage.

 

[Lingo]

This title has your name, so I thought I'd share here

Who’s Your Scarecrow?
What scares you off? What do you resign yourself to as some fundamental reality regarding the powers that appear to be and what you can or cannot do about yours or humanity’s situation? More subtly, what makes you stand back in an intimidated state of awe-stricken wonder, whether consciously or subconsciously?

Scarecrow’s are straw dummies, crude approximations of humans hanging on a stick to scare away crows and other predators from feeding on farmers’ crops. Sound familiar?

We can see it today in society, and it’s worked for millennia. This cowered sense of frozen resignation to self appointed higher powers ruling mankind is rampant in the human psyche. This is all due to their perceived superior capabilities, supposed heritage, and assumed occult and perhaps inter-dimensional powers, all baked in massive amounts of oppressive hubris.

more here:
http://www.wakingtimes.com/2015/11/13/whos-your-scarecrow/

 

[Skarekrow]

Doubt and Deepening your Vow

[URL="http://www.owengent.com/"]
Artwork by Owen Gent[/URL]​

In fairy tales, there is often a character whose sole purpose is to introduce doubt into your mission.
Like a strong tide their influence can pull you away from the shores of your truth, tempting you to renounce your secret vow altogether.

These characters are not always unsympathetic — they may even be folks you admire — but when you are subtly attuned to your nature, you’ll notice yourself wilting in their presence, taking on their diminishing view of your abilities.

Like eating something that doesn’t agree with you, this will give you a sour feeling in your belly, which sometimes grows into a rejection of life itself.
In the worst of times, it may seem to stretch into an ocean of lostness in every direction.

When you find yourself in such an untethered place, there is a secret which can anchor you back into intimacy with your vow: The recognition that you are only susceptible to the invalidation which matches a companion vulnerability in your own standpoint.

Now, this isn’t to say that the other is not being an empirical jerk, but that in their jerkness, they’ve brought to light a place within that requires fortification.
It is the thing that keeps us in relationship with those who don’t see us, or which holds us back from fully emerging with our gifts.

You may even recognise it as an almost comfortable self-abandonment, where your losses outnumber your triumphs and “that’s how it will always be”.
But in the Dreaming Way, these periods of detachment are invitations to deepen your vow.

To make boundaries against those sour-belly influences, tightening your circle of intimacy, taking symbolic steps towards that which knows your true name.
This can be as simple as keeping a daily list of those beautiful things which conspire in your favour, recognising the tiny triumphs that are keeping you from downspiraling, or exalting in some physically symbolic way the life you are calling towards you.

Destiny is not to be mistaken with fate, where one has no influence upon its outcome.
It requires us to take steps towards it, to parent its growth especially in times of doubt and weakness.

And if we find the courage to move in its direction despite the absence of grand signs, we are often graced by the small miracles of confirmation and synchronicity that we’d been hoping for all along.

 

[Skarekrow]

Not sure if this is a good idea to have in your house…just saying.
It’s a clever design…but…no.

 

[Skarekrow]

The Ripon 'ripple of anxiety' and mass hysteria

When up to 40 children collapsed and suffered nausea at a Yorkshire school yesterday,
media outlets were keen to diagnose ‘mass hysteria’.
But what is it?

One particularly strange story cropped up in the news yesterday: around 40 children were treated at a school in Ripon, Yorkshire, after collapsing during a Remembrance Day service.

The trouble is, no one’s quite sure why it happened.
Although a hazardous materials team were called in, no obvious toxic substances were found.

The assembly room was warm, apparently, so the mass fainting could have been down to everyone overheating, but an alternative explanation that some media outlets are putting forward is that it was simply a case of ‘mass hysteria’.

Mass hysteria is a fairly broad term that covers a few different types of collective delusions, so it might be more accurate to characterise the Ripon event as a case of ‘mass sociogenic illness’ or MSI — described in a 2002 paper by Robert Bartholomew and Simon Wessely as situation in which signs or symptoms of an illness spread rapidly through a group of people, and which don’t have any sort of organic cause.

In a seminal paper in 1987, Wessely described two different types of MSI: mass anxiety hysteria, in which the event lasts a short time and, as the name suggests, manifests mainly in symptoms of anxiety and fear, and mass motor anxiety, which tends to be much more prolonged and manifests as a disorder of movement.

As you might expect, MSI has a fairly rich and fascinating history.
Cases reported up until the late 19th Century tended to fall into the category of mass motor anxiety — outbreaks of so-called ‘dancing mania’, in which large numbers of people would reportedly dance uncontrollably for hours on end, were reported as early at the 7th Century.

More recently, a famous case happened in the autumn of 2011, when a number of high school students in LeRoy, a town in the Finger Lakes region of New York, spontaneously started producing incoherent speech patterns, involuntary muscle twitches and facial tics.

After having ruled out any potential environmental causes, the students were eventually diagnosed with conversion disorder - essentially, a form of MSI.
The case was the focus of a Channel 4 show, The Town That Caught Tourette’s, shown in 2014.

But despite this long and notable history, there is little scientific research into MSI.
Part of the problem is that, because outbreaks occur without warning, any subsequent analysis of them is somewhat opportunistic and tends to result in case reports.

These are great as a starting point for understanding a medical phenomenon, but they’re not particularly useful in helping to determine the underlying cause.
As such, outbreaks of MSI tend to usually be diagnosed by exclusion — in other words, other likely causes are ruled out first, and a diagnosis of MSI is used as a last resort when no other explanations are left.

In 2010, a team led by Lisa Page at King’s College London tried to address this issue, and looked at the possible predictors and frequency of MSI outbreaks.
They used data collected by the UK Health Protection Agency that described instanced of ‘chemical incidents’ — events in which members of the public had, or could have been, exposed to a chemical that could have caused illness.

Of 747 eligible cases, they took a random sample of 280, and applied a set of 5 criteria for defining MSI.
They were able to classify 19 out of the 280 sampled incidents as episodes of MSI — so in other words, about 7% of all reported chemical incidents could be an episode of sociogenic illness.

As for predictors, reporting the presence of non-smoke odours came out as a good factor, and Page’s team reported that episodes of MSI were more likely to occur at schools or in healthcare facilities.

So what about the Ripon event?
Well, one of the key criteria in Page’s study asks whether the symptoms were compatible with any other environmental exposures.

Reading the news stories about yesterday’s episode, it seems like a lot of people reported that the assembly room was quite warm, which is probably the simplest explanation for everyone fainting.

Occam’s Razor and all that.
Or, it could be yet another case of mass sociogenic illness for the record books.

 

[Skarekrow]

Meet the Former Pentagon Scientist Who Says Psychics Can Help American Spies

Steps from the Hayward Executive Airport in Northern California, a brunette in jeans and hiking boots scans her surroundings for police.
She’s carrying a 13-pound canister of liquid nitrogen in her hand.

She unclasps the lid and dumps the colorless, minus-320-degree liquid into a beer cooler packed with 2,000 tiny aluminum balls.
A thick white cloud erupts below the airport’s control tower, a witch’s brew that crackles and pops.

Undetected, she darts back to her SUV and is gone.
Over the past two years, the same intruder has performed this clandestine ritual three dozen times across the San Francisco Bay Area.
Without warning or permission, she’s released nitrogen gas clouds in front of a fire station, a busy Catholic church, a water tower and a government center.

She’s smoke-bombed her way from Palo Alto to Alameda, spewing her cryogenic concoction in popular city parks and near lakes, highways and Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) subway lines.

She’s not a Satanic cultist or an incompetent terrorist.
Arguably, her mission is even more improbable.

It’s all part of an experiment run by a former Pentagon scientist to prove the existence of extrasensory perception, or ESP.

Dr. Edwin May tests a participant for remote viewing. Two decades after the CIA denounced the government’s top-secret ESP program, May is trying to bring it back to life. ​

Washington's Most Expensive Psychics

Twenty years ago this month, the CIA released a report with the unassuming title, “An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications.”
The 183-page white paper was more like a white flag–it was the CIA’s public admission, after years of speculation, that U.S. government agencies had been using a type of ESP called “remote viewing” for more than two decades to help collect military and intelligence secrets.

At a cost of about $20 million, the program had employed psychics to visualize hidden extremist training sites in Libya, describe new Soviet submarine designs and pinpoint the locations of U.S. hostages held by foreign kidnappers.

But the report, conducted for the CIA by the independent American Institutes for Research, did much more than confirm the existence of the highly classified program.
It declared that the psychic-spy operation, code-named Star Gate, had been a bust.

Yes, the CIA researchers had validated some Star Gate trials, finding that “hits occur more often than chance” and that “something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place.” But the report declared that ESP was next to worthless for military use because the tips provided are too “vague and ambiguous” to produce actionable intelligence.

Like a Ouija board, the resulting news headlines seemed to write themselves. “End of Aura for CIA Mystics,” The Guardian quipped.
“Spooks See No Future for Pentagon Psychics,” a Scottish paper reported. “Putting the ‘ESP’ Back Into Espionage,” BusinessWeek added.

ABC News’s Nightline also joined the fray, hosting a face-off between Robert Gates, the former CIA director, and Edwin May, the scientist who had been running the government’s ESP research program.

Gates struck first. “I don’t know of a single instance where it is documented that this kind of activity contributed in any significant way to a policy decision, or even to informing policy makers about important information,” he said.

May fought back, citing “dramatic cases in the laboratory” in which Pentagon psychics had accurately sketched a target thousands of miles away that they had never actually seen.
That wasn’t good enough, however.

Already embarrassed and under pressure for the disclosure that one of their own, Aldrich Ames, had been spying for the Russians for a decade, the CIA officially shut down the psychic spies program.

Star Gate had fizzled out.

It was November 1995, and May was out of a job.
His life’s work had been discredited by the CIA, and he had been humbled on national television.

At 55, the trained scientist might have retreated to academia or simply walked away.
Instead, he doubled down on ESP.

A Jewish Hungarian Cowboy

As a boy, May always seemed to stand out.
Born in Boston, the Navy brat moved frequently, finally settling with his family after World War II on a ranch outside Tucson. “I grew up as a Jewish Hungarian cowboy in Arizona,” he says, while digging into a plate of country ham at a tavern in Virginia. Fascinated with the Russian language, he taught himself the Cyrillic alphabet. He fell in love with physics at a local private boarding school and headed to college in New York.

“I had a letter sweater in calf roping,” he says. “The only guy at the University of Rochester with that.”
May graduated in 1962 and began pursuing a doctoral degree.

It didn’t last long. “I flunked out of my first graduate school,” he says. “Fell in with a bunch of fast nurses and learned to play a bagpipe.”

​

His timing was unfortunate.
The Vietnam War was ramping up, and the U.S. Army came calling. “It was more than a wakeup call. It straightened out my life,” May says of nearly getting drafted.

He enrolled at the University of Pittsburgh and buckled down, earning a Ph.D. in nuclear physics in four years.
By 1968, with the counterculture movement raging, May had gone legit, authoring a thesis titled, “Nuclear Reaction Studies via the (Proton, Proton Neutron) Reaction on Light Nuclei and the (Deuteron, Proton Neutron) Reaction on Medium to Heavy Nuclei.”

May found post-doc work at the University of California, Davis, conducting tests with cyclotrons, but life outside the physics lab began exerting its own magnetic pull. “I moved to San Francisco,” he recalls proudly. “As a professional hippie.”

In the Bay Area, May dropped out, attending trippy lectures on parapsychological research and experimenting with drugs.
With the standard-issue beard and ponytail in place, he took off for India in search of the miraculous.

May expected to “make Nobel Prize—winning discoveries of mind over matter,” but he came home empty-handed. “I was unable to find a single psychic, whether street fakir or holy guru, who was able or willing to fit into my scientific framework,” he wrote in Psychic magazine upon his return.

An exterior view of the SRI International Building in Menlo Park, California, where May would conduct psychokinesis experiments. SRI International was founded as the Stanford Research institute in 1970. Unknown to May at the time, many of the projects were top secret and funded by the CIA.
​

In 1975, May’s career found him.
A friend recommended him for a job at the prestigious Stanford Research Institute, now called SRI International, in Menlo Park.

May would be conducting psychokinesis experiments.
Unknown to him at the time, many of the projects were top secret and funded by the CIA.

Three years earlier, spooked by the Soviet Union’s growing interest in parapsychology, the CIA had embraced ESP.
At first, the Cold War—era tests were low-key, with CIA officials clumsily hiding objects in a box and asking a psychic to describe the contents.

Soon the CIA got serious and ordered a $50,000 pilot study at the SRI, determined to see if psychics could use their remote-viewing skills to visualize and sketch large target sites in and around San Francisco.

Harold Puthoff, a laser physicist with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, was the program’s first director.
The CIA, he wrote, “watchful for possible chicanery, participated as remote viewers themselves in order to critique the protocols.”

The CIA officials drew seven sketches “of striking quality,” Puthoff recalled, and “performed well under controlled laboratory conditions.”
Later, a psychic sitting in California visualized inside a secret National Security Agency listening post in West Virginia, right down to the words on file folders, according to Puthoff and a CIA official.

The CIA project director described the NSA-visualization results as “mixed” because the psychic nailed the code name for the site and its physical layout but botched the names of people working at the site.

Nonetheless, interest from the U.S. intelligence community spiked. And when that same remote viewer–provided with only map coordinates and an atlas–described new buildings and a massive construction crane hidden at a secret Soviet nuclear weapons facility (but got most other details wrong), multiple U.S. agencies began signing up for ESP studies.

A few years later, two psychologists at a New Zealand university had a premonition about Puthoff: They called him a bit of a rube.
Writing in the journal Nature, the psychologists revealed that they had obtained transcripts of the original CIA experiments.

The psychic who had seen deep inside the NSA outpost and the Soviet nuclear site had been fed “a large number of cues” from the judges over the years, they reported, and it was impossible to duplicate the uncanny results of his ESP testing.

“Our own experiments on remote viewing under cue-free conditions have consistently failed to replicate the effect,” the psychologists concluded. Puthoff, who would also famously declare that spoon-bender and magician Uri Geller possessed psychic powers, disputed the psychologists’ findings and kept running the ESP program until 1985.

Although the CIA stopped funding ESP research in 1977, the Air Force, Army and Defense Intelligence Agency kept writing checks.
The Army’s Fort Meade base in Maryland became the program’s secret operational home.

In 1995, when Congress directed the CIA to evaluate remote viewing and either take over the program or cancel it for good, the DIA was at the helm.
Congress bankrolled and protected the program for years.

Well-known defenders included Rhode Island Senator Claiborne Pell and North Carolina Representative Charlie Rose, who once told an interviewer that "if the Russians have remote viewing, and we don't, we're in trouble."

A lesser-known supporter: Maine Senator William Cohen, who would later become the Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton. “I was impressed with the concept of remote viewing,” he tells Newsweek in an email.

“The results may not have been consistent enough to constitute ‘actionable intelligence,’ but exploration of the power of the mind was and remains an important endeavor.”
To May, that’s an understatement.

Former Secretary of Defense William Cohen is pictured during his appearance before the 9/11 commission on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2004. 'I was impressed with the concept of remote viewing,' Cohen tells 'Newsweek' in an email.

​

‘I believed it then, and I believe it now’

To his admirers, May is a legitimate parapsychologist.
To his critics, that phrase is the ultimate oxymoron.

From 1985 to 1995, May served as the California-based research director of the Pentagon’s ESP program.
A proton-probing scientist by training and a paranormal prophet by choosing, May was that rare specimen–a full-time ESP researcher with a salary and 401(k) plan courtesy of the U.S. government.

Thick of waist now with a shiny pate and white beard, he could pass for aging folk star Peter Yarrow.
May has never met an aside he didn’t like.

Conversations come loaded with amusing chestnuts (“We’d answer the phone, ‘Hello, Division of Parapsychology. May we tell you who’s calling?’”), Washington gossip (“You know the Energy Department is run by Mormons?”) and TMI (“I hung out with the Wicca community for a while”).

But when the talk turns to nonbelievers who dismiss remote viewing as voodoo without examining the evidence, May is short-tempered.
“I’m not going to deal with a skeptic who has no fucking idea about what he’s talking about. Because he’s just making it up. That’s bad science. I’m a scientist.”

And May has even less time for all the former Star Gate psychics who peddle mood-ring junk science online, some warning paying customers about flying saucers and the coming apocalypse. “They are ripping people off, and I have to undo that when I try to sell this to mainstream scientists,” he says.

So what is his scientific evidence?
In 1995, when the CIA began preparing its program review, May provided the review team with results of 10 experiments he felt provided “the strongest evidence” to support “the remote-viewing phenomenon.”

The tests, with names like “AC lucid dream, pilot” and “ERD EEG investigation” detail the success rate of each experiment.
One of the CIA reviewers, while clearly in the minority, was sold. “It is clear to this author that [ESP] is possible and has been demonstrated,” she wrote in the agency’s report. “This conclusion is not based on belief, but rather on commonly accepted scientific criteria.”

The CIA spent millions trying to develop psychics military spies, finally abandoning the project in the 1990s.
​

Today, May says ESP has “already been proved,” and defends it like an impatient school teacher explaining gravity.
He quickly offers a barrage of evidence and anecdotes to make his case.

In a recent interview, May references an obscure presentation that the military’s own remote-viewing project manager wrote in 1984 for his Army superiors.
According to the now-declassified “secret” briefing, available online, the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command had conducted “100 collection projects” using ESP since 1979 for a slew of government agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI and Secret Service.

Several of the projects involved the use of Army psychics to help locate Americans taken hostage by Iran in 1979.
“Over 85% of our operational missions have produced accurate target information,” states the briefing. “Even more significant, approximately 50% of the 760 missions produced usable intelligence.”

May sees the Army report as confirmation that Gates was protecting the CIA when he declared on Nightline that remote viewing had never “contributed in any significant way” to U.S. intelligence efforts.

“Gates lied,” he tells Newsweek. “What more can I say?”
Gates, now a partner in the RiceHadleyGates consulting firm, wouldn’t comment.

But the author of the Army’s 1984 report did.
Brian Buzby was an Army lieutenant colonel when he briefly ran the Pentagon’s ESP program in the 1980s.

He’s retired in Alabama now and has never spoken to the media before.
He stands by his remote-viewing report. “I believed in it then, and I believe in it now,” Buzby says. “It was a real thing, and it worked.”

Buzby says the program was just one low-cost tool that provided an additional source of intel for military and civilian analysts to weigh.
When he learned the CIA had shut down the program, “I was disappointed that somebody wouldn’t pick up the banner.”

For May, further proof of the program’s many wonders is Star Gate’s legendary “Agent 001.”
The first psychic to work directly for the Pentagon, then—Army Chief Warrant Officer Joseph McMoneagle began remote viewing for the government in 1978.

As a child, McMoneagle recalls sharing thoughts telepathically with his twin sister, and says he honed his ESP abilities as a soldier avoiding deadly attacks in Vietnam.
May says McMoneagle could correctly identify a target “just under 50 percent” of the time when presented with five possible options.

Using chance alone, he says the best outcome would be just 20 percent.

A satellite image of two Typhoon SSBN submarines that Russia plans to scrap, pictured in Severodvinsk, Russia on May 28, 2013.
​

May cites one intriguing example.
It was 1979, and the National Security Council wanted help in “seeing” inside an unidentified industrial building near the Arctic Circle in Russia.

McMoneagle began imagining himself “drifting down into the building” and had “an overwhelming sense” that he could see a submarine, “a really big one, with twin hulls.”
He made detailed drawings of the giant sub for the NSC.

Only later, McMoneagle wrote in his 2002 memoir, did U.S. satellite photographs confirm the existence at the Soviet’s secret Severodvinsk shipyard of a massive double-hulled Typhoon submarine, which constituted a new threat to American national security.

Upon retirement from the Army in 1984, McMoneagle was awarded the Legion of Merit.
Given for exceptionally meritorious conduct, his award states that he served in a “unique intelligence project that is revolutionizing the intelligence community.”

It adds that he produced “critical intelligence unavailable from any other source” for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, DIA, NSA, CIA and Secret Service.

Meeting a Millionaire

For years after the government shut down its ESP program, May and McMoneagle tried to bring it back from the dead.
They approached friendlies inside the U.S. agencies that had once funded them, “and they fled from us like you wouldn’t believe,” May says.

He was “getting desperate, out of money,” and then he met a millionaire.
The third-generation owner of a pharmaceutical empire, Luís Portela, was in a unique position to help. In 1924, Portela’s grandfather opened a modest laboratory above the pharmacy where he worked in Porto, Portugal.

Today, that business is called Bial, and it’s the largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in Portugal.
Its products are sold in more than 50 countries on four continents.

From an early age, Portela has been spellbound by the paranormal.
In an email, he says he’s always tried to understand why humanity and religion “accepted too easily some phenomena, so-called mysteries or miracles,” while scientists “denied those phenomena, claiming that they did not exist.”

So in 1994, Portela set up the nonprofit Bial Foundation to study ESP and “the human being from both the physical and spiritual perspectives.”
It’s a radical concept for such a conservative industry.

Imagine Johnson & Johnson financing crystal healing.
The Bial Foundation has funded more than 500 projects in 25 countries, including dozens of ESP studies and even research into ghost sightings and belief in UFOs.

May has been a frequent Bial recipient, collecting about $400,000 in research funds for nine ESP-related projects.
In the process, Portela has become a fanboy, believing the controversial scientist has helped “foster the understanding of the human being.”

Liquid nitrogen disperses into the air after May's assistant poured it out near Hayward Airport in California. May believes the mist acts as a homing beacon for psychics.
​

Funded by the Bial Foundation at a cost of $45,000, May’s latest ESP study “is probably the best experiment in the history of the field,” the Star Gate researcher says.
The goal: to test whether “changes of thermodynamic entropy at a remote natural site enhance the quality of the anomalous cognition.”

That’s a two-dollar way of asking whether a sudden release of thermal energy, like a rocket launch or a liquid nitrogen eruption in a beer cooler, can improve a psychic’s ability to perceive what’s happening at the site from thousands of miles away.

“This wasn’t something that we just pulled out of our rear ends,” May explains. “It was really all the spying stuff we did for the government, where we discovered that when targets involve large changes of thermodynamic entropy, like underground nukes, accelerators, electromagnetic pulse devices and so on, they work much better” in signaling remote viewers.

To conduct the ESP-improvement experiment, May reassembled his old A-team.
Out of rural Virginia, there’s McMoneagle, the former Army intelligence officer who won the Legion of Merit.

Then there’s Nevin Lantz, a former Star Gate researcher who works today as a Palo Alto psychotherapist and “authentic happiness coach.”
And finally there’s Angela Dellafiora Ford, a former Star Gate psychic and DIA intelligence analyst from Maryland who markets herself as a “medium that can help people connect with their spirit guides as well as communicate with their loved ones on the other side.”

Ford was one of only a half-dozen women who worked as psychics for the government’s program.
Some of her military colleagues derided her because three “spirit guides” would possess her mind during Star Gate remote-viewing sessions and guide her observations.

One was a fat cherub, another a boy-like angel and the last a 17th-century British professor who spoke through her, Ford says.
In an interview, she also says she once saw a UFO outside her suburban home in 2010.

“It reminded me of something like they call the mother ship,” she says. “It was not moving. It was hovering...and then it sort of disappeared.”

Senate Appropriations Chairman Robert C. Byrd looks over notes on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 15, 2008. Maine Senator William Cohen, who served as Secretary of Defense under President Bill Clinton, says Senator Byrd was a supporter of the Star Gate program.
​

Regardless of her unorthodox methods and beliefs, Ford also has her admirers.
One of them is Cohen, the former senator and secretary of defense.

He first got to know Ford when he was on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, which helped fund Star Gate even when the Defense Department lost interest.
Ford conducted psychic readings for Cohen when was he was a senator, and he remains a true believer.

“I did support the Star Gate program, as did Senator Robert Byrd and other members of the committee,” Cohen says in an email. “There seemed to be a small segment of people who were able to key into a different level of consciousness. Angela Ford was one of them. It doesn't mean that she or any of the others in the Star Gate program possessed psychic powers that could predict the future or peer into the past and retrieve lost information. But there were a number of remote-viewing tests conducted that I found impressive.”

With Ford, Lantz and McMoneagle back on the job, May began work on his ESP 2.0 experiment.
The first step was to design protocols and choose 22 distinct Bay Area outdoor locations near his private Cognitive Sciences Laboratory in Palo Alto.

Sites included the Hayward Executive Airport, a BART overpass in Union City, the Palo Alto Duck Pond and the Pulgas Ridge Preserve in Redwood City.
Next, May would fire up his Sony Vaio laptop and ask the computer to randomly select one of the target sites.

May and the remote viewers would not know the result.
The computer would also generate a text message to inform May’s assistant–the mysterious brunette, a former waitress named Lory Hawley–where to drive and whether she would create a mini liquid nitrogen eruption. Again, May and the psychics were not told the result.

May worked with the psychics, one at a time, in a quiet room.
He placed a blindfold over each psychic’s eyes and then said: “Please access and describe the first thing you see when we remove the blindfold” in a half-hour or so.

After getting into a relaxed or trance-like state, the remote viewer then described exactly what he or she “saw” at the Bay Area location.
May then entered the psychic’s descriptions into his laptop, assigning a number value for each water feature, man-made structure and other physical element described.

Finally, the computer determined the accuracy of each remote-viewing session.
For these tests in California, May drove the psychics to the site the computer had selected and then told them to remove their blindfolds.

But many other times, May conducted the experiment using locations thousands of miles away, in Maryland or Virginia, in hotel rooms or McMoneagle’s den.
In those cases, May held up a photo of the correct target site for the psychic to see once they had described their vision.

The duck pond at the Palo Alto Baylands Nature preserve, pictured in 2008. The duck pond was one of 22 locations May selected for his ESP 2.0 experiment.

​

The old Star Gate psychics recently completed 72 trials, with May’s assistant pouring liquid nitrogen 36 times.
In his final report to Bial, May declared victory, finding “a significant effect supporting the study hypothesis (zdiff = 1.80, p = .036, ES = 0.425 ± 0.236).”

Translation: Liquid nitrogen works.
The sudden release of energy acts as a flare in the dark, May believes, helping psychics to see across the country and even into the future.

“I think it’s very important,” he says of this unpublished study. “If it holds up, it will be a breakthrough.”

You Can't Bullshit a Bullshitter

Chances are, Ray Hyman won’t see it that way.
A professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, Hyman is one of the nation’s leading skeptics about the paranormal.

Along with his friend James Randi, aka the Amazing Randi, he’s a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, whose mission is to promote “the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.”

As a scientist and former magician and mentalist, he’s a living embodiment of the “You can’t bullshit a bullshitter” maxim.
Hyman and his skeptic kin are deeply suspicious of parapsychology and other phenomena they can’t prove, including man’s ability to walk through walls, become invisible, stop animal hearts through intense staring or any of the other wacky ideas embraced by Pentagon officials in the ’70s and ’80s and lampooned in the book and movie The Men Who Stare at Goats .

Hyman and May first met at the SRI in the 1970s, and originally the skeptic was encouraged.
Sent by the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency to the institute to observe illusionist Geller–“just a charming con artist” – Hyman grew to respect May’s scientific rigor and ethics.

They agreed that the early SRI research was “crap,” Hyman says, providing way too many clues to the psychics and fudging the results.

Magician and scientific skeptic James Randi is pictured with Johnny Carson during 'The Amazing Randi' episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson on November 3, 1987. Randi was a founding member of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now known as the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, whose mission is to promote 'the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.'

​

But when May began running the ESP program, Hyman says, he also created protocol problems.
May became the only arbiter of whether a psychic had accurately described a target.

“The only judge who could make it work was Ed May,” Hyman says. “That’s a no-no.”
So in 1995, when the CIA selected Hyman to help evaluate the Star Gate program, the automatic writing was on the wall.

Although the famous debunker was paired with a known ESP proponent, Hyman’s views prevailed.
The final CIA report chastised May for serving as both judge and jury on virtually all the ESP tests.

“The use of the same judge across experiments further compounds the problem of non-independence of the experiments,” the report concluded.
Reached recently at his Oregon home, Hyman expresses a begrudging respect for his old adversary. “Smart guy, no question about it–he’s talented,” he says.

The 87-year-old professor says that well-meaning researchers like May are trying to bring respect to a field burdened by strip-mall palm readers, 1-800 psychics and Star Gate alums on the Internet who now charge top dollar to purportedly game the stock market, discover the lost city of Atlantis and uncover the truth behind the Kennedy assassination.

Yet Hyman believes even the most sincere and sophisticated efforts to prove the existence of ESP have all failed: “Having the window dressing of statistics, controls, double-blind, all that kind of stuff,” he says, “doesn’t make it science.”

An Interview With a Psychic Foot Soldier

A few months ago at McMoneagle’s home near Charlottesville, Virginia, May volunteers to conduct a live remote-viewing test for me, with his ace psychic at his side. “Joe, please access and describe a photograph you will see in about one or two minutes from now,” May says.

McMoneagle sits still for 30 seconds and then begins sketching on a pad.
From the comfort of his brown recliner, McMoneagle describes his drawing. “These squares are representative of buildings,” he says. “And these buildings are kind of just scattered through here. So they’re like embedded in a hillside. The roads are not very good roads; they’re more like paths.”

May asks for more. “Float up in the air a thousand feet–it’s safe–whirl around 360 degrees and tell me what the gestalt of the area is like,” he says.
“OK, you’ve got a large body of water. This is probably an island of some kind. Mountains up in here because the river goes up into the mountains. You’ve got a couple of bridges. This is a small village,” McMoneagle adds.

Then May’s laptop randomly selects two ographs and labels them Targets A and B.
May flips a coin, and it comes up heads, which my teenage daughter had secretly decided beforehand would represent Target A.

May pulls out the Target A photograph for the big reveal...and it’s a close-up of a giant waterfall.
There isn’t a building, path, island, mountain, bridge or village in sight.

Both men laugh.
The test has been a failure. “I’ve never gotten a waterfall in my life,” McMoneagle explains.

But May suggests some alternative theories. “There’s a concept in statistics called nonstationary. What that means is the phenomenon comes and goes in unpredictable ways,” he says.

He adds that intention, attention and expectation always affect remote viewing, and “we violated virtually all three things in this particular trial.”
Then Ed May pauses and offers his final explanation: “It was just a demo.”

 

[Skarekrow]

Quantum Psychoanalysis:
Interpreting Precognitive Dreams



​

Near the end of Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar, astronaut “Coop” is able to communicate with his younger self (as well as his daughter) decades in the past using a tesseract, a theoretical multidimensional portal created by our descendents thousands or millions of years in the future.

Coop’s messages are oblique–he can’t address his younger self directly but has to send symbolic messages using the books on his bookshelf.

His younger self, before his planned mission to a black hole, realizes there something significant occurring but misses the precise meaning of these messages: a warning not to go.

So at the risk of sounding like a reductive materialist bad-guy (which, honest, I’m not), I do think the answer to psi (not necessarily consciousness) is going to be found in neuroscience.

All the evidence points to this.
No energy transmission or reception has ever been found to account for psi.

The physics of information that governs psi and synchronicity has nothing to do with “thoughts through space,” the airy mental image most of us probably have when we think of psychic phenomena.

We need to get rid of that mental model of waves radiating from or toward a head.
The brain may not create consciousness, but it certainly gives shape to our conscious experience, in the form of memory, thoughts, symbol use, sense of self, and so on.

Our experience is processed and shaped by the brain, so our future experiences are mediated by our brain in the future.
If the brain is a quantum computer, the possibility I discussed in the last post, it could work by creating coherent systems of entangled particles that are isolated enough, for long enough, that they are able to manipulate information in ways far beyond what conventional computers can achieve, including sending coherent information into the past and extracting information arriving from the future.

Whether or not the mechanism is precisely the one I proposed, based on Seth Lloyd’s theory of time travel via quantum teleportation, I predict that some form of trading and extracting of coherent information across time may turn out to be a basic function of the cortex, a picture that could provide a radically new understanding not only of psi but also of memory and other basic cognitive functions.

The brain may be precisely something like Nolan’s tesseract, an organ that is genuinely a tunnel through time, extending across our whole lifespan.

I see a brain-based theory of psi as a more compelling alternative to “nonlocality” theories commonly invoked by parapsychologists.
Even if it is true that all points in space and time are connected, that gets us no closer to explaining how psi works–for example, how a remote viewer given an arbitrary code word can home in on and describe a specific geographical target that the code word represents, among all possible targets in the universe (and that she hasn’t seen before and couldn’t possibly “recognize”); or how a mother could have a vision of her own dying son on a battlefield (and not all dying people everywhere); or why people have premonitions not of major disasters but specifically of their own reading of those disasters in the news (J.W. Dunne’s major discovery in his 1927 book An Experiment With Time).

None of this has anything to do with nonlocality; it’s a matter of information search and retrieval, and it reveals how intimately personal psi information is–we are “recollecting” information from a future point in our own timeline when we will learn something we don’t yet know and don’t yet even know we want to know.

Psi is thus fundamentally memory-like in the way it behaves.
Just as we can only remember our own past and not other people’s pasts, we can only remember our own future.

And besides being personal, psi is also associative–again, just like memory.

Free Association

As in Nolan’s tesseract, the character of the brain’s self-relating across time is allusive and indirect: We don’t just appear to ourselves bearing explicit messages from the future; messages from our future self are oblique, more like a game of charades.

They may need to be, to conform to the rules that govern memory, and to conform to the demands of “post-selection”–that is, not allowing an action that would foreclose the message from being sent.

It’s not like there’s a “precognition police” enforcing this; it’s more like informational Darwinism: the only precognitive messages that “survive” are the ones that lead to their being sent back in time in the first place.

Among the parameters of such a tesseract would be a tendency for the clearest examples of precognition to be only consciously recognizable after the fact, unless there is no possibility of preventing the future outcome in which information was sent to the present.

​

Precognitive dreams illustrate this principle marvelously.
The basic function of dreaming appears to be the updating of the brain’s associative search system that catalogs and files daily autobiographical events by linking them to other events (and themes) in our long-term memory.

Although isolated elements may be immediately recognizable as “day residues,” dream episodes never literalistically represent events, but are tableaux assembled from memories and images those events remind the unconscious of–exactly the kinds of distortions and displacements that Freud mis-took as symbolic disguises for repressed wishes.

But even if dreaming’s function is basically mnemonic and not wish-fulfillment, mnemonic associations are formed through precisely the types of puns and other substitutions that Freud identified.

Precognitive dreams obey the same principles, and this is why free-association is invaluable in uncovering the true extent of our our nightly precognizing.

Standard Freudian dream interpreters, being entirely past-looking–and biased to search for disguised wishes–are liable to completely miss the large number of precognitive dreams we have on a nightly basis.

I now suspect that a sizable portion, maybe even half, of our dreams actually encode events of the subsequent day or farther out, but this is inevitably missed if we do not return to our dreams at later intervals (especially the following afternoon or evening) with an eye to searching for this material.

You don’t need to contort or “twist” a dream to find precognitive referents.
Contrary to what Freud-bashers always assert, free-association is not (when it is done right) straining to come up with “meanings” that will lead to a desired conclusion.

You do have to play by the rules though: Only the first thing that comes to mind for a noticed dream element is a valid connection.
If the first things that come to mind for various dream elements don’t suggestively illuminate a dream episode, just leave it.

Many dreams are smarter than we are, and we have to concede defeat; others may refer to events that haven’t happened yet, so we can never assume that the right answer is findable.

But when done in good faith, free association reveals abundant precognitive material in dreams that would otherwise go unnoticed.
A particularly clear example from my dream journal from this past April will serve to illustrate the process. (Apologies in advance–I hate reading other people’s dreams, and I know you do to…)

Petroglyph Dream

On my way up a mountain, I had stopped at a roadside tourist attraction, a cave with ancient Indian petroglyphs on the ceiling, the most prominent being an enormous elongated/tall rectangular ‘man’ or headless being of some sort, reminding me of one of those elongated tall shaman figures in Southwest rock art [like the middle figure in the picture below], and then a smaller object higher above that figure that I found less interesting.

I didn’t have my camera with me (specifically, my old Pentax, which I knew was loaded with black and white film), but I thought I could get it somewhere farther up (the mountain); so I resolved to stop on my way back down so I could take black and white pictures of the petroglyph.

The scene changed: I realized I had my iphone in the car so I retrieved it and attempted to take color pictures in the cave.
No matter what I did, however, the screen kept “repelling” my attempt to photograph the largest (tall, vertical) petroglyph that interested me.

I turned the camera around to use the front-facing camera, but it still only showed my face on the screen, as though there were a force field preventing any image of the actual petroglyph.

Then I dropped the phone and damaged the side, where a button is.
The scene shifted again: I was inside a visitor’s center at the “top” of the mountain, but associated with the cave.

It was circular in plan, and around the outer ring were various vestibules with stuff for sale, including snacks.
I found a coffee-flavored drink to buy.

I thought there might be something else interesting in one of the other rooms, so I went searching, and circled the whole visitor’s center and came back to where I’d started, disappointed.
​

​

​

On writing down the dream initially, the only association that immediately came to mind was the “unphotographable petroglyph”: Two decades ago, when living and working in Eastern Europe, I had a coworker friend named Petra who refused to be photographed; my only picture of her shows her with her face turned away and her hand held up to block the camera.

Thus “petroglyph” seemed to be a kind of dream representation of Petra, a “Petra picture.”
There was no reason in my current life to be thinking of this old coworker, however.

It was later that afternoon that the primary event-referent of the dream became clear.
I had taken time away from my work to watch the live web coverage of a SpaceX launch from Cape Canaveral, which would be delivering a cargo module to the International Space Station.

It was somewhat exciting, as all rocket launches are, but my main reason for watching this launch was my expectation–based on some Twitter postings earlier that day–that SpaceX might also broadcast the attempted landing of the first stage of the rocket on a barge in the Atlantic; this retrieval method had failed the previous two attempts, but there were high hopes for success in this case.

After the launch the cameras on board the rocket showed the first stage separation, but the only views subsequently shown were shots of the exterior and interior of the orbital Dragon module; several minutes passed, and I became increasingly frustrated when the cameras didn’t cut away to show the first-stage retrieval I had been excited to see.

It became apparent that, despite the misleading publicity on this launch, the SpaceX broadcast was not going to show the landing, no doubt because of the uncertainty of the outcome.

​

In the aftermath of my frustration at being unable to view the first-stage landing/retrieval, I realized that my petroglyph dream had been about this minor emotional salience in my otherwise uneventful workday, and thus my frustration turned to excitement.

The shape of the bottom/main petroglyph I was interested in, in the dream, was exactly like a tall first stage of the rocket with a flat top. In the dream, the object of my interest resisted being photographed/viewed, like my friend Petra many years before, and thus the dream concocted an amalgam of these two ideas: a “Petra picture,” placed overhead on the roof of a dark cave (like the sky), which my iPhone (a small computer/camera) was unable to capture in its screen. (Remember that there was also a smaller object up above the tall “man” that I found less interesting.)

One of Freud’s key insights was that the unconscious cannot represent or conceive an absence; it must put an object in its place–in this case a cave roof for the empty sky, narratively consistent with the “petroglyph” idea that was itself required by the pun on Petra picture, perfectly fit the bill.

​

That the petroglyph dream element referred to the first stage of the SpaceX rocket is clinched by my desire/intention in the dream of getting my old Pentax camera and photograph it in black and white.

This was a very specific memory reference to watching a space shuttle launch in Orlando Florida in the late 1990s, which I had photographed with my Pentax, not remembering it was loaded with black and white film–producing very disappointing lackluster photographs of what was a colorful and spectacular sight. (I have not used that Pentax camera in many years, and that frustrating event was my strongest “free association” with that camera.)

In the dream, I specifically wanted to get my Pentax to photograph it “on the way back down”–displacing the rocket’s “way back down” with my own way back down the mountain.

​

Although the first-stage retrieval was not televised, news tidbits trickled in via Twitter that the barge landing had failed; one person on Twitter said they “broke the rocket.”

It was revealed that the rocket had hit hard, with too much lateral momentum, and fallen over on its side.
In the dream, I dropped my phone and broke it, specifically the button on its side. (A few days later, video was made available showing the interesting and highly entropic outcome of the failed landing attempt: the rocket descending onto the barge but falling over and exploding.)

The last part of my dream, about traversing a circular gift shop “at the top of the mountain” and finding a coffee drink.
is also directly significant.

The main media-worthy fact about this SpaceX mission, which was part of the chatter during the launch coverage, was that it was going to be delivering an espresso machine to the International Space Station.

During the coverage, at the point of my maximal frustration (i.e., when I hoped it would cut away to show the barge retrieval), what was shown instead was a boring, somewhat ambiguous viewpoint inside the circular cargo module, along its visibly curved edge (i.e., my frustration and disappointment at circling the circular gift shop and finding nothing but a coffee drink).

Thus, as is typical with dreams, various old memory fragments with resonances to an emotionally salient autobiographical situation (inability to see/photograph a friend; failure to satisfyingly photograph a rocket launch) were woven together by the unconscious to create an associative symbolic tableau, rather like a game of charades hinting strongly at a core autobiographical event that is not directly represented; but in this case the event was a few hours in my future, not the previous day or two as is the somewhat more familiar and typical pattern.

Psi has always been noted to involve emotional upheavals of various kinds, and to especially express itself when ordinary communication channels prove limiting or frustrating–both of these characterized the autobiographical episode this dream seemed to be pre-encoding.
(The connection between new communications technology and psi is a whole topic in itself, of course; in the early days of the ARPAnet, Jacques Vallee noted telepathy occurring among networked chat users.)

Also, there is a distinct connection between precognitive information and highly “entropic” events like rocket launches and explosions, as Edwin May has shown.

Many (although not all) of my own precognitive dreams involve entropy gradients in one way or another–often an entropic event on the news, or indeed on Twitter–although I believe this has less to do with our “psi eyes” and more to do with the kinds of information we as humans find interesting and survival-relevant, whatever the sensory channel.

True to form, this dream managed to draw together multiple lines of association to express the idea of a disappointing or frustrating failure to fully see what I wanted to see–a camera being a standard representation of “seeing”–precisely in connection with a rocket launch and landing.

Dunne Right

Note that there is nothing immediately obvious in the above dream that would connect it with what I am asserting was its future referent; like most precognitive dreams, it would have gone completely unnoticed had I not been in a habit of
(a) recording my dreams,
(b) unpacking my dreams via free-associative Freudian methods, and
(c) revisiting them later in the day in search of possible precognitive references.

Again, a dream is not a literal replay of an event (past or future), but the firing of neural circuits that in one way or another closely associate to that memory (or its themes)–wiring these associations together by firing them together.

Dreaming is the experience of neural rewiring, the updating of the search system, and thus the actual autobiographical episode they relate to is generally not represented and thus not obvious at first glance; the dream is a kind of associative halo around the event, and the event is a kind of blank space at its heart.

​

Dreams in which you can discern the precognitive referent without any kind of free-associative unpacking are infrequent, but even those are common enough that a casual dream-recorder can occasionally discover them.

J.W. Dunne gave no thought to Freudian methods of dream interpretation, for instance, yet recorded several plainly precognitive dreams that had very little symbolic/associative ‘disguise.’

Dale Graff, who was a director and remote viewer in the Star Gate program, has written extensively of dream precognition and precognitive remote viewing using dreams in his excellent memoirs Tracks in the Psychic Wilderness and River Dreams, and he also describes several examples in which the target is plain without the use of free association.

The fact that so much precognitive dream material comes to light when using free association suggests that precognitive dreaming occurs far more frequently than even its advocates typically assert.

In my case, not a week goes by when I do not record at least a few dreams like the above, that clearly refer (once unpacked) to an event the following day.

Typically these events are trivial, not the sort of thing you’d imagine warranted a warning or alert, and certainly lacking the “numinous” quality commonly associated with premonitory dreams.

Even the most assiduous dream recorder only remembers and records a small handful of his/her dreams each night.
We may dream for a few hours each night but, in my case, I suspect my recorded dreams amount to only a tiny fraction of that total–perhaps a few minutes worth of narrative.

Thus I suspect strongly that we are, all of us, probably precognitively dreaming (in addition to retrocognitively dreaming) in abundance.
It’s probably a basic function.

The trouble is that dreams are very hard to remember and are otherwise highly recalcitrant to study, for a host of reasons.
For one thing, the dreamer is an n of 1, and his/her associative language is unique, and thus it can take years of working with one’s own dreams to get a sense of their character.

And critics will always be able to accuse you of making your interpretations up.
The “n of 1” problem is what makes Freudian dream interpretation–as well as its variant, mnemonic dream interpretation–inherently untestable.

No dream can be replicated, and multiple dreamers will dream about the same experience in totally unique and idiosyncratic ways.
The most basic support for the mnemonic theory, however, is in its consistency: If one dream element associates to a particular event in daily life, the remainder of the elements in the same dream episode almost always refer to that same episode or to the same narrow window of time.

Again, this is because they are not wish-fulfillments but bundled episodic memories being processed and accessioned by the hippocampus. The hippocampus is like our autobiographical librarian; dreaming is like that librarian taking a new book/event, stamping it with a bar code and scanning it into the system, before placing it on the appropriate shelf; our dreams are those bar codes.

Also, dreams are hard to fully unpack in public or outside a therapeutic context because they touch on very personal, private symbolism that is just too difficult to explain to others to make it worth the trouble.

I chose the “Petroglyph” dream not because it is the most stand-out example but because the symbolism in it doesn’t happen to be that embarrassing or personal (although it still strains the “TMI” limits that make another person’s dream-interpretations always annoying or embarrassing to hear).

Most are much worse from the sharability standpoint.
This is why the psychoanalytic literature is such an important augmentation to Dunne and the rest of the parapsychological literature bearing on precognition.

Jule Eisenbud’s books Psi and Psychoanalysisand Paranormal Foreknowledge are full of compelling examples taken from his own case files.
The bottom line is that precognition is normal and constant, but is highly personal, like memory, and manifests indirectly and unconsciously.

We are undoubtedly also receiving precognitive information across the course of the day that never gets expressed in any conscious form but primes us for action and thought in numerous invisible ways.

This is the “first sight” logic described by James Carpenter

, which is supported by numerous presentiment studies such as those by Daryl Bem, Dean Radin, and Julia Mossbridge.

So-called synchronicities, of course, are misrecognized precognition’s main, most visible symptom.

Precognition and Repression

This is more speculative, but I have a hunch that those associative rules that govern memory and precognition may have a specifically “quantum” rationale in information theory.

On the quantum level, in a closed, coherent system such as a quantum computer, information cannot be lost or destroyed, but only “traded” back and forth through time, and thus post-selected information would specifically transfer back in time and disappear from the present.

The ongoing fluidity and flux of memory could be a product of information obeying quantum (or quantum-like) rules, even if association itself really involves macro-scale, classical dynamics.

It may even be that precognition is the flip side of repression: Repression would be a process of trading unwanted data into the past, and precognition would be the corresponding process of receiving that repressed (and hard to interpret) information from the future.

Or you could say, precognition is the appearance of new information without knowing the cause, whereas repression is a cause that seems to somehow lose its effect by losing part of its affect.

The brain’s ongoing process of time-binding may thus involve acquiring information from the future at the price of loss of information in the present and losing information in the present to the past when new information is acquired–such as an emotionally salient (i.e., memorable) autobiographical event.

If some function of attention is able to make determinations about what part of that new information to keep in the present, then precognition would be linked with this preference system.

This would give us reason to link the Freudian concept of “repression” to this process of making choices about the dispersal of information in time.

If this is so, we would be especially precognitive for events that are too “explosive” (in multiple senses) and that we do not want to fully confront or face right when they happen.

As I discussed in my “Trauma Displaced in Time” article, the splitting of our reaction to traumatic events like disasters may cause any positive emotion connected with them to “travel” into the past and emerge as premonitory or precognitive information before the traumatic event occurs.

A range of positive feelings like excitement, thrill, and arousal were stimulated by news coverage of the terror attacks on 9/11, for instance, particularly for those who didn’t have loved ones possibly affected by the disaster.

These unacceptable emotions may have been partially or wholly sacrificed to the past, retroactively giving rise to the countless premonitory and precognitive dreams and visions experienced by Americans during the previous days and weeks.

If there were any way to test it, I would bet money that 99 percent of Americans dreamed of the terror attacks on the night of 9/10/2001; the thousands who actually reported their premonitory dreams of the event were just a fraction of those that noticed such dreams and didn’t report them, which would itself be a tiny fraction of those who had dreams associatively linked to the themes of the day without ever noticing the link … and that would be a tiny fraction of those who had such dreams but didn’t remember them at all, and so on. (There should a be Drake Equation for precognitive dreaming.)

In fact, in keeping with my current obsession with “Twitter dreams” (which I seem to have a few times a week), I think part of that unacceptable emotional energy around disasters might be the frenetic, dopamine-induced excitement we feel when they are unfolding, particularly stoked by TV and new media like Twitter.

Although we outwardly express grief and shock, it is the savage (but really, highly adaptive) eagerness to “find out more” that keeps us engaged with unfolding tragedies like terror attacks.

That excitement, if my hunch is right, may be a lot of what gets shunted to the past.
Straightforward excitement at a reward or achievement in the process of skilled engagement can also be traded into the past for another reason.

Anyone who does a martial art or writes creatively or performs any high-stakes skill (flying a plane, performing brain surgery, etc.) knows that requirement of successful skill-engagement is “curbing your enthusiasm”–not allowing yourself the luxury of celebrating small successes in the moment but staying coldly focused.

Thus, just like with traumas but for different reasons, rewards may pass excitement back into the past or future, accounting for the greater emergence of highly adaptive precognition in these flow states, consistent with the “first sight” idea.

Just a hunch.

POSTSCRIPT: Does Longevity = Processing Power?

I realize it is highly out of fashion to liken the brain to a computer, but quantum computing may breathe new and interesting life into that metaphor.

If the brain can reach across its own timeline, accessing information in its future and past, then it could be characterized as a fully four-dimensional information processor, able to utilize all its computing power over its whole lifespan, not to mention capitalize on all the other fantastical abilities of “qubits.”

If the brain is a quantum computer (or more likely, an assemblage of billions of quantum computers linked classically)–and if it thus can, at any given moment, utilize all of its states across time, as well as all possible paths to obtaining the answer to a search query in memory–then not only its precognitive capabilities but its computing abilities in general would be formidable indeed.

​

It is already well known that, in humans, intelligence correlates with longevity; although obvious commonsensical explanations, such as smarter individuals being better able to avoid dangers, are no doubt operative, some research has found a common genetic factor uniting them.

The notion that brain could be a quantum computer “calculating” across its whole history raises a further possibility: that longer lifespan causes higher intelligence by increasing the four-dimensional computing resources of the individual’s brain.

This could perhaps provide an alternative explanation for the genetic correlation.
I am opposed to frivolous animal experiments, but purely as an animal-thought-experiment, you could test this idea by assessing the intelligence or problem-solving ability of a group of identical animals (cloned mice, for instance), and then sacrifice a randomly selected half of the group immediately after the assessment, letting the remainder live a full life.

If their brains are making computations drawing on the computing power of a whole mouse lifetime, the long-lived mice would be hypothesized to perform better than the short-lived ones.

A more ethical variant of this type of experiment would be to randomly expose half the mice to a condition of more learning and a more enriched environment following the test.

Essentially, some of Bem’s experiments with college students in his famous “Feeling the Future” research program have shown such benefits of subsequent learning on prior performance.

In keeping with my “Libet’s Golem” speculation, perhaps we ought to think of baseline cognition as displaced into the future.
Maybe instead of pre-cognition we should talk about post-activity.

Mentally, we are in the after-life, displaced (milliseconds, seconds, hours, even years sometimes) from the classical billiard-ball unfolding of our physical bodies.

Yet we are never directly aware of that because all the physical data from our senses, which could be used to fix us in time, belongs to that “past” body locked in its classical time zone, it’s singular moment of “now,” which provides all of our reference points (unless we are in an altered or meditative state).

This narrow sensory window misleads and confuses us about what we are, and when we are.
In other words, the present moment refers to the coordination of our senses, not to the “when” of our subjectivity and thought.

Yet our only window onto the physical world is at one time, the conventional social “now,” the singular cursor in our life’s video-editing timeline.

Yet the place of thought may be that whole world-line of the brain, from start to finish.
We have no way of seeing that, except indirectly, in oblique paranormal phenomena where the other times of our mind push through into conscious awareness because our defenses against psi have momentarily broken down.

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Related posts:

1. Feeding the Psi God: Precognitive Dreaming, Memory, and Ritual
2. Destination Pong (Precognition and the Quantum Brain)
3. What Dreams Really Are
4. The Great Work of Immortality: Astral Travel, Dreams, and Alchemy
5. Unknown Unknowns: Psi, Association & the Physics of Information

 

[Skarekrow]

Now where am I supposed to go?!​

 

[apemon]

Now where am I supposed to go?![/CENTER]