Reddit mentions: The best esp books

I haven't read it yet (been thinking of picking it up), but this is about that:

http://www.amazon.com/Experiment-With-Time-Studies-Consciousness/dp/1571742344/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_1

I am a huge fan of William S. Burroughs, and although I think he was frequently (especially in old age) really gullible, his lifelong obsession with dreams informed his work and life in really productive ways.

If you want to start wondering if our understanding of time is at all correct, start doing a dream journal. Stop if it gets too annoying (unless you're an avant garde writer), as writing down your dreams solidifies them in your memory like real events, and you'll start stumbling around the world having errant thoughts like you have to be careful of the toothy fish that lives under the TV.

However, what you'll probably notice, even within a week or two, is a hard-to-explain prescience in your dreams. For example, I was recently dream journaling again for a class I was teaching on Burroughs (I have a neat job and can sometimes just teach stuff that I like, as an elective.), and I dreamt that I was a boxer who was supposed to throw a fight for the mob, but I didn't, because I wanted the win. I then turned myself in to the mob to take whatever was coming to me. It was the mobsters from True Romance (this is obviously a very Tarantino-inspired dream). They beat me up, yadda yadda not important.

I get up and go to the computer to write this down (since I'd assigned a week of dream journaling to the students, I made sure I did it too), and Firefox is open to Google News. Top story: James Gandolfini died.

James Gandolfini played the enforcer in True Romance.

How many other mob-related dreams can I remember having? How about... zero. Ever. In my life.

Could be something, could be nothing, but mysterious nonetheless.

(BTW, that's how you think about the paranormal. A mystery. Anyone who says they think they've got it figured out is deluding themselves.)

I was on a real-estate case a few years ago. It was probably the most boring thing ever, I suppose. Like, some guy bought property he thought he could turn into apartments but it turned out he couldn't and blah blah easements and local land laws. Big money, two weeks, and rich lawyers duking it out.

But, man, it was so fascinating. The legal process is so complex and interesting to me that I wish I could be on a jury more often. If you love reading police procedurals and watching legal dramas, jury duty'll be right up your alley. I spent most of the time paying attention to the cat and mouse games the lawyers played.

Of course, the rest of the jury was composed on complete idiots. One of the other jurors, I shit you not, read this book during our downtime.

I got a lot of reading done during those two weeks, as I recall.

I know you did not say it. It was the link you posted that said it.

What you did say was that if you did not have someone singing then were simply doing it wrong. Which sounds very much like a fact, but is in fact a statement which is very objective. But you forgot to mention that it was your personal opinion.

But I am certain a lot of people has had a very profound and pleasant experience drinking ayahuasca without any shaman songs or songs of any kind around.

What triggers me is this elitist bullshit "well you know.. that's not how the shamans do it..."

The proper way of doing it? What does that even mean? Proper according to who? If someone did it first, then they have the copyright on how do ingest something? That's a great way to never find a better way of doing something.

And they know exactly what they are doing? So in their mind all they do is set the mood with some songs? They don't call out the good spirits and keep the bad ones at bay? In my mind there might be some contradictions going on there, but what do I know? I am uneducated on the subject.

While we are on the topic of books, here are some great ones.

An old colleague and good friend of mine has worked for many years in human sleep research. At his request I have spent a good amount of time validating methodologies and statistical soundness of various studies he has unearthed.

If you are interested in learning more about current and past research, here are some reasonable starting points.


Susumu Tonegawa, a neuroscientist at PILM, led an experiment that claims to have isolated a genetic characteristic involved in situational pattern-matching and memory:
News article

A recently published book by Richard Wiseman, a reputable psychologist and skeptic of precognition:
Amazon reviews

A recent publication on precognition by Daryl Bem, a researcher and psychologist at Cornell University:
Paper

Richard's review of Daryl's procedures, including an experimental design concern with rebuttal from Daryl:
Review

J. W. Dunne's historical case study research on precognition in dreams:
Amazon review

Long-term research at Princeton University led by Robert Jahn regarding a purported human affect on randomization experiments:
Main site

As with all disruptive research, my experience is that this is a field in which deep emotions from both "sides" interfere with effective discourse. Remarks such as the non sequitur "you must be religious" made by Rooster_Illusion are typical: many persons inappropriately ostracize those who hold an agnostic, skeptical, and scientific stance. My main interest in this thread was to give my experience in logical and reasoned discourse to Rooster_Illusion, which Rooster_Illusion seems to have mistaken for me believing coercion and psychological manipulation are positive actions.

> this only works gradually and logically, you can't just imagine you'll have wings and voila. As per (4) each shift can only happen when it's just as likely for either result to occur.

Ever heard of Dimensional Jumping? Check out /r/dimensionaljumping for more info.

It's all about jumping to another reality that is not a logical extension of your current reality. It's like you detach your consciousness from your current reality stream and reattach it to a different stream.

Some people have claimed to have some miraculous effects.

Also check out Exploring the 5th Dimension this guy claims to have actually teleported his body.

And My Big TOE was written by a scientist working with Robert Monroe on scientifically testing the idea of out of body experiences. They have some amazing claims and his whole thing seems to be that the universe is actually non-deterministic....at least not the way we think it is.

Anyways fascinating stuff if you ask me. :)

> My understanding is that all near-death-experience examinations that have tested for specific verifiable information (identifying geometric shapes placed prominently on top of cabinets, etc) have fallen flat.

This is both true and false. Those that have been tested for specific signs have failed - but on the other hand, only five such experimental procedures have been carried out, and only in one or two of them did they even have enough of a sample size to get a single OBE, so there's not yet any real data in that department. Currently, the AWARE project is under way which is a large multi-center study hoping to address this in a way more thorough manner than have been previously attempted.

On the other hand, studies by both Dr. Michael Sabom and Penny Sartori has found that OBEs during NDEs contain veridical information that control groups fail at in the otherwise same circumstances.

http://drpennysartori.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/obe-veridicality-research/

and

"Sabom had interviewed 32 patients who reported NDEs in which they seemed to be watching what was going on around their body. Most of these were cardiac patients who were undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) at the time of their NDE. Sabom then interviewed 25 "control" patients, "seasoned cardiac patients" who had not had an NDE during their previous cardiac-related crises, and asked them to describe a cardiac resuscitation procedure as if they were watching from a third-person perspective. Among all these patients, 80% of the "control" patients made at least one major error in their descriptions, whereas none of the NDE patients made any. Moreover, six of 32 NDE patients related accurate details of idiosyncratic or unexpected (to them) events during their resuscitation. For example, one man, who developed ventricular fibrillation in the coronary care unit, said (among many other things) that the nurse picked up "them shocker things" and "touched them together" and then "everybody moved back away from it [the defibrillator]". As Sabom explained, rubbing the defibrillator paddles together to lubricate them and standing back from the defibrillator to avoid being shocked are common procedures."

• Kelly, Edward F. & Emily (2006), Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, p. 389.
  
  > I don't know much beyond that, but I find it curious that if there's so much documented evidence out there, that no one has grabbed it and used it to get that easy million dollars from Randi.
  
  It's not at all that simple. Randi's committee is not accepting currently existing evidence in peer-reviewed journals, they want the experiments to be carried out while they are present. That alone refutes the relevance of his prize in this context, since flat-lining people is not (yet) legal for scientific experimentation. But if you really want to research Randi's participation in this field of investigation, I would recommend you this book to give some balance to the issue of his relevance.

The first thing you've got to know is that this story isn't from an actual study. It originated in the 1979 book Lifetide by New-age pseudoscientist Lyall Watson.

It was first debunked in this article from 1985 by Elaine Myers who went back to the original studies that Watson was interpreting and saw that they didn't actually say anything about the skill of fruit washing jumping islands.

In an article in Fringes of Reason, the 1986 issue of the Whole Earth Review, Watson admitted: "It is a metaphor of my own making, based . . . on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay."

That issue was later expanded into a book that you can pick up here. It's a darn good read that talks a lot about how to judge claims like this. You should consider picking it or something along those lines up to help you deal with all the bullshit you're going to find when you start looking into the collective unconsciousness.

>I firmly believe miracles happen all around us every day. Most of us, religious or not, may not even recognize it much of the time, instead we chalk them up to simple good fortune or a stroke of luck.

Could be fraud too, such as wafers becoming in essence the body of Christ. If miracles are so common, why don't they do better ones in church?

>Other miracles from the Catholic perspective (HERE) include incorruptible bodies of saints, ...

It's not surprising that that source doesn't allow comments. I suspect that the author of that article knew it couldn't stand up to that sort of attention.

In Flim Flam, James Randi did some experiments that concluded it was possible for chunks of raw chicken to dry out before they rot, so I'm not at all sure that incorruptible bodies of saints are miracles.

If you didn't already know about the experiment with the drying raw chicken, your belief in miracles hasn't been sufficiently examined. If you are going to base your religious belief on this sort of thing, it is the most important thing, so you should take the trouble to become incredibly well informed about it.

>... stigmata, and one of my favorites -- The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima.

Sorry, only one miracle per customer. Otherwise I would be on the losing side of a Gish Gallop.

lol - yeah I am sure you went through all the videos and articles in that google search in the past hour. I'll save you time - if your truly skeptical - you would read this book

You might also look into Rupert Sheldrake and his experiences with Randi. Sheldrake, on a public stage, calls James Randi flat out a 'liar' - and he does without fear of legal recourse - because Randi has been caught actually lying about data.

I dont have the time, or the need, to deconstruct Randi's methodologies here, mainly because Sheldrake and McLuan already have done that.

Randi is not taken seriously as a scientist, his test is not scientific as he likes to present it. The test is designed for failure. I know many scientists (sheldrake being one of them) personally, and none of them take Randi seriously when it comes to DATA. Randi's test is designed to produce evidence of Randi's POV, and nothing more.

EDIT: I also dont want to paint the wrong picture - although Randi's approach has little value scientifically - I LOVE that he goes after true FRAUD, such as Sarah Brown and people like that. I think it's great he exploits the frauds, he just has nothing interesting to add regarding the actual phenomenon itself

Sure. He's obviously a fraud. Many psychics are. Everyone knows that.

I'm more concerned about what everyone DOESN'T know which is the degree to which Randi himself is duplicitous and why his 'prize' is a bogus heap of steaming bullcrap.

There's a few great books on it and how and why Randi's stacked the deck. This is a good one:

http://www.amazon.com/Randis-Prize-Sceptics-Paranormal-Matters/dp/1848764944

And on Randi himself and his depredations everyone should read this recent Daily Telegraph article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-news/11270453/James-Randi-debunking-the-king-of-the-debunkers.html

To everyone who's experienced this or curious about it in any way, I'd thoroughly recconmend J.W. Dunn's book An Experiment With Time. He experienced dream-precognition to a great degree and developed highly intriguing scientific theories on the basis of his experiences.

Fire has been shown to alter our brain waves. We have different states of brain activity depending on sleep, deep sleep, active thinking and pondering. Looking at fire and water can affect those patterns and put us into a different state of mind.

As for ions, look into the positive and negative charges associated with molecules. Water has been shown to create a negative charge, which is associated with positive moods and good health. Rain shadows and dry air create positive charges, which lead to worse health, irritability, and an increase in crime and hospital admissions. Many countries have a name for this 'Witch Wind', including Switzerland which use the phenomenon as defence in court.

As for magnetism, look into ley lines and how most of our ancient grounds are built around them. It's also interesting to check out some studies that deal with testing a human's ability to their whereabouts innately without compass assistance. It's even more interesting when you see how putting magnets next to the heads of these people will fuck with that ability.

There's publications about this, written by scientists. Science has the aura of being lifeless and dead, so there is resistance when it can and has been used to support ideas like ESP and planetary consciousness.

Good place to start and a
Good followup

Let me help you.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W0I00Q

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004X6U5DY

http://www.amazon.com/Sense-Being-Stared-At-Extended/dp/B000AXRTP6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1322811422&sr=1-1

Ever hear of this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Experiment-Time-Studies-Consciousness/dp/1571742344/ref=sr_1_1?crid=21MRBFF8SH5F3&keywords=an+experiment+with+time+dunne&qid=1563444075&s=gateway&sprefix=an+experiment+with%2Caps%2C413&sr=8-1

Citation as requested: the PEAR Lab results which spanned nearly three decades. Remote perception and remote influencing are rigorously proven to be real, measurable and reproducible phenomena. The most concise summary of the research can be found in the following video:

http://www.ufspiritualityandhealth.org/news/details.asp?id=1018

Here's just a bit more:

http://vimeo.com/4359545

Here's a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Source-Reality-Robert-Jahn/dp/1936033038

No but J.W. Dunne does, and this little book influenced C.S. Lewis quite a bit.

If you're referring to Randi's fake, pseudoscientific, fraudulent "prize", forget it. It's been debunked.

• https://www.amazon.com/Randis-Prize-Sceptics-Paranormal-Matters/dp/1848764944
  
  
• http://whitecrowbooks.com/michaeltymn/entry/journalists_book_randis_prize_exposes_how_skeptics_distort_evidence_for_par/