Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: December 1, 2018 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic : the difficulties and sound methods of interpretation of input (Whisp has requested a book on the topic, so it’s probably of enough interest for a seminar). Saturday, 1 December2018 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer — Search LECTURE51
Wayfarer: We start in THREES of minutes.
ceahhettan: Hurray!
Chirotractor: Oh no!
Wayfarer: Oh yeaaaah
Rainsong: Whoo
Rose: three!
Scelana: Hehe
Wayfarer: Okay, I mean it’s right up there but this will be LECTURE51, and the topic is also right up there but we’re talking about difficulties and sound methods of interpretation of input. Sort of. I mentioned to Rainsong maybe last week that I had some things to add and she suggested I just take the wheel this weekend, so that’s what’s happening here.
Wayfarer: Unlike Rainsong I tend to type in giant blocks, rather than sentence by sentence. That said, if I’m typing, I haven’t left yet.
Wayfarer: I did do up some notes for this thing. I thought about just writing a paper on the topic and copy pasting it in here on a feed but decided that’s ridiculous. … I might make a bot to do that in the future though.
Rainsong: Thanks for taking this one. 😀
Wayfarer: Since most of us just reread the logs and don’t engage anyways it wouldn’t really be noticeable at all. lmao
ceahhettan: I mean or you could take what you type here and tuck it in a word doc and make it into a paper in the future.
Wayfarer: I mean that’s what we normally do, it works both ways! I’m really back and forth on the issue of papers and the OEC anyhow because decades of acculturation have normalized like 3 bullet points total for an article.
Wayfarer: But it’s about 5 minutes since the start, I didn’t ping or anything but I figure people will be filtering in. I can ping. I will do so now: @here I’m about to start rambling about difficulties in, and sound methods of, interpreting input. Except…
Wayfarer: That’s not really what we interpret, is it?
Turbo: Let’s define input
Wayfarer: Let’s! Normally when someone says an input, that’s the thing we put in. We input a keystroke into a computer. We input data into a spreadsheet. We give someone our input. But we don’t interpret that. We pretend we interpret that stuff…but we, human beings, don’t really get to touch inputs in real life.
Wayfarer: Strap in, we’re getting philosophical for a minute:
Wayfarer: “Inputs,” for lack of another word, are sensory information. The inputs are … input… to our sense organs and then that mixes with our consciousness and turns from a sensation into a … perception.
Wayfarer: So what we’re really interested in is how we interpret our perceptions. Because we don’t get to touch inputs.
Wayfarer: Psychic information bypasses our conventional senses, but it still comes to us through some kind of … sixth… sense. Well that’s proprioception, normally, if I’m being honest. But you get the point. Information about the outside world isn’t experienced in the outside world. It’s experienced in our inner world. Normally, we choose to consider these two things as the same. And, for the most part, our internal experience of perceptions corresponds pretty closely to the outside world.
Wayfarer: And that brings us to the other part of the question, which is about how we come up with sound ways of interpreting those perceptions. With normal senses, the conventional senses that perceive the really real world, this isn’t a big deal. I mean it is, epistemology is big deal philosophy, but it’s also not.
Wayfarer: Normally, we validate our interpretations of the world by checking if our internal perceptions correspond with how things “really are.” I think a square is blue. If it is blue, we’re good. I see The Dress as blue. If it is blue, we’re good.
Rose: oh gods, The Dress
ceahhettan: Are we going to touch on base differences of perception at some point as well? ie how a physical sound that may be very loud to one person may still not seem super loud to someone else (assuming both people have non-damaged, normative physical hearing, not assuming anything about neurotype etc). Because that can extrapolate and affect this too, I’d think? Side note, I do NOT see The Dress as blue.
Wayfarer: This is called the correspondence theory of truth. And it’s important stuff. But we’re not gonna get too deep into that tonight because this is a practical class and not a class on philosophy. But yes, we absolutely are gonna touch on that Cousin.
ceahhettan: (Can we have philosophy class some other night?)
Wayfarer: In fact, we can do that right now. (Yes.)
Wayfarer: A perception has two parts: the sensory input, and us. The shit we bring to the table. Our thoughts, ideas, impressions, beliefs, dispositions, physical status, etc.
Wayfarer: Rose’s name is green, but not if we can’t see green. But… it’s still green. Our experience of “green” varies.
Wayfarer: See, with physical sensations, it’s all about the transformation of some kind of physical phenomenon into an experience. We all look at the same name on the screen and we can all agree that it’s blue or green or pink – but we really have no way of knowing whether our pink or blue or green is the same. And …
Wayfarer: It doesn’t matter, either.
Rose: …that gets me into a really philosophical and confusing question I once wondered, that had me tangled up
ceahhettan: Right.
Rose: should I mention it?
Wayfarer: Because it’s both internally consistent, and externally correspondent. When I see something green, I see the same thing as the same green (with some exceptions we’ll get into). When I see two different things that are the same color, I see them as the same color (barring some weird synaesthesia stuff). When you see the same green, you might experience it differenlt…but yours is also consistent. And we both provisionally call the thing “green” because we’ve both learned an internal model that maps to an external phenomenon.
Turbo: Wouldn’t this all come back to a point you made in a previous lecture? I think it was on astral woo. Experiences are entirely subjective, no matter who’s feeling them, and how many of you there are
Wayfarer: Rose, in a minute? Let’s finish out this point. Turbo: yep, more or less, and that’s going to play in right now:
Rose: okay
Wayfarer: See, the problem with psychic shit, is that we don’t have either an external frame of reference or an internally consistent model for how we experience it.
Wayfarer: We spend time in school learning the names of colors as little children. We spend time learning different hues. There’s evidence that different languages and cultures have different experiences of color. Older languages usually don’t even have a word for “green,” it’s just blue, but different. They see differences, of course, but they don’t have different names for the colors.
ceahhettan: Blue as in sky or blue as in grass, yes.
Wayfarer: We call these “red,” Tibetans do not.
Wayfarer: They get really confused if you talk about “red dharma robes” in Tibetan. These are just “dark.”
Wayfarer: Or sometimes “Dharma colored”
Rose: …you just answered my question, nevermind the one i had pending
Wayfarer: But not red.
Wayfarer: But there’s a wavelength of light, right? So when we tell them that “in English we call this color red, or maroon” they go “oh, okay.”
Wayfarer: And it’s red then.
ceahhettan: Right.
Wayfarer: The names of colors, then, are just associations we make with wavelengths of light when they hit our eyeballs.
Wayfarer: And when we get jaundice, the sensors get fucked up, and everything gets a shitty yellow hue.
Wayfarer: And when we hit our brains really hard, we scramble up the words, and we start calling things the wrong color.
Wayfarer: And when we’re in a room with blue lights in it, everything gets a different color. Professional artists can get really into shading because it’s not just “take the same color and make it dark.” You have to take the lighting itself into account. The same thing under the same color light looks different because the wavelength hitting your eyeball is different.
Wayfarer: That is to say, colors are not properties of things. Colors are experiences that happen inside our heads. Philosophy.
Turbo: My blue is more blue than yours
Wayfarer: So what about psychic inputs makes them difficult? Well, we don’t have an easy way to compare them, for one.
ceahhettan: My mother and I have running disagreements over the differences between blue and green. I tend to see more things as blue than she does.
Rose: do some people actually see the color “green” as what others would see “blue” as? But they’ve come to call it green because everyone associates that wavelength, which always looks the same hue, with the name “green”?
Rainsong: Rose: yes
Wayfarer: I can take the same picture and show it to people and go “what color is this” and everyone is going to call it whatever they usually call that color because they have an external frame of reference. Everyone sees a red ball as red because it’s red and we can all agree. Sometimes we argue about things (the dresssss) but we’re all looking at the same thing and we can, in the end, come to a consensus. Even if that consensus is “it’s gold to some people and blue to some people.”
Wayfarer: But the thing that makes the difference…is us.
Turbo: Well, yes. I’d wager if you raise a child and give them an entirely different description of colors as they would normally be taught, they would associate the wavelengths with different words, as taught
Wayfarer: So actually, psychic perception is not very much like how we perceive color. But we can still use a confusing color analogy that works: what if I feel blue?
Rose: …but if i’m correct, the wavelengths always look the same hue to whoever perceives it… therefore it is a strict, set, immutable definition of the color. Even if for one person that looks more like green and for another it looks more like blue, it looks different for both people but always the same for each of them.. and so it’s clearly defined?
Wayfarer: That is a whole different question. Because first of all, language and culture come into play. In English, generally, “feeling blue” means feeling sad. I want to say in German it means feeling intoxicated? But I don’t remember exactly. Different cultures use different color analogies, though. They’re entirely poetic constructed artifacts.
Wayfarer: Right, that’s true of visual colors. I don’t want to say always (because what if you get jaundice?) But we learn to associate words with phenomena that arise inside our head, and those phenomena arise based on sensory information that hits our eyes in a consistent way.
Wayfarer: And consistently results in the same perception.
Wayfarer: But what about feeling blue? Let’s leave culture and shit alone for a bit, we don’t need it: if I say “I feel blue” do I mean the same thing as when Turbo or Rose say “I feel blue?”
Wayfarer: I mean putting aside the fact that color expressions are super tacky and I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who actually uses them in the real world.
Wayfarer: We know what it means, in English, and the fact is…my “sad” and someone else’s “sad” are different things. My “blue” and your “blue” might be entirely different degrees of sadness. My “blue” could be a mild slight low energy state. Yours might be crippling depression. There’s a huge range and it could be anywhere in between.
ceahhettan: Right.
Wayfarer: This is much more analogous to when someone goes “scan my construct,” because psychic perception isn’t nearly as consistent as normal sensory perception.
Turbo: one reason why I don’t scan things on demand 😛
Wayfarer: Which brings us to the problem: no matter what kind of psychic shit we’re perceiving, we lack a stable, consensus-visible sense object that we can point to, show to other people, and ask, “hey, uh, this thing?”
Wayfarer: We have ways to work around this, and we’ll discuss those moving forward, but that’s the crux of the problem. The other part of the problem is that as a culture we are really pretty tuned into our physical senses.
Wayfarer: Like if I wake up and everything is red hued I’m gonna notice pretty quick.
Wayfarer: Jaundice is a weird case because it sets in so slowly, so you get a boiling frog water scenario – I want to say this is called a “least perceptible difference” in psychophysiology talk but I don’t remember exactly.
Wayfarer: But in any case, the basic idea here is if I wake up and I am suddenly deaf it’s not gonna take me too long to notice.
Wayfarer: But generally speaking, we’re really shitty about tuning into our psychic senses.
ceahhettan: And yet people who lose their hearing gradually may in fact take quite some time to notice that something is different.
Wayfarer: Right. So let’s talk a bit about psychic senses for a minute. First: everyone has psychic senses. Different people vary in their level of sensitivity with them. I usually compare it to taste because everyone is familiar with “supertasters” and most people don’t understand how “taste” works so it’s better than “sight” where everyone just goes “oh well if you have better eyes you see better.” It’s an analogy here, roll with it.
Wayfarer: Some people have super acute senses of taste. Some people have shitty senses of taste. Most people are somewhere in the average on a bell curve (like, by definition 64% of people, because that’s how normal distributions work).
Wayfarer: But the thing is, anyone can learn to taste better. They can train themselves to learn to taste things they can’t taste otherwise. Anyone can go to sommelier school and while not everyone can be the best (again, those distribution curves, y’all) but everyone can be better than when they start. And psychic senses work the same way.
Rose: you keep answering my questions shortly after they pop into my head.
Wayfarer: Straight up, I used to be a terribly biased dickhead about natural ability vs. “nons” and I’ma say it now: I was wrong and dumb.
Wayfarer: That’s just not how it works. There are people who are less sensitive, there are people who are vanishingly sensitive. There are probably people who are “blind” psychically but that would likely be a super tiny set of the population. When someone is blind visually it’s because the sensory equipment doesn’t work normally, and rarely it’s because their brain is broken, but in both cases there’s something physically wrong we can point to and in theory if you could swap out a visual processing cortex like you can a car battery you could fix neurogenic blindness.
Wayfarer: So forget all the things you’ve ever learned about natural psychics and non-psychics. What we’re looking at is a normal distribution where, because physical sensory reliance is adaptive and culturally encouraged, we ignore the subconscious stuff and it never breaks through the threshold of conscious awareness.
Wayfarer: In a very small amount of the population, that psychic information is too sensitive, and it routinely breaks through to conscious awareness. Those are your natural psychics. And much like a person with extremely sensitive taste, it is a blessing and a curse because you can’t ignore all the damn cilantro the person chopped on the board before they cut the onions or whatever.
Wayfarer: But everyone has that psychic sense. The problem is, we don’t have language for a lot of psychic stuff. We use words that describe other things. We try to map energy to shapes, textures, and colors.
Wayfarer: Let’s be real for a second: if you are visualizing your energy like a stone wall, making a tower shield, and your energy is actually getting a physical texture of stone, you’re amazing. It can take on those properties Elsewhere, it can take on those properties in a conceptual fashion, but if it’s actually becoming material you’re fantastic and my hat is off to you. Same with color, “flaring” was a big thing in the early 2000s but that’s a pretty small set of the population. And it can be done, but unfortunately everyone wanted to do it using photos and the sad thing is… it was still just psychic energy.
Wayfarer: So you can make psychic energy visible, but (most people) can’t make it, you know, actually reflect light.
Wayfarer: What the fuck does that mean?
Wayfarer: Well you can make it so people perceive it as if it were visible. But in that case you’re putting the thought-experience in their head. They are perceiving it. They aren’t sensing it, because light isn’t hitting their eyes. Their brain is going “oh, there’s something there.” Why? Because… well, like I said, everyone is psychic. You just have to have something big enough to break through into conscious awareness. Easier said than done, and not what we’re here to discuss.
Wayfarer: Let’s talk about inputs again, because we started talking about perceptions, and I want to be clear that I am answering the request.
Wayfarer: Psychic inputs are sensed by…
Wayfarer: We don’t know. Womp womp. Shit.
Wayfarer: There’s the energy hypothesis that says it’s all just exchanges of energy. There’s the karmic phenomenal arising hypothesis using like, yogacarin Buddhist mind models. There’s a parapsychological model for goddamn everything. Telepathy, empathy, clairvoyance, whatever. And these are all, presumable, different senses? I’m not convinced. But we really don’t know. We’re best guessing. What we do know is that we can sense some shit.
Wayfarer: For the purposes of this lecture, I’m going to talk about energy sensing, and telepathy/empathy, and clairvoyance. I’m not going to talk about remote viewing as such because we’ll talk about that next week and because it’s just a protocol method for solving some of the problems we’ve brought up.
Wayfarer: I’m probably going to use the word “telepathy” a lot. I don’t think that there’s actually any evidence supporting this is other than empathy. I think it’s the same thing with different personal dispositions for what we notice, just like some people notice bitter flavors and some people notice sweet flavors when eating ginseng cookies.
Wayfarer: So if I say “telepathy,” know that I mean “empathy” also.
ceahhettan: Reasonable.
Wayfarer: Before I start digging into specific actual practical stuff, questions? Comments? “Fuck you I’m special and natural?” “Keith take a break my dude your hands need a moment?”
Rainsong: So far so froody, but if your hands need a moment, by all means, take a moment. 😉
Wayfarer: I was about to say, no mercy, damn y’all.
Rose: i only had a comment and it’s not a very useful one. All questions I had… you already answered :sweat_smile:
ceahhettan: I have several comments, none of them particularly useful, which I may save for after the fact.
Rose: I was like “Oh I need to write this one down… oh nevermind, there’s the answer.”
ceahhettan: Also, there are a few and far between people who are pretty much psychicly blind and not for lack of trying or lack of exposure or such. My girlfriend happens to be one of them.
Wayfarer: I leave it as an exercise for the reader whether I know the material, am picking things up while I type, or neither, or both. 😛
ceahhettan: Said girlfriend has plenty of belief and inclination and has spent significantly long portions of their life attempting to be able to feel/perceive/do bits and pieces.
ceahhettan: Don’t matter, nada, sinkhole etc.
Wayfarer: Some people have shitty hardware and their ability to overcome that will be limited. I don’t think that they’re just totally fucked but we have to start from where we are. I’d love to have said girlfriend run through the program I’m developing when I develop it to see what happens.
Rainsong: I’ve known a couple (literally two) people who had very little sensitivity but who were highly skilled in making construct things that accomplished stuff. One of them tended to be loud enough, that he’d get calls from all ’round by telephone from people telling him to shut the (insert expletive of choice) up
Wayfarer: Alright, jumping back in a moment.
Wayfarer: (i.e. when yr done)
ceahhettan: I’ll poke at said girlfriend and see if they’d be interested next time I’m home. They can as far as I know actually do some now but the amount of sensing and such is still nil. I have seen them walk right through a room where two people were focused pretty well on making the other psychicly bothered, and entirely unaffected. Similarly unaffected by people being loud, etc.
Wayfarer: Word, thanks.
ceahhettan: (Done.)
ceahhettan: (Said girlfriend being the partner that is not on the big rig with me, and such.)
Wayfarer: So, let’s talk about those particular things. We don’t know how any of that shit works but having models helps us actually get stuff done so I’m gonna talk about energetic sensing and then I’m going to talk about telepathy and clairvoyance and I’m going to tie things in in a way that hopefully makes sense. If things don’t make sense, let me know.
Wayfarer: Starting with energetic sense, because the “how” is weirder, and essentially it boils down to this: things like constructs and auras and energetic impressions and such aren’t distinct. There’s basically a big field of energy stuff and we are part of it and inside it and we influence it and it influences us. When we walk into a room that is full of shitty angry stuff because of the megamurders done in it, we suddenly feel shitty and scared and mad and sad and whatever, right? That just kinda happens because we’re contacting that energy. Sensitives learn to shield as a result … what’s shielding? Preventing that energy from contacting your energy. So, where does the sensation come from?
Wayfarer: The contact.
Wayfarer: Energy affects energy, it interacts, because it’s all just a big thing and our aura or energetic field or whatever is just a part of that big thing. Energetic centers in the body are the areas of energy that are affected by our nervous system because the physical and energetic worlds are related (all that “principle of correspondence” stuff in Hermeticism) and they affect one another. I’m not going to get into any kind of physiological theories, some do exist, like that we sense energy in the “gut” because we have an absolute fuckload of nerve endings down there that manage the guts and that acts like a big antenna blah blah blah. I’m not really convinced of that right now.
Wayfarer: But when your energetic field touches another energetic field, they interact, and that’s what you’re sensing. … where are you perceiving it? Well, inside you. In your own mind. Because the sense is turned into a perception, right? You can’t interact with a sense itself, the mental activity is what happens when your stuff interacts with the other stuff.
Wayfarer: Can anyone hazard a guess at the huge problem that comes from this?
ceahhettan: Distinguishing psychic inputs from physical ones would be one guess. Or lack of distinguishing, in many cases.
ceahhettan: “Did Jeff just say ‘I hate you’ aloud or was he thinking it?” etc.
Wayfarer: That’s one, not what I have in mind though. Yeah, talking about that one, we experience these things as embodied people, and if you’re getting fucked on energetically you feel that in your body.
Wayfarer: (You feel it in your body because they are systems that interact and because your brain has to map the non-physical energy woo-land bullshit into a format that makes sense)
ceahhettan: It was just the one that was most I media in coming to mind, given my own life and experiences. :p
Wayfarer: But in particular: remember how jaundice yellows your eyes and changes the sensation because the equipment is borked?
Wayfarer: If our aura or energy body or whatever is, itself, the actual sensor of psychic energy stuff… and our energy body is changing constantly based on our environment…
Wayfarer: …then our environment changes the actual sensor equipment and, thus, the perception of energy around us.
ceahhettan: Right.
Wayfarer: Our eyes don’t usually change that much on us. I mean later in life they start to get fucked up for some people but for the most part our eyes only change the size of the pupil via the iris in order to control the amount of light coming in.
Wayfarer: Meanwhile our energetic body is warbling and wobbling and changing all the time based on our emotions, our physical body, our health (both physical and mental), the people in the room with us, the time of day, the neighbors…anyone play theremin in here?
ceahhettan: I want one, gotten to play with them once or twice.
Rose: I often notice that when I’m emotionally distressed, my senses tend to work less well, and i tend to be more prone to self frontloading..
ceahhettan: Another material possession to put in that house of mine.
Wayfarer: I play the theremin. The theremin is a shitty instrument to play because you’re dealing with an invisible radio field. People think the field being invisible makes it hard – it does, but what makes it a real fucking pain in the ass isn’t that, because you can compensate for that the same way you compensate to play a violin or a trombone.
Rainsong: Theremin’s are cool
Rose: or.. rather.. the fake information tends to fool me more easily, for some reason
Wayfarer: The real shitty thing is that the radio field itself expands or contracts based on other electromagnetic and radio fields around it.
Wayfarer: You turn on a light in the room, your tuning changed.
Rose: i’m mentioning this, because, I want to ask: how is this related to the energetic body warbling and wobbling?
Wayfarer: A person walks in? Tuning changed.
Wayfarer: Air conditioner kicked on and drew power off the house? Tuning’s changed.
Wayfarer: Shitty instrument. People work the same way.
Wayfarer: So this is the big problem with energy sensing. Your equipment, which is your energetic body, changes based on things going on around you. There are other problems in how we validate information we get in the astral plane, but that’s less about inputs and more about the wibbly wobbly nature of non-physical spaces and the ways our consciousness interacts with Elsewhere stuff and it’s outside the scope here, that’s another lecture for another time.
Wayfarer: Rose, what you described up there is absolutely bog standard normal stuff. Your energy body is constantly changing. If you’re emotionally “hot” you’re fuckin’ up your own energetic field. It’s not going to be as sensitive to external inputs. Think about a still pool of water versus a bubbling hot tub.
Wayfarer: If you throw a pebble into a still pool of water, you can see all kinds of impacts it has as the ripples spread about.
Wayfarer: Throw a pebble into a hottub and you’re just gonna fuck up the filter.
Wayfarer: So your excited, angry, emotional, stressed out energetic field is like a hottub. There’s a lot going on. When you run into psychic energy inputs, you’re not going to notice them because you’re not in a position to notice them. The sensory equipment is all fucked up.
Wayfarer: I’m going to address how we deal with these problems in the second part, so moving on to telepathy.
Rose: thank you
Wayfarer: Telepathic inputs are weird because we think they are other people’s thoughts. They are and they aren’t. The telepathic experience is described as “thought transference” but that’s just because we have really dumb preconceptions about consciousness and brains.
Wayfarer: That is, “telepathy” is a term that comes from parapsychology. Parapsychology as a paradigm for studying psi stuff is great, but it’s a very limited approach. Why? Because it’s adopting these preconceptions and understandings from our understanding of the physical universe. There’s a problem: we don’t know how all this psychic stuff works in the current model. The current physical model of the universe has no mechanism for psi. That’s why it’s, you know, psi.
Wayfarer: So parapsychology is trying to use tools we don’t have to measure stuff we don’t know about. It’s a hard job. It also uses a materialist conception of the brain and thought. Thought transference? How do you transfer a thought? I can write a letter and transfer it to someone by handing it to them, but where does a thought happen?
Wayfarer: Westerners are inclined to say thoughts happen in their brains, but … why? Tibetans, for example, say thoughts happen in their hearts. Again… why? What? How the hell are thoughts conceptually physical things located in space? What kind of sense does that even make? Why do we have that assumption?
Wayfarer: This is called the hard problem of consciousness and I can’t answer all these questions, but basically we have no reason to believe that consciousness is actually related to the brain. I told you that story so I could tell you this one:
Wayfarer: “Thought transference” doesn’t mean that a thought gets up from one person’s head and walks across the street and climbs into another person’s head.
Wayfarer: That’s neither how it’s experienced by actual telepathic people nor does it makes sense if it were to work that way. It’s just a provisional way it was described by people because we don’t have good terminology for this stuff. There’s no evidence, for example, that telepathy is affected by distance. None. If it were affected by difference, we’d be able to use some law of inverse squares shit to determine how fast it happens. Unfortunately, no dice there.
Wayfarer: So telepathy doesn’t happen in our heads or in someone else’s head. We don’t go somewhere to get thoughts, and we don’t bring the thoughts to us. None of that spatial stuff applies at all. Telepathy happens in our mind, wherever the hell that is. And the experience is weird and troublesome, because it’s not like the movies.
Wayfarer: In the movies you hear thoughts come in like words and they’re complete full words and sentences and you’re just kinda listening in, like you were wiretapping someone’s inner monologue.
Chirotractor: RIP my dreams of getting so telepathic my hair falls out and legs stop working
Wayfarer: Ehhhhhh. Can you tap someone’s inner monologue? Kinda sorta but it’s again a specialized application and it’s not really how we experience these things in the actual world and if there’s one thing my studies have taught me so far it’s that we really need to get out of the lab and start looking at how people experience psychic shit in their actual lives.
Rainsong: (To be fair, sometimes it does sound like the way movies portray it)
Rose: (yeah but it tends to be occasional monologues, not all the time..)
Rose: (there’s usually visualisation and/or imagery, feelings, audio snippets..)
Wayfarer: Generally, telepathy is experienced as pre-verbal proto-concepts that arise in our mind the way we would experience those thoughts if they were happening to us. It may be someone else’s “voice,” if we’re paying attention. It might come in their own words, if we have a particularly strong rapport, or if we’re like super hard focusing.
Wayfarer: That is, we experience other people’s thoughts as if they were our thoughts, but we can tell they aren’t our thoughts any number of ways if we’re paying attention, or not at all, sometimes. And so again, we’re back to the big problem: we’re not experiencing other people’s thoughts as they experience their thoughts. We’re experiencing their thoughts as we experience their thoughts. We’re adding all our shit in there.
Wayfarer: Person A the telepath doesn’t experience Person B’s experience of Person B’s thoughts, they experience Person A’s experience of Person B’s thoughts. All of Person A’s stuff is still bouncing around in that head. If our minds are active and we have tons of strong opinions and we’re loaded up with hot takes about the stuff Person B is thinking about, we’re going to experience it very differently from how Person B experiences it.
Rose: (correct me if i’m wrong? that’s how i tend to think.. when i think in a consciously focused way)
Wayfarer: You can experience Person B’s experience of Person B’s thoughts, but that process tends to result in some depersonalization and really weird stuff philosophically and it’s beyond the scope, again, of this particular question. I can’t account for every single use-case, basically, in this lecture.
Wayfarer: It’s bordering onto a mystical union with another person and it’s getting v weird at that point as you lose the boundaries between self and other even if you’re still maintain boundaries between self-other and other-others. And like I said, I’m talking about telepathy as it is generally experienced, and not these weird specific uses, for reasons of practicality.
Wayfarer: So the problem is basically, other people’s stuff is happening in your mind and you have to validate that somehow, (we had a topic, actually, remember? lmao) but how? How do we make sure we’re interpreting that experience correctly and not just, you know, making shit up, or getting the wrong idea?
Wayfarer: Especially if I’m telepathically picking up “I fuckin’ looooooove Donald Trump” because the way I think that thought and the way my neighbor does have some slightly different implications.
Rose: …i usually just ask them, that tends to work for confirmation… the problem with that is that they can lie about it
Wayfarer: So, as before, we’ll return to that when we talk about solutions. We’re still identifying problems right now. So far we have the problem that our energetic body, as the “sensor” of energetic stuff, is constantly changing in reaction to energetic stuff, and the problem that our own shit and hot takes and beliefs and ideas and thoughts can change the meaning, context, and so on of external inputs (or down them out entirely).
Wayfarer: Now, clairvoyance: once again, the actual experience of clairvoyance takes place in our mind. There’s physical stuff around and we can see it. Sometimes, clairvoyance comes in the form of just straight up visual information about a thing. Obviously validating that psychic perception is pretty easy. Go look at the thing.
ceahhettan: Back.
Wayfarer: But, uh, that’s not always how it works. Sometimes it is. A lot of the time, even! Aaand actually since I didn’t disclaim this before and someone thought about it, like with telepathy and empathy, I’m gonna be treating all the clair* things as one “thing” because I don’t think there’s any actual evidence other than the arbitrary whims of early parapsychologists to break them up. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, clairsentience, claircognizance, whatever, just gonna talk about clairvoyance and you can mentally substitute in the clairsense of your heart’s desire.
Wayfarer: Basically, again, this is anomalous perception of some stuff about the world (or not about the world, in the case of sensing spirits or sensing energy, since some people call that clairvoyance also. Psychometry, too, while I’m at it).
Wayfarer: Once again, the big problem is that we experience this stuff not as a sense thing we can point at and go “it’s this, what is this” but as some vague impressions. But the clairvoyance stuff is in many ways the least troublesome, because it’s so often related to physical really real world verifiable things and a lot of stuff gets way easier when you can just use your conventional physical senses.
ceahhettan: Also the whole differences comes in how people perceive input and process it, rather than the source of the whole thing in the first place.
Rose: .. I am injecting my questions too early. My apologies…
Wayfarer: Right. And while we’re at that, clairvoyance for example isn’t usually able to get an image we’re not familiar with because our brain is trying to figure out “what the hell is this thing.” We can clairvoyantly get a thing but if we don’t know what it is we’re going to describe it as something else, sometimes losing the actual input in the process. Remote viewing, as a protocol, is a method of dealing with that by training yourself not to resolve impressions into an actual concrete image, but like I said, that’s next week.
Wayfarer: Like, when you look at the duck or rabbit image you see one thing. You can work around to see the other thing, sure. You can even get weird with it and see both. But initially you see one thing and if you resolve it in your mind as that thing you’ll start seeing it that way all the time. When it’s a physical thing, we can go back and look at it again. When it’s a psychic thing, going back and looking at it again is unreliable because….
Wayfarer: …. we’re another variable, as always, and if I go to clairvoyantly investigate the same thing at two different times of day I may very well have different degrees of success.
ceahhettan: Or someone walks into the room, turns on the light, etc?
Wayfarer: Right. So, recapping, we’ve got three problems:
Wayfarer: 1) our sensors are always changing and in flux, which means our experience of the energetic world is going to be changing and in flux. 2) we add our own thoughts and feelings and ideas and all that shit to everything we experience in our own minds 3) we are always trying to resolve information into stuff we recognize, which means we’ll always come up with something we’re familiar with when doing a clairvoyance. We all have an idea of what a castle looks like and if the data coming in seems like a castle we might well resolve it into our idea of a castle which might not be the thing at all. In low light conditions if we see a coiled up rope we might react like it’s a snake because we’re bad at resolving even physical sense information into correct perceptions sometimes. The fact that we can’t just look at it again easily just makes this harder.
Wayfarer: So, we’re at two hours, I promise the last bit goes a little quicker, but the first part needed some proper treatment, and I apologize to whoever is going to edit this. 🙁
Wayfarer: An quick break before we finish out strong with “how do we actually, you know, deal with these problems without throwing our hands in the air and deciding to learn a useful skill like sewing.” Any questions, comments, hatemail, etc. can go here again. 🙂
ceahhettan: None from me.
Rainsong: And also time for Wayfarer to briefly rest his typing-fingers 😀
ceahhettan: At least, not this time.
ceahhettan: (Something something rest when something something?)
Rose: 1. The thing I typed between parentheses, about thoughts… that’s how I experience thoughts as opposed to what’s portrayed in movies. Is that the common experience for many people?
Rose: 2. Asking people for confirmation as a method. But I think that’s for the next section..
ceahhettan: Re 1, that seems pretty in line at least to my experiences. Sometimes it’ll tend more towards one particular than the other but it also changes from one week to the next what my brain is deciding to process all that input as if I’m not consciously picking and dealing with it.
Wayfarer: 1. All of those are ways that you can render perceptions into information that makes sense. The actual input is, normally, a pre-verbal proto-concept. So like when someone looks at something you get the information about what they’re looking at before they identify it. Like if there’s an orange sitting on a table and you’re telepathizing just the most boring people, the experience you’re going to get is the proto-concept that arises in their mind just before they go “oh that’s an orange on that there table”
ceahhettan: I mean, for me there’s also map fragments, but I’m pretty sure that’s a slightly weirder than normal weird way of putting it into images.
Wayfarer: And what they actually perceive, and what you actually perceive, when thinking “an orange on a table” might be different, or might be identical. Like my concept of an orange on a table might be different than yours. I might be thinking of blood oranges on a bigass table and you’re thinking of like a mandarin orange on a folding table. But the telepathic information won’t be their sensation, it’s the thing that happens after the sensation while the actual concept of “that’s an orange” is still forming.
Wayfarer: It’s a very particular thought instant in my experience that some people have to do a bunch of meditation to even recognize in their own thoughts.
Chirotractor: wow that’s a round table…
Rose: …that leads me into another question but it requires me to talk about a subject that seems a bit frowned upon, as to it’s believability
Rose: …i’ll ask it outside the lecture, I suppose
Wayfarer: The reason this is important is that if someone is thinking “wow I am super hungry and want to make some lunch” I might actually experience hunger myself and think “gee it sure is getting close to lunchtime.” The words aren’t the same but the concept that seeded them is the same and based on our individual situations something slightly different might arise.
Wayfarer: Or sometimes I might actually just straight up get “wow I am super hungry and want to make some lunch” and then I might go “huh, that doesn’t sound like me, why would I think wow, what a dumb thing to do”
Wayfarer: But that would be more likely to happen with, for example, my wife, than with some random guy down the street I’ve never talked to.
Rose: I posted the question outside this channel for later
Wayfarer: Because we have a kind of thought-affinity and because I’ve synchronized and kind of oriented to how she thinks from being around her and because we’re very familiar so I recognize the feeling of her thoughts, and so on.
Wayfarer: But yeah, the tl;dr is yes, what you’re experiencing is consistent with the way people experience telepathy, but the important detail is that those little visual clips and snippets of words and so on aren’t what they are thinking, it’s how your brain is interpreting what they’re thinking; just like your brain might see The Dress as blue while someone else sees it as gold.
Rose: okay
Wayfarer: Okay gonna relocate and then we’ll resume and finish this out.
Wayfarer: And we’re back
Wayfarer: So, how do we overcome these problems?
ceahhettan: Welcome back.
Wayfarer: I broke this down into 9 points. “Just ask someone if they were thinking about something” is a pretty good way to know if you were right, but it’s not always an option. It’s not an option when we’re dealing with random other people, it’s not an option when we’re using divination or telepathy surreptitiously, it’s not an option when we’re dealing with random spirits or something in the context of magical work or mediumship, etc.
Wayfarer: So I think we can do better. But yes, always seeking actual real world verification when possible is a good idea. Otherwise we can end up deluding ourselves an awful lot.
Wayfarer: The first thing we can do, though, is practice. Practice a lot. Run a lot of sessions. Do this intentionally. For those of us who are naturally very sensitive, we get practice all the time, but it’s not the kind of practice that helps us improve because it’s just us doing what we’re doing. Practice is intentional. That doesn’t mean you have to do like, energy sensing games or telepathy games, necessarily. Those can help, but… well, not always.
Wayfarer: Practice in this case means observing the process while we’re doing it. Guess the fruit or shapes and colors are good games to practice, but they practice a niche application of telepathy that isn’t how we tend to experience it in the real world. Ian Stevenson from UVA did a ton of research into how telepathic experiences are experienced by people in just their lives, and I don’t remember any of them being “I knew a fruit also a shape and color that someone was thinking at me.”
ceahhettan: So somewhat like applying mindfulness towards the whole doing?
ceahhettan: Rather than letting it become automatically, all, oh a thought, let me push this away and shield.
ceahhettan: Although being able to do that is useful.
Wayfarer: The parapsychological community would burn me alive for heresy at suggesting we practice outside a paradigm that can be statistically analyzed and verified: fine. We’re not trying to improve our telepathy so we can perform under lab conditions and meet the demanding standards of statistical accuracy required in a lab. And people might think “welp here it goes, now everyone is just gonna learn to play imagination games” and that is such a silly bad faith criticism that I can’t even really respond to it. But yes, applying mindfulness to telepathic impressions as they come in and more importantly actually tracking and paying attention to when we’re reasonably wrong or right.
Wayfarer: It turns out, repetition of a psychic task alone doesn’t actually result in improvement on that task. Not in the lab, and not in the real world. We have to practice while focusing on the process. We need a process orientation, not a result orientation, in our practice. Practice doing the telepathy right, practice sensing the energy right, which is all about tuning our mind correctly, attending to unconscious information, quieting our minds so that that information can cross the threshold into consciousness, and so on.
Wayfarer: If we’re fixated on just getting a good, statistically valid measure that shows that we can in fact do a telepathy, we’re not going to get better at it, and it’s not going to help us validate those inputs. Remember that in those kinds of experimental settings, even with something broad like ‘shapes and colors’ rather than, say, Zener cards, we already know what valid inputs look like. If it’s not a shape and/or color, it’s not what we’re looking for. But that doesn’t help us be more telepathic. It helps us validate inputs in that one very niche setting.
Wayfarer: So, 1) Practice.
Wayfarer: Second, keep yourself consistent.
Wayfarer: Your whole energy body is changing all the time. Don’t just let it go wonky and weird. Ground. Center. Keep yourself emotionally regulated. Take care of your body. Pay attention to what is going on with you.
Wayfarer: All sorts of things can affect you, the actual sensory equipment. You need to take care of that equipment. You don’t want to be a hottub, you want to be a still pond. Psychic sensation happens very subtly, and you’ll miss it if you’re all over the place. You might miss it just because of external variables. But don’t make that even harder by letting yourself be all over the place. Keep yourself consistent to yourself.
Wayfarer: 1) Practice 2) Stay consistent. 3) Use more than one sense to map things. Don’t get bogged down in words or in visual information. If you feel things in your gut, pay attention. Practice by observing how your guts feel when you’re around different things. Learn to attune to your whole body, because your whole body is connected to your energetic field. Don’t let it all be in your mind, don’t compartmentalize it to your thoughts.
Rose: More than one “clairsense”?
Wayfarer: Following from that, mindfulness. Just learn to pay attention to your whole body. Meditate and just observe sensations as they arise all through your whole body.
Wayfarer: Sure, but I’m talking about your actual physical body senses here.
Wayfarer: Like, what does it feel like in your chest when someone is angry at you?
Wayfarer: If you feel your chest tighten when someone is angry around you, and you feel your chest tighten up a little…
Wayfarer: Because psychic shit doesn’t usually deliver us service with a witness. It’s very subtle sometimes. Empaths can go their entire lives not realizing that their emotions are all over the place because other people are affecting them. We have to pay attention to ourselves all over. I usually feel energetic contact as a light brushing on my head or just over my ears. It’s a physical sensation. If I’m not attending to my body, I’ll miss it.
Wayfarer: I feel telepathic reaching or scanning or touching like someone brushing my ear, sometimes. I have to pay attention to that! And you can’t learn to make those associations without….
Wayfarer: Going back to 1, and practicing.
Wayfarer: 4 was mindfulness, which plays off that same thing…practice mindfully. Pay attention to your whole body. Be wholly engaged with it. If you are going to practice shapes and colors while browsing around on Reddit or watching something on YouTube, just don’t even waste your time, frankly, because you’ll improve a thousand times better by spending literally 10 seconds just thinking “how do I feel right now?” and checking in with your body than with hours of distractedly half-assedly guessing things even if you’re doing all the right visualizations or whatever.
Wayfarer: 1) Practice. 2) Stay consistent with yourself. 3) Use more than one (actual, physical sense). 4) Mindfulness and whole body awareness. 5) Be comfortable being wrong.
ceahhettan: My dinner is done, thank you for the lecture and I’ll catch the last bits later!
Wayfarer: Psychic shit is something that we all have but we spend a lot of time learning not to do it. Uh, if there are any 5 year olds reading this, don’t tell your parents about my language and also you probably haven’t learned to ignore psychic input in favor of physical input yet so uh just kinda don’t learn to ignore psychic stuff. It worked for me!
Wayfarer: But we’ve all spent a long time learning not to be psychic, and sometimes we’ll be mistaken. And that’s great. Every time you’re wrong, because you were practicing mindfully, you can evaluate why you were wrong, in what way you were wrong, what circumstances were at the time when you were wrong, and so on.
Wayfarer: Nothing will make you worse at being psychic than holding yourself to a false standard of what should be expected of psychic performance. When you’re wrong, fantastic, that’s an opportunity for learning. Chill. If being psychic meant you were right 100% of the time I’d be getting paid a lot more for this lecture.
Wayfarer: Following from that… 6) Keep lots of notes. How are you going to compare what was going on when you missed to what was going on when you hit if you didn’t keep notes about what was going on when you hit?
Wayfarer: How are you going to know when something you did worked correctly if you don’t know how it was different from what you did yesterday?
Wayfarer: If you’re practicing mindfully, with whole body awareness, these notes can be super detailed. That’s good! More information is better. If you can document everything, do it. If not, it’s still better to keep quick notes than no notes at all.
Wayfarer: 1) Practice. 2) Stay consistent with yourself. 3) Use more than one (actual, physical sense). 4) Mindfulness and whole body awareness. 5) Be comfortable being wrong. 6) Keep lots of notes. Changing gears a little, 7 is Stay abstract. Unless you’re looking at actual concrete things, you’re not likely to get the verification you want from getting concrete. If you’re trying to do clairvoyance on a building, yeah, get concrete I guess (but uh remote viewing protocols avoid that for a reason). If you’re doing telepathy, well, hell, our own thoughts aren’t very concrete, but rather extremely fluid for the most part. Stay loose, stay abstract, look at big pictures more than fine details. If someone thinks about apples and you say it was a red apple and they say it was green, don’t worry about that shit. You got an apple. Hell, picking up “fruit” at all is pretty good, unless you’re, you know, playing guess the fruit. In which case stop guessing and start practicing better.
Wayfarer: Eight follows from seven: Develop a vocabulary and jargon for describing things consistently. Remember 800 years ago when we talked about not having consistent words to describe psychic inputs? Fix that. Nobody is born knowing the words for colors. Nobody is born knowing the words for psychic sensations or inputs or whatever. Start naming things.
Rose: …is there even a sort of dictionary for the names of psychic inputs that everyone across all of the Online Energy Community (OEC) understands?
Wayfarer: In psychotherapy, therapists will often teach clients to learn big huge lists of emotion words because if the only word you know is “angry” you’re losing a ton of nuance. Frustration, consternation, aggravation, annoyance, perturbment, indignation, all more useful and specific than “anger.” They’re all more specific, and they’re all shades that have slightly different meanings to each of us.
Wayfarer: Nope.
Rose: I mean.. we have clairvoyance, all the different names for different clair-senses.. we have ESP, we have “extrasenses”, we have “sixth sense”, we have simply “senses”.. there are so many terms for the same thing
Wayfarer: So you want to get a lot of words. The more concepts you can actually think of, the more likely you’re going to be in the ballpark. And if someone feels consternated and you say perturbed, that’s not a miss – just know that what you feel as perturbment they call consternation. It’s cool. You still did a psychic.
Rose: ohh.. I misunderstood. Oops. I’ll be quiet.
Rainsong: (Some of you might recall Buchanan’s vocabulary exercises… useful here, too)
Wayfarer: Learn words for things. If you’re learning to be clairvoyant, start learning about architecture and different parts of buildings so that when the target is in the gables you know what gables are, that can help because now you’re recognizing something and we’re right back to 4, being mindful! Nice.
Wayfarer: Rose you weren’t wrong, that is also something to consider. But I was talking more about how we describe perceptions and not what we call the senses. But that’s an actual thing to consider, right? For example, earlier today you related a story about someone making everyone feel sick energetically. I don’t need you to answer now, but… sick how?
Wayfarer: “I felt sick” is useful information, sure, but “I feel nauseous and like my upper left quadrant is knotting up a bit and my back feels like it’s trying to curl up into a ball” is much more descriptive, right? Especially if you know that your back feeling like you’re trying to curl up into a ball is what you feel when you’re around someone who is depressed.
Wayfarer: So eight is get a bunch of words and concepts and develop vocabulary and jargon for describing things. If I say I feel “puffy” there are people in here who know exactly what I am talking about and what to do about that versus if I say I feel “tired” or “clouded” or “muddled.” There’s a vocabulary there that doesn’t mean anything to most people but it’s meaningful for me, the person who is describing the sensation, and to the people I’d be describing it to, which is what matters.
Wayfarer: 1) Practice. 2) Stay consistent with yourself. 3) Use more than one (actual, physical sense). 4) Mindfulness and whole body awareness. 5) Be comfortable being wrong. 6) Keep lots of notes. 7) Stay abstract. 8) Develop a vocabulary and jargon. Finally, 9) See where things go. Most psychic stuff isn’t going to be super concrete and just instantly recognizable. Let stuff play out. Be with it. Be present. See where your mind goes and what your body does when you interact with things. If someone says “this here is my house spirit” then take a breath, check in with yourself, and see how you feel when you encounter that spirit. Whole body. Two weeks later when you feel those exact feelings again? Guess what – you’re sensing spirits.
Wayfarer: We spend a ton of time in the OEC doing all these like insane astral visualization exercises that it’s very easy to stop using our actual, you know, bodies and experiences and senses and all these great tools we have for holistic intuitive experience because we’re trying to project to the astral caves of whatever that we don’t recognize what the astral caves of whatever feel like while we’re there. Because we’re trying to do these sensory overlays and imagine it like we were a body that was there, we miss out on tons of tools we have for knowing things about the world.
Wayfarer: Let’s get practical: someone says “scan my psiball” and then someone else goes “oh it’s blue and pyramidal” and then the person is like “hah wrong idiot it’s blue and prismatic” and that whole experience is dumb, that was just guessing. Let’s try, “here is a construct.” Okay, don’t talk about the construct. Stop right there. What do you feel like when you interact with that construct.
Wayfarer: You can’t feel the construct. The construct is an input, and we can go allllll the way back to the beginning of the class and realize, hey, we can’t access inputs. We can access perceptions.
Wayfarer: Stop looking at the input. Start looking at the perception. What’s it like to contact that construct? What do we feel, in our inner world, when we sense that construct? Okay. Now, when else do we feel like that? Now you’re getting information and it’s far more useful than playing games guessing that “I made a construct with 18 tubes that have different elemental charges that …” just stop. Because that guy’s 18 tubes are conceptual architecture that might not translate the same way to you. Constructs are energy and they barely actually occupy space and they barely actually have spatial characteristics or colors or whatever and if someone is putting all their time into making a construct that actually does something then all that shit is going to be symbolic anyhow and if they’re actually spending their time on the cosmetics of energetic constructs then uh, yeah just let them do them in my opinion.
Wayfarer: But the constructs that actually do something? The fields and shields and wards and psychometric imprints and so on? You’re going to feel that stuff a certain way, and that’s what we want to pay attention to.
Wayfarer: Okay that’s all it’s been three hours so if there are questions, comments, death threats, or so on, go for it. If not I don’t know if there’s a formal way to close these things or not but namaste, peace be with you, tashi delek, sarva mangalam, etc.
Rose: No questions I want to ask right now. Thank you for the lecture!
Rainsong: Thanks, Wayfarer. That was very informative. 😀
Wayfarer:
Rose: The question I mentioned in #lecture that i wanted to ask here: If the telepathic information we perceive are pre-verbal proto-concepts.. then what’s happening when through telepathy you’re looking at someone’s experiences/memories and you see it as moving imagery, like a sort of film/vision? [9:39 PM] Wayfarer: You’re translating the telepathic stuff into moving imagery based on concept+your own stuff. The other person whose thought it is (lmao you can’t own thoughts language is so dumb) is experiencing that concept+their stuff.
Wayfarer: So if someone is driving a car thinking “I have to turn left” and you start seeing visual imagery of turning left sometimes you’ll see what they are seeing as they actually turn left but more often than not you’ll just see some other stuff about whatever “turning left” means to you.
Wayfarer: We get way deep into inner imagery and inner symbolism and such at that point and you develop a lot of your intuition by looking at your own symbols and meanings and internal world because ultimately we experience everything in our inner world even when those experiences relate to things in the outer world.
Wayfarer: Putting this in here because it’s relevant and important.
Wayfarer: Wish I’d closed it out with that last bit actually. I still can, and I will:
Wayfarer: You want to get way deep into your inner imagery and inner symbolism and such, because we develop a lot of our intuition by looking at our own symbols and meanings and internal world. Ultimately, we experience everything in our inner world even when those experiences relate to things in the outer world. So the best way to deal with the problems of interpreting psychic perceptions is to learn about our inner world and look inward, at ourselves, rather than trying to reach outward.
Wayfarer: The End everyone get out of the lecture hall until next week. Back to the #social-hall everyone. Go on!
Rainsong: Thanks, Wayfarer 🙂
Rose: thank you! see you there
Scelana: Thxies for the lecture Wayfarer, sorry I wasn’t so active in it. Brain kinda not firing on all cylinders today. I’ll read through the log when it’s functioning better.
K317AM: That’s a juicy lecture right there. Thanks!