Consensual Reality and Psychokinetic Safeguards

The notion of consensual reality is popular in some metaphysical and philosophical circles. The basic idea is that reality is the product of the consensus of the minds experiencing it. Inertia and gravity are things that most people will agree about the existence of. If you put something down it will stay there until something moves it. Gravity constantly pulls things down. These are pretty basic truths. The question that consensual reality brings up is "Do gravity and inertia work because we believe they do?" An even deeper question is "Are gravity and inertia so inescapable simply because we believe they are?"

I'm not trying to touch too deeply on consensual reality but it brings me around to psychokinesis and other paranormal events that could be the product of psychokinetic processes. Are psychokinetic feats so difficult because we've been conditioned all our lives to believe that they should be? Does the consensus have anything to do with this? I bring all of this up because in my own PK experiments with moving objects I've noticed that once I make a little progress in making something move it suddenly gains a mind of its own and fights me. Pinwheels that will rotate one way suddenly decide to do the opposite of what I will them to do when I decide I want them to spin clockwise instead of counterclockwise. They will just stop dead or wobble or move in little half-rotations back and forth like they can't decide what to do.

Psychokinesis is no easy feat but manifesting small effects is not as difficult as one would think. I feel that this may be because one eventually thinks it's not that difficult. You come up with a neat visualization or get really psyched up and you make it budge a little. That little budge makes you believe enough until you're making the pinwheel do rotations. Eventually you can make it move under glass and that erases all the doubts that it could just be a draft or the heat of your hands. Then the question becomes "Where do I go from here?" and it usually leads to trying to move bigger stuff that has more inertia and more friction acting on it. This is where I usually hit my roadblock and get bored.

Back to consensual reality. Is the shared believe that heavy things should be hard to move what stops us from being able to do it? Can we overcome this sort of passive shared belief with an active personal one? That seems to be the mechanism at work with PK acting on a pinwheel. It is an act of sheer will in the face of everything we've been taught to believe about reality that takes us over that first hurdle. Perhaps that pinwheel enters our personal sphere of reality enough for us to be able to manipulate it free of the constraints of the consensus. Maybe our continued attention, intention, and interest pulls that pinwheel into our sway and away from the collective sway of other minds saying it should sit still no matter how hard we stare at it. Could we overcome bigger obstacles with more time and effort? If you kept pushing this notion of personal reality could you eventually do more?

Maybe impressive psychokinesis is hard on purpose. Maybe consensual reality is a safeguard for all reality. I mentioned earlier that even after I succeed in making the pinwheel move, at a certain point it rebels against me. It moves but with a seeming mind of its own. Maybe it's trying to get back into that consensual equilibrium. If our minds are so powerful that they contribute to the rules of reality then maybe reality needs a safeguard. If everyone could manipulate matter however they wanted with just their thoughts then imagine what kind of chaos there would be. Or what if just thinking something caused it to happen with no intent on your part? You have a fleeting image of someone being pushed down the stairs and then they go tumbling. What if you didn't want that to happen but it did anyway just because you thought it? Do you see how distressing that could be? We would have to have supreme control of our thoughts and impulses.

Maybe this is why it's so hard to use psychokinesis. Perhaps this is why it's necessary to build extreme intent to perform PK. If just thinking something caused it to happen we would all be in a lot of trouble. Consensual reality could be helping keep us all safe in this way by building and enforcing the rule that things just don't happen because you think them. This is a good thing.

It seems the key to psychokinetic ability is riding that line between personal intent and consensual safeguard. We can only push on that barrier for so long until it seems to push back. Maybe this is how uncontrolled psychokinetic activity happens, things that are often blamed on poltergeists? It's just a thought. All of this is just conjecture. I've been thinking on it deeply enough lately that I thought I would share it. Hopefully I've been clear enough that this makes some amount of sense.

Medicine and Mysticism

I think that eventually anyone that is involved in any kind of mystical or spiritual practice (or anyone that is alive) is going to be faced with a medical condition for which they will be faced with a choice. That choice will be: Do I take an accepted modern treatment for this condition or do I use an alternative treatment? The severity of the condition will obviously play into the decision but ones own principles and beliefs are going to figure in the decision. Do you believe that Big Pharma is solely out to get your money and feed you a treatment with no intent on curing you? Do you feel that alternative treatments are little more than placebos? Are you willing to try anything as long as it works?

Once you've settled on what you're going to do you're faced with another question: What does this mean for my beliefs and practice? Likely if you chose an alternative treatment you aren't going to have to wrestle with many moral of philosophical issues but if you went the conventional medicine route and depending on your spiritual or mystical leanings, you may have to reconcile some things in your belief system.

Any of us involved with altered states of consciousness or those of us that deal with things that aren't really there already know the "rational" explanations for these experiences. They're a product of the brain misfiring, chemical reactions, tricks of the light, etc. When you go throwing pharmaceuticals into the mix things get even trickier. You may begin to doubt your experiences even more, even if you haven't already. If your path focuses on energetic or natural healing you may even feel like you're betraying everything you believe in by taking a pill regardless of what you experience. There are a lot of things to consider here.

I mention all of this because I've been wrestling with many of these questions myself over the last several weeks. I've never been a fan of pharmaceuticals but I've also never had a reason (or need) to use them in the long term. When you have a condition that affects your life in such a way that you're willing to do just about anything for relief, even compromise your beliefs and principles, it starts a ripple that crashes through the core of who you are. I guess writing this is one of the ways that I'm coping with how I'm having to change my belief system. I'm giving evidence based medicine and pharmaceuticals a chance to do what they're supposed to do even though I don't have a lot of faith in them.

I don't think that the medications I've been using have hindered my ability to be mystical or spiritual but they haven't really been helping my condition either. The side effects have just made it harder to concentrate alongside the condition the medication is supposed to treat. I'm taking a hiatus from mystical endeavors to give the medication an unbiased and uncontaminated chance to work. I don't want any false positives. I have plans to attempt to treat my condition with alternative methods but I'm giving conventional methods their shot first. I'm not keen on taking drugs with lots of side effects that have an unknown mechanism of action but I'm not a neurologist so I'm providing as much optimism as I can muster on that front.

In the coming weeks I'll try to get back into the groove of things but until this grand experiment is over I can't say when it will be. I have lots of ideas floating around but I can't really test anything at this point and my condition makes it hard to concentrate on anything too mystical, let alone practice it. Thanks for bearing with me.

Hiatus at an end.

I haven't been very active with this blog or with the paranormal in general for a long while. Short of keeping up with weird news I haven't been doing much at all in regards to the supernatural. Daily modern life and some health issues sidelined my interests for a while and I apologize to all of the people that may have been sad to see me stop updating so much.

I would like to point out that you're going to notice fewer ads on this blog now. The only ones remaining should be the ones that Google may or may not impose because they own the service. I've closed my AdSense account and because of this there won't be so many ads on the page anymore. I won't be making any money at all off of this blog anymore; not that I made much money in the first place. The reason I bring this up is so you as the audience can know that I'm not in this for the money. I started out with the aim of writing about things I found interesting while maybe getting a few cents here or there for my effort but it was never exactly profitable (I've always had a day job so to speak). Being as unprofitable as it was I decided that there don't need to be that many ads imposed on the readers and I don't need the headache of trying to manage ads.

This said, I do intend to get back into blogging about all the weird stuff that I find interesting. I don't really have much to share to that effect this time around and I most likely will not be posting everyday as was the convention years ago, but I do want to get back in the swing of posting frequently. I also want to produce higher quality content with perhaps more personal experiences or insights into subjects.

So since we all didn't perish in the apocalypse I hope all of my readers will stick with me and maybe some new people will start reading too.

Just a few thoughts.

I've been taking a bit of an hiatus from posting here because I feel like I've said just about everything there is to say at this time. A lot of times there is a subject or a news piece that I discuss but I rarely have anything to add to that particular item. In many ways when it comes to the paranormal and the occult, it really has all been said before. It seems to be the nature of the esoteric, however, that all things eventually come full circle again.

Many strange news items appear everyday all over the web that one might ostensibly label paranormal or just plain strange. The items that are genuinely interesting and unexplainable are typically the ones that we never hear about again. This seems to be the way of things with anything worth exploring in this particular field. We can muse and discuss all we like, but it doesn't get us any closer to why we've decided to take up this mantle.

In light of all of this I've recently decided to take some time to write privately, experiment, and just read and study. I think that eventually every occultist needs to take the time to go back to the drawing board and decide where they want to go from there. I've grown tired of reiterating what's been done before. I want to head to places that haven't seen the light of observation in a long time, or to places newly found. I always have to have something new to stimulate my mind so I keep searching. I suspect it's the same with all true seekers. It's the hunger for discovery.

There is no overall point to this post. I'm mostly thinking in text for all to read. Maybe it will inspire the reader to examine their own stance and perhaps go after something new. If you don't hear from me for a while take heart that I haven't forgotten about this blog. I'm just off working on other things with the eventual goal of reporting something here that might be truly interesting. My thanks to those of you that still check out this blog from time to time.

A lot of lessons.

Hungry Ghosts

There are a lot of lessons in that piece for occultists and paranormal enthusiasts, both green and seasoned.

On Hiatus

I'll be taking a break from this blog for a while to focus on other pursuits. Hopefully I'll be back with a lot more to discuss. Feel free to leave comments or send me an email in the interim.

Bugarach is still under siege by New Agers.

I posted about this over a year ago but it's making the rounds again with a few updates on the situation.

Doomsday 2012: Thousands queue for UFO rescue at Pic de Bugarach
Hippies head for Noah’s Ark: Queue here for rescue aboard alien spaceship

I can admire the conviction of these people. They believe something so much that they aren't content to just talk about it or preach it; they're actually out there doing what they believe they should be doing. Regardless of how I differ from them in my beliefs I can respect them for theirs.

I am a little concerned about what might happen if what they're expecting doesn't happen though. At the same time I don't understand the enmity toward these people that's expressed in the comments on these articles. Can the whole thing be seen as amusing? Sure. However, some of those comments go beyond expressing amusement and seem to express some kind of hatred towards these "hippies." Or maybe it's jealousy of how completely devoted they are to something greater than themselves.

Maybe we really do need a new spiritual age.