by philo 81 Replies latest jw friends
They can analyze it until they're blue in the face, I know what I've experienced and continue to experience. And I've experienced a whole lot more than I'm gonna tell about here. I don't wanna get any visits from the men in the white coats waveing them butterfly nets around. Got nothing to prove to anyone but me, and I already believe it.
Franc
I don't know how to explain these things, but I do know that they happen. I know when I'm guessing about something and I know when I am absolutely SURE about a future occurrence.
My husband is on disability. We had to go through hell to convince the administration that he actually qualified for disability, but after he won the judgement, we were notified by the lawyer that we would receive a check for the back payments due us in about six weeks, or perhaps longer. He told us that these things were notoriously slow. For some reason, I knew that the check would arrive in three weeks, and I told my husband the exact day, June 15th, when it would be in the mail. He laughed at me. On the fifteenth of June, the check was in our mailbox.
Coincidence? Possibly. But I don't think so.
I dont know about visions. I work in the medical field. Time and time again, when examining patients, especially those with misplaced vertabrae or dislocations, I can feel where the problem is, and by placing my hands in the correct place, but not touching the skin...it generates tremendous heat and rectifies the mispacement. My medical colleagues have witnessed this many times and we all wonder.
Yes, I did 10 years medical training..no I cant explain it...and yes many other things like this happen..
weird.
RHW, Deacon,
But the question is how often are your predictions or feelings accurate? Do you get such feelings often and forget about them unless you get a hit? You might be surprised if you think about how often you get such feelings and nothing happens, or your guess is wrong. Your accuracy would have to be substantially better than chance would allow (and that's taking into account ALL of the occasions) for there to be any real phenomenon. Otherwise it's just psychology.
I'm not saying these things don't happen, because they happen to me too, but it is very easy to only remember the hits and forget the misses. It seems our brains are wired that way. This has been shown in studies where people were sure they had some type of psychic ability, but when scrutinized it was found that they were greatly overstating their abilities. It's not that they were lying - they really believed they had these abilities, but they were fooled by this comon phenomenon.
I think one of the most interesting cases is a test set up by a 9 year old girl for a school science project which showed that people who claimed they could feel heat in others' bodies without touching them (touch therapy) actually couldn't - and even did worse than chance would allow. Young Emily's research was peer reviewed and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As an aside, she became the youngest scientist to ever have a paper published in a major medical journal.
Those touch therapists were astonished at how bad they did. They were sure they had special gifts, and they thought they had done quite well until the results were published. Their brains were fooling them. They were only remembering the hits - not the misses.
rem
"Most people would rather die than think; in fact, they do so."
..........Bertrand Russell
I guess I have had lots of those kinds of visions.
When my eldest son was about 6, I had a terrible nightmare that he had been killed in a bad car accident, a really horrible one. I woke shaking, and told my husband about it, in the middle of the night. The next morning, he told me the newspaper had an article about a bad accident that had happened in the night, and a young man was killed. Guess what his name was? Same first and last name as our son. That really freaked me out.
Another time, I was making a pie. As I was mixing it, I remembered that it was a favorite of a friend of mine, that I hadn't talked to in about a year. The phone rang. Guess who it was? Yep, it was that very friend. Eerie, eh?
Marilyn (a.k.a. Mulan)
I'm not saying these things don't happen, because they happen to me too, but it is very easy to only remember the hits and forget the misses.
Hmm..if you did 100 targets, or random images, and told a remote viewer to sketch each target one after another..and he or she got 50 of them right out of 100, thats only 50/50 and therefore dosent prove anything right?
Well, these are complicated targets. Like what if one of your targets is a picture of the inside of your house, with furniture etc. And she produces a sketch that exactly matches that. And gets 49 more hits to that degree. That's far too high to consider cooincidence. Understand? These is verifiable. Put the sketch right next to the target. Its an exact match. This isn't someone fooling themselves into thinking they have a special ability.
Again, these are the kind of experiments that you can do at the map
That kind of result would indeed be much greater than what you expect from chance alone. In all seriousness, why not go after the $1,000,000 prize offered at www.randi.org for being able to perform a feat like this under controlled conditions? Again, in all seriousness, I could perform a test with you from here in Rhode Island by placing some object in a specific location, and having someone view it remotely. If an ability like this exists, I would be delighted to see it. Really.
I said:
But I have experienced them, Susan! Only after taking hallucinogens, or when excessively tired or under stress. And yes, they can be very real. But they are manifestations of what's going on inside your head, rather than a feature of the outside world.
RedHorseWoman said:
This may explain YOUR experience, but it does not explain everyone else's experiences.
It certainly explains the majority of experiences, and is difficult to rule out in any cases, unless the visions make some sort of testable, non-trivial prediction and that they do so more often than can be explained by chance.
If anyone wants to try their hand at remote viewing but doesn't feel confident enough to go for Jame's Randi's million dollar prize, I'm willing to set up a test and offer a slightly less grand prize of fifty American dollars! Any takers?
--
Those who can induce you to believe absurdities can induce you to commit attrocities - Voltaire
That kind of result would indeed be much greater than what you expect from chance alone. In all seriousness, why not go after the $1,000,000 prize offered at www.randi.org for being able to perform a feat like this under controlled conditions? Again, in all seriousness, I could perform a test with you from here in Rhode Island by placing some object in a specific location, and having someone view it remotely. If an ability like this exists, I would be delighted to see it. Really.
I was thinking this very thing, unfortunatley my skills are not very good. But sure, pick a target. It can be anything, but not something that I or whoever I choose to be the viewer can sort of vaguely gues.. An example of a bad target is a house. Too vague. Go for something very identifiable, like the eifell tower or your cat. Ideally it might be better if you pick a 'control'..a target you or I do not know. Like a random picture in a random magazine..so pick something and give me a couple of days and I'll upload a sketch or two. I hope I can convince my girlfriend to participate cuz she is much better than me.
So basically, pick a picture since 3d objects are kinda weird for me, it's best if you also do not know the target, but if you prefer theres nothing wrong with you knowing the target...don't pick text either. Do you have access to a scanner to upload the image after I upload my sketch?
Anyone else on this board who would care to participate?
Oh and as for randi, since the time of houdini magicians have claimed extraordinary prizes to people who could prove the paranormal. Unfortunatley, this is often a publicity stunt with no real scientific intent. Also it is not scientific in that the example of houdini, he beleived from the start that it's impoosible. YOu don't go out in science to prove something impossible. You test wether it is true or not, with no conclusion in mind other than annalyzing the results to see if they are true or not. I'll look more into James Randi and his little contest. Thanks :)
.. http://www.mceagle.com/remote-viewing/pub/news/95dec04-wp.html
Thats an interesting article
I think that Randi's offer serves a very valuable purpose by giving those who claim to have special powers a place to prove their claim. As the old saying goes; "extrodinary claims require extrodinary evidence" and it seems that most of the people who have attempted his prize do not get past the basic preliminaries. In other words, once a true double-blind test is applied to folks who - in all sincerity - REALLY believe that they have some power (irrespective of what it may be), they can't perform their feat.
I don't quite understand what this remoe viewing entails. Is it a matter of you or her seeing the same thing that I or another person sees, or that we think about? Or is it a matter of having us both agree on a specific location, and your being able to see what is there? In any case, what I can do right now for a preliminary test is take a photo of something and put it right in the middle of my desk here in the office. Now, (again, I'm not trying to be a smart-ass here), do I have to tell you the address or can you locate this just based on MY knowing where it is?
(spelling corrected)
