Monthly debate - ESP, reading minds, where do you stand?

[Priscilla]

A number of Anne's series deal with various forms of ESP, mind reading, telekenesis, many forms of mental activity. So, we were wondering. Where do all of you stand on this subject? Do you believe any of it is possible, use it yourself, know someone who does?! ;) For starters, I thought I'd include the lyrics to an old song that I used to love! :D

Gordon Lightfoot.
The title of the song is "If you could read my mind"



If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
You know that ghost is me
And I will never be set free
As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see
If I could read your mind love
What a tale your thoughts could tell
Just like a paperback novel
The kind that drugstores sell
When you reach the part where the heartaches come
The hero would be me
But heroes often fail
And you won't read that book again
Because the ending's just too hard to take

I'd walk away like a movie star
Who gets burned in a three way script
Enter number two
A movie queen to play the scene
Of bringing all the good things out in me
But for now love, let's be real
* I never thought I could FEEL this way *
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back

If you could read my mind love
What a tale my thoughts could tell
Just like an old time movie
'Bout a ghost from a wishin' well
In a castle dark or a fortress strong
With chains upon my feet
But stories always end
And if you read between the lines
You'll know that I'm just tryin' to understand
The feelin's that you lack
I never thought I could feel this way
And I've got to say that I just don't get it
I don't know where we went wrong
But the feelin's gone
And I just can't get it back

[Lady Faizah]

I don't have much to say at the moment, but I saw the title and thought I'd pop in and take a look. I like that song too. :good: Anyway, I'll just be sitting up in the back row, I'll probably speak up a bit later. :)

[Mayhem]

I believe in the whole ESP shebang, mostly because I am afflicted with precog. Dreams of little things mostly, things that come true in a few weeks. The Twin Towers was the worst episode. I never dreamed up the planes, but saw the towers burning (At that point I didn't know what they were or where) and felt lots of heat/worry/sorrow, then blackness as one of the towers collapsed.

There also appears to be a very small amount of telepathy in me too. I can be thinking that I wish someone would ring or get online and they do, usually talking to me and wondering why they rang/got online, they had other things to do *Grin*

*Worries that she now looks like a nutter*

May sound like I am just striving for attention by saying I am different, but it's true...and sometimes I wish it wasn't, life would be so much quieter and I would probably sleep better too ;) :D

[AnnMarie]

ESP, Precog, Telepathy.... they exist. Although, to be honest, I think calling it ESP is a bit of a misnomer..... Extra Sensory Preception. I believe the latant abilities are in all humans, in those parts of the brain we still haven't figured out.

OldWolf and I are connected telepathically one one level. No matter how far apart we are, we know when each other is ill. He's better at it... I remember coming home from work with a migraine so bad my car stayed at work, because a coworker drove me home. OldWolf called me about an hour later, asking what I'd done to my head! Now, this was BEFORE we were married...before we'd even met face to face.

[Kathryn Draconna]

I believe in the whole ESP shebang, mostly because I am afflicted with precog. Dreams of little things mostly, things that come true in a few weeks. The Twin Towers was the worst episode. I never dreamed up the planes, but saw the towers burning (At that point I didn't know what they were or where) and felt lots of heat/worry/sorrow, then blackness as one of the towers collapsed.

There also appears to be a very small amount of telepathy in me too. I can be thinking that I wish someone would ring or get online and they do, usually talking to me and wondering why they rang/got online, they had other things to do *Grin*

*Worries that she now looks like a nutter*

May sound like I am just striving for attention by saying I am different, but it's true...and sometimes I wish it wasn't, life would be so much quieter and I would probably sleep better too ;) :D

Hey, if Platty looks like a nutter, I'll look like more of one... I belive in these things and have had a few "foretelling" dreams but just lil things that happened the next day at school, and freaked my friends out because on the bus that morning I had been telling about my dreams the night before. I'm actively working on opening up more ablities... I can now project energy (which most but not all people can feel) in the form of heat at people... but I have to be about two inches or closer to make most peeps feel it. *sighs* We are still working on that one.

Don't feel bad Platty, I know EXACTLY how you feel on the whole "normal" issue... I got dragged into this because some of my friends and I all started having freaky things happen to us... now we are trying to learn to control it so it doesn't control us... this is the main reason I was off here for a few months. :shhh: We freaks may one day rule the world, Platty! :razz: Sorry, couldn't resist a bit of humor in there!!

[Bronze-Dragonrider]

Although I don't beleive in fulblown telepathy or any other sort of ESP, I do beleive that humans certainly do have a certain level of empathy that can somehow level mind to mind. And precognition is something I've experienced before, nothing major, but a precise chain of events that happened in a dream played out exactly the same way in real life. I have no explanation for it, and I've ruled out coincidance, but I think it's just a human occurrance that has no real significance or that could be a sign of a fortune teller. It could happen to anyone I think.

[Mayhem]

I was taught the other day to make a 'bubble' to contain feelings by my pal Steve. Most interesting, and certainly useful! He is teaching me a lot about how to control myself, and how to help others control themselves. Very instructive he is. He is gonna do some hands on healing for me when he gets up here. Want my back fixed ;)


. :shhh: We freaks may one day rule the world, Platty! :razz: Sorry, couldn't resist a bit of humor in there!!

Cool, so long as when we do, I get to have Nightcrawler ;)
I wanna blue mutie for my V own! Bring on the 'fuzzy blue elf' !!!!

[Kathryn Draconna]

I was taught the other day to make a 'bubble' to contain feelings by my pal Steve. Most interesting, and certainly useful! He is teaching me a lot about how to control myself, and how to help others control themselves. Very instructive he is. He is gonna do some hands on healing for me when he gets up here. Want my back fixed ;)




Cool, so long as when we do, I get to have Nightcrawler ;)
I wanna blue mutie for my V own! Bring on the 'fuzzy blue elf' !!!!

Bubbles are useful things... just don't program them to explode... peeps that can feel these things don't appreciate that... Lol, You can have the "fuzzy blue elf" all to yourself, Platty!

[Keita]

Telepathy to a certain extent yes as well as precog. I had several precog events myself - mostly minor incidents. Empathy - you betcha! I KNEW something was wrong on 9/11 but it was just a feeling of unease and a feeling of...change coming. :erm: Or something like that. It's hard to pin down exactly.

Telekinesis....no.

[scentman]

As much as I wish ESP and other psychic phenomena existed, I haven't seen evidence for it actually occuring, so I don't believe it exists in RL (In a book or movie it most certainly does, because the author/screenwriter made it a premise of their imaginary world).

The explanation I have for so-called 'psychic' phenomena is
(1) logic/cognition - your brain subconsciously worked out a conclusion from the data already present
(2) coincidence - we selectively remember our successes and forget our failures, which give us a feeling we are psychic, when it is actually a random 'good guess'

All ESP phenomena fail when a rigorous statistical test is used. You can do one for yourself. Take a pack of regular playing cards without the jokers (52 cards) shuffle them facedown, and do the standard 'cut' - now guess what the top card is. If you don't cheat by looking at the cards while shuffling, and the cards are not marked (what mathematicians call a fair game), you will get 1 in 52 guesses correct just by coincidence.

Repeat this shuffle and guess many times - lets say 520 times for ease of calculation. You should get 10 guesses correct and 510 wrong. If you get 20 correct, does that mean you are psychic? - No, It means you temporarily got lucky. If you repeat the test you could wind up with only 5 correct - that is the way it works - the outcome is not predictable beforehand, but upon more and more results you get closer and closer to 1 in 52. If someone were psychic they would consistantly score above this 1 in 52 level of accuracy, which doesn't occur unless some cheating is going on.

here's a webpage about how we self-decieve ourselves:
http://skepdic.com/selfdeception.html

[Masterharper Bridget]

Does ESP exist? -----In My Opinion, I think it does!

Does everybody have it? ----- I M O, yes, to some extent they do!

Have I had experience with it? ----- Personally, yes, on more than one occassion. And it has rarely been something I've felt comfortable with.

Is calling it Extra Sensory Perception a Misnomer? ----- I M O, I'm going to say the E should stand for Electromagnetic rather than Extra!


I'm inclined to think that a lot of so called empathic / percognitive abilities can be put down to the subconcious, or unconcious mind, working to put certian facts we normally may not be aware of on a concious level, in a way that the concious mind can't quite explain, and then at some later point it can seem perfectly reasonably for things to work out as expected even if you can't explain why you knew it would end up that way.

On the other hand, all our senses are basically electromagnetic signals our nerves are sending to our brains, aren't they! Sight is the frequency of colorwaves and their intensity or density(whichever) that our eyes process. Sound the vibrational frequency our ears manage to pick up out of the air. The heat or pressure vibrations of frequecies which we process through our skin, mouths, and noses make up our senses of feel, taste, and smell. And all of them would seem to be linked, to some extent, because if you are deficiant in one the others seem to compensate in some way for it. Or so I was always lead to believe.

What if we ESP is merely our using these electomagnetic frequencies or vibrational waves in some other sensing perception that we aren't quite scientifically advanced enough to recognise yet. Everything has an Aura, as corilion (sp ? ) photography has proven, and those auras change with the individuals mood. Who's to say that some of us can't read those auras on somekind of subconcious or unconcios level! And I'm not just talking about auras of people, but of objects and possibly atmospheric phenomina like weather!

There is so much we don't understand about the human body. Anything is possible. As for science have a way to test for it . . . No one's every had it strong enough for long enough with enough frequency for there to be any reliable tests developed, no matter what any one may say to the contrary!
So I'm just going to reserve judgement, trust good old common sense, and follow Mom's advise: "If heart and head do not agree,
Then somewhere trouble is going to be!
If both agree then follow thru,
Trust in your self, it's the best thing to do!"

[Bronze-Dragonrider]

Bring on the 'fuzzy blue elf' !!!!
:rofl2: Whenever I hear that, I can't help but imagine Legolas with a thin layer of blue fuzz :evil:

[jjmouse]

Oh yes, I think that some people know things that others do not. Other people are able to 'read' people by facial expressions or by body language, and make predictions and such.

I know that, with good friends, I often pick up the phone to call them, and they are already calling me. Phone does not ring and there they are, asking me what on earth I think I am doing.

There have been times when I wish I had listened to that little voice. The one that says 'Oh the cat just got hit by a car' was the worst. Because she had been hit by a car. The same voice that sais 'They have what you want in that store' and the next day, I find out that they DID have what I wanted, YESTERDAY. :roll:

For every real 'pyschic' out there, there is a pretender.

[Nurianna]

My mother was the precog dreamer, she also knew wehn the phone was going to ring and who was on the other end, she also knew where I was. -always- :shrug:

I and Tifer are the Empaths of the family, he's stronger in some areas and I in others. we usually end up answering each others questions or sentances before the other finishes (or even some times starts.) He and I have to make a point of introducing ourselves to new people as Aunt and Nephew, cause otherwize they will ask how long we've been married... :shake::tilt: it's silly~

[Nurianna]

the skill I want though, is kenitic... or language translation :D

[scentman]

There is a million dollar challenge still available to any true psychic:
http://www.randi.org/research/index.html

No one has passed even the preliminary test, and it has been available for the taking since 1964. This evidence strongly favors that ESP does not exist, else the prize would be claimed in the past 40 years many times over.

[Aranel]

Where do I stand? You tell me. ;)

I most definately think it exists. I'm an empath, myself. I have, on occassions of severe stress, been able to project feelings onto other people. Calming feelings, if you must know. I have been overwhelmed by someone else's feelings a time or two. The most notable was years ago when my best friend was at Disneyland on a band trip. For some crazy reason, I had a horrible terrified FEAR reaction to absolutely nothing. Enough so that I broke down into tears, curled up into a fetal position on my bed, and waited for it to go away. It was strange. I knew it wasn't MY feeling, but I couldn't block it. Later, I found out at that exact time, she'd nearly drowned in a swimming accident.

I have precog dreams, the last one I recall coming true that amounted to anything was seeing the waiting room at the hospital where Masta Tek had his surgery before I ever even knew I was going to be there. I was sitting in the room when I remembered that I'd seen it before. LOL, and that was proof to Kool, I think, that I'm off my rocker, since I had described the room of my dream to him before I went. The LOOK he gave me! :D

So yes, for me, it definately exists. As does the spirit world, which I have had a great deal of contact with. Sometimes more than I'd like!