I was reading an article about the ganzfeld ("whole field" in German) experiments today. These experiments are widely renowned for being the first scientific attempt at proving the existence of telepathy.
The ganzfeld experiment involved two people, one of whom was termed the 'sender' and the other, the 'receiver'. The receiver was placed in an isolated environment from the sender. The sender had to look at an image and had to try to relay the details of the image over to the sender, through psi. The sender had to describe the image to the person conducting the test and later identify the image that the sender had seen, from among four images in which one was the actual image and other three were decoys. If left to chance, the receiver would have a strike rate of only 25% (1 out of 4). But the experiments turned out a result of more than that. Even though there were a number of shortcomings in the procedure which even the experimenter accepted, this experiment caught my interest because of the somewhat sound logic based on which the results were to be obtained.
Psi, is the name given to a unknown factor, the presence of which helps people perform actions which cannot be explained by known physical and biological mechanisms. Call it the dark force or the sixth sense, if you may.
We hear numerous anecdotes wherein people are able to foresee or get an inkling of events which have not yet occurred or have occurred in isolation. But in almost all the cases we cannot surely say that the foresight or inkling was a result of extra sensory perception. The perception which does not rely on the five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. The intriguing thing is that most of these foresights, inklings and premonitions come to us in our dreams, when we are in deep sleep. Which brings me to the important point I want to make.
We all perceive the world to be what it is through the five senses we know of, and that is why extra sensory perception seems so surreal to us.
Take for example floating on water on your back, replicating a state of weightlessness. I, for one, feel vulnerable doing that. Concerned whether my breathing is in sync, whether there is water finding its way into my ears, whether or not I have floated adrift too far away, whether I have been in this state for too long, why am I doing this. All these thoughts occupy my mind and drag me back into the world of these five senses. Compare this to the state of deep sleep. A state of sleep in which our mind is free from the clutter of these random thoughts and we create a world of our own with such detail, that it seems real. We often don't even remember the dream as soon as we wake up. Just goes to show the untapped power of our minds. But even in this state we are wrapped up in a blanket made out of the five senses, which is so cozy, that even the loss of one of the senses (eg. weightlessness caused by an endless fall) in our dreams, pulls us out of that state and wakes us up.
People who have lost the ability to see are known to have developed the power to see through touch and hearing (echo location). People who have lost the ability to hear are known to have developed the power to hear though sight (lip read). So it is known that the loss of one sense strengthens the others and our dependence on them. .
Imagine ourselves in an environment which does not give us any sensory inputs in the five forms we know of and you may just as well imagine yourself developing psi.
The ganzfeld experiment involved two people, one of whom was termed the 'sender' and the other, the 'receiver'. The receiver was placed in an isolated environment from the sender. The sender had to look at an image and had to try to relay the details of the image over to the sender, through psi. The sender had to describe the image to the person conducting the test and later identify the image that the sender had seen, from among four images in which one was the actual image and other three were decoys. If left to chance, the receiver would have a strike rate of only 25% (1 out of 4). But the experiments turned out a result of more than that. Even though there were a number of shortcomings in the procedure which even the experimenter accepted, this experiment caught my interest because of the somewhat sound logic based on which the results were to be obtained.
Psi, is the name given to a unknown factor, the presence of which helps people perform actions which cannot be explained by known physical and biological mechanisms. Call it the dark force or the sixth sense, if you may.
We all perceive the world to be what it is through the five senses we know of, and that is why extra sensory perception seems so surreal to us.
Take for example floating on water on your back, replicating a state of weightlessness. I, for one, feel vulnerable doing that. Concerned whether my breathing is in sync, whether there is water finding its way into my ears, whether or not I have floated adrift too far away, whether I have been in this state for too long, why am I doing this. All these thoughts occupy my mind and drag me back into the world of these five senses. Compare this to the state of deep sleep. A state of sleep in which our mind is free from the clutter of these random thoughts and we create a world of our own with such detail, that it seems real. We often don't even remember the dream as soon as we wake up. Just goes to show the untapped power of our minds. But even in this state we are wrapped up in a blanket made out of the five senses, which is so cozy, that even the loss of one of the senses (eg. weightlessness caused by an endless fall) in our dreams, pulls us out of that state and wakes us up.
People who have lost the ability to see are known to have developed the power to see through touch and hearing (echo location). People who have lost the ability to hear are known to have developed the power to hear though sight (lip read). So it is known that the loss of one sense strengthens the others and our dependence on them. .
Imagine ourselves in an environment which does not give us any sensory inputs in the five forms we know of and you may just as well imagine yourself developing psi.
In the book of Shiva's Trilogy (Meluha), there is something related to this Telepathy. Even though it is fictions, the author states that the travel of cosmic waves to communicate between people from various locations. They exchange information even without talking, hearing, seeing and directly communicating with each other. All in the imagination. These are transmitted by the thoughts and are received into one's thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThere are some real life experiences - There was a common thought in the form of a dream between two people in the same night at different locations that a huge chimney is going to break and fall down.
Just as the dream which showed a chimney falling down, are all our thoughts/visions/dreams, our own? Say we live in a world in which there is a mechanism of transmitting these thoughts but we do not possess the power to control the transmission. We are unaware of whether or how we can exchange them. This is exactly the dilemma we are in today.
ReplyDeleteNow imagine if these thoughts/information in our minds are leaking, and the leak is uncontrollable. Can we, surely say that the thought generated in our minds as a result of extra sensory perception did not leak into our mind from someone else's mind?
Imagine that the first person gave birth to the thought of the chimney falling, while parking his car near it which he later recalled in his dream. This thought during his dream leaked into the second person's mind while he was asleep. And probably they both were dreaming at the same point in time. It would be interesting to hear their description of their individual dreams and see if there are any similarities.
Mind blowing! Were you under the influence, while these thoughts originated, by any chance?!
ReplyDelete