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Originally Posted by John Freestone  If, for instance, I decide that I can predict the future, and I'm a bit wooly in my thinking, and I experiment by taking something random like "mouse", and I sit and concentrate on images of mice for an hour, chanting "mouse, mouse, mouse", and then I'm sitting later watching TV and suddenly a trailer for a wildlife documentary includes a mouse, I will consider this good evidence and think I'm making progress. This is the kind of 'evidence' people 'find' all the time, but if you learn about the principles involved in this kind of thing, you discover that there are natural psychological pressures to believe these are significant events when they are pure coincidence.
I dare to say "are" rather than "might be" coincidence because of the weight of scientifically tested, repeatable evidence for such self-delusive functions of the mind. Indeed, the sad thing is that LoA and IM theories notice the effects, but misinterpret their meaning. Not only do they include all sorts of false positive 'evidence' (indeed, if it was a field vole in the trailer, or an advert for a computer mouse, the wooly thinker might include it), they ignore evidence against. When challenged to make something change out there in subjective reality, and they can't manage it, they find excuses - they're not masterful enough yet, their preconceptions are too strong, they're having an off day, anything to allow them to continue to believe they're psychic. The history of psychic research is absolutely full of such people, sincere believers who are sure they can prove their abilities, who go away angry because the scientists, with their more level-headed approach, find that their predictions or readings are correct no more often than one would expect by chance.
There's a difference between saying "I tend to see what I want to see" and "My beliefs change reality". |
I have problems with all the same things you mention here about inconsistency in results, and then wondering how much really is pure coincidence.
With the example you give about the mice, what's missing is something that is really very weird, weird enough that other people are a bit freaked by it and don't just pass it off as coincidence. Now first, I would never do this with mice, because I would wind up with a house full of mice
, but if I did, I'm pretty sure what I would get is an ad for a computer mouse, because that seems to be the way this tends to work for me. It always seems like I'm getting a result that is humorous. At least it's humorous to the universe, it isn't always humorous to me.
I have no explanation why these things seem so random. I could be a complete skeptic and say it's because coincidences are bound to happen, and because of my intense curiosity about this subject, I might notice them more. Or, I could be more agnostic like I actually am, and get freaked when the coincidences seem really very weird, but still want to know why these events seem so random and uncontrollable.
I told a story on the forum at some point about handing my girlfriend a birthday present while we were at her parents' house, and they had some wildlife show on the tv, and I had wrapped her gift in paper with hippos and other exotic animals on it, and at the exact moment she started to open it, a hippo appeared on the tv that looked exactly the same as the hippo on top of this present, and I mean exactly the same, it was so strange, I pointed at the tv and went "Look! Look!" and she looked and we were both kinda freaked out by that.
Trying to calculate odds of random events like that is kind of impossible though. What are the odds her parents would have a wildlife show on, and one that would show hippos, and that I would use wildlife paper to wrap her present, and that she would open the present right at the moment a hippo would show up on tv, etc.
Events like this can get more and more bizarre as you make the odds wider. Like, if her parents never watched tv, and none of us have any interest in wildlife, but they happened to have the tv on because there was a tornado warning. And they had on a soap opera, but there was an ad for the wildlife show. And the ad showed the hippo. And I never buy wrapping paper with wildlife on it, but happened to get some free in the mail. And then my friend got a card from her son with a hippo on front and it said "Hippo birthday to you!" And so on.