The Tiers Of Psychic Powers
Are we psychic? For long, we have treated the mind as an "entity" to hold and process our "conscious" and "unconscious" (or "subconscious", as it is nowadays called) emotions and thoughts which come from some unknown "source". We also treat the mind as an "entity" into which we "pull" memories from a huge archive located "somewhere", to process every now and then. Is this all that the mind can do? Or is it capable of doing more? Does our mind possess powers that we are not aware of? In other words, are we psychic? This was the question whose answer we had set out to seek in an earlier article.
_*In that article, we took cognizance of the fact that the stuff we see on the screen or read in the books are nothing but creative outpourings of hired professionals of creative departments of entertainment companies, who are investing their imagination in the best way possible that will earn both them and their masters wads of money, and that this exercise does not make them anymore an expert on the subject of psychic powers than the rest of us. Good entertainers, they. However, their role in giving us the right direction is rather limited, other than to stoke our imagination about what could be possible if only we "apply our mind".
It also dawned on us that we cannot rely upon the romanticized and entrenched professions - such as tasseomancy, scrying, and mediumship - to show us the way to discovering what psychic powers we hold to give us the insights. There is more light than substance around and in these special gifts, and we come away from encounters with the practitioners even more confused and befuddled if not overawed and mesmerized. And it doesn't help when we are confronted with the doubt as to whether the claimant to such powers is indeed genuine? Or are they yet another charlatan?
_*This man, it is said, would go into a trance state with the help of a hypnotist and then would give "readings" on issues faced and questions posed by people while in this state. Cayce could perform remotely too, so these people need not be in his physical vicinity during the trance. The subjects he dealt with in his readings were diverse, ranging from personal health to business advice, from Akashic Records to dream-interpretation.
The man has both his share of supporters and critics; in fact people have obtained doctorates by writing critiques on Edgar Cayce's work. Cayce's mystical talent came to light very accidentally. For wannabe psychics, the question is: presuming that his talents were not quackery, how did Cayce get to tap into this magnificent power of his mind? Do we have to wait for some accident similar to Cayce's for the Power to reveal itself? Or is there some systematic technique to reach this hidden treasure?
At the same time, we also realize that there are certain powers for which there is no "rational", "scientific" justification in this world, yet. We discussed the examples of dowsing and blindsight in the earlier article to demonstrate how science either trashes their innate value or refuses to recognize them as belonging to the psychic domain. At its current stage of maturity, science takes the "unscientific" stand rather steadfastly, that just because it does not have the appropriate instruments to validate or convincingly explain these powers; ergo, the powers do not exist even when they are staring in the face. If you want to see hubris at its ugliest best, you don't have to look far.
_*The domain also holds a repository of studies such as ones that required people to guess who the caller might be when the telephone rings, or guess what card from a pack of playing cards a "psychic-signal sender" must be holding while sitting in another room. Some researchers publish papers that emphatically claim that most people (especially, and overwhelmingly, women) have an uncanny ability to intuit the caller's identity even before they hear the caller's voice or before the caller introduces themselves. This they conjecture happens because the caller sets their intention on the receiver while making the call. And when somebody focuses their mind on you, you get to "know" - is what these researchers say. (One example of such a study is this.) But there are opponents who come out with their own set of data that claims telephone telepathy to be all hokum. (Here is one example that discounts telephone telepathy).
The studies have continued using newer technologies. A paper for example - published in the Journal of Science and Healing - discusses a study that required people to guess the correct identity of the person who sent an SMS to their cell phone - from amongst 3 SMS-senders. The study has reported a success rate of slightly below 38%. Mathematically, there's a 33.33% probability that people will correctly guess who amongst the three possible senders sent them the SMS. The success rate reported by the study is therefore higher than the mathematical probability. So should we conclude that whatever else we may not possess, we at least possess the gift of guessing who is thinking about us? Wait. Quite likely, some other researcher will come out with a study that will contradict these results, taking us back to Square One!
If at all there was any line drawn between behavior which may be considered as a manifestation of psychic powers (which science doesn't believe in anyway) and behavior which is schizophrenic, delusionary and therefore abnormal (which is a domain science understands and vibes with) - this line has over time been blurred to the point of becoming almost invisible. It is not therefore uncommon for white-coats to look upon anybody claiming to possess psychic powers as a "mental patient" in need of observation, treatment and care. Psychic - psychotic - psychosis - asylum - anti-psychotic. The words resonate synonymically in popular lexicon.
_*That delusion is a hallmark of psychosis – that it is an important psychiatric symptom -, is universally acknowledged in the domain of psychopathology. But how exactly do you define this term? Karl Jaspers, one of the gurus of Psychiatry, equated delusion with madness, a "psychologically irreducible" state. Psychopathologists have to contend with delusions harbored by schizophrenics, the exaggerated beliefs of anorectics, and the convictions of regular attendees of religious gatherings. Every one of them experiences their particular delusion as "certain, requiring no proof and no evidence." Before firmly concluding that the subject sitting before them indeed suffers from delusional disorder, the doctor has to carefully filter the subject's statements through the chromatograph of a host of caveats - from plain daftness to hypochondria to nihilism to depersonalization to solipsism to overripe imagination to multiple personality disorder to ... which makes it a tough call - Is the subject deluded, or no???
Now to this cauldron is added the claims made by people who say they possess psychic powers, who say they can intuit the emotions and thoughts flitting through the mind of a person located a thousand miles away. Emerging from the study after a session with a confirmed schizophrenic who claimed they heard "the voice of God" the other day commanding them to do this and that, the doctor will usually not - and in reality does not - hesitate to club these psychics with their patient!
Journalists, writers and other members of the communications media pick up these subtle vibrations coming from the scientific establishment and propagate them across society's echelons. Couple these with the image of the "weird" associated with anything got to do with the capabilities of the mind as projected by the entertainment industry, and it is no surprise that we - from the general public - view with heavy doses of both skepticism and fear, the idea of what we can and cannot do with our mind.
James Kirk, Jill Teed and Alfred Humphreys, ShareNow/Mag1955.
Remember the clip from the movie "Powder" that we discussed in the earlier article? Where people are afraid of the boy who can transmit a dying animal's suffering to other humans? The clip above has a similar feel to it. The scene above beautifully captures the dilemma faced by "ordinary" folks - muggles, actually - when confronted with instances of others who have succeeded to tap into the hidden powers of the mind. This confrontation becomes especially angst-ridden when these "others" is one of their own.
"You have to understand. We thought Bobby was going to the school for the gifted. We just didn't realize that (he was a mutant)." "The 'mutant problem' is a little ... complicated."
So there is no option but to disown the one who up until now was one of their own. That is the power of the fear about what the power of our own mind can do. And this fear puts paid to any desire to develop psychic powers - we simply don't make any attempt.
It is from this background that we approach the question: what treasure of psychic powers lie hidden in our mind? Exactly what could these powers be? To answer this, let's begin by first defining slightly more formally what we mean by the term "psychic powers" that we have been harping about all this while. Having been disappointed by traditional science's blinkered vision, we turn toward the triad of philosophy, psychology and metaphysics to attempt to work out the answer.
In this article our modus operandi is to formulate a list of our own hypotheses about what our mind should / must be capable of doing, besides the taken-for-granted faculty of helping us feel, think and reminisce. Painting broad strokes on the canvas of the possible, we envision different "tiers" of powers of the mind that we can systematically begin to inculcate one after another - Tier One, Tier Two, Tier Three and so on. As we progress from Tier One onwards, the level of difficulty to master each tier will increase, but so will our confidence.
_*So here goes. Quest for Nirvana's version of "De Anima". We begin by positing that the "mind" is a "granular", sublime entity. We state that the mind is granularized and made distinct and detached from the rest of the anima mundi by virtue of it being housed in the four-dimensional, gross entity we call the "body". The mind remains so housed till the last breath is exhaled from the lungs, where after it is "free" to lose its granular, independent existence and dissolve itself in the anima mundi. We are of course taking refuge here in the Dualist / Dvaita metaphysical school of thought. We are also being careful in not using the word "soul" or "atman" right now and are instead keeping things as "simple" as can be. Discussing the why and where-for behind this most complex of Universe's architectures that creates individual, "living" entities out of the apeiron mass and dissolves it back into the oblivion it came from - is beyond the scope of the present discussion; we take it as given.
_*We further posit that the treasure of powers we have all along been harping about are nothing but "characteristics" or "properties" of the mind. The ability to feel, think and reminisce is a fundamental property of the mind that is gifted to us naturally when we slip into the costume being processed inside the womb. With every passing moment from the time the umbilical cord is cut, we begin becoming more and more aware of this fundamental property. The first gasp of breath that blows air into the collapsed lungs, expanding them like two tiny balloons, kick-starts the first emotion of bawling complaint, an emotion that will linger till the last gasp!
It must be the emotion of fear towards the strangeness of the new atmosphere outside the comfortable warmth of the uterus, the new sensations, which must have caused you and me to bawl thus. Ironical, isn't it, to have to begin our life's saga with a bawl? Anyway, this emotion is most likely the first that our mind gets to process after coming into this world as an integrated, mind-and-body systemic whole. And later we use the fundamental property of the mind to explore and discover the external world. Much in the same way, we can use this fundamental property to explore the world within and discover its other properties. We have chosen to allude to these properties as "powers" because of the inherent sense of exercising control over our life that this nomenclature gives.
_*In this scenario, the first "object" that the mind interfaces with, in fact, the only object that the mind directly ever interfaces with in the lifetime from the first to the last breath, is the body itself. This brings us to Tier One of our psychic powers. Tier One is the basic tier of powers that we must be able to inculcate with the barest difficulty. The primal powers that we expect the mind to possess are that of healing. To be able to heal one’s own body and maintain the pristine stasis that has been bestowed by Nature, must be the most fundamental concern of any power. Especially since the body "houses" the mind, and who wouldn’t want one’s dwelling to be clean and hygienic? Mastering this first tier of psychic powers will itself resolve a majority of our problems!
With the powers developed in this, the basic tier, I can heal the arthritis that has inexorably been taking control over my bones. I should be able to reinvigorate the pancreatic gland that had stopped oozing the juice to regulate my blood sugar. I will have the ability to cajole the thyroid gland to sputter back into life and perform its job more carefully. Disciplining the cells misbehaving in the bloodstream which doctors are vainly trying to keep in control through chemotherapy, should become possible. These are some of the gains, we hypothesize, that should be possible by developing psychic powers at the very basic level. Tier One, we have chosen to call this set of psychic powers.
Let's take this hypothesis a bit further. Can I arrest cell-ageing? In other words, if I discover / develop this Tier One psychic power at the age of 45, will my body’s further degradation stop from here on? Will I continue to "look" and "feel" like an individual of 45 years even forty-five years from now? Now let's take this one step even further. Can I reverse cell-ageing? Can I rejuvenate and return back to my youth? I promise I won't repeat the same mistakes of youth this time around! So will I have defied death? Will I have achieved immortality? There's a downside to all this. And it is the shutting down of the close to one trillion US dollar pharmaceutical industry, the closing down of the clinics and the hospitals, and the diversion of manpower away from the traditional healing infrastructure, including centers of learning. Can we allow the mastering of Tier One to topple the delicate stasis of economy?
_*Part of Indic mythology, Ashwatthama was a warrior who fought in the grand, 18-day war that is popularly known as the "Mahabharata". The enemy spread the rumor of this man's death to get his father to temporarily lay down his weapons, which deceit was the only way for the enemy to slay the father. In his final battle, Ashwatthama directed the powerful "Brahma Astra" weapon towards the womb of a pregnant woman belonging to the enemy's family, killing the fetus. In perhaps the only instance of its kind in Indic mythology, the dead fetus was revived back to life. As nemesis, upon Ashwatthama was bestowed the curse of immortality.
Why should immortality be a curse? Because Ashwatthama was to spend the rest of his days - which is forever - as a leper without treatment, an unwanted castaway, who can never come near any living being, isolated and ostracized from human civilization. Legend has it that Ashwatthama walks the earth to this day.
The moral of the story for us? When developing the psychic powers to arrest ageing, be careful about the state of the body when it is arrested! In other words, develop psychic powers tier-by-tier.
Continuing with our modus operandi of defining psychic powers, let's move on to Tier Two. Here we shift our absorption and obsession with one's own body to the grid of the anima mundi which connects us to the minds of the other beings. While the body engages in interaction with other bodies at the physical level, the mind too is engaged in interacting with other minds at the ethereal level. The "simplest" power in Tier Two appears to be mind-to-mind communication, popularly known as telepathy (a shade different from the intuition of identifying who has called on the phone). To certain extent, mind-to-mind communication already happens "along the way", without our being "conscious" about it. Ask couples - who have spent a lifetime together - how their hunches and intuitions about what the other is thinking is usually so bang on target! Or ask people who are in deep love with each other how they can intuit what is going on in the other party's mind! The challenge in this Tier is to perform this task with individuals who are not in one's physical vicinity, and / or who one doesn't know much about.
Thoughts are already used by the disabled - such as amputees and tetraplegics - to control physical objects. (Here is an article on this blog that talks about this ability: "Your Emotions And Thoughts Have Incredible Power! Learn To Harness Them...". In the coming years, look forward to your kids playing video games with their mind. Will it come as a surprise, if your child comes home to announce one day that they have been awarded the "Best Psychic" prize from Sega or Sony? The word "psychic" will by then have shed all its negative connotations, and taken on a meaning that it richly deserves.
The same technology will soon be embedded in industrial control machines. Told you, you have it in you to harness your psychic powers!
Mind-to-mind communication being a two-way street, both the minds have to develop this Tier Two power in order for the dialog to take place. If one party has mastered this power while the other party is still lagging behind, then the most that can happen is the sender's thoughts getting "impinged" on the mindscape of the receiver. If the receiver is an absolute "muggle" and is not aware of the powers of the sender, or if the sender is a stranger to them, then there is every likelihood that they will confuse the thought streams coming from an external agency with their own thought streams emerging from within. It is this capability that movies and stories of fiction capitalize to the hilt when they want to show how somebody in villain's makeup and costume "controls" their victim before the hero or heroine comes to the rescue.
Dr. Sheldrake incidentally was physically attacked by somebody who thought the good doctor was using mind control techniques on him. Like the two edges of a sword, the mind too perhaps has double-edges! Any power in this world, for that matter, has double edges. Use carefully, when you develop your psychic powers!
But when both the streets are open, then you can have fun! All you have to do is to set your intention to communicate with a particular person, and hey presto! The communication gets established. And it will not matter whether the person is sitting in the next cubicle or driving a car 9,000 miles away. And this can be extended to multi-way conferencing. So you can have people from continents X, Y and Z chatting with each other over the telepathic network. Tell me, is Tier Two difficult?
Tier Three, we hypothesize, is where things become exciting. This is where we as an integrated, whole, mind-body unit begin to detach from the biome we are embedded in. Say for instance, the mind switches off the body's need to go look for water or forage for food. The mind similarly switches off the need to sleep, and permanently opens up the sluice of abundant energy that will keep us cheerful and bouncing all the time, no matter how busy our schedule and how taxing our deadlines. We should be able to develop immunity to extreme weather conditions, after mastering this tier.
_*In case you are beginning to wonder whether this article is turning out to be even more fantastic than the fantasia woven by the comic-book and movie-script writers, here is one evidence of the powers that are waiting to be harvested; if only you begin to believe in yourself. Mr. Manek is said to receive all the daily nourishment required by his body through the practice of sun-gazing, which he is said to perform every day. This subsistence on solar energy and water has even been given a name after him: the HRM phenomenon.
The caveat? Critics say the act of gazing at the sun can and does cause solar retinopathy. JREF, James Randi's organization, has questioned the truthfulness of the claim.
Taking a neutral stand; for us, seekers of truth, the fact that there is an individual who has (perhaps successfully) shown how the body's dependence on food for subsistence can be reduced, hints at the ability of this - or similar - power to be within reach, if only we try - albeit keeping safety foremost. But then, mastering Tier One should take care of the safety angle, will it not?
Let's take this detachment to its logical extension. How about the need for having to continuously inhale and exhale air - that most vital biomarker of life? The lungs that had expanded, like little balloons, when we had gasped that first breath in, remember? Can we shut this process off, too, and yet, continue to survive? After reaching Tier Three, this continuous interchange of gross gases appears so primitive! Reminds one of the periodic interchange of signals between a cell phone and the nearest tower; the interchange assures the controlling computer sitting somewhere that the cell phone is alive and can be tracked. As I said, 'tis so primitive! Mastering Tier Three should free us from the stultifying control of that Somebody Sitting Somewhere keeping tab of our existence. As for the implications and consequences of this freedom....
It is in the further tiers that the creative artists have excelled in building their elaborate structures of phantasma. Manipulating the elements of nature is what their characters do all the time. You will find somebody defying gravity and levitating at will. Somebody else will bend the direction of Time and either fast-rewind or fast-forward. Yet another will be able to fiddle with weather and make the entire climatic system follow their diktat, may be even predict (or cause?) earthquakes or tsunamis. An alchemist will spring from nowhere to transform gold into some even more precious metal. Can we as newbie wannabe psychics ever reach these tiers? It is like asking a child who has just arrived at the kindergarten on the first day to visualize what goal statement they would like to prepare for their Ph.D. thirty years hence.
_*This then is one possible answer to the question "what exactly are psychic powers?": beginning from the fundamental properties, build up what we expect our mind to be capable of, tier-by-tier. Call it a flight of fancy, or call it an analytical approach to answering a difficult question. There are others who might take a different route to this Tier-construction. Spiritualists for example might wonder why we are so obsessed with the material - the body and the people -, and perhaps go off on a different tangent altogether. For them, the first Tier to master more appropriately would be, say, getting out of the recurring cycles of reincarnation. For them, this is the one and only tier to aim for; anything less is not acceptable. Metaphysicians on the other hand might want to take a more intellectual line and seek to develop for Tier One, powers that can help appreciate the causality behind every action. Or to develop the power to discern that square pegs can go into only holes that are square and not round. Romantic mystics might want to first focus on developing the power to replace an unfulfillable turbulent yearning of reaching-out... with the calm resignation of letting-go. Many perspectives, multiple tiers.
Link: 
The first clip shows his intuition nagging him about something going wrong in the vending room where Michaud is sitting with the bomb, apparently with the objective of disarm it. The second clip shows how he chooses the "path least taken", and ultimately bumps into the railway track where the train is carrying the unsigned trucks on its flat beds. The final clip shows him mentally priming himself to flee the chamber in the nick of time when the bees were about to be unleashed. And to think that Mulder is called "Spooky Mulder" behind his back, because of his belief that his sister has been abducted by aliens, and also because of his beliefs in the existence of the E.T.
Now, if only we could hone our "intuition" - a psychic power - to warn us of any impending danger! It will help us so immensely in our day-to-day life. It will be so easy to judge, for example, that the supplier giving that swank PowerPoint presentation will ultimately deliver inferior quality. Or that the sincere-sounding customer does not deserve to be given credit. Or that the glib HR executive conducting the interview for the job is hiding that the company is not in a position to pay next month's salaries. Life would become so much easier if, like Mulder, we too got those inner signals before it is too late.
Negotiating these tiers will help us develop into even more empowered and hopefully wiser versions of ourselves. You want a better version of yourself, don't you? Then approach this discipline with an open mind and allow yourself to acknowledge and welcome into your conscious all that the hidden precincts of the mind have to reveal.
We find that there exist people who are already in possession of special gifts without having first developed powers that in our eyes are fundamental in nature. One possible analogy to this phenomenon are prodigies such as Mozart. This genius of music could compose the most intricately beautiful pieces at the age of five. After getting up from his table with the satisfaction of achievement, he must have had to take the assistance of some elder to tie his shoe laces! In some individuals, psychical growth perhaps takes place similarly earlier. Which is quite okay, that is the diversity of Nature. Who are we to question why?
Placing this tiered definition of psychic powers in the public domain, the hope is that it will inspire others to make their attempt to build similar constructs founded on logic and latest discoveries of human capabilities, constructs that will be more meaningful than subjective hype and hoopla. After having defined psychic powers from what is hopefully an unbiased perspective, in subsequent articles we will attempt to look at the mind's architecture as theorized by the triad of philosophy, psychology and metaphysics.
Posts
3 comments:
BRavo!
Great article! Enjoyed it very much.
Divya
Enjoying your articles, Sanjay! I will be spending the weekend absorbing all the awesome stuff here.
Karmen
It is true that the idea of psychic powers have always been mired in controversies. The sciences (such as psychology, psychiatry) have pooh-poohed evidences of psychic powers without giving any plausible rationale. These professionals find it below dignity to even acknowledge that they do not know anything about these powers.
Other so-called "experts" come out with either some mystical mumbo-jumbo or they write compilations of experiences of isolated cases who have experienced psychic powers.
In this background, your effort at making an attempt to put a structure to the concept is very commendable, Sanjay. Hope others take the cue and continue building more robust theoretical frameworks, waiting for, as you said, ordinary folks to develop the psychic powers.
Great job, well done!
Dr. T.Z.
Post a Comment