Psychological difficulties of psi techniques

This is an offshoot of this thread, I replied here since it would so too far off topic of the original and really needs it's own for wider discussion.

How do you think we get the results? I'm unsure of this because ISTM, going by my very limited experience, that psi has something to do with transcending the ego. That spirituality - meaning reaching a non-egoic consciousness, however that's understood - is necessary for psychic ability (nonlocal awareness and action). My understanding so far is that it's the reaching of a consciousness higher than personal, egoic consciousness that causes psychic ability. Psi, being nonlocal, comes from a nonlocal mind. It can't be gained by wanting it in order to show off.

I don’t know what “ISTM” means and although you’re using very different words than I would I think I get what you’re trying to say, if not please correct me.

My main question back to you would be, it psi abilities are non local does that really mean they require a nonlocal consciousness? Would not an interface or equivalent to the non local component of reality do the job, or perhaps other methods as well? Why or why not? What is it about “wanting to show off” that would mechanically prevent psi from working and how do you know/how would you test that?

This is what distinguishes it from childish magical thinking. A child believes their own will can cause things to levitate. But real psychic ability is I believe different because it comes from the transcending of the individual.

Well if it were true that your own will can’t get results then I wouldn’t’ve gotten the results I’ve gotten and would never have developed abilities like potergeisting and shared dream induction through astral projection. Things that more than a few times I’ve set up and done willfully with success. For awhile my girlfriend would custom order dreams from me since it’s what I was practicing at the time, as I had also learned you could “gamemaster” them. Even if they suffer the same temporal problems as remote viewing that I’ve yet to solve.

But I only developed those abilities because I defined the goal of my training to be to find a way to control things directly myself. I did run into a lot of the instability problems that it sounds like you’re referring to, and I understand why pretty much everyone concludes that you can’t control things directly after hitting that wall. But I was unwilling to compromise and accept anything less than direct control. So I spent quite awhile testing them and trying to figure out why things worked sometimes and not others, what all the common factors were, and then distilled that into a concentrated solution of specialized sensations so that things would work based on my will. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s certainly past the proof of concept stage.

I would argue that truly childish thinking is believing that you don’t even have the option of controlling it yourself, that you are forever subservient to some external thing who’s permission you effectively have to ask to get the chance of getting results that you want. The end goal of my training is to be able to demonstrate that such thinking is not required and is in fact self damaging. That magic is nothing but a skill that literally anyone can learn and perform. Besides, the idea that one’s locus of control is absolutely external to the person is well established in the field of clinical psychology to be incredibly unhealthy. Keyword is “absolutely”, there’s no problem with the concept that one’s locus of control can be conditionally external. I just want to help provide the means of physically realizing that for people.

I support science and results, rather than blind faith, but I think there's a baby and bathwater issue. If psi comes about in people because of their ability to go beyond their ordinary self and their ordinary stream of thoughts, then it's not part of atheism and individualism. Certainly on the tests, for example, whenever I've tried to guess or force the right answer I miss it. It's only by relaxing and listening with empathy towards the different answers that sometimes the answer comes. While there are certainly bad things about religions - if they encourage people to let go of the self to some degree then I'd think they're more conducive to developing psi than an individualist belief system.

Although I get where you’re coming from with your experimental results I’m not the only one who’s noticed the link between religion/spirituality and psi deficiencies. I did a whole bunch of stuff, mostly between 2015 and 2016, to figure out why things seem to work better some ways than others. I’ve cataloged some of this in my energy explanation thread, Something that I will likely never be able to fully complete due to the sheer amount of supporting experiences, theories and whatnot I’d need to write up for it to cite all the various things that led to the conclusions I’ve come to and why they're that and not something else. 

The short version of what the evidence shows so far is that “energy” shares many properties with fluids such as responding to pressure differences and the ability to condense and become more viscous. It also follows your attention pretty much to the letter. And since like other fluids energy doesn’t seem to like to be close to itself it needs to be condensed in order to have any appreciable impact on the physical world. But unlike muscles your energy doesn’t have a convenient skeleton or structure to keep it stable, your mind needs to provide all of that for it, constantly. Which means that even under normal circumstances controlling it is like trying to pressurize air without a bottle. With such extreme psychological requirements at the base level, it was no surprise to hear Lyn Beauchaman say the three things that make it impossible for someone to succeed are the exact same three things that I found:

1: fear of the unknown

2: fear of crossing a religious boundary, example: believing in a religion that says astral projection is blasphemy.

3: attributing everything to spirituality or religious things, example: Believing pretty much everything you experience is a sign from god or spirits

It’s also no surprise then that no animals have evolved strong psychic abilities, a favorite criticism of psi skeptics. It’s the same reason animals didn’t evolve reinforced titanium skeletons, rocket boosters, and 50 caliber machine guns. Those things are all very resource taxing compared to bone, legs and teeth. and in an environment where resources are scarce and you have to fight to survive, the most adaptable, resource efficient thing wins. There's lightbulbs that  require more power to run than the human body. Likewise strong psychic abilities are so horrendously unstable as to be almost totally maladaptive under those circumstances. But much like all the useful things humans have managed to build out of “inefficient” things like steel and silicone, it doesn’t mean psi isn’t real or can’t be applied in an equally powerful way, it just requires it to be approached in a way that maximizes efficiency. Much like how you can show a proof of concept of steam power by boiling some water over an open flame and watching as the steam slowly but surely moves a pinwheel every once in awhile. That’s a far cry from the applications of that concept that led to the industrial revolution.

There were probably “steam skeptics” back then that believed it was impossible to harness enough power from such a concept to allow you to do what those machines were and are capable of doing. But I guess it sucks to be them, eh?

Much like steam power, harnessing psi power is going to require a lot of refinement of the concept and constant reevaluation of effective techniques. For example, you got results with empathy but have you thought about why empathy works? Have you thought about what component of empathy is the one that makes you more able to feel the right card? Or did you stop at “empathy works, therefore empathy is required”?

I’ve been doing that work, and I found that there are components of certain emotions or sensations that are relatively common among the ones that work. So I worked on distilling that component out from those other sensations and making a specialized “targeting” sensation out of it. It’s not 100% perfect, but it is much better than using love, empathy, anger, etc. Because it’s “the thing” that makes those emotions work for targeting. Much like how iron is “the thing” that makes Tektite valuable. It’s just that, there’s a lot of useless stuff with the iron you gotta refine out first.

And I’m not saying that as a jab or anything, I’m saying it because this is all part of why, absolutely, there is a reason that theism and spirituality need to not be a part of this. And that reason is not in any way prejudicial but entirely based on effectiveness. The one advantage that religious and spiritual people have when it comes to learning magic is they’re really good at getting things done at the start. Something else that wasn’t surprising after what I learned in 2015-2016 about the perception of the “authority of reality” as I call it. The problem is that although those people start off really good, they quickly hit a wall due to their self limiting and narrowing beliefs, and just stop progressing. So it’s great that their way of thinking gets that good jump start, but it’d be a lot better if we figured out why that is and then refined out “the thing” that makes that happen from it, and got rid of the rest.

Consider the grey parrot named N’Kisi studied by Rupert Sheldrake.