Contents:  

1. Introduction

2. The Nature of Psi

3. Psychic Phenomena

4. Divining Devices

5. Consciousness

Introduction

The prevalent belief in the existence of a spiritual world comes from one observation, that when we look at the world, there exists something within us (which I generally call consciousness, although this word is not well defined, often being used differently by different people) that sees the world through a single unified perception and which cares (as opposed to simply showing an automated neural reaction).  Although religions and other spiritual belief systems try to flesh out this basic perception, to explain how it is that the universe has a spiritual nature and why it is that we feel, care and have ethics, all of these attempts use other sources of evidence to achieve this.  In ancient times this meant explaining spiritual matters in terms that primitive, uneducated people of the time could understand (none of the ancient religious leaders, or anyone else from those times for that matter, had more than the equivalent of a modern public school education).  Typically, these explanations took the form of common experience, that a body of water develops waves when someone stirs it, that water flows when someone pours it, that wind blows when someone blows it and that plants grow because someone plants them.  Although the idea of explaining phenomena as being produced by an ever-present, all-powerful, invisible person seems foolish from the modern scientific perspective, the commonsensical nature of these explanations, that they fit with common experience, made them compelling to early peoples.  Although the children of these beliefs, the current religions, persist do to simplistic appeal, popular support and tradition, they provide almost no evidence on which to determine the truth of spirituality.  The only valid evidence for spirituality that the religions hold is the fact that people seek spiritual explanations of the world, that despite the success of science at explaining the world we live in, there exists rational and intelligent people who still find this explanation incomplete.  The reason for this sense of incompleteness is consciousness, that anyone who understands science knows full well that there is nothing within current scientific theory that explains their personal experience of the world, and that if a science were to develop that could explain this experience, it would have to severely deviate from current scientific philosophy.  If we are to work out the nature of spirituality, however, serious, valid sources of evidence are required.

Now, although any rational theory of spirituality must explain the properties of conscious experience, being as conscious experience is the only concrete evidence on which the belief in spirituality is based (a rational person would not conclude that a floating cloudlike light in the form of a person was the spirit of a deceased individual unless they already believed in spirits, there are other, more rational explanations for such a sight), analysis of this conscious experience alone is insufficient to identify the nature and properties of the spiritual world.  An interesting source of further evidence comes from parapsychology, in particular the observations of parapsychologists that random events appear to be effected by the mind of the observer without any identifiable mechanism.  If it is the case that an individual’s consciousness acts on random events to modify the outcome, then, since consciousness is the fundamental element of spirituality (the only element of spirituality we know with any degree of certainty to be true), these parapsychological observations could hold the key to the physical manifestation of spirituality, and hence the means by which spirituality could be measured and quantified.

The Nature of Psi

One of the most fundamental qualities of the universe, as fundamental as matter and conscious experience, is the universe’s non-contradictory nature.  In fact, it is the absence of contradictions that is the basis of logic, logic being an essential component of reasoning and mathematics, without which they would have no meaning.  If even a single contradiction were to ever materialize within the universe then reasoning and mathematics would be invalid, they would not apply to everything.  Since reasoning and, to a lesser extent, mathematics are fundamental to science, a single contradiction would render science invalid.  In order for science to apply universally, as the vast majority of people, particularly scientists, believe it does, the universe would have to be completely devoid of all contradiction, and as such if a potential contradiction were to present itself, the universe would have to function in such a way as to ensure that the contradiction would fail to occur.  If an individual were to attempt to travel back in time to kill their father before their conception, something would have to stop them.  If they managed to develop a means of traveling through time, then it would have to be the case that a banana peel causes them to trip and break their neck.  This presents an explanation for the nature of psychic phenomena (psi); when our actions lead towards potential contradictions we experience bad luck (detrimental psi) causing those actions to fail, when our actions reduce the number of potential contradictions then we experience good luck (beneficial psi).  Psi, of course, would not be the most efficient way to prevent such contradictions, however the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of time travel makes most blatant contradictions rare.

Now, although I have studied three such potential contradictions in depth (the document “Why ET never phones” contains a detailed analysis of two) and, as a result, have strong confidence that the structure of the universe does, in fact, allow for such potentials, this work is extensive and, for the most part, of a non-parapsychological nature and so it would not be justified to present it here simply to counter the critical assertion that such potential contradictions do not exist.  Rather, instead of trying to explain how psi acts to counter any particular contradiction, there are two generalities that apply to the prevention of all contradictions.  The first of these is that the more variety the universe has, the more potential paths or events that would be available for psi to induce, any one of which might be able to counter a contradiction.  The second is that the more randomness that exists the more on edge things will be to go one way versus the other, and hence the more sensitive the universe would be to psi, with psi having to exert less force in order to select between the potential paths or events available to it.  So, anything that increases variety or randomness will be supported by psi since by supporting these things psi would be supporting that which gives it greater power over the world, that which would make the world more sensitive to psi.  Therefore, by exerting beneficial force (luck) towards anything that increases variety or randomness in the world psi acts indirectly to serve its goal of a non-contradictory universe. 

Now, although a stone may have a great variety of crystalline structures within it, it is relatively unchanging over time, so this lack of change leaves it with little overall variety and the unmoving, unchanging nature of a rock makes it insensitive to psi.  The result of this is that a rock, and most any other inanimate object, has little luck, psi not being concerned with their fate.  Air, which is in constant motion, is a good instrument for psi since it is sensitive to minute forces, but it has no structure and therefore provides little variety.  It is only the simplicity of inanimate matter and gases, that they exist without any effort being exerted on them to exist, that makes them plentiful.  Life forms, on the other hand, are sensitive to psi in that the manipulation of a few molecules in their bodies can result in significant changes in behaviour, and slight variations in their environment can act to change their entire path through life.  Also, they provide great variety as a species, as individuals, and even over time; for example, if an individual changes their posture they change the pressures and densities throughout their body, and even in the ground they stand on.  All this makes life forms highly desirable to keep and maintain, so psi will favour anything that promotes the health and well being of such beings, thereby making them lucky.  Plants, being that they lack a nervous system, can only change themselves through growth.  Slight differences in the location and time that they grow, such as underground rocks, obstructions to light, different mineral distributions and water content of the soil, allows one plant to grow unique from any other.  And since plants generally undergo continuous growth throughout their lives, they are also in constant change.  Animals, however, undergo change primarily through behaviour, and so, where as plants typically change through growth, animals change through movement.  This behavioural change gives animals a far greater ability to produce variety and results in a greater sensitivity to psi since the animal is sensitive to variations in its own structure, i.e. its mental structure, as well as the external world.  A plant, on the other hand, can only react to the external world, never changing the nature of its reactions.  Furthermore, movement is a more efficient means of producing change than growth since it involves using the same structures over and over, whereas a plant has to create more of itself to create change.  As such, animals are more lucky, more favoured by psi than plants and plants, luckier than inanimate matter.

            The most important expression of psi, from our perspective, is its action on the brain since it is this action that produces pleasure and displeasure.  Stimulus in the brain coincides with increased knowledge, and hence the creation of memories.  Any memory, and hence any stimulus, adds to the complexity of an individual’s memories, and will thereby increase variety.  In addition to this, stimulus also increases neural connections, and hence creates physical variety.  So, stimulus will generally be desirable to psi regardless of whether or not it is of any direct value, and therefore psi supports the attainment of stimulus in general, meaningless or meaningful.  For example, many forms of pleasure, such as music and touch do not necessarily produce any benefit, but are still stimulating and pleasurable.  However, some stimulus contains knowledge which, if acted upon, could serve psi’s interests; for instance knowledge that leads an individual to create greater variety in the world, that increases their sensitivity to psi, or that increases their potential to experience future stimuli.  Such beneficial knowledge induces psi to further support such stimulus beyond the general luckiness psi provides towards the experience of any odd sensation.  Conversely, some stimulus could cause an individual to behave counter to the interests of psi, in which case the meaning of this stimulus would induce psi to counter the good luck it provides towards stimulus in general.  Pain generally acts opposite to stimulus, destroying memories and neural connections, and is therefore, in general, undesirable to psi.  However pain, like stimulus, can have meaning to it; it can destroy desirable behaviours, and thereby become even more undesirable than meaningless pain, or it could destroy undesirable behaviours, for example spanking a child for misbehaviour, thereby resulting in benefit.  Consequentially, psi may choose to exert force towards a painful situation, despite the undesirability of pain in general, if the overall effect is beneficial.

Now, psi generally act by taking something that is already likely to occur and making it occur.  This is since it takes relatively little force to turn something that is almost happening into something that is happening.  For example, the likelihood of spontaneously levitating without the help of a psychic force is so close to zero as to be effectively zero, and so psi cannot make it happen, having nothing to work with.  A coin toss, however, has a fifty-fifty chance of coming up one way or the other, and so psi has to exert very little force in order to effect this.  However, a coin is a large object (relatively speaking) and depending on which face is up when it is picked up, how it is tossed and perhaps other macroscopic factors, the coin will be biased towards landing in one position over the other on any given toss, which reduces psi’s power.  This is the case of apparently random vs. truly random events.  Just because we lack the ability to know which way an event, such as a coin toss, will turn out, does not mean that the event is random.  Most apparently random events (tosses), probably only have one possible outcome, and without this true randomness psi’s power is denied.  For example, if only one in ten coin tosses is actually truly random then psi would only be capable of controlling this one of the ten.  If a hundred tosses were made and psi intended to maximize the number of head that came up, forty-five coins, on average, would end up heads and forty-five tails regardless of psi’s intent, five that would have gone as tails would be switched to heads by psi and another five tosses, which were already headed towards heads, psi would leave alone.  As a result, if ten percent of coin tosses were truly random then the maximum average success rate would be fifty-five heads out of a hundred.  However, the more on edge the coins are to go one way or the other the less force psi needs to exert, and hence the greater the percentage of such events that would be truly random.  Since psi dominates over random events, it is this force that is responsible for luck, that causes chance to favour or oppose an individual, and as such the words psi and luck are often interchangeable when discussing psychic phenomena.

            Now, a coin toss is not innately lucky or unlucky on its own, and on its own such a toss should average fifty-fifty.  In order to be lucky or unlucky the result of the toss must be logically connected to a significant event, something that effects the world, or a small part of the world, so that if the coin comes up one way the event will go one way, but if the coin goes the other way, so will the event.  For example, doing the good deed of helping elderly people across the street may be of interest to psi.  So, we could act by tossing a coin a hundred times, noting the results of each toss, and afterwards stand at a crosswalk.  Each elderly individual who goes to cross would be represented by one toss, with the first person representing the first toss, the second, the second and so on.  If the coin reads heads we would help the individual, but if it reads tails we would ignore them.  If helping elderly people across the street is lucky (or unlucky) then a force should exert itself to push the coin tosses towards one result or the other.  However, there are a great deal of particularities to the expected behaviour of psi in this case.  For instance, if a researcher were to do the coin tosses, but the tosses came out fifty-fifty and so they decided the experiment was a failure and did not complete it by helping (and not helping) people out, then the logical connection would be broken and the experiment would be rendered invalid.  Likewise, if the experiment was left incomplete, the researcher giving up or failing to find enough people to help, then only the coin tosses involved in helping or intentionally not helping would be valid, those that were not gotten to, rendered invalid.  The logical connections between the events and the coin tosses must be present; if they are broken then the experiment will necessarily fail.  Beyond this, if the researcher were to greatly dislike helping people then the detriment of their experiencing displeasure would act counter to the benefit of helping.  This could potentially reverse the effect of the experiment and so the experiment might come out differently depending on the researcher, and even the researcher’s mood at a particular time.  Moreover, if the researcher or the people who see the results of the experiment hold onto beliefs that are counter to the existence of psi, if they gain their sense of purpose or community from such a belief, or would use the results for destructive purposes, then this would make the luckiest result pure randomness so that such people would be convinced that the experiment was a failure.  As such, psi makes exceedingly fine distinctions between different situations and then ‘choose’ the right response, a behaviour that can make predicting the actions of psi difficult. 

Psychic Phenomena

            The two most basic psychic behaviours that come out of this theory of psi are telekinesis and esp.  Now, as presented earlier, psi acts by exerting force to prevent or inhibit potential contradictions, with the experience of stimulus generally serving this goal and pain opposing it so that psi commonly acts to promote stimulation and prevent the experience of pain.  So, if a researcher were to ask a subject to try to exert telekinetic force on a coin toss in an effort to cause the coin always to land heads up, psi would typically only exert a force if there was some source of stimulus or pain.  If the individual were to gain pleasure from believing that they possess telekinetic ability, or displeasure from having such a belief dashed, then this would induce psi to act to make them believe they were successful.  This could be done by making the coin favour a heads up position, but it could also be accomplished by acting on the researcher to induce them to make errors, a possibility that will be discussed further shortly.  On the other hand, if the individual were to gain pleasure or avoid displeasure by not having telekinetic abilities, then the coin would favour a fifty-fifty outcome.  For example, some people hold onto beliefs or philosophies that would be threatened by psychism.  Finally, there are those who produce tails when asked to produce heads.  This can result from an individual’s need to maintain a sense of individuality, or it could come from the fact that many people have a tendency of looking for someone or something to blame for the difficulties in their lives.  If a telekinetic experiment were to convince such an individual that they have bad luck, that psi always acts against their interests, then this would give them something to blame, and thereby prevent them from exercising blame or loathing of themselves or others; the result being that they would induce less displeasure in theirs and others’ lives. 

            Besides the effects on the experiment by the subject, there will also be effects caused by the researcher and the people who later read the results.  Since psi is a result of the non-contradictory nature of the universe, and since two things that are in contradiction are in contradiction regardless of the distance in time or space that divides them, any individual who experiences stimulus or pain as a result of the experiment will exert a significant force through psi on that experiment.  The only effect distance and time can have on psi is the effect they have on the level of connection an individual has with the experiment.  The researcher will have the greatest psychic effect over the experiment since they are the most aware of every aspect of it.  The subjects are only connected to their part of the experiment, and so will exhibit a weaker, but still strong effect over the experiment, but so long as the number of subjects is large their effects should dominate over that of the researcher.  The readers of the experimental report will only be aware of that which the researcher writes down, that which the researcher considered significant, and as such, will typically have a relatively weak effect on the experiment.  However, the number of readers could potentially far exceed the number of people involved in the experiment, and thereby, could end up exerting the greatest effect.  Now, the readership will typically be a mixture of believers, sceptics and those people who accept the truth wherever it may lead them.  If psi were to act to produce positive results within a telekinetic experiment then the need of the believers for psychism to exist would be satisfied, but the needs of the sceptics would be denied.  Likewise, if the results were negative the sceptics would be satisfied, but the believers would not.  Because these two results are completely opposed, psi is put into a position where it is forced to displease someone.  However, if psi could please all the people all the time, it would maximize pleasure and minimize displeasure, but it cannot achieve this by making the results either positive or negative.  Psi could, however, induce error or ambiguity in a researcher’s results.  In this way, the believers would act by grabbing onto any positive results, while the sceptics would take any error or ambiguity as evidence that the parapsychologists are pursuing a red herring.  As such, by acting this way psi satisfies all the people all the time.

            Now, these are all passive effects of psi, psi responding to the effects the telekinetic experiment has on all the people involved.  However, when a researcher asks a subject to exercise telekinesis, the subject typically doesn’t just sit passively watching the results of the experiment, in the case of the coin toss, whether the coin comes up head or tails.  Rather, they will typically concentrate on the coin and try to force it to come out the way they want it to.  Now, in order to understand the nature of concentration, and hence its potential effect on psi, it is necessary to understand the nature of excitation. 

An analogy that fits the nature of excitation is that of a compressed gas canister (see my document on neurobiology for the precise mechanism of excitation).  When the value on the canister is closed, gas cannot escape, but it cannot be forced in to fill the tank either.  However, when the value is opened, the gas will quickly escape emptying the tank, but it is only when the value is open that gas can be forced in to fill it.  The brain acts in a similar fashion with respect to the formation and use of memories.  When the brain’s apparatus for the formation of memories is active, it can form memories from an individual’s experiences, but this sensitivity to forming memories also makes these memories sensitive to degeneration.  Now, if the individual experiences enough sensations, enough stimulus, the formation of memories will exceed the degeneration of memories, and since psi favours increased variety and complexity, it will support this.  However, if the levels of stimulation are insufficient then the degeneration of memories will dominate over memory formation, which is a state of affairs that psi opposes.  Since the level of sensations a person experiences is highly variable, sometimes life is interesting, sometimes it is boring, for the brain to leave this memory formation system fully active all the time would cause such an individual to go from the extremes of remembering everything around them in great detail, regardless of its significance, to having all their memories erased.  On the other hand, when this system is completely inactive the individual becomes comatose.  Since these situations are unacceptable, the brain has a mechanism for controlling the level of activity of this memory formation system.  Now, since the level of activity of this memory system controls the amount of sensation experienced, the amount of sensation that is used to form memories, the circumstances under which this system is most active will be those where an individual experiences the greatest pleasure.  However, the times when an individual experiences the greatest pleasure are those where they are in states of the greatest excitement, for example sexual excitement.  Likewise, when this memory formation system is most active is also when memories degenerate most rapidly.  However, not only do the greatest experiences of pleasure coincide with excitement, but also the most intense experiences of pain.  So, the level of excitement an individual experiences is related to the level of activity of the memory formation system, and as such it is reasonable to say that excitement is the level of memory formation.  Now, since concentration increases an individual’s awareness and experience of that which they are concentrating on, which, as explained, is what excitement does, concentration is the act, by such an individual, of inducing excitement within themselves towards something.  This is significance to psi since excitement increases the rate of increase or decrease of variety and complexity of memories.  When the individual is concentrating on something stimulating they create memories in abundance, which is a state of affairs that psi favours.  However, when they’re concentrating on something unstimulating, and hence undesirable, their memories degenerate, a state of affairs which psi opposes and must attempt to prevent.  Moreover, when the individual is not concentrating their memories are not increasing, but the memories they currently have are not degenerating either, and as such, psi will see nothing desirable or undesirable to support or oppose and so will remain dormant.  Therefore, as concentration increases the level of activity of psi will also increase.

Now, there are two ways concentration can exert psychic force.  The negative method is for the individual to concentrate for so long as psi does not do what they want.  The displeasure this concentrations induces as the mind degenerates opposes the interests of psi, and as such psi must exert a force to attempt to prevent this degeneration.  There are two ways psi could do this; one is to give the individual what they demand; the other is to act on the individual’s mind to get them to give up, to stop concentrating.  Now, coincidentally, the undesirable sensation of displeasure is a sensation that induces avoidance of that which produces it.  So, when the individual concentrates in a negative fashion, two things happen; one, their mind undergoes degeneration which induces psi to stop their concentration, and two, they experience the mysterious sensation of displeasure.  Therefore, the sensation of displeasure is analogous to psi’s action to prevent degeneration of the mind, generally through the prevention of pain.  Further, by symmetry it follows that pleasure must be analogous to psi’s efforts to support an individual’s mind, which it typically achieves through promotion of stimulating situations.  So, pleasure is typically, although not always, the equivalent of stimulation, and displeasure the equivalent of pain, and as such the words pleasure and displeasure are commonly used in the place of, or when people are in fact referring to, stimulus or pain.

Now, in general, negative concentration will fail in the case of a coin toss experiment.  This is since the coin flip takes the same amount of time to occur, regardless of whether the coin come up heads or tails, so when the individual concentrates on the coin their concentration will last the same amount of time, whichever facing comes up.  Since the same amount of concentration occurs regardless of the ultimate facing, the same amount of displeasure, and hence degeneration of the mind will occur regardless of what psi does.  Therefore, there will be no motivation for psi to make the facing come up the way the individual demands.  However, it is be possible to flip this behaviour around.  Instead of the individual concentrating on the coin to come up with a particular facing, they could, rather, concentrate on the coin after the flip, concentrating on the coin only if it were to fail to come out the way they desire.  The result of this is that they would only experience mental degeneration, and the consequent displeasure if their attempt to control the toss fails, and as such psi would try to prevent this failure by exerting a force on the coin to favour the demanded facing.

A second method of using concentration to effect psi, free concentration, is for an individual to simply use concentration to make themselves sensitive to pleasurable or displeasant experiences, and then to allow psi to react as it chooses.  In this way, by concentrating on an event that could go more than one way, if one of these possibilities would be pleasurable then psi would want to promote this possibility over those possibilities that would be displeasant or neutral.  By doing so, psi would take advantage of the sensitivity to sensations that concentration produces to increase the variety and complexity of the mind.  On the other hand, if an individual were not to concentrate then they would not be sensitive to pleasure, and as such psi would see no reason to promoting one possibility over another since the individual would not be able to appreciate the results of its efforts.  So, in effect, concentration increases the amount of pleasure that would be experienced as a result of psi’s efforts, and thereby, increases psi’s interest in exerting an effort.  But, in order to gain the advantage of sensitivity to pleasure, psi must put up with the sensitivity to displeasure that concentration also produces.  So, whereas negative concentration will always be opposed by psi since it only leads to displeasure, the negative aspects of free concentration will be accepted since free concentration, overall, serves to allow psi to maximize pleasure.  Now, in the case of the coin toss, the act of concentration makes the individual more sensitive to experiencing pleasure when the coin faces the way they wish, and displeasure when it does not, and thereby will induce psi to exert a force to make it face as desired.  However, this brings up a problem. 

A coin does not induce any significant stimulation on its own, so the pleasure that is experienced from a coin toss would have to be of a complicated variety.  In fact, it would be expected that this pleasure would be highly variable and unpredictable, with different people favouring different results from the experiment and the effects of boredom having a strong influence.  So, in order to use concentration effectively it is necessary to find a method to determine when the subject of an individual’s concentration will be stimulating to them, and when it would not.  However, there is a pre-existing mechanism for drawing an individual towards things that produce pleasure; desire.  Now, there are two forms of desire, one caused by the operation of the brain and another produced by psi.  The brain form of desire is produced by the brain’s prediction of what the resultant experience of an action that it is considering would be.  If such a prediction suggests that the results would be stimulating then the brain will act towards carrying out the action that is being considered.  The psi form of desire is produced by psi’s direct action on the brain to promote the individual to pursue anything that serves psi’s interests.  Since it is in psi’s interest to produce stimulus, and hence pleasure in an individual’s brain, the individual’s psi based desires will usually coincides with their brain based desires.  However, since the brain’s predictions are imperfect, the brain having only so much mental ability, so much experience and limited perceptions, it will not always get things right; sometimes it will decide that something is desirable, but things will turn out unpleasant.  Psi, on the other hand,  can not err, however its interests may sometimes involve detriment to the individual.  So, psi may induce desire in an individual to do something that may not be in their personal self-interest, psi needing them to do something that benefits others, but which may be detrimental to themselves.  The result is that desire, of either form, will usually, but not always, coincides with the pursuit of something that would be stimulating and pleasant to the individual who experiences it.  As such, if an individual were to concentrate on something that they desire, typically they would be concentrating on something that is stimulating to them, and hence, something that, if psi were to make it happen, would serve psi’s interests.  And as such, psi would act towards trying to produce that desirable outcome.  In addition to desire, there is also need and fear.  Whereas desire is an expectation by psi of pleasure or the brain of stimulus, need is the expectation that something will prevent displeasure or pain while fear is the expectation that something will produce displeasure or pain.

Desire – expectation by psi/brain that a particular thing will produce pleasure/stimulus

Need – expectation by psi/brain that a particular thing will prevent displeasure/pain

Fear – expectation by psi/brain that a particular thing will produce displeasure/pain

Returning to the case of the coin toss experiment, if an individual desires or needs the coin to come up with a particular facing and concentrates on it, in so far as this desire or need is psi based, the coin will tend towards coming up as that facing.  If they fear the coin coming up with a particular facing, then their concentration will induce it to come up as the opposite facing.  However, if they do not care, or cease to care, i.e. get bored, then concentrating on the toss as it occurs will have no effect; psi gaining no benefit from their concentration, regardless of which facing comes up.

            Another potential experiment for studying telekinesis is the robotic arm attached to a randomizing device.  For example, a researcher could use a computer which reads the average rate of decaying atoms from a radioactive source and then compare this to the normal rate of atomic decay.  If the rate of atomic decay is greater than normal, the computer would be programmed to move the arm one way, but if the decay is less than normal, the computer would move it the other way.  Since the arm moves one way in response to a greater rate of atomic decay and the other way in response to a lesser rate, psi could exert its force to move the arm one way or the other by controlling this rate of decay.  So, if an individual were to use negative concentration to move the arm in one direction psi could end this self-induced displeasure by moving the arm the way it is demanded.  However, if psi were to move the arm in the opposite direction, this would not cause the individual to stop concentrating; it may, in fact, cause them to concentrate more so.  The result is that the more psi opposes the individual’s demands, the more displeasure they would experience, and hence, the more psi would be motivated to obey.  As a result, this type of apparatus should prove significantly more sensitive to negative concentration than the coin toss experiment.

            Now, although controlling psi may be tempting, it is not a wise idea.  As the saying goes, god gives those he loves what they need, god gives those he hates what they want.  This represents the concept of omniscience, the idea that an omniscient being would know what to do to ultimately lead an individual to happiness and contentment.  So, if god loves an individual, he would use his knowledge to ensure that that individual receives that which is truly valuable to them, but if he hates them, he would give them that which they think would benefit them, and then let them suffer the consequences of their arrogance.  Now, there are two ways to act on psi, to induce psi to output its force, the first being the concentration technique, and similar tricks, which act by trying to force or manipulate psi to do the individual’s bidding.  However, psi’s intent is the creation of pleasure and the prevention of displeasure, not obeying people.  If an individual were to insist on trying to force psi to their will, on using the negative form of concentration, psi may decide that that individual is not serving its interests and act accordingly to put an end to that situation.  The second means of inducing psi to output its force is, not to manipulate it at all, but rather for the individual to take psi’s intent to heart and act to create pleasure and prevent displeasure in the world.  In this way, psi could serve its intent, could act to produce pleasure and prevent displeasure by acting to protect and benefit that individual.  Now, since psi acts in response to anything that is significant to the making of its decisions, including the results of its own actions, psi is, in effect, omniscient, and as a result is capable of acting in such a way as to guaranty its own success.  Consequentially, if psi chooses to benefit an individual it is capable of ensuring that its actions will ultimately succeed.  On the other hand, if psi should choose to detriment an individual, even if that individual were proficient at forcing psi to their bidding, it would always be able to find some way of obeying them in such a way as to ultimately produce their destruction.  Therefore, the only wise way to use psi is towards the better serving of psi’s interests.  If an individual were to use free concentration, or other positive, pleasure based methods to motivate psi to do their will they would generally be serving psi’s interests, so psi would obey without generating a backlash.  However, if they were to create pleasure without any demands on psi then psi would decide how to respond to them, and as such they would gain the benefit of psi’s omniscient nature.

            In addition to its effects on random events, psi will also exhibit a strong effect on the brain.  This is since psi does not act on randomness, but rather, acts on things that are sensitive to very slight exertions of force, with both random events and elements of the brain being sensitive to such minute forces.  Now, in the same way people’s interests will effect a random event telekinetically, those same interests will also effect the brain to produce esp.  So, if a researcher were to choose a picture and ask a subject to identify the image without seeing it, the same factors that effect the success of the coin toss experiment would effect this experiment as well.  Those subjects, researchers, and readers of the researcher’s papers who would gain pleasure or avoid displeasure by the experiment succeeding (who gain enjoyment from psychic phenomena, who’s beliefs in such phenomena would be substantiated) would promote the subject’s success at identifying the image.  Those who gain pleasure or avoid displeasure by the experiment failing, would promote the subject’s failure.  Although these effects will be present, concentration will also have a strong effect on esp, in the same way as it effects telekinesis.  However, the effects of concentration vary sharply with the precise nature of the psychic method being exercised, as discussed earlier with the description of the differences between the coin toss and the robotic arm experiments.  For example, lets return to the experiment mention above, in which the researcher has the subject identify an unseen image.  When the subject concentrates on seeing an image, this would induce psi to create an image in their brain, however, it would in no way matter to psi what that image was.  Once the image appears in the subjects mind, they would be satisfied and stop concentrating, and thereby, psi could stop any acts of negative concentration.  Moreover, although their concentration would make them sensitive to the experience of the image, since they wouldn’t know that it is the wrong image, they would gain as much enjoyment from the image regardless of whether it was correct or not.  As a result, concentration will induce psi to produce an image in the subject’s mind, either to stop negative concentration or to take advantage of free concentration, however, there is no reason for psi to exert force to make that image coincide with the one the researcher happens to be holding.  An important point concerning this example is that this concentration, although it would not be producing esp, is producing an interesting phenomena.  This example shows that the images that are produced in the brain by concentration are, in fact, psychic in origin.  Moreover, other concentration based phenomena (concentrating to recall a memory, concentrating to come up with a solution to a problem) are also naturally occurring psychic behaviours where the individual attempts to manipulate psi, inducing psi to manipulate their brain in order to solve a problem.  Therefore, it can be concluded that the act of concentration is, in fact, the act of mental exertion of psychic force.

            Now, a different esp experiment could be set up, this one involving two subjects, a sender and a receiver.  In this experiment, the receiver acts by concentrating on seeing an image, and then describes the image that comes to mind with this description being sent, one way, to the sender so that the sender hears everything the receiver describes.  The sender, on the other hand, would be given a picture, but they would not concentrate on that picture; rather, they would concentrate on the words the receiver uses to describe that picture.  The effect of this is that the sender would be exercising a telekinetic effect on the brain of the receiver, with their concentration making themselves sensitive to the words of the receiver so that psi could promote those words that are desirable (typically the desirable words would be those that coincide with the picture) and suppresses those that are undesirable.  In this way, the receiver would induce psi to produce images in their mind, while the sender would induce psi to form those images into something sufficiently similar to that of the picture.  For this form of esp to work it is necessary for the focuses of the subjects’ concentrations to be correct; having the receiver concentrate on the sender, or the sender concentrate on the picture would produce poor results.

            Now, the sender, receiver esp experiment provides a basis for understanding telepathy.  Say a sender wanted to convey the words ‘how are you doing?’ to a receiver; how would they go about doing this using esp?  First of all, they would need to induce the receiver to concentrate on receiving a meaning.  For instance, if they simply stared at the receiver that individual would wonder why they were being stared at, they would not be focused on the words being conveyed by the sender.  However, when an individual is talking to another person, that person focuses on the meaning of the words in an attempt to understand them.  So, in order to induce a person to concentrate on a meaning, the sender would have to take advantage of this reaction, they would have to trick the receiver into thinking they’re being talked to without conveying any meaning in the sounds being made.  In practice this would be exceedingly tricky to carry out.  In order to work, the fact that the sender conveyed no meaning with the sounds they made would have to completely escape the receiver’s notice, something that can only be achieved under very limited circumstances.  The second thing a sender would need to do to convey a telepathic message would be to concentrate on the expected reaction of the individual to the words they wish to send.  Concentrating on the words themselves would be useless since the sender cannot see the other’s thoughts, and therefore their desire for the receiver to hear those words cannot be satisfied; whether those words were experienced or not by the receiver would not induce pleasure within the sender.  What they can see, however, is the reaction of the receiver to the words that enter their mind.  So, if the sender wants to send the greeting ‘how are you doing?’, the desired reaction would typically be the response ‘fine, thank you.’, so that by focusing their desire on this response, if psi were to produce the greeting in the receiver’s mind then their concentration would be satisfied by the receiver producing this response.  On the other hand, if psi should fail to produce the desired message in the receiver’s mind then their concentration would remain unsatisfied until either psi does what they wish, or they give up.

Now, as it happens a behaviour similar to the telepathic procedure just described is common place in everyday communications.  An abundant behaviour in speech is the action of repeating the ideas of another in our own words.  When an individual is trying to convey a concept or meaning, they may have difficulty converting these thoughts into words, and further, slight differences in how people use words can result in a sentence not having precisely the same meaning to another person.  As a result, there is a significant need for a mechanism for filling in the blanks, for conveying at least some meaning without words, a need which psi is capable of satisfying.  In order to accomplish this, an individual says a sentence, but, being suspicious that the other person doesn’t completely understand, invites them to repeat the idea in their own words.  The receiver responds by attempting to build a sentence that reflects the meaning of the sentence they received from the other.  However, if they failed to completely understand the original sentence there will be gapes in the meaning they try to build their sentence from.  So, they will be concentrating on the meaning they use to build their sentence from, but since there will be meaningless gapes in the concept they try to repeat, this concentration will induce psi to fill in those gapes.  On the other side, the sender is concentrating on the meaning that they are trying to convey, so, if the receiver outputs a sentence that coincides with this meaning then the sender’s concentration will have been satisfied.  However, this would only be likely to happen if the proper meaning was placed in the receiver’s mind by psi so that they could produce a meaningful sentence with which to reply to the sender.  So, the sender’s concentration on their idea would only be satisfied by psi ensuring that the receiver understands what the sender was talking about.  As a result, the concentration of both these individuals works together to fill in any gapes in the understanding of ideas they try to communicate.

Now, the forms of esp discussed up to now have been effects between individuals that occur roughly simultaneously.  However, since this theory of psi is based on the non-contradictory nature of the universe and since two events in contradiction are in contradiction regardless of the time that divides them, there can be no temporal limitations on psi.  So, a researcher should have no difficulty using the esp technique presented earlier to send messages to a receiver in the past.  An interesting aspect of this type of temporal message transmission is that since psi acts to prevent any contradictions, it will act to edit out any component of the message that would produce a temporal contradiction.  A significant problem with this form of esp (temporal esp) is that someone is needed to send the message to, and so, if an individual should have something of importance to send, the person in the past would have no way to know they should be listening.  Moreover, if the receiver fails to suspect temporal esp they might mistake a valid message from the future for a failed message from the present.  In other words, an individual in the future may have reason to send a message back, so they might take the recordings of receivers from an esp experiment that was conducted at the time and place they need to send the message.  They could then act by trying to usurper the experiment, trying to send a message in place of the one the researcher was using.  However, since the researcher was only looking for messages from the present, they would dismiss this as a failure and ignore the message.  As such, it would be useless for a future individual to send a message to a present researcher since their message would fail to have any effect, it would be ignored, and so they would not bother.  However, this individual might have reason to manipulate a particular subject, and since the esp experiment may have provided the necessary recordings for send a message, the possibility exists that such future manipulations of past experiments does occur.  For example, if the subject of an esp experiment were to recount to a descendant that an image from such an experiment induced them to make a fortunate decision later in life, or lead them to the solution to a problem, the descendant could act to induce this image by taking the recordings and acting as a sender to the subject.  However, the subjects of esp experiments would not likely be the most preferred receivers for such future psychics.  There are three criterion that would have to be met for a receiver from the past to receive future messages.  Firstly, their act of concentration would have to be correct, would have to be simply the act of concentrating on images or words entering their mind.  Second, their words would have to be taken as significant, and as such, acted upon.  And finally, their descriptions of the images would have to make it to the future so that future senders could use those descriptions to send the messages.  A number of popular mediums appear to fit these requirements, and as such this presents the possibility that the successes of such people could, in fact, be do to their acting as conduits for future psychics.

            Now, there are a number of points that should be discussed with regards to esp.  One issue is that esp cannot be used to do anything contradictory.  A sender may attempt to send such messages, but psi would simply edit them out.  So, if an individual wishes to send messages into the past with any degree of reliability, they would have to ensure that nothing within them would produce temporal contradictions.  For example, if they wanted to send a cure into the past in order to alleviate suffering, if that cure had not been developed then the discoverer of that cure might hear about it.  Having learned the cure, that individual would have no reason to develop it, and as such the cure would never have been discovered, and hence wouldn’t exist to be sent back in time.  Psi would never allow such a situation to develop.  As such, if an individual wishes to send knowledge back in time they must to ensure that it cannot spread, that it would not make it back to its discoverer.  For example, they might be able to send such information to an individual stranded on a desert island, but not to a world famous medium.  Therefore, if they wished to send a cure through a known medium they would have to ensure that the cure was patient specific and that the knowledge from which they derived that cure could not be worked out from the cure.  Moreover, if any attempts should be made to work out the knowledge on which such cures are, at a future time, developed then this would induce contradictions, which psi would have to counter.  So, for a medium’s predictions to have a chance of being accurate scientific investigations into the contents of those predictions would have to be deigned. 

            A second issue with esp is that the use of multiple senders will increase the power of the sent message, if done properly.  In order for any sender to have an effect they must be individually exposed to the descriptions of the receiver and must concentrate properly on the words coinciding with the image they are given.  If proper sending is achieved then each individual sender will have an effect on the receiver.  However, this doesn’t necessarily mean they would be having an accumulative effect.  As discussed earlier, desire is the exertion of psi towards a result, while if the result is undesired psi will act against the result.  So, if one sender desires the receiver’s description to coincide with the image while the other finds this to be undesirable then the two senders will negate each other.  Therefore, it is necessary to ensure that all the senders involved distinctly desire the results to be positive.  In addition to this, as previously discussed, many other factors have the potential of playing into a psi experiment.  The beliefs and interests of the senders, the researchers, the readers of the reports and those of the public if the experiment should gain sufficient public exposure.  With so many more people involved and exposed there will be equally more psychic factors involved.  So, an experiment can only be kept uncontaminated from external factors if it is kept within the lab, with only the people who need to be involved ever becoming aware of it or its results.  Further, there is the problem that more than one image could potentially be sent by the senders.  If the experiment’s senders are not of a like mind they could end up focusing on the receiver describing the image differently, and hence induce differences in the image received that could cause the receiver to describe it differently.  If such differences are contradictory then the experiment would fail.  One way of dealing with this problem is not to give the senders an image, but rather to give them a description of an image.  In this way, all the senders would be focused on the same description, which the receiver would only be able to produce if a single, specific image appeared in their mind.  This is the same idea as with telepathy, that the would-be telepath must focus on the response to the message they are trying to send, not the message itself.  If the researcher gives a sender the description of the image then psi is forced to act be inducing the receiver to give this description by creating, in their mind, an image that will induce them to pronounce those particular words.  In this case, the sender concentrates on their desire for the receiver’s description to coincide with the description they were given by the researcher, while the receiver acts as before and concentrates on images appearing in their mind.  One final point, since time is not a barrier to psi, it is unnecessary to have all the senders that work together concentrating simultaneously.  The recording of the receiver could be shown to multiple senders in sequence until enough people are working together to produce a sufficient effect.  However, to use this technique it is necessary for the researcher to be completely inflexible in their approach.  If they decide the experiment is a failure should the receiver’s description fail to match that of the senders, and as a result choose to cancel the experiment and not use all, or any of the senders then the experiment would not have been carried out.  Since there would have been few senders acting on the receiver it is to be expected that the receiver would produce a poor result.  So, for a temporal esp experiment to be valid it must be completed, regardless of what might be seen along the way.

            Another issue that needs discussion, which will effect esp, and also telekinesis is the differences in the interests, and intensity of those interests, of different individuals on psi.  For example, say an individual was to try to send a cure to a medium in the past in order to cure someone.  First of all, they would have to be ignorant of whether the individual was ever cured of their illness.  If they know that an individual had an illness but was never cured then there would be no amount of psychic force that could be exerted to change this.  However, if they are aware that a past individual was ill, but not the consequence of this, then they could act on them, and hence perhaps contribute to their health.  However, even if this problem was to be dealt with, even if the individual keeps themselves ignorant of past events, the power of esp will be minute in comparison to the telekinetic power of an individual in need.  No one can desire a cure more than the individual who is ill and those close to them.  As a result, most of the psychic power that would be exerted on a medium in the case of cures to illnesses will result from the psychic force of such people.  Only when it comes to matters of relative insignificance will the psychic force of the senders dominate over all other factors and, as a result, a pure esp effect result.  Moreover, psi decides on its own what it should do, and as such if someone goes to the trouble of figuring out just the right cure to send through esp, if psi has other ideas then their concentration may act counter to helping the individual.  The individual’s suffering acts to exert a telekinetic effect on the medium to give the right cure, but if the sender’s cure is incorrect, if psi concludes otherwise, then the sender’s concentration will oppose the psychic effect of the ill individual.  So, unless the sender can predict with great certainty exactly what psi would choose as the proper cure it is best for them not to concentrate on a particular cure but rather to concentrate on the individual in need being cured.  Since the individual’s suffering exerts telekinetic force towards their being cured, not towards being cured in a particular way, concentrating on their being cured ensures that the sender’s psychic effect will work together with the psychic effect of the suffering.  As a result, psi would receive no conflicting demands on it and would, most likely, produce the desired effect.  Now, what all this says is that esp only dominates if there are no other, more significant forces acting on psi.  For instance, if a sender were to try to send a message using esp that would result in good, innocent people suffering or being killed, psi could and would counter this effect.  In fact, since evil generally causes suffering and harm, psi resists being used for evil purposes.  It could be used by such people if it would not result in a destructive result, but if they were to try to use it to abuse or victimize others, such attempts would generally fail.  Moreover, if changing a message would produce benefit in the world then psi would not hesitate to make such a change.  So, it is only when esp messages are insignificant that they have a significant chance of going through unaffected.  If a message is of importance to people, not necessarily those involved in sending the message, then these people’s interests will act on psi, thereby changing or inducing modifications to the message.

            Now lastly, when all is said and done all sender based esp is, is telekinetic mind control; the sender acting by exerting telekinetic force to attempt to modify the operation of another’s brain.  Now, although this may make esp look like an invasive and perhaps immoral activity, as explained above, personal control over psi phenomena will only occur if the situation is of little or no significance.  Say someone wanted to use esp to assassinate another individual by forcing them to commit suicide.  First of all, since killing themselves would induce suffering and harm within themselves, the psychic force of that potential suffering would greatly intensify the victims psychic power.  Moreover, if an assassin was after someone, that person would certainly be an individual of some significance, someone who has a great effect on the world.  If such an individual was having a significant beneficial effect, if many people’s best interests would be sacrificed by their death, then the assassin would not only be acting against the psychic power of that individual, but also all the other people who would suffer a lose, whether they realize it or not, as a result of the individual’s death.  So, only when inducing a behaviour in another that neither benefits nor detriments them, a change in behaviour that the individual being controlled would not care about, will mind control have any significant power.  A good example of this is when an individual is walking head on towards another.  Assuming that that individual does not want the embarrassment or discomfort of bumping into the other, they would want that person to pass by on the expected side.  This desire for the other person to pass on one particular side would express itself as an act of mind control, with the individual inducing psychic force on the other’s mind to get them to move the way they wish.  Since, on which side the other person passes is of no concern to that person, they would exert no counter force, and as such, under this situation an individual’s mind control ability would be quite strong and reliable.  So, by its very nature mind control resists abuse, and hence there is no reason for any concern that this ability might be misused in the wrong hands since it would be almost impossible for such ‘wrong hands’ to use it at all.

            Now, there are a number of phenomena that can be understood as simply manifestations of telekinesis and esp; miracles, prayer, danger sense and extra-sensory awareness of stares.  Miracles are the simplest of these phenomena to explain.  A miracle can be understood as simply the action of telekinetic force, most likely induced by the suffering of an individual or those close to them, towards anything that might undo their illness or affliction.  Of course, not all miracles are medical, but the basic concept applies regardless of the precise nature of the need that a miracle acts on.  This concept of a miracle is opposed to that which religions call miracles.  In order to be called a miracle by most churches an event must defy explanation, however the less likely an event is to occur on its own the less likely that psi can induce that event to solve a problem.  Rather, a miracle is a likely event occurring with certainty and an unlikely event becoming likely.  All the inability to explain an event shows is that science has not reached the point of being able to explain the causes of everything.  So, many true miracles are dismissed simply because science can find a cause, when, in fact, the true miracle of a miracle is that the cause, and hence the event occurred at the time and place someone needed it to occur. 

            Prayer can be understood as the act of using concentration to induce telekinetic results.  The only difference between prayer and the telekinetic experiments presented earlier is that prayer is ritualized and done under a religious context.  But ultimately prayer is just the act of concentrating on a desired result.  So, if an individual wishes for someone to get well they could pray for them and thereby add their additional psychic force to that of the sick individual.  However, as explained earlier, the effect an individual can exert on psi through concentration will be minute compared to that of the suffering individual and those who suffer along with them.  So, although prayer can be beneficial, it will have only a small effect under such extreme situations.  Generally, when it comes to important situations of any kind, situations on which people’s happiness or well-being turns, the psychic forces generated by potential happiness or suffering will act on psi to induce the events to go in the positive direction.  Psi will strive to both increase happiness as well as to reduce suffering, and so, when it comes to any important event the power of prayer will be small in comparison to the psychic forces that are already acting.  The power of prayer only dominates, like the power of telekinesis and esp, when it comes to matters of no great significance.  In other words, prayer can give an individual a strong ability to effect which, of two ways, an event goes, so long as the benefit of those two paths is roughly equal.  But if one of those paths is distinctly better than the other then psi will choose the better of the two regardless of what people pray for. 

Now, say a researcher runs a prayer study in an attempt to identify the effect of prayer on healing.  In this study they randomly choose half the patients of a hospital to be prayed for.  The other half they use as their control group.  Now, say they find that the prayed for patients experience significantly better health than those not prayed for.  On the face of this it would appear that prayer’s effect was great, that the psychic power generated by prayer was roughly proportional to that of the suffering of the patients and their loved ones.  If this were the case then this study would counter the idea presented that prayer, telekinesis and esp are psychically weak in comparison to the psychic power generated by suffering.  However, there is a fundamental flaw in studies of this design.  The individuals who are praying are praying for their patients to become healthy, but the force of this prayer could act to improve the health of the patients or, alternatively, it could act on the random selection of patients to ensure that the individuals praying only get patients who’s health would ultimately improve.  Of these two possibilities it is much harder for psi to significantly heal an individual than for it to act on a random selection mechanism, and so it would be expected that the second possibility would be that which actually happens.  So, any study relying on random selection would fail when studying psi phenomena since the random selection process itself is susceptible to the effects of psi.  To do this study properly the researcher would have to remove the random part of the random selection.  For example, selecting the patients by the first letter of their last name would be a selection process nearly devoid of true randomness.  However, if there were two hospitals in a city, which hospital a patient would be taken to could have a degree of randomness to it.  Such a problem could be eliminated by selecting a relatively isolated city and doing the study over all the hospitals within that city.  In this way, anyone and everyone who becomes hospitalized in that city would fall into the study.  Since this corrected study would force psi to only be able to satisfy the individual’s prayers by healing the patient, this study should show much weaker results than the study that used random selection.  However, prayer will have some beneficial effect, and as such a small improvement in the health of the patients that are prayed for is to be expected.  Whether this improvement would be sufficiently strong to show up in a study, though, is questionable.  It should be mentioned that it is vital to such a study for the individual who prays to be aware of the situation and fate of the person prayed for.  For example, if the individual were to pray for someone and then was told the person they prayed for completely recovered then their prayer would have been answered.  It wouldn’t matter whether they were told the truth or lied to and the person had, in fact, died.  To satisfy the individual’s prayer all that is necessary is to make them believe the person lived.  And of course, if they were told nothing then their prayer would neither be satisfied nor unsatisfied, and so no significant results would appear. 

Now, this is not to say that prayer is without significance, only that prayers of any significance are not answered.  This statement is true given psi theory, but it is also true within the beliefs of most religions.  The question is, if an omniscient, omnipotent and benevolent god existed would that god answer an individual’s prayers?  The answer to this question is a distinct and definite no.  An omniscient being would know the individual’s needs, an omnipotent being would be able to satisfy those needs if at all possible and a benevolent being would do its best to satisfy those need if the individual were deserving.  Therefore, if the individual needs the assistance of such a god that god would have already given it without having to be asked.  If such a god failed to give its assistance then it would have had reason not to, and so no amount of prayer would change that decision.  However, returning to psi theory, even though prayer has no effect on significant matters, the results of prayer can themselves become a significant matter.  The belief in religions results from, not only a recognition of a spiritual nature to the universe, but also, for many people, a need to fulfill the purpose of that spiritual nature.  In the absence of a belief in the spiritual nature of the world, the sense of purpose people hold becomes unjustified and meaningless, the material world lacking any purpose of its own.  As such, when a prayer is answered, this acts on the individual who prays to support their belief in the spiritual, and so reinforces their sense of purpose and removes the hopelessness that comes from questioning, in the absence of evidence, that any purpose exists.  As such, if an individual’s faith in spirituality is dependent on a prayer being answered, then the significance of this may exert sufficient psychic force to cause a significant event to coincide with the individual’s prayer.

            Danger sense and extra-sensory awareness of stares are phenomena which appear as esp effects in which the individual’s mind is acted upon by psi in order to make them aware of a situation of great importance to them.  Danger sense is the more obvious of the two of these.  Since an endangered individual is entering a situation in which there exists a significant potential for suffering and harm, psi must act to the best of its ability to prevent such an outcome.  However, in the same way that esp effects are weak, so is danger sense.  A sense of danger will not, generally, be capable of presenting the exact source or nature of that danger, but it could induce anxiety and wariness.  Now, this may act to make an individual notice a danger before they step into it; but also, say someone was considering attacking them.  If the individual exhibits caution and wariness this could induce the attacker to worry that they may fail to catch the individual off guard, and as such to rethink their plans.  So, not only can a sensitivity to danger allow an individual to avoid hazards, it is also capable of stopping a danger from manifesting itself in the first place. 

Now, danger and stares are closely related.  The sense by a soldier that someone is looking at them may induce them to be wary, and such wariness could make an opponent abandon a plan of ambush.  But more directly, whenever an individual is staring at someone, they have some interest in that person, either for good or bad.  The person staring from across the room at a party could very well be that individual’s future spouse, and if so, noticing such a stare could lead to great happiness.  On the other hand, that person could be a stalker, or a con-artist looking for a target.  Therefore, noticing stares of any sort is of great importance, and even more so when the individual staring does not want their stare to be noticed.  Now, there are two other psi effects that involve stares.  An individual who likes to be the centre of attention would gain pleasure from any indications that they are, in fact, that centre of attention.  So, their desire to be stared at exerts a psychic force both to induce others to stare at them and also on their being sensitive to noticing any such stares.  The second effect is that if an individual desires for someone to notice their attention they can act as an esp sender and thereby induce the other to feel as though they are being looked at.  Such an image in the receiver’s mind would cause them to look for the individual who is staring, and hence fulfill the sender’s desire for their attention to be noticed.

Divining Devices

Now, divination can be defined as the use of a device for the purpose of ascertaining the interests of psi.  Since a tool can be modified and perfected in order to perform its function to the greatest extent, divining devices provide great potential for the practical use of this theory of psi.  Now, two common tools used for divination are tarot cards and horoscopes.  A number of astrologers very distinctly use astrology as a divining tool, however others use it in a way that is suggestive of something more than divination, so there may be another phenomena underlying this particular practice.  However, tarot card predictions are entirely and exclusively divinations.  Now, there are two things that make tarot cards a divining tool.  One, the card that comes up is random, or at least fairly random, and as such will be susceptible to the effects of psi.  Secondly, each card, or ordering of cards, has a distinct and definite meaning, so that when a particular card comes up it has a precise effect on the person asking the question.  If the prediction doesn’t in any way change the life or actions of that person then psi would be wasting its time, so there must be some resultant response in order for anything meaningful to be expected to come up.  Now, besides the fact that card shuffling is not the most random of randomizing procedures, there are two other major deficits with tarot cards, and most other types of divination. 

First, people generally act by asking a question of the cards with the expectation that the cards will tell them the future.  However, psi has no interest in transferring information from one time to another; psi simply acts by trying to change or modify people’s behaviours in order to make their lives more pleasant and less displeasant.  Therefore, all that can truthfully be asked of a divination is what should be done, not, what will be.  Of course, psi doesn’t care what questions are asked of it, only whether it can somehow manipulate an individual to do the right thing.  However, if an individual maintains the belief that divination acts by predicting the future then, if it fails to do so their belief in divination, and hence their likelihood of taking its advice, would diminish.  As a result, psi would have to expend some effort convincing the individual that its predictions are true, and hence its ability to direct that individual towards a beneficial life would be reduced.  In fact, one of the responses of sceptics is that diviners are charlatans who use general predictions that can be applied to any situation solely for the purpose of convincing people they are legitimate, but of course, psi would love this technique since it involves relatively little effort to perform.  In other words, psi has no reservations about using the same tools that the charlatan uses in order to convince people to take its predictions seriously.  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately from the sceptics point of view, such an activity acts to feed the sceptics disbelief.  On the other hand, if an individual were to ask the cards a question of what they should do then psi would be freed from having to maintain their belief, and could focus on providing the best divination it can. 

The second problem with tarot card predictions is that they assign equal probabilities to all the possible predictions.  Say an individual was to flip a coin and, based on the result, did not go to work, the idea being that the coin would act to protect them from any unfortunate accidents, such as getting hit by a bus on the way.  This form of divination would be quite effective, however they would miss half their work days on the one in ten thousand chance they might have an accident.  In other words, such equality in the results of a divination tool would result in massive numbers of miss-predictions.  Now, there is no perfect way of dealing with this problem.  However, by trying to determine the likelihood of a particular behaviour being the right behaviour and then setting up the divination so that the likelihood of it outputting that particular prediction is equal to the likelihood of that prediction being right, miss-predictions could be greatly reduced with a prediction only coming up as often as it is right for it to come up.  However, this does not necessarily mean that the prediction would come up when it is right to come up.  The more unlikely a prediction is to be right, and hence the less probability it would be given within the divination tool, the more force psi would have to exert on that tool to produce that particular prediction.  Consequentially, a divination tool could be made either with even odds between all the predictions, in which case the user would be spending much of their time running about dealing with miss-predictions but the device would be sensitive to the unlikely predictions, or it could be made with weighed predictions.  Such a weighted divination tool would produce few miss-predictions but it would be relatively insensitive to the unlikely probabilities.  So, such a device would be sensitive to predictions that are relatively likely, and hence it could be used to make predictions of relatively likely events even if such events are of little importance.  However, it would be insensitive to highly unlikely predictions, only being able to produce reliable results if a matter is of significant importance.  Now, this would seem to say that weighted and unweighted divination tools are equal, with one being better for some predictions and the other for others.  However, the lack of weighting of the probabilities not only makes the unlikely predictions come up often, but it will also make highly likely predictions come up less often.  For example, if a fifty/fifty probability, i.e. heads or tails, is given to a particular prediction while one of these two predictions has a ninety percent chance of being right then four times out of ten would miss that right prediction.  So by far, the weighted divining tool is the best of the two. 

Now, from all this a set of rules for the design of an ideal divining device can be drawn. 

1. A divining device should use the most truly random randomizing source available. 

2. For each random output a prediction should be assigned. 

3. The probability of a particular prediction being outputted should be set, as close as can be determined, to the likelihood that that prediction would be the right prediction.

4. All assigned predictions should be in the form of suggested actions.

5. Any question given to the divining device should ask for a prediction of the right action, not of a future or unseen event

In addition to these there also comes the statement; the degree of significance and commonality of a prediction determines the power of the prediction, with increasing significance and commonality producing increased likelihood of success. 

Now, because of the large number of different predictions and because each of these has probabilities assigned to them for their being the right prediction, an ideal divining device would require a substantial data base.  Moreover, some computing power would be required to adjust the probabilities to the situation.  For example, the prediction that an individual should flirt with tall, dark and handsome is more likely to be true for a woman than a man.  As such, an ideal divining device would have to be able to take in a large amount of data about the individual and the individual’s situation, and then readjust the probabilities in accordance with this data.  Therefore, such a divining device would have to be in the form of a computer.  Of course, the randomizer within modern computers is nearly devoid of any true randomness, and so would have to be replaced by something more advanced. 

Consciousness

            Psi, as with any force, is composed of an input and an output; psi observes the universe and then acts on what it sees.  However unlike the other forces which are simple, easily quantified, clockwork reactions to a local environment, psi governs that which we are in a spiritual sense, the part of us which has eluded scientific explanation and scrutiny.  The output of psi appears as the force of psi which can be predicted, as previously discussed, if we have the patience to work out all the complexities.  The input of psi, psi’s experience of the world, is our conscious experience, that which we call consciousness.

Consciousness – psi’s experience of the world, psi’s input  

Now, this input has two further components, the things that support or threaten the interests of psi and the universe that those things reside in.  The things that support or threaten are those that psi must ultimately act on; psi acts to create or maintain those things that serve its interests and destroy or corrode those that act against it.  The words pleasure and displeasure refer to conscious experiences that people feel a motivation to support or be rid of; the experience of things that support psi’s interests produces pleasure and the experience of things that threaten psi’s interests produces displeasure.

Pleasure – conscious experience of situations which serve psi’s interests (usually coincides with stimulus)

Displeasure – conscious experience of situations which oppose psi’s interests (usually coincides with pain)

Now, people experience a great deal of things that neither produce pleasure nor displeasure, but of course not everything in the universe will support or threaten psi’s interests.  In the same way as a fish in water lives and one outside of water dies, whether something is good or bad, and how an individual should respond to that something, depends as much on the environment it is in as what it is.  Therefore a conscious awareness of things that do not produce pleasure or displeasure is vital to how psi deals with people’s awareness of those things that produce pleasure and displeasure.

The output of psi is a response to its inputs.  If something creates pleasure or displeasure within an individual (i.e. it supports or damages good or bad qualities within them or serves or detriments psi’s interests) then they feel a motivation, coinciding with psi’s need to exert a force, to attain or avoid that thing. 

Desire – motivation to pursue a thing that would produce stimulus, pleasure

Need ¹ – motivation to pursue a thing that would prevent pain, displeasure

Fear – motivation to avoid a thing that would produce pain, displeasure

Love – motivation to give stimulus, benefit to those individual has personal involvement with

Hate – motivation to inflict pain, detriment to those individual has personal involvement with

Want – (a desire) to desire but not need a thing

Lust – (a desire and need ¹) to desire and need a thing

Need ² – (a fear) motivation to avoid losing a thing that would prevent pain, displeasure

Envy – (a desire) motivation to pursue the same thing someone else possesses that would produce stimulus, pleasure

Jealousy ¹ – (a need ¹) motivation to pursue the same thing someone else possesses that would prevent pain, displeasure

Jealousy ² – (a fear) motivation to avoid losing a thing to someone else that would prevent pain, displeasure

Stimulus and pain are used by the brain to express these emotions while psi expresses them using pleasure and displeasure.  The brain’s ability to roughly mimic the properties of consciousness acts to reduce its reliance on psi for dealing with many situations, and thereby, by operating this way, serves the interests of psi by reducing psi’s need to act.

One observation that may seem to counter this view that psi produces motivation is that, when an individual acts out of one of these motivations they typically act towards their own benefit, approaching something they desire mostly because it would produce benefit for them, and only slightly because it would produce benefit for society in general.  This property is to be expected on account of the fact that an individual is always present at every moment they carry out an action.  So, it would be much easier for psi to give an individual a set of responses that benefit them, and others responses that benefit those others, than for it to give everyone a different set of responses to deal with each person they might meet in their life.  Because of this, an individual may love qualities within another because these are the qualities that benefit them, but these qualities may not be beneficial to that other person.  So this other may feel unloved despite their being loved since they are not loved for who they are.  In order for an individual to feel supported by another, that other has to be the type that loves (and hates) the same things within the individual as they themselves do.  In this way, by this other promoting the individual to become what they want them to become, they are also promoting the individual to become what the individual wants to become.

            Now, this presentation of conscious experience (psi’s input) says that consciousness involves an awareness of the whole universe through out all of time.  This is to be expected from the connection between the non-contradictory nature of the universe and psi, and the fact that non-contradiction acts beyond time and space; a contradiction is a contradiction regardless of where the objects involved are located in space or time.