Soynut butter

So, I've had some interesting advancements. It appears I have come full circle once again, to where everything started from.

I was 11, in 6th grade, when I first got into psi. Specifically, telekinesis. Active Psy led to Psipog, which lead to everything after that. When I knocked over that tube of paper, I don't think I realized at all at the time the logical ramifications of it. Or the torrent of fluff that would be to come.

Oddly, what caused me to break away from psi for three years after a few months of study was the fear that I would accidentally become so adept at precognition, that life would become simultaneous monotonous and too much to bear.

So here I am now, nearly a decade later. I'm recovering from the dark hole of atheism and skepticism that was somehow directly or indirectly brough on by RPI. It made me miserable, and for a while I was starting to fear that my life would become permanently mundy. When I started to pull out of it, I initially loathed the process, but now I'm seeing it as an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up. A solid base that cannot be shaken, regardless of any events, experiences, scientific data, or overzealous scrutiny of nihilistic skeptics who deep down inside hate their life.

An A priori. A statement that is unfalsifiable because it is based on its own self-evidence, just like 2 + 2 is 4, and all bachelors are unmarried, to use the most overused and cited examples ever.

Right now, it is as such:

Observation changes reality.

I'd like to use consciousness instead of observation, but I'm afraid that from a logical background, consciousness is derivative and not direct.

Obviously, this statement makes a lot of sense from a common sense point of view. If something is observed, information is transferred, and therefore it's impossible for things to be exactly the same as they were. To put it in, well, simpler terms,

The concept of observation influencing reality is a basic tenet of quantum physics and information theory. But it should also follow that because observation (and therefore consciousness) can be directed in specific places, one should be able to bring about specific changes merely by making the right observations.

In other words, mind over matter.

Which brings us to our next anecdote. I had heard about peanut-free formulations, such as SoyNut butter, that are designed to be as close to the real thing as possible, for people such as myself with a peanut allergy. I got my mother to pick me up some at the supermarket, and I was feeling bold this morning, having just gotten a fantastic internship/job at a small chemical company startup only 3 miles from where I will be staying with my girlfriend for the better part of the summer.

So I peeled off the seal lid, wiped a bit off with my finger, and put it on my tongue. It was simultaneously tasty and frightening, because it tasted like peanut butter. You may ask, how the heck could I have ever tasted peanut butter? I haven't, but I can smell it, and smell contributes far more to taste than many people realize.

Let me tell you, they got the realism down pat. No sooner than going for a second dab of the stuff, does my throat start closing up. I feel the distinctive scratchy feeling in the back of my throat, and I let out a wheeze as I exhale. Mildly panicking, I have to read the ingredients to make absolutely sure that there are no peanuts in it (even though the label's selling point is that it is Peanut Free). But sure enough, my airways are constricted enough to be uncomfortable, but not enough to be terribly dangerous. Just typical acute asthma. And eventually, it goes away.

My mind was convinced that what I was putting in my mouth was in fact a peanut product. I've always been intuitively wary of peanut products; my mother could NEVER get me to eat peanut cookies as a child, and didn't know why until I broke out after making artwork from peanut shells. But in hindsight, this wasn't the first psychosomatic reaction I've had. I can remember at least 3 different events where I ate something sketchy, worried it may in fact have enough peanut in it to make me ill, and got asthma.

This just shows how powerful the brain is. However, it also shows how the brain can be wrong. Which is why I have been and will be wary of receptive psychic abilities. They are too easily confused with deep hidden fears in the subconscious. Often times, I will have a snap reaction, such as slowing down because I suddenly don't feel like going fast, only to see a cop speed trap minutes later. Or in the case of finishing other people's sentences. These always seem to be fairly reliable. But it seems that if I have to think about it for even a tenth of a second, it's likely to be flawed.

And so we come back to telekinesis. Because thoughts can be wrong, but shit moving without any cause that follows Newtonian mechanics, that's not up for questioning. Skeptics can do as they will, but if I can move stuff to the point where I'm positive it is in fact TK, nothing can shake that. It's an event that happened right in front of me. And if I do this over and over again, there becomes such a mountain of evidence that I abolish every shadow of a doubt in my mind, allowing me to pass even further hurdles. Such as performing TK reliably in front of even hardened skeptics.

Because the thing about our A priori is that it doesn't have a caveat, "This only applies to psychics/enlightened individuals/wytches/fluffybunnies/psions/whatever." Everyone, the skeptics that are in the room, the people who may read about it later on the internet, the scientists who might want to publish a paper on it, the students who may read that paper, ALL have some influence on whether or not that object moves. Which brings up an interesting point, which is effectively, "what determines the outcome?" Is it a sum of collective thought power? IQ? Religion/spiritual entities on a side? Does distance matter? Does degrees of separation matter?

Clearly, TK must obey some sort of law, because not all influences are created equal, and there is definitely a diminishing effect with psychological distance. A skeptic sitting directly in front of you is going to have more detriment than doing it on camera and posting it on Youtube. Which leads me to believe that there are certain properties of these occurences that can be studied further. But the big problem is, A priori, the scientists will influence the outcome. It's impossible for them not to. A skeptic running an otherwise identical experiment is going to get different results than a trained psychic. They have to. Anything to the contrary would undermine the principle itself.

An experimenter of psychic phenomenon would have to be absolutely impartial in their own mind, not just in scientific rigor, and most people don't have that kind of mental strength. But hopefully that will change in time.

So, going back to myself, I have for the time being abandoned plans of making a super-rigorous TK experiment to "prove" its existence, because it's setting myself up for failure. Instead, I am out to prove it to only one person: myself. Because simple mind over matter, which seems at times to be a parlor trick without much practical value, allows for the emergence of everything else.