PSI Debate and the Great Yellow Ray Blocker

[Questioner]

Hey everyone,

This is sort of an open letter to myself. Feel free to comment, query or otherwise add your thoughts!

Thank you for introducing the topic, Lavazza. Through many experiences with "heartless intellectuals," this whole area has been an area of conflicting experience and self-recrimination in my own life. I can certainly empathize with the consternation.

I admire your skill at tracing the conflict outside of you to how it shows a conflict inside of you, which you then traced to its roots in your own thought process. That's a lot of hard work most people don't want to bother with! As a result they miss out on a deeper ability to choose their own ideas. Instead, they just take on the shape of whichever dominant mold they've been pressed inside most recently.

Here is what I see as the key to the whole matter:

did I allow myself to become so emotionally attached? Did I begin to view attacks on (my beloved idea) as attacks on ME? Yes.

I've been thinking about some implications if the phrase, "thoughts are things" has some truth to it. This idea implies that ideas and concepts have their own existence, whether or not any person is currently thinking them. If a person has "tuned" their mind/body/spirit complex to receive this thought, then the thought appears in their mind and is available for them to accept as is, or to use as catalyst to inspire them to choose a different thought they would find more harmonious for their own evolution.

If the thought is similar to what the person was already tuned in to thinking, then it's a simple and easy matter to "move the dial over one station," so to speak, to the adjacent idea. If the thought is very different, "on a completely different wavelength," then to think that thought instead of the previous one would require a really big spin of the dial.

People generally don't mind if you bump their mental dial one station over. But they often really resent it if you try to grab the wheel and spin them around to a whole new point of view that they are not ready to accept.

The psi debate is just one example. If consciousness precedes physical existence and the physical is moving into the metaphysical, then it's easy to tune in to the idea that thoughts are things and that nervous systems and chakras can serve as transcievers for energy that doesn't show up on any test equipment from Tektronix or H-P.

But if an amoral, indifferent physical universe randomly evolved consciousness as an artifact of random activity, and consciousness is nothing but a chemical process inside an individual skull in a world that has nothing that can't be explained by science (given enough time), why it's ludicrous to even consider seriously studying psi.

Each of these existing stations has several repeaters on adjacent frequencies, with their very enthusiastic, dedicated listeners. If you try to get them to the far end of the dial, they'll dig in their heels before you get to spin them around!

So the content of the psi debate almost doesn't matter, given the war of clashing worldviews. But psi is a central battle of the war because it has to do with the whole essence of which side is doomed to ultimately lose. Nobody wants to admit that they're on the losing side. If there's anything to psi, than everything based on "hard-nosed" materialism is up for re-evaluation... including the funding and respect hierarchies within the science establishment and the academy.

These issues are central to the identity and livelihood of the skeptics. They get as anxious as someone who just fell off their yacht into the freezing stormy waters!

As with anyone afraid of drowning, their anxieties can get bystanders on the shore to feel as though their feet are also awash. People who have nothing to do with who gets tenure, or who gets a new million dollar research grant, can get caught up in the anger and fear of those who are terrified that they'll lose their ability to make a living.

For both sides, it's not safe to acknowledge, with kindness and respect, the feelings, hopes, and fears of the other side's people about what it might mean to be proved wrong. All of this emotional energy then goes into allegedly logical debates in which the fury leaks out. It's as though you weren't allowed to clean off the kitchen countertop, so whatever you cooked next oozed unexpectedly with yesterday's leftovers. (Can you tell I visited a worse fast food place than Taco Bell today?)