The tests focused on a series of light flashes and sounds and pushing a button when they were observed to test the frequently reported phenomena of "precognition" observed by NDA folk. These tests took place over some time, like half an hour, although the tests themselves were shorter.
The folk at IONS were kind enough to provide me with a short movie of the EEG scans (give it a few seconds to load) which is @ http://www.happiness-beyond-
The IONS analysis of these scans, thanks to Leena Michel (attaching the EEG net) of IONS, is "The attached movie in quicktime format shows the results of your session in the EEG experiment. The movie has three brainmap images. The two on the left show the electrical activity at the surface of your scalp from 500 milliseconds before to 500 milliseconds after an audio tone or a light flash. If you recall the experiment, whether you were about to get an audio tone or light flash was completely random, so you could not outguess what was about to happen. The brainmap on the right shows the statistical difference between the two electrical maps in terms of a p-value (probability value). The hypothesis in this study was that if your awareness extends through time, then your brain activity would be different before a light flash than before an audio tone.
When you play the movie, what you see in the two maps on the left is how your brain was behaving electrically over time, from a half second before the stimulus to a half second after. If the difference map on the right occasionally shows patches with orange or red colors, it means that there was a strong statistical difference between how the brain was behaving in the two conditions, In particular, if the difference map shows orange or red before the stimulus happened (you can see the time in the millisecond counter near the audio brainmap on the far left), that provides evidence that some part of your awareness was correctly anticipating what was about to happen. This suggests the presence of an unconscious form of precognition that we call presentiment.
What is measured in this test appears to be different from the NDA "precognition" events that frequently/daily manifest in consciousness, and that others report, which appear unpredictably, very much at random and can be far in advance of an event to which it might refer. These NDA events for "me" do not show the future event itself, but rather an unexpected action to be taken now to prepare for an upcoming unknown event.
Many of you have heard about my "put your jumper cables in the car" event prior to a workshop i was part of @ Kripalu. As it was early fall and my car (and battery) were in great condition, the "message" made no sense. i went to the workshop w/o incident, and towards the end of the workshop, a feeling emerged to go down to the front desk, which i did. Nothing there.
Another feeling emerged to go out into the parking lot which i did; sitting in the exit of one of the major parking lots was a car with, you guessed it, a dead battery. No one had any jumper cables and as Kripalu is somewhat remote, nothing was happening, until "my" jumper cables appeared.
This could all just be "serendipity", with alternative explanations, of course, but they do happen frequently and typically with less time delay before the event. These "precognitive" messages are sufficiently common that Adyashanti in a workshop of 300 folk talked at some length of how he decides whether they are "truth", or "just the mind doing its thing". If you ask "why does that make any sense?" (or its equivalent), and there is an answer, that's "just the mind doing its thing". If it is the "truth", there will be no answer/reason. i have done this many times and it certainly does appear to "work".
The philosophical and scientific conundrums represented by these phenomena are significant and i truly don't have a good model for how it works beyond saying "the Universe does it and She's not telling". It is what it is, whatever it is.
Very interesting Gary! I'm not sure I understand this part though, can you explain it at all? (I don't really understand whats going on in the videos)
ReplyDelete" ...provides evidence that some part of your awareness was correctly anticipating what was about to happen. This suggests the presence of an unconscious form of precognition that we call presentiment."
Does that mean there was an observable area of the brain responding to the event before it happened? How compelling is this evidence? Was the "anticipating part" only active when it correctly anticipated the event or could it have been a "guess"?
Dear Introspectre:
ReplyDeletei asked IONS for more information/interpretation, as like you, i was unable to make much of the precise details of the EEGs, having no knowledge or experience in interpreting them, but have not received more information.
Jeffrey Martin, the Director of The Center for the Study of Non-Symbolic Consciousness, who is affiliated with Harvard, has picked me up for his study on "non-dual awakened" folk, similar to what was done by IONS and the Baumann Institute when i was in CA. He came here to interview me in person after a series of productive e-mails and looked at these EEGs. He is trying to get some more information from the IONS folk who he knows.
Have been trying to get into an fMRI machine, either Penn State's or somebody else's, for some more detailed work and to "put another brick in the wall".
Along these lines, am in a webinar led by Bernard Baars, the originator of what appears to be emerging as the leading concept for "consciousness". He is @ the U. of AZ, and has written THE textbook on Cognitive Neuroscience. i met Jeffrey Martin, and other interesting folk, though that webinar. Will see what unfolds there.
Hope this is helpful.
gary
Gary,
ReplyDeleteThe jumper cable story sounds like an example of "meaningful coincidence" for which Jung coined the term "synchronicity."
Richard Tarnas, in his book "Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View," pp. 50-52, writes:
“Most of us in the course of our lives have observed coincidences in which two or more independent events having no apparent causal connection nevertheless seem to form a meaningful pattern. On occasion, this patterning can strike one as so extraordinary that it is difficult to believe the coincidence has been produced by chance alone. The events give the distinct impression of having been precisely arranged, invisibly orchestrated.
Jung took particular interest in meaningful coincidences, first describing the remarkable phenomena he named synchronicity in a seminar as early as 1928. The random chaos of life appeared to veil a deeper order. Accompanying the more profound occurrences of synchronicity was a dawning intuition, sometimes having the character of a spiritual awakening, that the person was herself or himself embedded in a larger ground of meaning and purpose. Because of its startling metaphysical implications, such a synchronicity carried a certain numinosity, a dynamic spiritual charge with transformative consequences for the person experiencing it. In this respect, the phenomenon seemed to function, in religious terms, as something like an intervention of grace. Jung noted that such synchronicities were often kept secret or carefully guarded to avoid the possibility of ridicule concerning an event possessing such significant personal meaning.
The classic example of a pivotal synchronistic experience is in Jung’s description of one of cases:
‘My example concerns a young woman who, in spite of efforts made on both sides, proved to be psychologically inaccessible. The difficulty lay in the fact that she always knew better about everything. Her excellent education had provided her with a weapon ideally suited to this purpose, namely a highly polished Cartesian rationalism. After several fruitless attempts to sweeten her rationalism with a somewhat more human understanding, I had to confine myself to the hope that something unexpected and irrational would manifest, something that would burst her bubble. I was sitting opposite her one day with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab, a costly piece of jewelry. I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane from outside in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle (Cetonia Aurata), whose gold-green color most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, “Here is your scarab.” This experience punctured the hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results.’ "
Krishna Jaya:
ReplyDeleteGreat quote and story from Jung. Have also felt Jung's reluctance to talk too much about these synchronicities.
Living in a university town, "Cartesian rational" minds are everywhere. i do appreciate how metaphysically unsettling consideration of these manifold synchronitities (that i believe occur in everyone's lives) can be; safer to disregard or refuse to consider them.
They are, however, a clear pointer that there is "something" behind (or as) all of "this"; that "it" isn't happening randomly. It doesn't require that i know exactly what it is, (i really believe it will remain beyond the ability of our humble minds to grasp) only that i can see its operation, over and over again, doing its amazing dance.
As Albert Einstein said; "Nature shows us only the tail of the lion. But I do not doubt that the lion belongs to it even though he cannot at once reveal himself because of his enormous size."
As i proceed(ed) along the "spiritual path", these events were/are so frequent, so astonishingly "right" and so statistically impossible, that all one can do is smile, and realizing that we are not in charge, surrender to the dance.